In Service Sector, No Rest for the Working - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/business/late-to-bed-early-to-rise-and-working-tired.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Long time ago, I used to work in retail. I had this schedule: 2 openings (start at 7am, 8am); 2 closings(start at 3 pm); start at 9am on Saturday. I was not getting 2 successive days off either.

When I asked my manager about this, he mentioned it is all computer scheduling and he can't help it. Who devised this shitty scheduling? This started like 25 years ago?

What explains this odd way of scheduling? Maybe, companies don't want you to go to school or don't want you to take a second job. Or they want you to depend on the company for paycheck forever.

<comment><USER3> _What explains this odd way of scheduling?_

You can find an answer in another New York Times article I cited here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089531)

(I find that thread interesting, in part, for the spirited defence some offered for the practice. Frankly, I find it indefensible.)

The underlying issue is, as @njloof suggests, the systematic degradation of low-skilled labor's bargaining power.

There was a big deal made this week about Wal-Mart's wage increase for its hourly employees. As this NY Times article notes, more predictable scheduling was also part of Wal-Mart's announcement.

It's nice to see the issue being acknowledged and finally addressed. But I expect this was done less out of corporate altruism and more in response to the growing effort to unionize Wal-Mart and other service sector employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is strange to me. Granted I haven't worked in the minimum-wage service sector for awhile (high school), but this still seems strange to me.

We used to have this problem too:

> any fast-food restaurants and other service businesses have high employee > turnover, and as a result they are often left with only a few trusted > workers who have the authority and experience to close at night and open in > the morning

but we just had "openers" and "closers". During the summer I used to open most mornings because I liked to have the afternoon and evening free to hang out with friends. Another employee liked closing for the exact same reason (because then they could be out late and not have to wake up until 2-3 PM).

Even during the school year, there were still regular "openers" and "closers", even if they were people who didn't necessarily enjoy opening or closing.

Is the turnover just that much worse now, that the few long-standing employees now have to open and close? Or what happened?

</comment><comment><USER5> If one of those workers ever got hurt, they could rest easy knowing the resident medical student helping them in the ER has been on shift for the last 24 hours.

<comment><USER6> There's a number of professions where the crunch time is insane. There's a lot of differences between that and service work, though.

\- Those people such as doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc. are paid an order of magnitude more for their time. Without counting the benefits which service workers don't get.

\- They're not just working to earn a living wage. Their work propels career advancement.

\- Their work is usually much more pleasant/interesting and they like it, which helps bear with crunch time.

Usually in a highly demanding, high-paying career you'll be able to advance relatively quickly and find yourself in a managing position which gives you a lot more slack. You'll also be able to retire rather soon. In light of all of this, the effort is more than worth it. But low-wage jobs... The only place service work leads you is to waste away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think we should have laws to fix these problems, but then in a few years Amazon will just have eliminated all these jobs anyway, so what's the point?

<comment><USER8> To push Amazon along quicker. The longer firms can exploit cheap labor, the longer it will take them to automate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh the irony: with so much turnover they work their dependable employees to death.</comment>


Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run - <AUTHOR> https://deadmanssnitch.com/ <comment><USER2> To those complaining about the price - the level of technicality, like for email@example.com in a crontab may not explain the price alone. Price != costs.

The right price is the price your target consumers are willing to pay. And if like another commenter you are doing to build it yourself instead of forking $19, you obviously are not the consumer. (and neither am I - I'll stick to cron :-) !)

<comment><USER3> Thank's for pointing out that price != cost. The value of the service is in not having to ever panic again when checking the backups during an emergency.

It is very easy to be notified when something happens (for example, MAILTO in cron) but it's hard to know when something DOESN'T happen, especially if you work on a lot of sites.

There are plenty of ways to be notified when something doesn't happen if you are willing to use a little elbow grease... we use one of them to make sure DMS itself is working properly.

<comment><USER4> As the creator and owner of deadmansswitch.net, I hate you :P

<comment><USER3> Haha, sorry. Maybe you shouldn't squat on domains? :P

<comment><USER4> I didn't realize running a web app on it for seven years was squatting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really shouldn't have to create an account just to figure out what your pricing looks like.

<comment><USER6> ^^^ this. Plus you say "Sign up for free" in the home page. At the very least it's misleading.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how it's misleading. You can sign up and have one snitch for free. It would be misleading if I said sign up for free and then didn't allow you to create ANY snitches without paying.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, say that exact thing _before_ people sign up. Just cut and paste "You can sign up and have one snitch for free." into the main page, so it's crystal clear to everyone, and hearsay from HN does not prevent people from creating the free account :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Monit does this pretty easily <http://mmonit.com/monit/>

You can monitor web services, processes, file modified dates, directories, loads of stuff all with email alerts and a web-front end too.

<comment><USER8> All with a thing called Round Robin Database, a database format built for temporal data and used by every graphing solution known to the IT world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> $19/month for more than one task? That's fine for companies, but I'm not going to pay that much as an individual, who needs 3, maybe 5 tasks to track.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I don't think my company would use this at the moment until it's proven service that has a good track record and a SLA (what's your up-time guarantee?). That said, I'd use it for my personal projects but not for $19/month. I'd pay about $1/month per monitor.

<comment><USER3> RE: SLA... the use case is more "I want to know sooner than later that something didn't happen" than "Something didn't happen this minute, I want to know NOW!". If and when we go down, your task won't be able to check in and we'll end up sending you a false "positive" which is better than not knowing at all when something fails.

<comment><USER11> Actually, false positives with alarms are really, really bad - I will start to ignore them very quickly if they're not reliable indicators of an actual problem.

EDIT: If you have reasonable default tolerances or the ability to set tolerances on tasks, I'm pretty interested in trying it out - do you integrate or have plans to integrate with pagerduty, or do you simply fire off an email?

<comment><USER3> What I'm saying is, in the rare chance we are down and your service can't check in, that one time we would send a false positive. We wouldn't be flapping between off and on sending you a lot of false positives. The resolution on our checks is so large (the smallest is an hour) that we won't be flooding you with emails in any case.

We don't replace something like monit to make sure your process continues to run, we are validation that one-off periodic things run... things that are easy to forget about but are important.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'm not terribly worried by that kind of failure, if that happens, a bunch of other things have already gone wrong. I would like something to keep track of all processes, though, that can back up monit. Good to know it's got some slack in the tolerances, I'll give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a shot at giving constructive feedback rather than bitching about the cost which most people here are doing. Point taken, there's the other stuff I can think of:

1) Disclose cost earlier. Telling people to sign up for free and then asking them to pay you is not cool. It starts off the relationship on a bad note and will prevent people from signing up.

2) You have a great idea here. Startups need this. We do not have time to set up and configure nagios, or some other warning mechanism. You make a good start by attacking the problem no one else actually wants to take care of, and making it really easy to do so.

3) Either forget the hobbyist or make another (less expensive) level of service for him. Do not forget there is very little money to be made on hobbyists unless it is very easy for you to take them on. You do not want to take on these people asking for the same service for $1 unless you can make it much cheaper to provide service to them.

4) As some have noted: Put in a SLA, and tell us why your service will not fail. Otherwise if we are not warned we will not know if it's because your service is down.

5) Put up a tutorial or more info on what you offer. Can we have planned maintenances (ie, do not warn me about this for 4 hours)? Can we hit the snooze button? What are the methods you use for notifications? How many people/emails/phones will be notified per failure? The unanswered questions go on and on.

6) Do more stuff. What about other type of monitoring? Can we group servers into groups so we do not have to set up each individually? Can we monitor stuff that IS running but I send you a value periodically through the HTTP hit? I want to graph stuff, like HTTP hits per hour, or HTTPD errors per minute. I want a warning to be sent to me when I get more than X HTTPD errors per minute, for example.

EDIT: 7) Add a trial period, this just makes sense.

So for work I run Nagios. I would love to have a Nagios set up for my side projects because Nagios provides a world of benefits but if I invested my time in setting up Nagios then I would not have time to do actual development.

You are onto something good, you just need to shape it a bit.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'll think on some of this stuff and probably incorporate some of it.

<comment><USER12> Still, first follow your hunches. :) Many of these ideas "sound good", but somehow it feels to me then you'd just replicate the functionality of some other service (probably something that the original poster was already using).

Like this site and it's simplicity a lot already, I think there's a lot more interesting things to explore before you'd get on with the feature creep. Good job!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem is that this doesn't address what I have found to be the most dangerous problem with periodic tasks.

