Turkish bank lets you send money to friends through Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&u=http://www.denizbank.com/acikdeniz/facebook-bankaciligi

<comment><USER2> About 8-10 years ago, another Turkish bank, Garanti, offered sms based money sending when the sms craze was at its height.

It would send you a one-time random code that you could enter at any ATM, along with your and the sender's phone numbers and the known amount (which would not be in the SMS you got as the receiver).

The sender would have to sms a service number like "3434" with the receiver phone number, the amount, and a special pre-determined pin. Whenever the amount was sent and accepted, the sender got confirmation SMSes, so they could notice and contest this in the off chance of fraud. Also, there was a daily limit to the amount that could be sent this way, only increasable online or over the phone after identity checks.

All in all, not bad. Could be abused under very lucky circumstances (eg. phone got stolen and was storing sent SMSes, which was not the default during those days when phone memory was limited. And then the thief would have to get another stolen phone to retrieve the money so as to not give out their identity, and would have to do so under a security camera'd ATM), but not a super high chance and no super high risk.

This saved me tons of times when I would have been stranded as a teenager but managed to call my parents. Or, later on, when I had my phone but had misplaced my card.

</comment><comment><USER3> Turkey is very interesting in such things. I live in Germany and my parents live in Turkey. No bank in Germany would even think about such things but in I can't shake off the feeling that they just do it. Another cool thing my cousins told me is that they can send each other cash from mobile phone to mobile phone. Say I don't have money on my prepaid card and my friends have enough and don't use it, they just can send couple of bucks to my phone.

I mean I don't use a prepaid card but I think it is awesome! As a student this is a great option!

I hope we see more of this kind of rule breaking things from around the world. Sometimes it feels like the people in the world are getting more and more afraid of change which breaks "common rules". Money transferring is one such crazy issue.

<comment><USER4> In a similar note, Africa; (especially Kenya) have wonderful services with mobile payments, SMS services and Facebook too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Similar service is offered by a Polish bank Alior Sync: [http://static.sync.pl/attachment/jak_zlecic_przelew_na_fb.pd...](http://static.sync.pl/attachment/jak_zlecic_przelew_na_fb.pdf)

When it comes to banking, I prefer to stay away from the cutting edge.

<comment><USER6> It seems like they had their "Facebook branch" open for ten months now. I wonder if they had any security issues.

Either way, it's cool seeing kids withdraw cash from ATMs by typing in their SMS PIN numbers. Kind of makes you feel young, and old.

<comment><USER5> My favorite modern banking feature is instant SMS notifications about credit card charges. It's cool to immediately see the confirmation on a phone after you type PIN into a terminal. It's even better for online purchases, when you often don't know whether the payment went through or not (and why).

<comment><USER7> not so cutting edge, inteligo has had it for like 10 years or sth.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying it's something special, just an example of useful application of SMS in banking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> South Africa's FNB also lets you send money to others and buy cellular airtime, SMS and data bundles via Facebook, so this bank's claim to being the first seems doubtful.

As an aside, FNB was recently given the Most Innovative Bank of 2012 award at the BAI-Finacle Global Banking Innovation Awards in DC. It's pay-off for a big investment they've made over the past few years to adopt new technology and mediums for banking. [0]

A friend and former colleague works there, so I'm pleased to see them doing well.

[0]<https://www.fnb.co.za/news/archive/2012/20121010FNBsDNA.html>

<comment><USER9> Actually this FB branch was announced in January. It's not news.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough, though when did it actually go live?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the same in New Zealand. ASBBank lets you send money to your Facebook friends from their mobile app.

</comment><comment><USER11> I sense a new iteration of the "I'm stranded in London after being mugged" scam.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a friend with a terrible hash habit. He will be so thrilled...</comment>


Sex toy flash drive ebooks - <AUTHOR> http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=593&mode=one

<comment><AUTHOR> Some irritating design company in California ripped me off and is getting a lot of press for it right now...

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/fashion/noted-a- vibrator-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/fashion/noted-a-vibrator- that-will-make-her-thankful-for-the-memory.html?_r=0)

...but I've been selling "Seed" since '09.

[http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=459&mode=one](http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=459&mode=one)</comment>


Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif - <AUTHOR> http://studio.forgif.me

<comment><USER2> I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline.

I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey.

I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: <http://gifsoup.com/>) and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely convert as I prefer your interface.

edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved?

edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the button again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it! The idea of greying the indicator out is nice, I'll implement it tomorrow.

Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get bigger :)

Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though.

Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!

<comment><USER3> Cofounder of GifSoup.com here (before we sold it off).

Prepare to have your bandwidth obliterated. You'll need to pay for way better hosting, people are literally going to hotlink you to death.

I'm not sure if your downloading process has a progress bar, but I suggest you implement one to keep impatient people from leaving (it looks like you do, but your server just might be unresponsive at the moment).

Your hosting bill is going to add up quick if you want to keep the service live and as is, so I suggest you implement a premium service. I don't think GIFs are a particularly profitable business, but we had fun with it, and its cool to see our watermarked GIFs on random places like Reddit. Enjoy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey coryl, thanks for your feedback! The studio is just temporarily storing the files, they are automatically deleted after (currently) 24h. We will move this down to 60 minutes though.

As mentioned before, the server this beauty is running on is a very very small one, since we didn't expect such a huge feedback. We will move to another server later this week.

I've been running an online video converter for 5 years now, 300 TB of traffic per month (and the resulting video files are a lot bigger than the .gifs we are creating with this service), so I guess I'm quite experienced in handling huge amounts of traffic. As I see the stats on gifsoup.com, it had about 7TB traffic in total, which I think is nothing to worry about. Thanks for the hint, though :)

<comment><USER4> If you would like to save bandwidth anyway, you could make the download link point to a data uri so that the users can _only_ download the image. Might be a worse user experience though, if you think it's an OK use case to hotlink temporarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?

<comment><USER6> In that case it would be a great pun, wouldn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably will be better to serve static content only by nginx. <http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif> error from rails.

maybe this will help <http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with- rails/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we don't have that much traffic, so we wouldn't see a big difference. We will configure nginx precisely when we move to another server, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice! However, in its current implementation, the service does not seem to optimize the created gifs at all, i.e. all frames are opaque and do not try to reuse existing pixels in the last frame(s).

This can be easily changed by using the integrated disposal methods in a gif, as shown on <http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm> , but afaik ffmpeg does not support this out of the box.

It seems imagemagick is able to do some basic optimization, as shown on <http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt> .

</comment><comment><USER9> I do like the interface, but in Firefox it's quit unresponsive and clunky, but a lot smoother in Safari. Either way, it was still quite difficult to actually find the start and end points I wanted. Not sure if this is something YouTube's end, like not allowing access to that certain point in the video.

I agree with other(s) when I say the quality is quite terrible, but hopefully some tweaks with FFMPEG, or maybe even another route.

I do like the neatness and unobtrusive-ness of the watermark though.

I think over all, it shows a lot of promise, but need to fine tune those UI controls and make it clearer/easier to select a timeframe, and improve the quality of the GIF somewhat too :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agreeing to the points you mentioned. At first we only had like one timeframe selector, but since videos can be pretty long, we added the zoom selection (the upper one), but it's quite hard to figure out how to handle them correctly. Actually you can use it very precisely if you know how.

I guess the first thing I will do is add an instruction video or a short tutorial to make clear what the controls are there for.