That is when your cron job _runs_ but there is some error in part of the script (for example maybe it writes/reads a file in a folder but the permissions on that folder were changed since the script was written). This causes an error which might cause a cascade of errors meaning that some other parts of your job either fail to run or run incorrectly.

Now what happens here, do you get notified of the error or does it just get silently eaten? It's also very possible that your system will eat the error and then proceed to the next step (calling this API) and everything will appear fine.

One thing I figure out what the expected output from the job should be, I then pipe the output from the cronjob into a file. I have a second cronjob that checks the contents of this file periodically and generates an alert if it does not match what is expected.

You should also try and find some way to test any generated data. For example if you are doing a DB backup, add another table with a field that contains data that is in some way based on the date. You can then have a task which will try and restore old backups into another DB, it can then check this field against the expected value for the date of the backup.

Of course none of these techniques are silver bullets and there are plenty of things that can go wrong, it is certainly prudent to check things manually every once in a while.

Perhaps this API could be modified to take as an input the output from scheduled tasks and check them?

<comment><USER3> You have to make sure your periodic tasks acts in such a way that if a piece fails, the rest doesn't execute (using && for instance). Then you would add hitting your special url the last thing to execute.

If you have a way of checking things like this, great! You should keep doing that!

<comment><USER13> That is true, but makes the assumption that all scripts along the way will return the correct values on errors etc. Not always true for rushed in-house scripts.

You may also have to consider warning conditions which might be more catastrophic to your "pipe" that the original program would believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I run this as a combination of monit timestamp checking and stdout to a file. Is there anything this does that I cannot do this without monit?

e.g.

firstname.lastname@example.com

1 23 * * * /home/cron/backup.sh 1> /backups/backup

and monit doing a

check file backup with path /backups/backup

if timestamp > 24 hours then alert

This way I am emailed when there is an error with the backup script, otherwise things continue as it is.

</comment><comment><USER15> This will be AWESOME for monitoring daily backups on the large number of sites/databases that _should_ be getting backed up automatically every night. They work reliably for a while and then I forget about checking them. Would be nice to know when one of those starts to choke.

</comment><comment><USER16> Those using cron hacks to check on previous cron jobs might want to take a look at Matt Dillon's cron (as opposed to Paul Vixie's cron), which is the crond that Slackware uses.

It has named cron jobs, @noauto and AFTER keywords, which let you run jobs depending on whether previous jobs (identified by name) have run successfully.

That, combined with using things like && and || and mailx, give you quite powerful ways of checking on previous cron jobs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ouch. I've been dabbling at a project that does the exact same thing and your implementation is so perfect that I may give up and sign up :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure this will make tons of money and will be amazingly useful as a hip tool for those developers we all know. But honestly the rest of us build this kind of stuff into our company dashboards without thinking twice. Where it belongs, in the hands of an internal team who can share the monitoring of more than $20 worth of "snitches".

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant username.

<comment><USER8> If supporting, contributing and deploying to open source software makes me cheap than so be it. I'm ecstatic at the chance to share that technology with my clients and to help them give it back where applicable.

I hope your endeavors continue to make you happy with your means as they do mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I definitely know quite a few small projects that this could be extremely useful for. However, I think some people are right that Munin works better at tracking these things long term.

</comment><comment><USER19> And what service do I use to find out when this service doesn't run?

<comment><USER3> What are you currently using to make sure your periodic tasks run?

As far as making sure DMS runs, we use another third-party to make sure our checkers run. Contact support if you are interested in finding out more.

<comment><USER19> We have an elaborate system that someone cooked up a while ago that involves a tree of communicating Processes running on different machines that monitor our real time services. If we could consolidate our 'checker' processes into one that may be the right thing to do. Can the system be set up to use authentication to get behind firewalls or do hue things being monitored have to be accessible over the public Internet?

<comment><USER20> The interface is a simple HTTPS request. The authentication is done using a unique URL component. This is an example of how to use Dead Man's Snitch:

$ curl <https://nosnch.in/c2354d53d2>

Dead Man's Snitch does not ping your servers. It is the opposite way around. If your server stops pinging Dead Man's Snitch, you will be notified.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Royal Canadian Mint Million Dollar Coin (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/learn/million-dollar-coin-1600006 <comment><USER2> _"Why did the Royal Canadian Mint make the world's purest and largest gold bullion coin? Because we can."_

That and because they probably made a decent profit from the sale of each coin.

</comment><comment><USER3> So it's worth 4 million US dollars today. I wonder who those 5 purchasers are.

</comment><comment><USER2> They don't say what they were selling them for. I want to know what the difference between cost of the gold and price of the coin was.

<comment><USER4> Typically (say on Ebay), gold coins sell (eg, are bid up to) for the same amount as that weight in gold on the global market.

<comment><USER2> They usually sell these special coins for a profit over and above the price of the gold. They would have cost a lot to produce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These coins were sold for 5 million a piece, so quite a large markup.</comment>


United Airlines bug bounty program – Earn miles for reporting bugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/Contact/bugbounty.aspx

<comment><USER2> _" We utilize best practices and are confident that our systems are secure."_

Why, then, doesn't the link to _" join the MileagePlus program"_ ([http://www.united.com/web/en- US/apps/account/enroll.aspx](http://www.united.com/web/en- US/apps/account/enroll.aspx)) use https?

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny they pay out in miles. On the positive side I'm impressed a legacy air carrier is this forward thinking.</comment>


Swift Playgrounds – Learn to code on your iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ <comment><USER2> Will they include a lesson on how to make Byte set up a provisioning profile in itunesconnect and install a code signing key in your local keychain and and enter the MAC address of his tethered device into developer.apple.com and then hopefully, just maybe XCode will allow you to run what you wrote?

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, this is a problem they (said) they addressed in latest Xcode. We'll see how that turns out in practice I guess.

<comment><USER4> I have a large complex project in XCode. (It's this: [http://macdaddy.io/mac- backup-software](http://macdaddy.io/mac-backup-software))

It looks simple but it's actually about 6 different programs all stuck together.

Codesigning breaks on it periodically, and it takes days to fix.

XCode 8 has just broken this worse than any other XCode version in history. It seems to have done so by trying to automate all its requirements. So now it outputs broken bundles when I compile it. This has taken me all of today, and I'll be surprised if I have it working within the next 6 hours of work.

This is a fairly typical experience of using XCode for me. Many times getting codesigning working correctly and getting it working within the mac app store parameters takes more time than writing the code.

In short: Using XCode is harder than programming.

<comment><USER5> You can never, ever, just upgrade Xcode (or anything important, really) on a production Mac. Xcode, especially, needs to be installed on a sandbox machine first where it can destroy anything it wants. It's an effort, but still better than having production explode in your face.

<comment><USER4> That's probably a good approach. Still, when my certificates expire (which makes the provisioning profiles invalid), that alone will take hours or days to fix. So even if it's left in a completely untouched environment certificates expire after a year or two and I cannot recompile the project without a lot of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone looking to get started on iOS programming Apple has released a free interactive iBooks book called "App Development with Swift" [https://itunes.apple.com/in/book/app-development-with- swift/...](https://itunes.apple.com/in/book/app-development-with- swift/id1118575552?mt=11)

Here is a report of someone using that book to get started, [https://hackernoon.com/i-develop-therefore-i- am-b501e2a10277...](https://hackernoon.com/i-develop-therefore-i- am-b501e2a10277#.9sjkahx0l)

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this support VoiceOver and some sort of Sound API?

I occasionally teach blind kids programming. Sometimes it takes an hour to just navigate them through an unfamiliar setup with a screen reader. If this can be used by a blind person, it could be a game changer.

<comment><USER8> VoiceOver: yes, as reported in this article: [http://mashable.com/2016/07/10/apple-innovation-blind- engine...](http://mashable.com/2016/07/10/apple-innovation-blind-engineer/)

> [Jordyn Castor] was a driving force behind accessibility on Apple's soon-to- > be released Swift Playgrounds, an intro-to-coding program geared toward > children. She's been working to make the program accessible to blind > children, who have been waiting a long time for the tool, she says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if Playgrounds for iPad is compiling code with LLVM behind the scenes or if they have written an interpreter?

<comment><USER10> compiling as usual. You have access to everything on iPad, it's acutally very powerful even for developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised it was not included with iOS 10 and had to be downloaded separately. It was part of it until beta 8

<comment><USER12> It would easily be as popular as the Stocks app and the U2 album.