The problem with Firefox is that the videos we are getting from YouTube and Vimeo are MP4. Since Firefox does not support the h264 codec right now, I had to implement a flash fallback which is not responsive at all. I wonder why people still use Firefox, though :P

I'll take some time tomorrow to have a closer look at the gif encoding code of FFmpeg to make it use another color palette. This is quite complicated though, so it might take some time. For now, we have to consider ourselves satisfied with the quality :(

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment> the-kenny Works pretty good: <http://forgif.me/gm>

</comment><comment><USER10> Great tool! Is there a way to add static text?

The 2 usability recommendations I would add are:

1) Tell me how long my video clip is. (Don't make me keep guessing if I am in the 5 second range).

2) After creating the gif, if I don't like it let me go back to the editing screen with the last settings I used. I trimmed a youtube video down in the editor, but when the gif was created a few extra frames seemed to appear in the final product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, static text is one of the features we are planning for this tool. Currently we round the start and end time (which will be fixed tomorrow) so you won't get very precise results. Also, a "change settings" button will be implemented / we will load the given settings if you reopen the editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> shameless plug. 4 months ago I released my own similar app. you can visit it here. <http://99gifs.com/studio>

Everything is done client side, it uses web workers to render the gif so it doesn't block the UI and it's fast.

</comment><comment><USER12> The elements are a bit too small to get accurate results. An indicator for when the 5 second limit is reached would be appreciated. Also, please indicate how long I have to wait, it has been splitting video for a long time now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both things will be implemented! Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bug report: I made a gif and halfway through it cut to some other video. Weird. I couldn't pull any kind of unique identifier out of the page to show you, sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Something like this here? <http://forgif.me/hc> I'll have a closer look at it when I'm at the office, thanks for the hint!

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, the converter was totally broken for the last few hours. Result: Totally random .gifs. Fixed that, should work now.

</comment><comment><USER14> You should post it on Reddit, as it will get lots and lots of usage there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somebody already did, it didn't get a lot of buzz though. Gotta try that later today!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was looking for exactly something like this, really nice interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It'll be great if uploading files are allowed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, that's another thing we are planning for the future. Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent work! Love this.

</comment><comment><USER18> any desire to open source your video UI? it's terrific

</comment><comment><USER19> How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already, and it's still chugging away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah the server it's running on is pretty damn slow. We will move to another server in the next days. Unfortunately we don't show the progress of the video splitting right now. Try again if it takes to long. Sorry for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> HN effect already, site down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed already, thanks for the comment though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Its very nice application

</comment><comment><USER21> This is so cool. Hot Videos are so funnly :)

<comment><USER21> I'm sorry I mean gifs :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best 'non-frustrating' search/directory UI/UX you've seen? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to find some inspiration for a new search engine I'm working but have found most searchable directory ui's to be very frustrating to use.<p>I'd love to know what you guys have seen out there. What have been some of the best examples of this type of ui that you've seen? <comment><USER3> If you means something that searches for files within any directory, I think the best so far I've used was Everything ([https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/)). Lightweight, fast, and really simple UI.

I'm still looking for a Linux equivalent (I'm currently using a shell wrapper for `ag --depth 0 -g <pattern> <directory>`.)

<comment><USER4> > I'm still looking for a Linux equivalent

You mean `locate`? Package name in Debian is mlocate.

I don't know ag and it's not a package in Debian.

That said, I agree that Everything is a must-have on Windows. I don't understand how Microsoft's own search engine is so incredibly crappy (and has been since, what, Windows 95?) while Everything is a 200KB binary that does it perfectly.

<comment><USER5> > I don't know ag and it's not a package in Debian.

You're in for a treat then: the package name is "silversearcher-ag".

Next time you want to grep a directory of files: instead of grepping it, pause, remember this comment, install it and then do "ag <searchterm>" instead.

It's quite a bit faster. Well, lots faster.

<comment><USER6> faster still: [https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)

<comment><USER7> Interesting. This probably the first utility in Rust I'm aware of that looks like it might belong on a production system (other than "cargo" and other rather excellent rust tooling). Nice way to show off rusts regular expression engine too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If we're talking ux it's how people search as well. We've got LATCH for that. Location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy. On the BBC website people might search for a 'detective' (category), but also might search for 'tomorrow, this week' (time) or 'most viewed' (hierarchy).

<comment><USER9> I've always found the search on iPlayer to be next to useless. Haven't got a specific search to demonstrate, stopped using it after I deleted flash. It's a real shame the BBC continue to use flash and recommend Adobe reader when they link to a PDF. I've emailed recommending some alternative but never heard anything back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe it's not what you're looking for, but I've found McMaster-Carr's website to be highly functional in its UI/UX:

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

</comment><comment><USER11> We built a SQL query tool for the filesystem (macOS) last year, and will be launching for Windows in the next two weeks.

Finding files is pretty straight forward using the LIKE operator against text in the filename, path or file contents. And the set-based logic of SQL works very well for identifying sets of files to work with: we have an exec() command that lets you run commands on file paths returned in query results.

License terms are free for personal use and $5/month commercial.

[http://etia.co.uk/](http://etia.co.uk/)

<comment><USER12> Were you inspired by Microsoft Log Parser?

<comment><USER11> We did look at Log Parser, and osquery, before starting to build Crab, but neither of them have an exec() command to run programs on query results - <USER2> as deleting them, unzipping them, or moving them. And Log Parser doesn't support joins either, which are useful to compare the contents of one directory or file with another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Newegg has one of the most powerful product search/filter mechanisms I've seen. It's not the best UX (could use more performance and a better multi- select mechanism, and dividing the interface into three levels of simple/advanced/power search doesn't seem ideal), but in terms of functionality, it almost always has the features I want pulled out and selectable. Search for a monitor, and you'll get options for resolution, inputs, size, etc.

In terms of raw performance, I'm impressed with the speed and presentation of [https://instantdomainsearch.com/](https://instantdomainsearch.com/) . Instant live responsiveness improves usability significantly.

<comment><USER14> I'll second [https://instantdomainsearch.com/](https://instantdomainsearch.com/). Despite lots of copycats and more "feature-rich" alternatives, I find myself using IDS by default because of its speed and simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The very old iTunes search bar. I still miss it.

Basically, because the list of songs was short-ish (in CS terms), it would fiter it based on the current search textbox what seemed like _instantly_.

I would have a large list and filter it down each time the user types another letter: and concentrate on making that _as fast as possible_.

</comment><comment><USER16> I do consulting for UX for faceted search, and the top of my shortlist for ideas/inspiration is still [http://devart.withgoogle.com/](http://devart.withgoogle.com/) But for a search engine, I'm interested in how UI that works much like this example would play out: [https://material.uplabs.com/posts/google-search-design- conce...](https://material.uplabs.com/posts/google-search-design-concept)

</comment><comment><USER17> I tend to add live searches in the most important tabular views of my apps, using something like this:

[http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/activesearch.html](http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/activesearch.html)

Search speed, good fuzzy matching and good row/chip design are as important/more important than the basic search UI, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER18> Have you looked at [https://uimovement.com/tag/search/](https://uimovement.com/tag/search/) and [https://uimovement.com/tag/filter/](https://uimovement.com/tag/filter/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Sublime text....

ctrl p, type fuzzy match, instant results.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been collecting examples of search interfaces, maybe it can help you: [https://sortandfilter.tumblr.com/](https://sortandfilter.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> A few examples of search UI?UX and an indication of their design shortcomings might provide context for answers and a starting point for discussion.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not sure if it counts as ui buy it is for me the only non frustrating way to search anything in my filesystem: grep and find in the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't know about a system for all file types, but I've always really liked how wallbase did image search. That went down but this is supposed to be the upcoming replacement: [https://alpha.wallhaven.cc/](https://alpha.wallhaven.cc/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't think its perfect, but I think Yelp's search UI does pretty well for a ton of choices, and integrates Geo-boxing in a way that most people can understand more easily than within 20 miles of a zip code

Example:

[https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=tacos&start=0&l=g:-122...](https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=tacos&start=0&l=g:-122.37739562988281,37.80839662111562,-122.47970581054688,37.726977588897356)

They keep the most common filters quickly available, make it easier to dive into more, and their search result entry contains the neighborhood so i can quickly figure out where something is, a photo, part of a review, phone number and address.