<comment><USER13> which you can finally delete:)

<comment><USER14> You're not really deleting it. You are just removing it from your home screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want a language + ide + (hosting/compiler) combo that's as easy to use as BASIC was back in the day. and scales all the way up from kids' apps to enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks so similar to Lightbot that I wonder if it's the same game just with updated graphics and characters and stuff.. and of course all the swift code

</comment><comment><USER17> Just curious, why does it need iOS 10?

<comment><USER18> How are they going to make you buy shiny new iPads otherwise?

Edit: Why the downvote? I still have an iPad mini (1st gen), and I don't get to play with Swift Playground because iOS 10 requires iPad mini 2 or newer. Look, I'm as much an Apple fanboy as the next person: I use a MacBook Pro, I have an iPhone 6s Plus, and my wife will be getting an iPhone 7 Plus, but you can't deny that Apple, just like other companies, build arbitrary obsolescence into their products.

<comment><USER19> Even if you want to be cynical, the far more important strategic value in this is in developing more developers for their platform long-term. They wouldn't compromise that for the purpose of marginally more device sales.

<comment><USER18> That's a sensible argument. I can neither agree nor rebute until I get to play with Swift Playground. I can borrow my mom's shinier iPad Air when I see her. It'll all depend on how Swift Playground plays and feels. For example, there are some questions that will help me decide whether I'm being too cynical: will Swift Playground be only suitable for teaching kids or will it be good for advanced adult programmers coming from other programming languages as well? How much of Apple-specific API will it introduce, if at all?

<comment><USER20> I've been using Swift Playgrounds on my iPad Air since the second iOS10 beta. It's been really stable, plays well with my bluetooth keyboard and the error feedback on it is excellent. My wish list for the next version would include (a) the ability to create and edit files in *.playground/Sources and (b) a project navigator view to let me move assets around the folders inside a Playground or Playground Book on the device. That said, it's a great tool for education as well as prototyping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> ACPU Studio is powerful development platform on mobiles with Livecoding. True IDE, built near to Bret Victor & Eve principles.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAcv12eBqcc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAcv12eBqcc)

Another sample: use Xcode on iPad for publish to AppStore remotely.

[http://acpul.tumblr.com/image/116464494150](http://acpul.tumblr.com/image/116464494150)

Coming soon...

</comment><comment><USER22> Have any of these kid targeted development products ever been highly successful?

I've seen dozens of attempts but they all seem to fizzle pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would've been nice to see some kind of animation on the code itself during the run, showing which commands it has completed.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, this looks cool and very complete, the must have put quite some effort in this. I've been 'stuck' on Objective-C for a while now, knowing I should 'keep up' and learn Swift. This could be a nice, fun way to pick up Swift in my 'spare' time.

<comment><USER25> I don't think your use of quotation marks adds anything.

<comment><USER26> The same could be said for your comment. (And mine too...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not as exciting as AIDE I have 2 apps on Google play with over 20 thousand users both of them built in AIDE with a combination of Java and C++ right on my android device.

<comment><USER27> However I'm holding out hope that iOS will become self hosting like Android this is a step towards iOS xcode in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is Swift Playgrounds' code itself open source?

<comment><USER29> unfortunately it is not open source... But they opened sourced Swift Playground Support [http://ericasadun.com/2016/07/07/apple-open-sources-swift- pl...](http://ericasadun.com/2016/07/07/apple-open-sources-swift-playground- support/)

<comment><USER28> > unfortunately it is not open source

Indeed, that's a shame, what better example than open sourcing the tool used to teach the language...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't work on iPad 4 :(

</comment><comment><USER31> If you want to learn how to code, get a desktop with Ubuntu on it. And start with C++.

<comment><USER32> And what GUI libraries would you recommend? Out of interest!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Found this whole project woefully disappointing considering Bret Victor used to work there.

</comment><comment><USER34> I hate iPad exclusivity. Like I get it, the content is better consumed on a bigger screen and you might be taking advantage of the better hw but maybe let me check it out and decide for myself if I'm willing to buy an iPad for the full experience.

<comment><USER35> They wanted to make an app for introducing kids to programming. There are already plenty of tutorials on the web, to run on a computer. A web-app or iPhone app would not have had a good enough UI and they probably don't have enough Android developers to make it work well on all Android devices.

Apple doesn't have unlimited people to assign to this project. They chose a platform where they can focus on providing the best experience for. Why complain?

<comment><USER35> Also, this a free app that increases the usefulness of existing iPads already in schools etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Etude sheet music app coming to iPhone, iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2010/03/15/etude-sheet-music-app-coming-to-iphone-ipad/

<comment><USER3> This looks awesome. I love apps that go after markets that would typically be thought of as "unsexy".

From the looks of it you get the game like elements of a Rockband, but a longer term benefit of learning to read music. I imagine it will be kind of lame on the phone due to size, but with an iPad or keyboard accessory it will be amazing.

I'm not sure how big the market for sheet music is. However, consider the kind of people who learn to play instruments: children of well educated, affluent parents. The addressable market could be bigger than a lot of markets that seem large on PowerPoint slides, but are unaddressable because of market limitations (e.g. iLike).

If you can pay for a kid's piano lesson, a few dollars for sheet music will be nothing.

I'm really looking forward to this!

</comment><comment><USER4> Feature brainstorming: Can it listen to the music the user is playing and figure out where in the piece the student is playing and scroll along as it's being played?

<comment><USER5> Heck, you can take this to the next level and make it a guitar hero game for real instruments. A lot of music teachers wouldn't have jobs anymore...

<comment><USER4> The new GarageBand does that via a MIDI input..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Killer app: A sheet music display app that can recognize the 2nd to last measure and turn the page for you. Would also work if a parent could stand 30 feet away in the wings and flip the pages via Wifi or bluetooth.

<comment><USER7> Just initiating a page turn by tapping the right half of the screen would be a dramatic improvement over paper.

<comment><USER8> Why flip pages at all?

I like yan's suggestion of detecting the music in the app and scrolling along as the person plays.

<comment><USER9> As someone who's played with sheet music, I can pretty confidently say that functionality would be extremely annoying.

Imagine reading along with a marquee. Yeah, it's that annoying. I'd much rather it flip virtual pages than scroll along.

<comment><USER10> I play music too and would like the scrolling score. Maybe it's more of an issue of it's less comfortable now but far more comfortable later.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps, but think of it this way. There's a reason typography focuses on line length in written text - it's easier to read something if you have a decent reference point [1]. A long line makes it easier for your eyes to get off track.

The same thing happens in music. Dividing things into measures and lines allows our brain to "chunk" it. Part of the chunking mechanism is returning your visual focus to the beginning of the next line.

Part of reading is the connection of eye movement to new information. If you no longer need to move your eye to get a new measure/phrase/note, it's patently more difficult to notice the change. That's why marquees are useful for short lists of phrases that repeat often - and not entire articles. Maybe scrolling music might be decent for karaoke or games like guitar hero - <USER2> the information encoded into one bar of classical staff is orders of magnitude greater (and one of the reasons I despise, say, piano rolls in most digital audio authoring software).

Disclaimer: I have only been reading sheet music for two decades; this may or may not qualify me to comment on the benefits or detriments of an autoscrolling marquee of sheet music instead of paginated sheet music.

[1]<http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/em/>

<comment><USER11> I just wanted to add on more to your thoughts: when I play piano with sheet music, I "chunk" as you mention, but I also look ahead anywhere from like one measure to an entire page to refresh my memory and see what I need to play next, and/or how I should transition from one section to the next. I also find that these definite divisions by lines and pages of music help memorizing and visualizing what to play. I would love it if there was an app that listened along and flipped/shifted pages over automatically, but marquee scrolling would be disastrous to the way I read sheet music.

(Disclaimer: I've been playing piano for over 15 years of my 21 year existence on this planet, is that enough to comment on my personal preferences? ;) )

On the other hand, throughout the years I spent singing in choirs and with specific situations like guitar hero, a marquee style method of presentation never posed a problem as long as I could see at least a measure or two ahead at a time. Likely because of the information density you mention - singing and guitar hero never felt as demanding as playing piano.

<comment><USER9> Oh, absolutely. To be able to play nontrivial pieces without looking ahead two-to-three measures is nigh impossible.

Reading music seems to be very interesting - after you truly know a piece, the notes seem to simply be reminders for muscle memory. It's not like reading a book - you do that when you learn the book. Sight reading is fairly difficult!