</comment><comment><USER25> Pinterest is good as a directory of almost everything that has a picture. A lot of people in UX is using it to collect inspirational UI screenshots, diagrams etc, so it's possible that you can find something there.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like Jira's JQL search functionality. (This is for rather structured data, which are issues in a project management system).

It offers autocomplete for logical operators, search operators, field names and even for values (where there is a limited amount of data available to select). And it offers enough power for nearly all queries I could think of so far.

(In contrast to SQL there are no subselects or explicit joins, but there are plugins that make subselects available).

</comment><comment><USER27> Have a look at [https://www.pexels.com/](https://www.pexels.com/). I think the UX is great to find photos.

<comment><USER28> Wow, this site has beautiful photos. Absolutely fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've also been working on a search engine website, and personally my approach for the search/directory UI has been to keep it as minimal as possible, like early Google.

Not sure how inspiring it is, but here you go: [https://changelogs.md/](https://changelogs.md/)

The goal of this UI is to have the bare minimum of useful info easily accessible.

</comment><comment><USER30> Upvoted, can't wait to hear some great comments and examples, because I too find this to be one of the most frustrating areas in my daily routine.

</comment><comment><USER31> grep

<comment><USER32> I am amazed that Google and grep are at the bottom of this thread. I guess they're not cool anymore, but they're two of the best examples of search UX there are.

<comment><USER33> As powerful and fast[0] grep is, it's probably because Regular Expeesssions aren't exactly user friendly

[0]: [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-Aug...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-August/019310.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> google ... before it became frustrating to be under total surveillance.

<comment><USER33> Google is amazing! However, to be fair, it'd be pretty hard to provide such amazing and accurate results without knowing a lot about you. Granted, I do wish they'd let you control more about what they know about you.

I'm reminded of the (not surprisingly) defunct Google Desktop and how it would build an index of your file system and let you search it "fuzzily" like you can with Google Search.

<comment><USER35> Some time back Google also had a product for sale to enterprises called the Google Search Appliance or something like that. IIRC they were pushing it as a packaged solution for on-prem search. Not sure what happened to it later.

Edited to add: Searched Google for it (how meta). Found this:

[https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html](https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html)

and this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance#Retire...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance#Retirement_and_Shutdown)

So it may still be available - until 2018.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Google.

</comment><comment><USER37> mu</comment>


Craigslist, 3taps Settle Their Scraping/Antitrust Suits; 3taps to Pay $1M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/craigslist-3taps-settle-their-scrapingantitrust-suits-3taps-to-pay-1m-to-be-donated-to-the-eff/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not certain, if I were emperor for the day, I'd write a law that would result in this outcome. But given that the law is what it is, this was certain to be the eventual outcome, as I wrote in July 2012: [https://plus.google.com/+DeclanMcCullagh/posts/HcCuHVG7rLM](https://plus.google.com/+DeclanMcCullagh/posts/HcCuHVG7rLM)</comment>


Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/31/notepad_china_spam/ <comment><USER2> Glad someone wrote a story to summarize the attack!

Here's the thread about the actual attack on Notepad++'s GitHub issues yesterday by pro-China users:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251)</comment>


What are best examples of well-structured open source products to learn from? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I am working on a product and I would like to get a glimpse on how do teams structure their code, and how do they organize their thoughts with respect to code/stack/production pipeline (e.g. [RASA](https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa)).
Sinece we are two engineers developing a product, with humbled experience, we would love to see more eye-opening examples that help acquire best practices. Examples can be e-commerce application, preferably a running pipeline in production. <comment><USER2> These might provide some insight.

[http://aosabook.org/en/index.html](http://aosabook.org/en/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some of my favorites -

Elasticsearch - [https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch)

Google's Guava - [https://github.com/google/guava](https://github.com/google/guava)

Sourcegraph - [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph)

Spectrum - [https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum](https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum)

Django - [https://github.com/django/django](https://github.com/django/django)

</comment><comment><USER4> Have a look at Gitlab. The source and the processes are available. I like the way they do things.</comment>


Why do you have to click Start to shut down? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/07/22/54559.aspx

<comment><USER2> This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive to all of us programmers, the usability study showed that it's what people expected. You can't really fault the Windows designers for following the users existing mental model rather than trying to change it.

<comment><USER3> Usability studies also show the cunning of the average user. It's difficult to know if what you have presented to them is good design or 'good enough' to allow _most_ users to cope. Combine this with people's knowledge that they are in a usability test, most people's desire to please authority figures and the natural skew to any process where you can affect outcome in your favour and usability studies become a mine field.

Windows is an exercise in 'good enough'. That's not a bad thing for a commodity OS. It doesn't mean that it should win any accolades though.

<comment><USER4> The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't "correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured out one way to do it.

Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this:

<http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html>

On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, _95 percent_ of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan _that_ textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it.

Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.

<comment><USER5> "We of course feel terrible to all of the 95% of the users that wanted to try Mono on Windows and the Mac and ended up using a two year old version of Mono."

That's humility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it really that unintuitive to click the start button to start the shutdown procedure?

</comment><comment><USER7> I think that as tech people, we often forget that the vast majority of people that utilise tech are often less logically inclined than we are.

Or to put it another way, simplicity + attractiveness sells.

David Pogue did an interesting TED talk on this in 06 in which he made a quick stab at the start menu thing at about 10 minutes in. Linked below for reference.

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplici...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually knew someone who could not figure out how to shut down their computer because it did not make sense to them to click "Start" to shut down.

<comment><USER9> I hope they figured it out eventually, though? It is not that hard a skill to learn.

No offense, but I think there are a zillion other things that would be more important to simplify.

Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary in the future anyway?

<comment><USER10> 'Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary in the future anyway?'

Yes, he was also complaining about there being 9 options to chose from when leaving your Windows Vista computer:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will the sequel explain why, on Macs, you drag disk icons to the trash can to eject them? That always made me think twice about what I was doing.

<comment><USER12> As of at least 10.4 the trash can becomes an eject icon when you drag a disk.