As for duration of experience, it's not necessarily the length of time.. but whether you've ever truly learned a piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's also Tab Toolkit which is similar and very cool: <http://www.agilepartners.com/apps/tabtoolkit/>

<comment><USER13> Is there anything like this for OS X?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice work, Dan!</comment>


How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@thatdavidhopkins/how-a-tv-sitcom-triggered-the-downfall-of-western-civilization-336e8ccf7dd0 <comment><USER2> Did I miss something on the news lately? Apparently Western Civilization has fallen?

Odd, because I could swear that western countries still have the highest standard of living, best universities and most powerful militaries.

</comment><comment><USER3> "one of his "friends" was sure to groan and say how boring Ross was, how stupid it is to be smart, and that nobody cares"

The sad fact is that the majority of people will find intelligent discussion extremely boring. Especially if it's about extremely esoteric topics.

From another perspective, Ross didn't seem to understand social cues and continued to talk about topics that his friends clearly didn't understand or enjoy.

It's less about bashing intellectuals and more about pointing out ineptitude that many smart people have when it comes to social intelligence.

I enjoy watching these types of shows because I don't really have to think. It's the same reason I watch stupid reality TV.

"This may seem like a non sequitur, but I'm convinced consumer culture and idiot culture are closely linked"

I disagree. It really depends on what you are consuming.

"And finally: protect the nerds"

Really? Nerds comprise most of the 1% in the US. It is pretty much the best time in history to be a Nerd. Startups in Silicon Valley are cool.

Do they really need that much protecting?

<comment><USER4> > Nerds comprise most of the 1% in the US. It is pretty much the best time in > history to be a Nerd.

No they don't. Capitalists, who are pretty much all of the 1%, don't seem predominantly to be nerds by any usual definition.

Nerds are, perhaps, overrepresented among elite workers, but even elite workers aren't the top economic stratum.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My first native android app – repost and/or download instagram posts - <AUTHOR> App is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.schueller.instarepost
I know that there are many similar apps but none did what I needed so I made this one.
I would love some constructive feedback.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Curious what it does that other apps don't do.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the ones I tried:

      - Doesn't work on my phone, crashes
      - Adds all kinds of branding to pictures, comments
      - Cost money or has giant ads
      - UI is confusing or just ugly (not really an issue)
      - Complex process to repost
      - requires a login or wants Instagram credentials
      - Slow</comment></comment>


Never say "VC" - <AUTHOR> http://davetroy.com/?p=710

<comment><USER2> I sincerely wish that I had spoken to this guy ten years ago as it would have saved me a lot of time, effort and anguish.

If you can prove your idea has traction in the marketplace then he's right the investors will come to you.</comment>


Here's Why You Can't Find a Technical Co-Founder - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkapps.com/entrepreneurship/heres-cant-find-technical-co-founder/

<comment><USER2> Great article on the skills to look for in a technical co-founder. Dispels the myth that you need a rockstar machine learning expert from Stanford/Google to build your consumer app idea.

<comment><USER3> No astroturfy comments on Hacker News, please. Users invariably complain, and it ends up hurting your cause.</comment></comment>


Apple refuses to sacrifice logic and profits at the altar of marketshare - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2015/01/13/sacrificing-logic-profits-at-the-altar-of-smartphone-marketshare/

<comment><USER2> All those "analysts" and "journalists" who think one metric is everything. What Crumb said yesterday:

"You don't have journalists over there anymore, what they have is public relations people. That's what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations."</comment>


Research as a Stochastic Decision Process - <AUTHOR> https://cs.stanford.edu/~jsteinhardt/ResearchasaStochasticDecisionProcess.html <comment><USER2> Absolutely this: that research is a creative exploration of the search space. It's why artists and scientists have such a kinship ;)

The image of a solitary Principle Investigator is fading fast. Cloud based datasets, Jupyter Notebooks, open review archives, even public discussions and distribution of results via Twitter attest to the collaborative nature of science in the modern era.

Consider the recent initiatives in Brain understanding, that could yield profound implications beyond neuroscience and AI into public policy and our most fundamental beliefs. And its not just discoveries about intelligence. Completing entire transcriptomes of cell diversity in mouse and nematode brains creates a cell atlas at a level of detail that other researchers can then use in their own investigations. Such as exploring the robustness of genetic diversity in transcription error rates!

<comment><USER3> > Consider the recent initiatives in Brain understanding, that could yield > profound implications beyond neuroscience

As a sideline observer inside the Human Brain Project I have to say this is already the case, perhaps not always for the positive

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fantastic perspective on managing ignorance. It is told from a personal perspective, but there are fascinating applications of this at an organizational scale.

My initial thought was that the primary challenge here (which the author addresses in part) is in estimating the time it takes to complete a task. If you already 'know' how much time something is going to take then is there really uncertainty? How much uncertainty? The author seems to be going in the right direction, but there seems to be something more here about sources of ignorance that touches on the number of special cases in the problem space, or something of that nature. I wonder if there is any work trying to infer the number of special cases, or 'practical realities' of a problem space (maybe a kind of roughness, inhomogeneity, or irregularity?) that will ultimately be the major time cost.

Another thought is that 'bad' negative results don't have the provenance required to rule anything out, but if you know exactly what was done then you have much stronger evidence about where the problems might lie.

Finally this is deeply connected to another issue which is that sometimes we don't have the resources to devote to solving the really big problems so we never even try. The economics of cutting edge research only serves to drive us further from the hardest questions because we don't have anywhere to start because we haven't the faintest idea why we fail.

Somehow this reminds me of my first play-through of Darksouls -- the only thing that kept me going was the belief that it could be completed. My repeated failures were required for me to slowly gather enough information to see where I was going wrong. Funding basic research that is truly at the edge of the unknown is like only funding noobs that have never played before, or maybe more like funding good players from one game that come to another, they'll get there eventually, but they have to be able fail, and if you make them play Ironman mode then we might as well give up -- the game is too hard.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't read this page too closely, but the better strategy is similar to an approach I've seen called the "ranking theorem" mentioned here: [http://www.prioritysystem.com/math.html](http://www.prioritysystem.com/math.html)

> One result is the ranking theorem: If independent projects are ranked based > on the ratio of benefit-to-cost, and selected from the top down until the > budget is exhausted, the resulting project portfolio will create the > greatest possible value (ignoring the error introduced if the portfolio > doesn't consume the entire budget).

This is speaking more generally of a "budget" which could be time, money, or something else. It's an approximation because when the resource is nearly spent it becomes a more complicated optimization problem, selecting projects which fit, which doesn't necessarily pick projects with the highest rate.

Obviously this becomes more complicated if the projects are not independent, e.g., one is a prerequisite of others.

<comment><USER6> Ranking Theorem requires two assumptions, which are both violated in this context: 1) The projects are independent 2) Not all project need completion to achieve success (i.e. you can select a subset of projects)

Here, the failure of one part leads to the failure of the whole project, and all parts of a project need completion at some point in time. The task at hand is thus to select the order of parts of projects to maximize the overall gain over many projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool, we have developed a framework based on the same ideas for early product development of physical products: [https://www.taf.expert](https://www.taf.expert) and successfully use it in a course at Technical University of Munich ([https://www.thinkmakestart.com](https://www.thinkmakestart.com)) as well as a number of large corporates.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another interesting way I look at projects is where the objective is unknown, where I'm searching for things that can only be discovered, not imagined in advance.

In that case I want to choose the search path with the largest variability in output, and limit downside time cost by just giving up after some time.

This is the antifragile approach. Seek out sources of volatility. Explore, don't chase predetermined goals.

This is also useful for software development.</comment>


Kyle Simpson: I Don't Hate Arrow Functions - <AUTHOR> https://davidwalsh.name/i-dont-hate-arrow-functions <comment> chupa-chups The TLDR made my curious: "Arrow functions are fine for certain usages, but they have so many variations that they need to be carefully controlled to not break down the readability of the code."

I tried to skim the article for the point the author wants to make. I got "arrow functions are not like functions, they are different, the author _doesn 't_ hate them by themselves".

Still curious due to the TLDR, i wanted to spot some examples. At the very end, there are some, but apparently those are related to a new plugin? Wait, what?

Still not giving up, I find a section somewhere in the middle: "But I'm not here to rehash the entire debate over => arrow functions. I've written extensively about my opinions on them, including these sections in my books: ..."

Found this quite frustrating. In order to be fair when writing this comment i forced myself to really read most of the paragraphs, and my first impression seems to hold.

The two links provided in the article get to the point, though, and quite to my liking as well.

I guess i'm missing some context here, just wanted to give some feedback.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the hacks for remote workers? - <AUTHOR> I have been working remotely for some time now and I am not able to keep up with the schedule. Its so easy for me to just sit there and work without any distraction that I forget to eat, don't do any exercise or sleep. Isolation is not very pleasant feeling either and dont have access to good coffee places near by. <comment> a-saleh Do you have friends that you can meet regularly? I had good success to alleviate this by going out with people for lunch, or swimming (and even considered taking up rock-climbing, just because my peer-group were into that sort of thing :-)

But the best success I had is with having a lunch with former colleagues and friends through-out the week, it doesn't take that much time and organization, and the ~hour I spend away from the screen serves as a nice reset.

</comment><comment><USER2> > dont have access to good coffee places near by

This is a major problem. Either move to a place where such places exist or don't do remote working. This kind of isolation ends up being a disaster for morale and productivity (speaking from experience).

</comment><comment><USER3> Routines. Force yourself to get out. Have a date with either a bar, or a coffee shop, or something else after work is done. Almost like a necessary appointment.

The market is the same as remote work, I think.</comment>


Drinking two cups of water before a meal will help dieting. - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11057891

<comment><USER2> It seems somewhat intuitive that filling your stomach with a zero-calorie substance would prevent you from subsequently filling it with other, more fattening substances.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd take it one step further though with eating something with fiber (like broccoli, carrots, etc.) a little bit before the full meal or drink some water with psyllum husk or metamucil or any fiber packed drink.. that would actually fill you up as compared to water, which might fill you up for the moment but it'll just leave u hungry a little earlier by the time of the next meal ..

</comment><comment><USER4> For some people it can also trigger dumping syndrome: quicker-than-normal evacuation of food from the stomach, peaking insulin and dizzy spells.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_dumping_syndrome>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm confused. Did it work because people felt more full and ate less, or did they eat the same amount but the water reduced the number of calories the stomach could generate from the food?

</comment><comment><USER6> I dont see this to be hacker-related topic. Not all hackers have problems with their weight. And I doubt that this "hack" is good for your stomach.

Flagged.</comment>


Show HN: Chrome Extension to See IMDB Ratings Directly on Netflix - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imdb-ratings-on-netflix/ohonjgnjobblbhfeamidafpnbkppbljh <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity:

The extension makes API requests to [http://www.omdbapi.com/](http://www.omdbapi.com/) for its data.

The free API key only allows 1,000 req/day but you apparently only need to spend $10/mo for unlimited queries: [https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=5038490](https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=5038490)

I've never seen Patreon used as a storefront like this. Kinda interesting because Patreon also gives you a UI for capturing other types of sponsorships.

<comment><USER3> I built up a similar extension to show MPAA rating on Douban and Zhihu. Though the extension is in Chinese, I setup a server to host all movies data to avoid the requests limit of omdbapi. Updating backend data frequently is definitely a hard job to do. I could guess why omdbapi is asking for support on patreon. Here's the extension link, if you don't mind I post it here :) [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mpaa-%E7%94%B5%E5%...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mpaa-%E7%94%B5%E5%BD%B1%E8%AF%84%E7%BA%A7/dnjigceoecdajpgbjemglmhhboleipfg)

<comment><USER4> In case Netflix is dominating your time... This is my Free Chrome plugin that will block Netflix after 1 hour and wait for you to commit something on Github to keep Netflix and Chill'n. Other options like Khan Academy are suppported.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/studycity/jhehahil...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/studycity/jhehahilkccjclfadmmplhpdnjjdgdlo)

<comment><USER5> I can see people adding this plugin thinking it's a good idea at the time of download.

Once the functionality kicks in and they're actually blocked when attempting to access Netflix, 'instant uninstall, proceed with Netflix binge..'.

or ... git commit -m "garbage commit. Give me Netflix!"

<comment><USER4> Main goal is to get children under twelve to go outside, jump in puddles, ride their bikes. My daughter did 10 rounds of this once, 10 hours of youtube with 5 multiplication problems each hour and eventually decided youtube wasn't worth it. It helps children to disconnect for a couple minutes and re-evaluate their summer day life choices.

<comment><USER5> Oh, well if you have someone of higher authority to enforce its continued and proper usage, then obviously that's a different story.

I was originally commenting from the perspective of the plug-in as a self-help tool where its usage and existence in the browser was determined solely by the users themselves.

In a household setting, I could see it being useful in preventing kids from spending too much time in front of the computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't use Chrome anymore except for dev work. Any chance this could be released for Firefox?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have recently learned to make chrome extension, will work on firefox once I get time.

<comment><USER7> It can likely be ported nearly directly.

Firefox supports a quite faithful port of the `chrome` object the Chrome extension APIs are namespaced under. The four extensions I've written in the past (generally internal-to-co) were all seamlessly supportable in both browsers once Firefox moved away from their old extension interface. There are some differences but Firefox keeps their additions/improvements they make contained to the `browser` namespace, which seem to be spec-driven[1] so maybe those changes will end up in Chrome some day too.

TL;DR: don't let worrying about compatibility prevent you from just trying to install and run the same code in FF to see what happens.

Also, is the source code for this publicly available? I was going to just check this myself, but I don't immediately see a GitHub link in this thread or at the linked page from FF for Android.

[1]: [https://browserext.github.io/browserext/](https://browserext.github.io/browserext/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointers, will try firefox too. GitHub link is mentioned on extension page. [https://github.com/pawanmaurya/imdb-ratings-on- netflix](https://github.com/pawanmaurya/imdb-ratings-on-netflix)

<comment><USER8> I tried it on Firefox and it works fine! I just needed to change the value of <secret_key> to a key I created on their website (or else it fails silently, it would be cool to have some console message I think).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An aside to the extension itself, but this makes me nostalgic for the days when browser extensions like this were commonplace. Today I don't even watch Netflix through a browser (I have a Roku and Android TV at home, and will very rarely watch on my iOS phone), and this kind of project simply isn't possible there.

I do understand the reasons why this is the case and don't have any proposals for how it could be meaningfully fixed, but still, I miss that bygone era of customisation.

<comment><USER10> Realistically, the platform itself should show these (imdb, rottentomat and metacritic). Instead they show some personalized likeness metric that never works.

<comment><USER11> In nearly 30 years of computing experience, one thing I've learned is the guys who make the platform never capture all the little details of what you'd like that platform to do.

IMO iPhones never really shined until they opened it up to 3rd party developers and built an ecosystem of developers around the app store.

One thing I love[d] about Windows was how deeply you could tailor the experience (through hooks, DLL injection, etc). Haven't played with Linux as much but love the concept that you can overhaul the whole source code to taste.

GreaseMonkey is analogous for the web.

I hope this concept isn't lost as corporations wrest control of both sides of the user experience (browser and services).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using RateFlix for a while now - haven't seen many issues as of yet. I love these type of ideas. When you add Rotten Tomatoes, I'm totally in to use!

1\. Movies and TV shows will show an IMDb™ rating next to wherever you would typically see a Netflix™ rating, and additionally will be shown on the play bar of what you're currently watching as well as next to each listed episode when browsing episodes of a TV series

2\. Rotten Tomatoes™ and Metacritic™ ratings will also be displayed in the same way, but currently only for movies

3\. Clicking on an IMDb™ rating will open the IMDb™ page for that movie or TV show in a new tab

For Chrome only [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rateflix/dddmgiige...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rateflix/dddmgiigenogheihnldadkdooelhepcg?hl=en)

<comment><USER13> I don't like that it requests to intercept traffic to [https://ajax.googleapis.com/*](https://ajax.googleapis.com/*) -that's far too general to trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Neat! I always end up doing the google search to check out IMDb/RT ratings.

Another nice to have is the number of reviewers - I've noticed that some of these movies have high ratings early on (potentially from crew/cast/fans) but then slowly drop to the mean as more people review the movie.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, but I am not sure of how to get number of reviewers since OMDB doesn't have it and IMDB doesn't have open API

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like how you scoped perms to only affect netflix.com and omdbapi.com. good job! Usually when I hit install and see "read and modify your data on all sites" I go straight to nope!

</comment><comment><USER16> I think it would be cool if this was generic enough to show Rotten Tomatoes user ratings as many people nowadays find it to be a better indicator. I hope you repurpose it someday!