<comment><USER11> I guess that shows you how much that freaked me out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For what it's worth, the first time I used a Mac quite a few years ago it took me a good five or six minutes to figure out how to log off.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think I just lost a little more faith in humanity. Thanks for that.</comment>


The State of Go Feb 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://talks.golang.org/2016/state-of-go.slide <comment><USER2> Duplicate of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025618)</comment>


Ask HN: Flunking out of college, how to proceed?  - <AUTHOR>

I am currently a sophomore in college, going for a computer science degree and will not be able to finish it. My GPA first semester of freshmen year was bad enough to put me on academic probation. I managed to pull it up and stay in school but currently I am beyond burnt out. I am completely hopeless and very unhappy for the first time in my life. I can't sleep, often staying up until sunrise. The only thing keeping my sane is tinkering with a ClojureScript/canvas library i'm working on.
I have no willpower to do anything in any of my non-major courses. I love computer science, but it is a struggle for me. Virtually all of my time is spent in my CS and Math courses, and I am failing them too. This will be my last semester, there is no recovering my grades. Luckily my parents are footing the bill, and parental shame aside, nothing terrible is going to happen as a result of me failing college.
I want to just work on something for someone. I don't have enough savings to pay rent and won't be able to ask my parents for assistance when I fail out. Living at home is the last option I want to explore. Is there any chance of getting hired without a CS degree? I have three years of summer internships at a C# shop, but all the places around me require a degree to even apply (far northeast USA).
I don't know how people handle situations like this. Is there some sort of person I can talk to about how to go about getting a job, moving to that location, not getting screwed on rent…
I am lost and frankly, fucking scared. Anyone have any advice, or been in a situation similar to this one? <comment><USER2> No matter where you end up working, some of the things you are going to be expected to do will be things that you aren't interested in doing. So far, your performance in college hasn't proven that you are capable of holding down a job. Right or wrong, from the perspective of an employer, the situation you described above would make me worry that you might have an aversion to hard work.

I'm not saying that you should stay in school, even though it would be a good idea, but maybe instead you should build a few personal projects from start to finish. That will allow you to demonstrate to employers that you are capable of working through the hard/boring parts of software development and pushing through to the end.

Also, you need to get your sleeping disorder under control. Being tired all the time kills your ability to concentrate and execute. See a doctor if you have to. If you don't take care of yourself now, you'll regret it when you are older.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was in exactly this situation back in 1996. I moved back in with my parents and enrolled in a couple classes at the local community college. I guess the assumption was that I'd get back on track and transfer back to a 4-year program, but that never happened (academia really wasn't for me). At the same time a friend connected me with an internship doing what amounted to desktop PC support, though it developed into more than that over time.

It turned out I was much better suited to (and motivated by) real world work. (I already had a reasonable amount of software development experience prior to college.) I quickly proved my usefulness, was able to take on more responsibility, and learned a ton about networking hardware over the next year or so. I should point out that during this internship, I was working _a lot_. I was really into what I was doing, really enjoyed everything I was learning, and seeking lots of feedback from everyone around me.

Since dot-coms were all the rage at the time, there were tons of places hiring anyone who knew anything about the internet (today, it would be mobile or web development perhaps). After a year or so, when I started interviewing, it was apparent I had the relevant experience and no one cared that I hadn't finished college.

I got lucky with the internship, I got lucky with timing (dot-com boom), and I got lucky that I really enjoyed doing something that happened to be highly marketable. But I also was really motivated and worked hard. I hated school because it felt so pointless. But entering the real world, I felt super- motivated because I felt I was doing something productive that wasn't just a contrived assignment to be graded and discarded. If this sounds like you, maybe you'll follow a similar path. On the other hand, if your poor performance in school is a reflection of general lack of motivation that would carry over to work, you've got a tougher problem to solve. My guess is that based on your previous internships, you already know the answer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone who answered. There are a lot of questions but most can be distilled down to how lazy I was.

I was lazy this semester, I thought I had a good handle on the material until this week when I failed all my midterms. I hardly sleep anymore which also plays a roll. I for sure could have been more active in pursuing help but to be honest I had no idea I needed it

I go out a decent amount, usually once a week, sometimes twice. It's not the "weeeeew college" level of partying from freshmen year, I would say it has little to no impact anymore on my grades.

One last relevant fact, it took me 3 tries to pass calculus, in highschool I was passed in precalc because the teacher knew I was involved in a lot of work after a botched computer donation program to our neighboring schools. This year I had to self-teach myself a lot which was tough, and the few times I did see my professor or TA they would only explain the material covered in class. To quote "I'm not here to teach you algebra/calculus". That is totally reasonable but having to have a logarithm cheat sheet with you at review sessions kinda sucks, not to mention I got shot down enough times early on where I would second guess asking questions for fear of them being too elementary.

I'm aware I fucked this up, but I really do love to code. It's the only thing i'm (ironically) not burned out on.

</comment><comment><USER4> You're asking for advice, but you aren't asking the right questions.

Why are you flunking out? You've told us about all these things happening to you, but that doesn't tell us why.

Are you genuinely bad at CS and math? Is that stressing you out so much that you don't feel you have the time to focus on your other courses? Would you be better off with a part time schedule until you get your legs under you?

How much of your time is allocated towards study / school work, and how much of it towards extracurriculars (social time, games, pet projects, browsing the web, getting hammered) on a weekly basis?

Do you really like developing software? No, I don't mean whether you'd really like a job developing software and the perks it brings with it, I mean do you really LIKE developing software? Because if you don't, and you don't have a degree, you're probably going to have a bad time.

Why do you think you make a good hire? While some classes can be boring, so are projects in the real world. The job market isn't interested in charity cases, nor is it interested in people who can't stay interested on mundane details (because there are ALWAYS mundane details).

You can't know the path to success if you don't know why you're failing and how to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER5> First off if programming is what you want to do as career, you got 3 options:

1) Same school try harder, but at a reduced work load that still keeps you full-time.

2) Different school with better teachers (This include curriculum) and take a reduced work load.

\- If you find you having spare time while getting good grades in those courses, build a portfolio of projects.

3) If your done with school as a option, than start building a portfolio as it will need to show future employers what you are capable of doing. Now finding a job without a degree will be very difficult, you'll probably have to do a lot of volunteer work that could turn to full time work if you show initiative.

Now with this being said I've been kicked out of a top 100 university world wide and after that way up call I got my degree at another university specializing in teaching. What I found from that experience was I enjoyed programming but not how it was being delivered to me at that university.

Oh the sooner you inform of your parents with a plan and a update of your current situation, the better chances you will feel relieved. Though this is dependent on your relation with you parents.

ps - Make a list list of things to do and sort them on scale of difficulty. Eliminate them to help you get back on a career path and bring some order to your situation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well.. I just stopped showing up. That was a _bad_ idea. Don't do that. It's probably too late but see if you can drop as many classes as you can before failing them or try to take them for no credit. Then take a break.

Honestly I feel like it took me ten years to recover from "dropping out." in the manner I did. Go look at the "Things I used to do." section of my profile. That's what it took me to get back to really programming and ultimately starting a business but It took a long time and a lot of work. That's about ten years worth of jobs there. Maybe I'm better for it but maybe not. College is not for everyone but looking back I wish I had 1) sought more help while I was there 2) Focused just a bit harder. 3) realized it's a game to play - there are many of them in life. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> First, I went through that story myself. You're going to be fine, in all likelihood. I've actually done this twice now—the first time because of grades; the second time, my grades were fine (close to perfect, actually) and I was just taking a break for a semester that stretched out years, and I realized at some point that I'd have been kind of nuts to go back.

You should be aware of the challenges you're going to face though. Not because of your grades or schooling, most likely (though that will close a few doors) but because you're still fairly inexperienced, and it can be hard to land those first few gigs. Develop at least one or two deep skills. That will get your foot in the door a little easier. Blog a lot. And the last, best piece of advice I have, that I wish I'd learned ten years earlier—build your community network and find a mentor. Those relationships are the most critical assets you can have early on, IMHO.

There's a hundred ways to success, and those are just the things I've learned so far—about me. There's sure to be a lot of other good thoughts about your situation that are worth paying attention to, and you'll still likely find your own. Best of luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER8> > I have no willpower to do anything in any of my non-major courses.

If you're not motivated enough to buy textbooks and work through them on your own I'd suggest looking around for a trade school that will allow you to specialize in programming. Your coursework will be pure programming.

> I want to just work on something for someone.

As a sophomore it is unlikely that you have the necessary skills to do much of anything for anyone, software-wise. Why not start a few projects of your own and learn as you go?

> Living at home is the last option I want to explore.

It's probably your best option, in my opinion. With your lack of coding skills its very unlikely that you'll be able to find a programming job, leaving low- paid, low-skilled jobs as your only other option. Working a 9-to-5 is tiring and it will be very hard to find the motivation to come home from work, study, and code. Why not live with the parents for a few years while you teach yourself how to program? Free room and board is a pretty sweet deal.

> Is there some sort of person I can talk to about how to go about getting a > job

There are always mid-clients/recruiters and monster.com, dice.com, etc. With the little amount of programming skills that you have, no real resume, and no portfolio it will be difficult.

</comment><comment><USER9> IMO as long as you make an effort to seek help from your professors in all of the classes you're having problems in, that is to say you actually go when they have their scheduled office hours so that they can figure out how to get you to understand what they are teaching; after all it is their job to be able to explain the material. Then at the very minimum you should pass the classes and eventually have what all deep thinkers all over the world have, a diploma.

If it's at all possible for you to get through college without going into debt with student loans then stick it out. And make the professors do their job by transmitting their knowledge in such a way that you understand it, and again the best way is to see them during their office hours. This way if you come up a little short on the exams they'll remember you and give a passing score (that's where pass/no pass can help out a lot if it's offered) Seriously I used that strategy myself in a couple of classes that I needed to pass and it worked.

</comment><comment><USER10> When you say "require a degree to even apply", what do you mean? How do you know? Is this one of those cases where it just says, "BA in CS or equivalent experience" as one of the line-items? If so, ignore that. Submit a résumé.

I dropped out of college my first year. I'm not going to say it works for everyone (or even most people) -- I had a LOT of experience before college -- but it's possible it may work for you. Though, what I will say is the same thing someone will recommend down the road when you're looking for a new job: don't quit before you've secured your next position.

Consider looking toward startups where degrees tend to be less important -- corporate cultures tend to lean on degrees too much as a means for filtering candidates, and it's probably not the type of place you want to be anyhow.

</comment><comment><USER11> > I have no willpower to do anything in any of my non-major courses.

How did you manage in high school? Is there a lack of motivation? Are you distracted?

> I love computer science, but it is a struggle for me. Virtually all of my > time is spent in my CS and Math courses, and I am failing them too.

Have you asked professors or TAs for help? Have you tried getting a tutor? I'm pretty sure your college has more than enough resources to help.

> nothing terrible is going to happen as a result of me failing college.

You can't know for sure, so I suggest not convincing yourself that this is the truth. It probably isn't.

Quitting school is not uncommon, but it's not the same as flunking out. Who would hire someone who couldn't manage to get through a few CS classes in college?

</comment><comment><USER12> Take a serious look at the US Military. Lots of smart guys have leveraged that experience to build highly successful careers. In exchange for serving your country, you'll get first-rate training, solid experience, & a chance to see some of the world.

</comment><comment><USER13> A few questions in the way of exploration rather than accusations, feel free to answer or not answer however you're comfortable.

Could you elaborate on what led to these circumstances? Did you find the courseload too difficult? What percentage of your attention did you devote to your coursework? What was your background with the subjects before you went to college?

More general questions: What is your social situation like i.e. do you have friends you can talk to? Are you living by yourself or with roommates? Are there any academic advisers you can reach out to? Are there any mental health services at your college you would feel comfortable reaching out to for help?

</comment><comment><USER14> I mean... no hate but this doesn't sound like a case of college is useless. If you tried your hardest and failed out, then maybe engineering isn't for you. I understand the engineering curriculum is much harder, but the fact of the matter is, to be a decent engineer you should be able to pass. It'd be a different story if you were failing because you were disinterested and had much better things to do with your time, but if you were failing because you can't get data structures or discrete mathematics then maybe it's time to change fields.

</comment><comment><USER15> I know going home sucks. but I've been there, and my advice is to withdraw from your college, go home and maybe take some classes at your local junior college. your health is more important than a degree. and in time you'll either get a degree or get enough experience that it doesn't matter anymore.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you can code, you're not enjoying school, and you're always coding instead of studying anyway, just drop out for a few years and go join a startup (they don't care about degrees). You can always go back to school if it's absolutely necessary.

Disclaimer: it's what I did, so I'm biased.

</comment><comment><USER17> Get yourself to a shrink, seriously. Call it ADHD or whatever but it sounds like you have the drive, just a problem with focus.

</comment><comment><USER18> join the army... write code in your down time... get a girlfriend... smoke some pot... go back to school when you have a clue.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some companies see a degree as a must, some will offer you less money if you don't have one, and a growing number don't care. (Since a degree hardly makes you stand out anymore.) You will probably be surprised at how many companies follow this formula: "we need this > you can build this > you're hired". (And that is the only thing they go on.)

If it was me, I would just lie and say I have a degree. Keep applying until you find a company that doesn't check. If you are smart and talented, no one will think twice. Even if they do, there's a chance you'll be entrenched in the position and they won't want the cost of replacing you any way. Don't be scared, just always think about your options and choices, especially the unconventional/controversial ones...

<comment><USER20> I don't think lying is good advice for anything. No one wants to live a lie and word can travel fast and ruin this guys credibility depending on the industry he wants to get into.

<comment><USER19> There are plenty of very honest people living under bridges and eating rats.

You either think it's wrong for a starving man to steal bread, or you don't.</comment></comment></comment>


A16Z Podcast: A Podcast About Podcasting - <AUTHOR> https://podcut.co/e/96F5QfFr_ <comment><AUTHOR> started cutting some podcasts I'm following, and this one was pretty interesting..

</comment><comment><USER2> this is huuuuuge.

<comment><AUTHOR> not sure if you're being sarcastic.. but thanks if not! let me know if you have any feedback :D</comment></comment>


ClamAV team leaves the project - <AUTHOR> http://markmail.org/thread/dvpc6xfif2oc7esn Ten years after the first release (and five years after the acquisition by Sourcefire) the ClamAV team has left the project and the company. Is this the end of the only open source anti virus? <comment><USER2> Oh no!!

</comment><comment><USER3> is it dead?</comment>


Show HN: HN-beautify – a stylesheet for the HN frontpage - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/guicoelho/hn-beautify

<comment><USER2> Looks nice on the front page, but doesn't work on the comments pages for me.

Also, is there a reason why the HN guys haven't done any css for mobiles yet? Seems odd that a community of forward thinking developers and entrepreneurs have a site that's so frustrating to use on iOS (and I'm assuming other mobile devices)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I started with the frontpage. Apparently people like it so I'll work on the other pages and update the extension ;)

<comment><USER3> I remember a few months ago it was enabled briefly for the comment pages -- I was so happy. Then it was promptly reset. Looking forward to the re-addition!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work!

While this thread is active I'd like to mention Hacker News Enhancement Suite (HNES). It's a Chrome extension that applies a stylesheet like this and also adds a bunch of nice features to HN (such as inline reply).