</comment><comment><USER17> I really like Taste.io's movie and TV recommendations. Having just reviewed a few movies on the site, it has given me better and more unique recommendations than Netflix or Amazon ever have.

Their site also shows whether the movie is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or HBO and will deep link to the other sites. I'm not sure what Taste.io's business model is.

[https://www.taste.io/](https://www.taste.io/)

<comment><USER18> My favorite movie recommender is Gnovies:

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

Apparently it uses AI to predict which movies you like.

In contrast to taste.io you don't need to sign up. You can get recommendations right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For me, the most useful feature of Netflix is the custom ratings it provides. They're almost always absolutely spot on, with the exception of "Netflix Originals" which seem to be bumped up a bit.

I'm curious why something like IMDB is useful for people. I would much rather get a metric related to what I, personally, might like, rather than what the majority likes.

<comment><USER20> Say you chose to share a single profile with your SO/family/household, for whatever reason. Then Netflix's ratings would be for a nonexistent aggregate person that is a combination of the tastes of all those people, weighted by the relative frequency of use and/or rating actions. This could be significantly less useful than what you as an individual see on your own account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> OT, but for anyone looking for an idea: it'll be neat if some service can notify me when a movie I saved on IMDB is available on Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great idea but I wish the data source was better, e.g. Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, because IMDB ratings are almost useless.

<comment><USER2> Interesting, because I've found imdb ratings to be the best because it's based on user votes.

Movie critics, on the other hand, seem to vote the complete opposite of regular viewers (and each other) to set themselves apart. Or voting some awful art house movie a 10/10 to signal that they, too, understood the high brow nuances that the groundlings could not. I end up agreeing with the user votes far more often than the critic scores on RT and Metacritic, and the user scores tend to line up with imdb anyways.

<comment><USER9> IMO IMDB has a big problem with recency. #3 in their top movies list is The Dark Knight, which is frankly absurd (it's a great movie, but #3 of all time? Come on)

> Or voting some awful art house movie a 10/10 to signal that they, too, > understood the high brow nuances that the groundlings could not.

I think this just speaks to a divide in movie reviews. Those critics are reviewing the movies as art, whereas many user reviews are reviewing movies as a consumer product. Neither approach is incorrect, but they have very different outcomes.

<comment><USER23> RT has Black Panther as their #1 movie of all time. The fact is, people have learned to inherently train themselves to use certain review websites. [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/)

My current rules - Anything over an 8 on imbd is a must watch if over a year old. If a comedy/action movie over a 7 is fine. For less than a year old I read reviews, and decide how invested I am in watching it. Fantastic Beasts 2 tanked, but I watched it anyway and enjoyed it.

<comment><USER24> Similar for me, but more forgiving. Especially for horror which I enjoy but IMDb raters don't seem to the same. In general, anything below a 6 I'll maybe reconsider, or 5 or so for horror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps this could include scores from multiple sources, similar to how google displays them when you search for a movie.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I am planning to introduce atleast rottentomatoes ratings at first. Wanted to validate idea first.

<comment><USER26> Would love the RT connection, especially if it has both critics and user scores. IMDB usually tells me nothing but "This sucks, don't watch it" (score of 5.X) but I don't get anything else from their ratings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a cool idea. But worked once - did'nt work for a LOT of titles i tried. Seems to be some bug.

Friends - [https://imgur.com/a/t5aduhK](https://imgur.com/a/t5aduhK)

<comment><AUTHOR> OMDB currently supports movies only, I think, that might be the reason. Will look into it

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Love it!

Bug:

\- Does not show the rating for all movies. Examples:

\-- [https://www.netflix.com/title/80189213](https://www.netflix.com/title/80189213) (empty)

\-- [https://www.netflix.com/title/70136120](https://www.netflix.com/title/70136120) (N/A)

Feature requests:

\- Show "IMDB rating" right away and a spinner while you're fetching the data from the API call.

\- Let me click on it and go to IMDB to see more information

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback. OMDB is used as data source and its doesn't have all movie's info. Will see if there's another data source with better coverage. I really liked idea of putting clickable link to IMDB.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update : I got "HN hug of death" and OMDB api free limit is crossed. Working on converting it to premium.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its fixed now thanks to quick response from OMDB creator

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> does that work with international, non US markets? non english Netflix versions?

<comment><USER30> I can confirm it works for the Spanish site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> it's being super super slow for me, otherwise, cool idea

</comment><comment><USER32> Netflix won't work with Chrome(ium) on Linux.

<comment><USER33> This should depend on whether your "chrome" package has the Widevine content decryption module plugin packed with it. With Arch linux - for example - it's a separate package to install.

<comment><USER17> Yes, Netflix and Widevine should work out of the box if you are using Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox builds for Linux.

<comment><USER32> Yes, it works fine with Firefox. I looked up for Widevine in Synaptic and found nothing. Same thing with Chromium extensions. I'll keep researching.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Announcing the Build Server Protocol v1.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2018/06/15/bsp.html <comment><USER2> This is clearly trying to sell on the success of Microsoft's Language Server Protocol.

However, it only supports Scala at the moment, and having a quick look it's goofing to be an awful fit for many other languages. I really don't feel they should be "camping" on such an obvious name without support for at least a half dozen different languages.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, LSP was TypeScript only in the beginning. You have to start somewhere.

<comment><USER4> And there was the sort of famous (at least in Scala circles) rant by Paul Philips about how insanely dumb the compiler is, how slow and unhelpful, as it builds up all the structures from scratch every time, just to throw a syntax/type/other error, instead of keeping the state and only processing the delta (the changes and the minimal related nodes in the tree).

So (type aware) programming should be a conversation with the compiler, trying to prove more and more about the code, while trying to clarify the intentions of the programmer.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, this has nothing to do with BSP and it's also not true technical wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, what is the difference in responsibility from the Language Server Protocol that Visual Studio Code uses? I get that they're riffing on the same concept, but why separate the two? What's the difference, other than that "oh this one is more build-y"?

<comment><USER7> LSP is specialised for static analysis of code, and aims to provide a generic protocol for doing that. However, say I want to run a single test from Vim. Currently I have, for ruby, rspec.vim so ",s" will run the test under the cursor, but all it does is shell out to an rspec command. So it seems the idea is to provide a generic interface for "run this test in this project", or "build this file", without having to care about the specific build tooling involved.

I like it as an idea. We'll see if it gets any traction outside of Scala-land.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Solutionism

SBT has an extremely non trivial start up, and spin up time. Even using a client JVM (more aggressive JITing). You need to know the hot paths, before you can JIT them.

And as a CLI tool, by the time you start optimizing your hot paths your tool will exit.

Now C/C++/Rust/Go compilers can be slow, when your compiling A LOT of crap. But the tools will spring to action extremely quickly on smaller jobs. And while build farm services exist, they're useful for handling instances where you have GiB's of sources, or sources which expand into GiB's of input.

Overall a generic build server API sounds good, but this doesn't solve the core problem Scala has which can be summarized by running:

        sbt -version

and seeing it take 1-2 minutes to display an error message.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you mean 1-2 _minutes_

<comment><USER10> No opinions, just facts:

So, what's wrong with SBT? [http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html](http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html)

But there's hope: [https://www.lihaoyi.com/mill/](https://www.lihaoyi.com/mill/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Link to the spec: [https://github.com/scalacenter/bsp/blob/master/docs/bsp.md](https://github.com/scalacenter/bsp/blob/master/docs/bsp.md)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've used Scala for years. If this is finally the thing that gets Scala a great IDE, it will be the single best thing for the language in a while.

I'm pessimistic, but also hope I'm wrong.</comment>


Show HN: Clarify – Awesome tools to Help You Launch and Manage Your Career - <AUTHOR> https://www.clarifyhq.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey there Hackers! I'm JC the solo maker of Clarify, my first product.

We built Clarify because often times in our performance reviews and in our résumés we have the tendency to solely focus on our job descriptions when instead we should be highlighting the things we've achieved and the areas in which we've created value for our organizations.

Clarify is perfect for you if you want to track your professional achievements and be Performance Review ready in seconds. You'll be prepared at your next Performance Review with a list of professional achievements, your compensation, and your own development plan that you can discuss with your boss. All of this easily prepared for you in a PDF report.

You'll be able to quickly and tactfully discuss the areas in which you've created value for your organization and naturally transition the conversation to your compensation, career development, and much more.

We're live on our web app, [https://www.clarifyhq.com](https://www.clarifyhq.com), which you can access on the web from anywhere with your desktop or mobile device.