Its all open source at github.com/etcet/hnes. I've contributed a few times and the owner is very open to PRs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip! I'll have a look ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We now have a few dozen HN "beautifiers", "mobil"izers. I guess the relativity in beauty perception makes it impossible for one of them to win the hearts and become the one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Been using this [1] for a while now, it's a good alternative.

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi?hl=en)

<comment><USER7> I prefer HN Special[1] for the same purpose. It even has some nice extra features like infinite scrolling, comment folding, link highlighting etc.

[1]: [https://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn- special/](https://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for bringing this up - just started using it and I love it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't work with Firefox using Stylish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't it? Could you figure out why not?

<comment><USER10> Works for me in Stylish. I installed the extension, then clicked "create new style for news.ycombinator.com", then copy-pasted the CSS inside

"@-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") { [...here ...] }"

However, the front-page was really wonky until I removed the "float: right" on: "body > center > table > tbody > tr:nth-of-type(3) tr td:first-of-type" (line 84 of the original file).

Comments also have weird alignment issues, but seems like others have posted about that on Chromium as well.

PS: do not use "//" to comment out CSS. Use /* foo */. I don't know for Chromium, but it's not valid in Firefox.

I didn't know about Stylish (and its Chromium equivalent), really fun stuff. Thanks for posting this, and looking forward to experiment with it more.

<comment><AUTHOR> The float right is a mistake, I guess I was playing around and forgot to remove it.

Yeah, webkit just skips lines that start with //, i'll convert them.

Thanks ;)

<comment><USER9> Comment page is still really funky:

[http://i.imgur.com/M3OsXAJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/M3OsXAJ.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks really good! Would you consider publishing it to CSS Stylebot? It's a chrome extension to load custom styles onto webpages.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha?utm_source=chrome- ntp-icon)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know stylebot but sounds like a good idea. I'll have a look. Tks

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ha, neat hack to hide the pipes in pagetop by changing the text color. Unfortunately the default doesn't work for custom header colors :(

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/xbgv7fvb1y6qt3h/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xbgv7fvb1y6qt3h/Screen%20Shot%202014-08-08%20at%207.03.51%20AM.png)

<comment><USER13> You could make it work for any colour with:

        color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Tks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love this stylesheet, and would love to see HN implement it natively.

I've installed it on Chrome using Stylish, but I am having a problem. Every page I load on HN flashed the old design before showing the new look. Is there anyway to get Chrome to prioritize so that doesn't happen?

</comment><comment><USER15> My favourite[1] despite it's name

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hipsternews/midncc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hipsternews/midnccdcbhikpniledkdhojbhdnkkkdb)

</comment><comment><USER16> Everything other than the titles are unreadable. What is with this grey on grey nonsense?

<comment><USER3> Contrast is a tricky thing. Some people really need lower contrast, while others can't stand anything less than black on white.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not a big fan of alternating colours in tables, but this looks pretty neat.

</comment><comment><USER18> Every few months or so I sit down to write a HN extension that rebuilds the DOM but the nested table selectors are so deep it puts quite a load on the browser. There aren't any reliable HN API's anymore are there?

<comment><USER19> There is an official one: [http://hn.algolia.com/api/](http://hn.algolia.com/api/) and several unofficial ones that you can find by Googling around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's mine: [https://github.com/bjourne/readable- userstyles/blob/master/h...](https://github.com/bjourne/readable- userstyles/blob/master/hackernews.css)

</comment><comment><USER21> HN Special has been great as well: [http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn- special/](http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/)

<comment><USER22> That's actually an imitation of the clearly superior hn-threes which came out first and should have gone viral instead of this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is really clean and nice. Many of the HN beautifiers change UX substantially, but this one still feels like the old Hacker News... just better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Someone needs to setup a proxy that pulls from HN and uses this style sheet so we don't have to download anything. (on a phone right now)

</comment><comment><USER25> Good idea, it makes the page load for a (way too) long time for me.

That's probably improvable

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks nice, but the extra spacing means too much scrolling. Add a compact mode.

</comment><comment><USER27> I had never realized that the HN front page is implemented using tables.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hell yeah it is!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a reason you don't want to put it on the Chrome Web Store?

<comment><USER29> I like it, but Chrome store would be helpful - then it'll load on all my PCs rather than just this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn- beautify/nhgmoo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn- beautify/nhgmoodfakokkkkkibmdaklneefimlag)

<comment><USER29> That's what I call service. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dragonfly - a fast and embeddable web framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.rundragonfly.com Dragonfly is a web framework for newLISP. It focuses on speed, small memory consumption and a small learning curve. Other goodies are a plug and play architecture for plugins and a very easy deployment.<p>This thing even runs on a Nokia N900 really fast :) <comment><USER2> Oh heck yes, the first annual Alternative Web Framework Day is underway!

Might I trouble you for a test implementation and pull request [1]? :)

[1] [https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks](https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Latest version: [https://github.com/taoeffect/dragonfly- newlisp](https://github.com/taoeffect/dragonfly-newlisp)</comment>


AT&T Seeks Approval of T-Mobile Deal With Offer to Bring Home 5,000 Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/at-t-seeks-t-mobile-approval-with-offer-to-bring-home-5-000-jobs.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder how this compares with reductions in redundant positions.</comment>


Show HN: A virtual machine designed for programming workshops - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jpadilla/juicebox

<comment><USER2> Why Python 2 over Python 3?

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt like if I installed Python 3 I'd still need Python 2 around. Didn't have a solid setup for supporting both and still being able to use virtualenvwrapper et al. I think I can just wrap some aliases like mkvirtualenv2.7 and mkvirtualenv3.3. Any better ideas are welcome.

<comment><USER3> How about pyenv (not to be confused with pyvenv), and pyenv-virtualenv? They are designed for solving this problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to do the same but with native installers, here is a good collection [https://bitnami.com/stacks/infrastructure](https://bitnami.com/stacks/infrastructure)

(disclaimer, I am one of the cofounders :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Are there more of these with more languages and tools?</comment>


Google's Corporate Login - <AUTHOR> https://login.corp.google.com/ <comment><USER2> It's basically what GMail used to look like:

[http://www.tapeze.com/imagedir/GmailLogin.png](http://www.tapeze.com/imagedir/GmailLogin.png)

They just didn't spend money on updating the design of something that probably works perfectly fine.

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize I missed that version of the internet so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Outrageous. It brings back memories of sites that were simple, fully functional, light, and designed in a non-obnoxious way.

</comment><comment> nevi-me I assume this is in reference to the article about Google opening up their corporate tools/services to their users on the Internet, but I've seen this MOMA login page (at least what I call it) before last year and probably before that too. On that premise I assume @google.com users have been able to log in from the Internet for a while, anyone have some light to shed on what's recently changed? :)

<comment><USER5> It is the MOMA login page :) From my time at google (around 6 months ago), you can access this page for a lot of services, but some of them will be accessible only from the intranet (or if you login to a VPN from the internet). What has changed is the number of services that are now accessible from the internet.

Also, when I was working there, I could not remote into my desktop from my company laptop from my home without signing onto VPN. Not sure of that has changed, but they wished to phase out VPN completely.

<comment><USER6> for ssh, they use chrome ssh plugin and connect via ssh-over-http now. no vpn needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the two JS files included is readable without any extra work.