Would love for you to give it a try and provide any constructive feedback you may have.

Follow us on Twitter [https://www.twitter.com/@clarifyhq](https://www.twitter.com/@clarifyhq)

Happy Achieving!</comment>


Map-based travel diary service? - <AUTHOR>

I'd really like a map-based travel diary service. Does anyone know of a service, or open source projects that could easily be modified to:
- Show a (google?) map - Include routes of driven or gps routes - Contain location-aggregated icons on map for photos based on photo metadata. Maybe photos are on the service, or maybe they're on flickr etc. - Has Icons on map for blog or 'diary' entries.
You'd be able to see your route between cities, click on a city "photo" icon to zoom into the city and see all of the icons for photos taken at different spots, or click on the 'blog' icons on the map to see what you talked about.
An interactive view of a trip. <comment><USER2> This used to be my "Big" project, back in the mid 'aughts:

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

I does, well, exactly what you're looking for. I still touch it from time to time, though mainly to hone my spam-fighting skeelz, which need to be top notch for a user-generated-content site such as this.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. Here's are sample user and trip pages (mine):

[http://www.blogabond.com/jason](http://www.blogabond.com/jason) [http://www.blogabond.com/TripView.aspx?tripID=10](http://www.blogabond.com/TripView.aspx?tripID=10)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for :)

I haven't tried to create an account/trip, yet, but my initial thoughts are that I'd revamp the interface.

I'll take a look at creating an account/using it.

What's the status of this? Are there still active users? Is it open source at this point?

It's impressive considering it was made in the mid 'aughts.

I've been considering writing my own and just using services (flickr, evernote) for pictures, "blog entries", etc.

Edit: Could I contact you on gchat or something? We have a lot in common (this project, coding, climbing, traveling etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I made one for myself: www.skiporgo.com It's wordpress based site, so I can add users and they can create their stories in the map.</comment>


Ask HN: If you were to create a new Joel Test, what would look like? - <AUTHOR> In case you haven't seen the Joel Test, here it is:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/
The Joel Test
Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing?
It was initially released in 2000 and since then, it's become outdated.
If you were tasked with creating a new Joel Test, what would it look like? e.g.,
1. Which source control do you use? 2. Which branching model do you use for Git? 3. Do you use an issue tracker? 4. Do you do TDD or some form of Unit Testing? 5. Do you do code reviews? 6. Do you have coding standards? 7. Do you do Continuous Integration? etc.
I want to see what the community thinks should be the new test? <comment><USER2> What is wrong with it? It still looks applicable. It's easier to do than ever, the point isn't to add more tech, but to tick off the same questions.

Lots of companies still don't have source control or testers. People still need to write code in interviews.

What I would add is that progress tracking should be up to date, with tools like Trello or Pivotal Tracker, rather than asking how much is there left to do.

And now, more than any time ever in programming history, we really need non- distracting working conditions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have a complete answer right now, but I would consider the following ideas.

* Can you deploy (not build) with a push of a button

* Can you deploy the same artifact to test, stage, prod, etc with no changes?

* Can all developers easily check metrics and logs for production?

* Can all developers access production?

* Are servers pets or cattle?

* Are developers allowed to choose the tools that best suit themselves?

* Who gets paged?

* What happens the day after page?

* How is server config managed?

* Are schema changes to the database automated?

Obviously, these are not all yes/no questions and should be simplified, but it is what is on the top of my head. Some if it is based on the idea of a 12 factor app and on using immutable images (docker, amis, etc) and some is based on devops/sre models of working. For example, who gets paged and what happens the next day is all about process. Fixing and forgetting the issue is not acceptable.

<comment><USER4> > Can all developers access production?

I don't think that's necessarily a good idea, for various data disclosure, security, and safety reasons. In fact, I'd say that a better question would be if developers are able to diagnose and solve problems without having to access prod. For example, a company may have an anonymised copy or partial copy of prod for developers to work with.

<comment><USER5> It is when your CI process will prevent any breaking changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the original Joel Test still holds up well and I still use it when I interview with companies. But these questions might get to culture issues that ultimately affect code quality and developer well-being:

\- Are developers/employees at the office for less than 45 hours a week?

\- Are employees discouraged from answering company email or signing on after they leave the office?

\- Do developers have admin control of their machines?

\- Do you trust your developers with internet access (i.e. no corporate website blockers)?

Any NO here is an organization smell to me that signals poor project management, too few people expected to do too much work, or basic lack of professionalism.

</comment><comment><USER7> I honestly don't think it is outdated at all. For example, its hard to find "quiet working conditions" in most jobs. In fact, when it comes to peace and quiet it seem to have gotten worse in the last decade. If you cherish solitude, you are "obviously not a team player" and "not a good fit for our company culture." :/

<comment><USER8> Agreed, everywhere I've work it's like trying to take a shower/bath with the door unlocked and people walking in and out. Just horrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thing I alluded to in answer to the other question you asked: I'm working on a Joel Test for companies to demonstrate if they have (or don't) a sane workweek.

For more technical stuff, googling "joel test updated" will find you a bunch.

</comment><comment><USER10> > 2\. Which branching model do you use for Git?

Bad question because it presupposes use of Git, and using source control other than Git is not necessarily indicative of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> My employer's answers to these questions are why I am actively looking for work.

1\. Do you use unit tests?

2\. Do you use static analysis tools?

3\. Do you use dependency injection?

4\. Do you use parameterized SQL or an ORM?

5\. What third party libraries are mandatory?

6\. Rank these three goals in order of importance - time to market, quality, maintenance costs.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm another who thinks the original has stood the test of time pretty well (with the "quiet" looking more precious than ever).

But were I updating, I'd be thinking about something like "do you compare your developers to assembly-line workers?". Management-speak definitely seems to have been heading in that direction recently, with terms like "backlog" particularly grinding my gears.

</comment><comment><USER13> * Do they ask algorithm pop quizzes in the interviews?

I don't mind doing a simple problem on a white board to show some basic competency. When I give interviews, I tell the candidates days before we'll be solving a very simple problem together. Just a basic fizz-buzz. Anything more complicated than that they deserve a compiler and Google Search.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would ask what % of features/fixes/improvements comes from the developers. That should be large (lets say >25%) in a healthy environment IMO.

Other than that the original looks pretty good. Too bad not too many companies score a 12/12.

</comment><comment><USER15> What makes it outdated besides the publication date?

</comment><comment><USER16> "Do you have an open office?" comes to mind. [http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170105-open-offices- are-d...](http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170105-open-offices-are-damaging- our-memories)

</comment><comment><USER17> Replace schedule and spec with a groomed and prioritized backlog.

<comment><USER14> The point of the question is that you should have a spec and a schedule. A groomed prioritized backlog isn't a replacement as it often doesn't have a real spec and doesn't imply a schedule.

What will your product look like? (in enough relevant detail) When does it get delivered? These are two critical questions. These things are always subject to change but a business should know what it's aiming for.

<comment><USER17> The point of agile is that your spec and schedule are nonsense. So-called BDUF has failed time and again and the reasonable approach is to not bother planning more than a few weeks at a time and be able to change priorities quickly.

<comment><USER14> This isn't about big design up front vs. "Agile". In my personal opinion if anything is a failure it's Agile which has turned into an excuse for pushing people around, poor management, poor software development. You have to keep your eye on the ball, know where it's going _and_ be flexible. You can't just be flexible. You can't build anything of consequence by only planning a few weeks ahead out of context of some larger plan. If you have no idea where you're going you're going to mess it up a few weeks at a time.

JMHO and I've done everything under the sun from various flavours of Scrum, XP, to more traditional project management techniques. This question will help you find out if you're going into a chaotic and stressful environment or if things are under some sort of adult supervision...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Do you allow remote work?" Anything other than "Yes!" is an org-smell (at least for me, YMMV).

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the original test still hits most of the important points. But yes, there's room to adjust some of them for modern tooling; the web ecosystem; and the current agile mindset.

1) Replace "source control" with "distributed source control". Or something about source control where branching and merging is cheap.

2 and 3) Replace "build" with "deploy" for web apps

4) No change

5) I've always been iffy on this one. What sort of bugs? All bugs? What software is ever bug-free? No new code until you've handled every single edge case and typo? Not very agile. I think this is another that differs between web apps and "shrink-wrapped" (even if digitally shrink-wrapped) apps; and with digital distribution significantly shortening the build/distribute/feedback cycle, it's less crucial than it used to be even for the shrink-wrapped apps.