Also this interesting HTML comment at the top of the page:

        <!--googleoff: all-->

<comment><USER8> That's just a special instruction to the Google 'Search Appliance' not to crawl the page contents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking at the wayback machine, it seems that they used to use tool called UberProxy: [https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/uberproxy/](https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/uberproxy/)

Source: [http://web.archive.org/web/20130716091355/http://corp.google...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130716091355/http://corp.google.com/)

<comment><USER10> They still do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought the entire corp subdomain was not publicly accessible...this is surprising.

<comment><USER12> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539372)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's (one of) Microsoft's login pages (I've seen a buddy use something like this):

[https://microsoft.sharepoint.com](https://microsoft.sharepoint.com)

<comment><USER14> That's for the developer network(if you are developing for X360 or XOne):

[http://developer.xboxlive.com/en- US/Xbox/Pages/home.aspx](http://developer.xboxlive.com/en- US/Xbox/Pages/home.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone else find the random images creepy as fuck?

<comment><USER16> What's creepy about them? I don't know if this is still the case, but for many years the images on the corpsso login page were photos taken and shared by googlers. It was just for fun.</comment></comment>


Ghostery exposed everyone's email address in its GDPR email by not using BCC - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8m45k6/ghostery_have_exposed_everyones_email_address_in/ <comment><USER2> Ghostery is owned by Cliqz and Cliqz GmbH (which is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media) is based in Germany.

CC instead of BCC has been a regulatory offence with fines up to 300000 EUR before GDPR. This is not a theoretical risk, companies have been fined for that in Germany.

<comment><USER3> > _CC instead of BCC has been a regulatory offence with fines up to 300000 EUR > before GDPR_

As an American, I'm skeptical about the odds of enforcement. If it were an American company that did this, on the other hand, I'd assume a decade of uncertainty and indecision followed with a fine.

<comment><USER4> I strongly hope that regulation is enforced independently of political convenience. And if it turns out to be misused that way, I'd demand it to stop. However, let's wait for the facts first, shall we?

<comment><USER3> > _let 's wait for the facts first_

The fact is political bodies have been empowered with increased enforcement discretion. They are motivated, as political bodies, by politics.

I watched the same thing happen, around 2012, in Frankfurt and Berlin with respect to Germany's regional banks. Weak and undercapitalized, in violation of EU rules, they were summarily ignored due to political necessity. The same tendencies will apply with GDPR. The lack of a requirement for politically- independent enforcement was a mistake.

<comment><USER4> > They are motivated, as political bodies, by politics.

The "political bodies" in this case are the National Data Protection Authorities. They are indendent, and their only politics is ensuring compliance with the data protection regulation, as required by the GDPR, Article 52 [0].

Furthermore, due to lack of evidence, your example is not conclusive as to show that regulatory bodies act for political reasons they were not supposed to pursue. Also, if one regulatory body broke the rules, that does not mean that others will do so, too.

However, I'd love to know the details of what bank was breaking what regulation and what authority was not acting according to their mission, if that is what you want to exemplify.

[0] [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-52-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-52-gdpr/)

<comment><USER5> It is incredibly naive to think they are apolitical. They are part of executive branch, their actions directly affect state budget.

<comment><USER6> In Poland, for example, the chairman of this regulatory body has 4 year term and is unremovable. So he doesn't have many reasons to be political.

<comment><USER7> He has to be political to get the position in the first place and then again if he wants to get renewed (assuming it's not limited) or if he wants to move to a higher position after the four year. The only way to make it minimally political is to have the term limited to one and have the person be ineligible for any political appointment or government job of any kind at the end of the term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oops, that isn't good when a privacy policy rollout causes mass private info to get out.

They should have just sent the email one per individual user anyways for safety.

When you CC/BCC it spawns the copies downstream and can cause issues sometimes if there are too many.

Back in the day over dual ISDN lines, we used to update pharmaceutical machines with FTP and email back in late 90s and when we BCC'd the backup updates (machine tried to connect FTP then looked for email updates to update itself) the ISPs would get mad at us as it hosed their systems a few times due to the number per message.

Depending on the volume and sensitivity, it is sometimes better just to send one per user not only for privacy/protection but for cpu/memory reasons up or downstream.

<comment><USER9> As far as I remember, (B)CC is implemented by just setting multiple RCPT headers in the SMTP envelope, and for BCC not setting them in the DATA (email body)—surely then, the only difference with 1-envelope-per-recipient is _less_ SMTP messages? If you implement the same level of rate limiting as you would have on 1-per, how could you ever cause more traffic / resource usage?

Do you mean it's easier for humans to then not set those rate limits if you're using multiple RCPTs?

<comment><USER8> At some point the CC/BCC messages duplicate per consumer even if it is on receive/pull.

Probably less of an issue now, but back then the ISP/provider would duplicate the sending of the messages with multiple recipients, could have just been a flaw at the ISP which was Frontier back then. Could have just been a DDoS type event where too many were pulling at once rather than throttled/tapered or spaced out over time. The group emails spiked their systems, probably not an issue today.

Personally though the cost of CPU/memory is small now, I wouldn't risk sending sensitive data to a large group unless I could verify BCC was being set not CC. Seems a small price to pay to not allow a mistake like that by duplicating the messages app side rather than provider side. By sending out throttled by user on app side, even if a developer or marketing person inadvertently chose CC rather than BCC, it wouldn't leak sensitive info (emails).

<comment><USER10> Could also be that if you send one message with 10k bcc, they all hit isp at once. If you send message per recipient, the isp will get a stream of messages.

I love asking why when I get these kinds of request so i can better understand the requirements. I've found that some people aren't interested in helping you understand. I had a recent interaction with a surgeon who was vexed by me asking for more detail and why that reminded me that some people just want to do their job and don't care about learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't say I'm surprised that someone would do this. I had just written a breach policy that included "Use the Bcc field to send notification, don't make it worse than it already is."

Pedantry: title should use "its", not "it's".

<comment><USER12> I would say that's a bad policy. You've added it because so many people make a mistake, and putting it in the policy won't stop (or reduce) the mistake, but it gives you something to point at and say "you were told not to do that".

A better starting point for such a policy would be to enforce use of a mailing list for e-mails to customers.

<comment><USER11> It's a nonprofit, so we have no customers nor paid employees. Honestly I have no idea how a mass mailing works with our system, it'll probably be via Extension:MassMessageEmail or something. Honestly, I need to look into it for fundraising.

But what you're saying is analogous to saying checklists are ineffective for preventing errors. This isn't true. The first thing a person should do after finding and closing a security breach is to pull out the procedure, because not forgetting a step is important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Stupid question perhaps but why would I want a ghostery account in the first place? It's just a local offline plugin.

In a way I'm glad this happened. This highlights why gdpr is needed. If you can't handle my data safely you shouldn't handle it at all. Keep your plugin offline and account-less.

<comment><USER14> I've tested Ghostery back when it was launched - as with other blockers you could enable/disable blocking per domain and third-party (iirc); you could then use a Ghostery account to synchronize these settings between your devices.

<comment><USER10> Or you can do as I do and synchronize settings yourself through Dropbox or a billion other ways.

I remember the good old days when software companies used to like to reuse stuff to prevent having to use user data. I used YNAB and they had all the user data in a Dropbox folder. So their app knew who you are and I/O'd to Dropbox, but the YNAB company didn't know.

Then they switched from software to service and all of a sudden it was essential that they know their customer and have an account and whatnot.