6) I might replace this with something more agile involving sprints/milestones/target dates; or about adjusting scope to meet schedule

7) The term "spec" tends to get feathers ruffled, especially in agile circles. I've seen software built very successfully from nothing but a UI design and a short bulleted list of legal compliance requirements. I think there's room for something here about knowing what you're building and the whole team (from design/product to engineering to QA) being on the same page about what that is.

8) This. 10000x this. This is the item that 95% of software companies these days fail hard.

9) I've seen people complain that this doesn't take into account the prevalence of open-source tooling, but I think the point here is that you should be willing to invest a LOT of money in making your developers' lives easier and software quality better. Don't skimp on workstation hardware, or AWS instances, or licenses for whatever tools will improve velocity/software quality/quality of life. Perhaps it could be reworded somewhat.

10) These days I would split this one into whether developers write automated tests that are run in CI and whether you have someone other than the developers do click-through testing, both of which are important (unless you're writing nothing but SDKs)

11) I would say during either an interview or a take-home exercise, but yeah. Write code as part of the interview process.

12) Kind of meh on this one. For most web apps you can do A/B testing, partial rollouts, and feature flags to get much higher quality and nearly as quick feedback than you would with "hallway" usability testing. For shrink-wrapped apps, I think it depends on how representative people in your hallway are of your target user. Yes, you need usability testing, but the "hallway" part is debatable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Who is joel?

<comment><USER21> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky)</comment></comment>


Dropbox's Onboarding Brilliance - <AUTHOR> http://theindustry.cc/2012/08/07/dropboxs-onboarding-brilliance/ <comment><USER2> After publishing a video on improving the first run experience for software applications, I now have a small flock of little birds telling me that you should really, really consider doing this.

Dropbox has one of the best I've ever seen -- seriously, sit regular users down and watch them interact with it, it will be worth your time. There is still _significant value to doing this_ even if you're not going to nail the execution nearly as well as they did. It should be _embarrassing_ how easy it is to wring huge increases out of the standard drop-folks-in-the-app-and-pray- they-think-like-your-tech-lead experience.

<comment><USER3> > _After publishing a video on improving the first run experience for software > applications, I now have a small flock of little birds telling me that you > should really, really consider doing this._

Not sure if it's sentence structure or my stupidity, but I'm not sure what you're saying here :)

Are you saying that all software applications should have a 'how it works' video, or that you made a video about the 'first run experience' and everyone should have a better 'first run experience'?

Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the oblique phrasing -- I was trying to avoid being self- promotional. I'll rephrase to make it more comprehensible but it's going to require an ad:

I made <https://training.kalzumeus.com> <\-- a video on this subject. (The site trades access to the video for your email address and permission to contact you.)

Subsequently to publishing that, people who I am declining to name (+) got in touch with me and presented several independent confirmations that, yep, their first-run experiences that they wrote using the video's advice did meaningful things to their business.

\+ There is an idiom in English "A little bird told me that...", which reports a comment made by someone whose identity you want to keep secret. A "flock of little birds" is an amusing image for reporting the same comment made by many people, or at least I thought it was.

<comment><USER4> When the way to make your post sound less self-promotional is to make it less comprehensible and useful, please go ahead and be self-promotional, i.e. put the link in there and be specific about what success people have told you they had using the technique.

If you've become shy about self-promotion due to downvoting, please ignore it. Downvoting on HN seems random in the last year or two. Please think only about how helpful you think your comment is, as if you were oblivious to how self- promotional it might sound.

Helpful pointers to something you made will always sound self-promotional; there's no way around it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A good article.

Dropbox's onboarding is very good, but one thing I wonder is: has it always been that good? For example, what was the onboarding process like when Dropbox very first launched - was it terrible, average, or pretty much like this the whole time?

I guess the reason I'm interested is that we all have these really early stage discussions in our startups about how perfect to get the onboarding process before launch, and it would be cool to know the story about Dropbox for a reference.

<comment><USER6> I signed up for Dropbox maybe 2+ years ago, the onboarding was pretty good then so it seems like they've been doing it well and improving from there at the very least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It didn't feel the same when Kicksend did it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rather than classifying this as Dropbox's brilliance, it might be more prudent to point out the lack of diligence and thoroughness in user experience modeling on part of other software vendors.

It is bloody obvious than a guided tour of a program or a service is a really good idea. Anyone who ever tried using their own software while pretending to be an uninitiated user can attest to that.

<comment><USER9> Everything seems obvious in hindsight. Trust me, if what Dropbox has done is as obvious as you seem to claim, a lot more software vendors would have done it.</comment></comment>


Facebook blocked our domain name without reason - <AUTHOR> our website wapwon.info is a youtube api based mobile website and it has been blocked by facebook.. this site is fully clean web site but they blocked it.. any solution ?? <comment><USER2> Maybe because you allow users to download videos. Facebook has strict guidelines for what they allow. They might think your site is a pirated video site because users can download videos. Confusing it with Popcorn Time and other pirate video sites.

Facebook has no phone to call to appeal.

Try this link [https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=102047264...](https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10204726425583957)

</comment><comment><USER3> hug your pillow and cry !!!!!!! I think so best solution ever!!!!!</comment>


Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314959)

</comment><comment><USER3> Aswesome :)

"Finally, this phenomenon hinges on the exact timing of the RAS signal at the nanosecond level, and on many machines the critical situation simply doesn't occur. The timing (and thus the probability of a crash) depends on factors such as temperature, VIC revision, parasitic capacitance and resistance of the traces on the motherboard, power supply ripple and interference with other parts of the machine such as the phase of the colour carrier with respect to the dotclock. The latter is assigned randomly at power-on, by the way, which could be the reason why a power-cycle sometimes helps."

</comment><comment><USER4> Well of _course_ LFT was the one who discovered the reason! His work is impressive. Example: [http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminded me a bit about the modern DRAM issue, i.e., row hammer -- although the details are of course different -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer)

</comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off topic but it's pretty cool to live in a day and age where people can post logic analyzer dumps of hardware processes and debug them together on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a neuroscientist, this makes me feel better about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11843376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11843376)

</comment><comment><USER8> Shit like this is where I wish we could have a demo scene for modern architecture. (Maybe there is one, and I'm just don't know about it)

I have always fantasized about going back to the bad old days, where you have to boot the computer into the program you want to run.

I dream about having the full capability of modern computing to just run one program. Without any overhead. Without an OS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing is preventing you from doing that.

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is unfortunate 4164s dates before CAS before RAS refresh. Not all 41256s supports it either I think. There were even SIMMs with labels indicating that they are for Mac Plus/SE only when Apple had to use Siemens chips that don't support it.

</comment><comment><USER11> One should add '[2013]'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bias for newness is a bad thing.

<comment><USER12> Having read this several years ago, I think [2013] is appropriate.

<comment><USER11> If you scroll to the bottom of [http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php) you can read "Posted Wednesday 20-Mar-2013 23:23". :-)

<comment><USER13> Not the point. The point is to have it in the title so everyone knows BEFORE clicking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He should have waited ten more years, then it would have been a 40 year old bug. Much more impressive! ;-P

<comment><USER15> Depends on how much oak you like in your bug.</comment></comment>


Rate my startup: Quivee.com - <AUTHOR>

Clickable http://Quivee.com<p>Trying to simplify the job search process.  Would love to know what you think! <comment><USER2> I run a naming service, and I'm writing a book about naming startups, so I can help you the most on that topic:

I'm confused as to the name. Unless I'm missing a job/career/search reference, it just sounds like a random web 2.0 name to me. You're definitely going to have problems with communicating it (on the phone, in person, etc.) as well as just general forgetfulness due to the vagueness of it.

\--

As for the site in general:

\- design looks solid, although the black bar at the top is a little too tall

\- the headings near the bottom could be more descriptive; "It just works" doesn't really tell me that it reads all job links. Likewise for "Arrive in Style." "Google Maps Integration" might work better.

\- I'm unclear on this: can I search for jobs through your site, or do I add links from other job sites to Quivee to manage it?

Other than that, I'm intrigued. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> The name is pretty confusing for me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The service seems very useful, and executed well. The name sucks. I don't know how to pronounce it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks great, is there a cost involved?

Not sure on the name, though?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't see why a name matters so much. Unless it sounds super a like to another company name. Google makes no sense yet their big.

</comment><comment><USER7> Clickable: <http://Quivee.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea. Yeah the name is a little easy to forget.</comment>