Proper software design minimizes complexity. [0] If users are likely to already have a common, free way to synchronize settings, design for that. Don't add another risk by collecting PII. Especially if it makes you money in ways you aren't disclosing.

[0] Steve McConnell Code Complete, page 80 - [http://aroma.vn/web/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/code-complete...](http://aroma.vn/web/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/code-complete-2nd-edition-v413hav.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is like meta-irony.

It's kinda serious, but kinda funny at just the ridiculousness of the whole situation.

Ghostery users definitely appreciate their privacy though, this may require some. Bending over backwards for ghostery to make it right to their users. I suspect they may be perturbed about this thing.

<comment><USER16> On the other hand, Ghostery's business model is apparently based on an opt-in feature that reports back data on which ads were blocked... so that subscribing companies can learn how to avoid getting their ads blocked in the future. Very confusing.

<comment><USER17> a simple solution: use privacy badger instead. or even just the optional social & tracking blocklists in ublock.

<comment><USER18> I immediately dropped Ghostery and switched to PB after hearing this many moons ago.

I've never looked back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if everyone at Ghostery knows what CC and BCC stands for? I have a feeling that the relatively obscure abbreviations plays a role in the usability of these two different but similar functions. It's like putting a "send test" next to a "send alert" button (menu item)...

<comment><USER20> Imagine a world were an email could only have one recipient and CC/BCC wasn't even an option.

Then that 'reply all' bs wouldn't be the plague of mankind.

<comment><USER21> Imagine all the cars would be very small and have only one seat for the driver, then all that 'no space for parking' bs wouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER22> Both of these are great ideas. Too bad about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence) though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a fine line between tragedy and comedy. I like Ghostery a lot but this definitely falls on the latter.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if they didn't use a bulk email service for protecting their customer email id's; but derped while sending bulk email themselves.

I feel bad for the person responsible for that.

</comment><comment><USER25> I got an email yesterday (on an old-style listserv mailing list) where the admin said 'we have disabled the website for now, and if you want to stay on this list, you have to send an email to confirm you want to be on it'. So what happenend - literally seconds after that mail, other mails started flowing in from people just hitting 'reply', typing 'confirm' and hitting 'send'. Doh...

<comment><USER11> How long did it take until other people started complaining about the spam on list, and then someone sent 'unsubscribe' to the list? That's usually how these things went.

Your story makes me miss listserv. Doing @here on Slack just isn't the same.

<comment><USER25> Tbh I just hit delete on all of them - I dread opening my email later this morning, how many more will there be...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

[https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2002/01/eli-l...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2002/01/eli-lilly-settles-ftc-charges-concerning-security-breach)

Eli Lilly's mistake not only cost it some settlement money up front but as I understand it helped push the U.S. pharma industry into a very expensive regulatory regime that now impacts every server they build and every software update they roll out. The process requirements are quite onerous.

(I had worked closely with the teams involved but left about a year before the mistake. When I heard about it I spent a few hours racking my brain to make sure I hadn't left behind some tool they might have used.)

</comment><comment><USER27> Hope they don't do the same thing on the data breach notification they're now legally required to issue...

<comment><USER28> I would doubt this reaches the bar for a breach notice. Article 34 states that the breach has to be "likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons" before notifying data subjects is required.

<comment><USER27> I suspect "the right to keep your mailing list memberships and email address private" may be one of those rights/freedoms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how many breach notifications the ICO got on the first day?

<comment><USER30> I wonder how many complaints they got as well. I know I debating sending one after getting an email stating "We'd love to still keep in touch, but if you don't opt-in to hear from us, you may get left out as we won't be able to contact you from 25th May." (which I ignored), then still getting another marketing email today, with the footer "This email communication makes use of a "Clear Image" (gif) to track the results of the email campaign. If you wish to turn off this tracking for future emails, you can do so by turning off the images in the email itself."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oops. That isn't gdpr compliant!

</comment><comment><USER32> Nothing about this GDPR protest has been helpful compared to what the consequences of just rolling forward and silently introducing whatever deletion features are required.

</comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of the 1st spam mail by DEC.

</comment><comment><USER34> "it's" ALWAYS means "it is" or "it has". Therefore, the title should be "its", which surprisingly is a word.

<comment><USER35> It's not all that surprising if you think of "its" in the same vein as "his" and "hers".

<comment><USER36> It's dual of his and _her_; not of 'hers'. (In which form 'his' is unchanged.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is why GDPR has the fines up to €20m. Hopefully some of these users who were breached file for a breach, if you can't hold my data you don't deserve it. Good intentions aren't compatible with the law.

<comment><USER38> Good intentions absolutely are[0] compatible with the law...

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

<comment><USER39> You'd need to cite the law for that, not just a concept that applies to some laws.

The alternative to a _mens rea_ requirement is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability) .

<comment><USER40> [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/)

> When deciding whether to impose an administrative fine and deciding on the > amount of the administrative fine in each individual case due regard shall > be given to the following

> the intentional or negligent character of the infringement;

A company with good intentions is going to be regulated less severely than a company who does't care.

<comment><USER37> Yet another reason there is ambiguity in the terms. Most websites can portray themselves as good meaning. Socially defined justice is not really the law.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Myth of Learning by Writing Code - <AUTHOR> https://dnote.io/blog/myth-of-learning-by-writing-code/ <comment><AUTHOR> I think that writing code is not the holy grail of learning programming or improving as engineers. What really matters is the process of giving 'form' to an otherwise abstract ideas.

I wrote this article to explain why learning by writing code might be a myth, and to suggest an alternative way of approaching learning based on my personal experience.

</comment><comment><USER2> A lot of evidence suggests the best learning occurs through practice. Programming is no different.</comment>


Potato salad on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad?ref=nav_search

<comment><USER2> are there any food regulation involved?

<comment><USER3> I read the FAQ, they have contacted "people to assess the feasability of sending Potato Salad around the world." I think there's a very real chance you won't get a bite of the potato salad even if you pledge $3. Caveat emptor.</comment></comment>


Reddit Troll Violentacrez Admits Doing CNN Interview Was a 'Huge Mistake' - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/10/violentacrez-admits-doing-cnn-interview-was-a-huge-mistake/

<comment><USER2> Even in real life, I've noticed that when the proportion of men is high enough and one person present in a conversation starts throwing in casual sexism/racism (normally masquerading as jokes) it tends to suck everyone else in. The conversation quickly collapses to fairly uninteresting lowest-common- denominator nonsense. Some people are essentially poison to group conversations because for whatever reason they're unable to stop themselves constantly making crass comments.

It's actually quite remarkable. Recent changes in my life have meant that I've often found myself in a pub with one of these people. Suddenly conversations that I thought I'd grown out of when I was 16 rear their heads again, and every single social event devolves into a pile of misogyny.

Given that Reddit is in many ways a very large conversation with a high proportion of men, the likelyhood of one of them being conversation-poison is much higher.

What we can all do, whether in real life or online, is stand up to it. The best online communities are those that are obscure or very aggressively moderated. If you make it clear that behaviour isn't acceptable, it tends to die out.

<comment><USER3> > Even in real life, I've noticed that when the proportion of men is high > enough[...]

Whoa there, why do you think this behavior is exclusive to men? This can happen in almost any social group targeting an underrepresented/absent demographic.

Everything else you've said I can agree with, but "men in groups by themselves devolve into misogynists" is painting with too fine of a brush.

<comment><USER2> Giving it further consideration, I'm sure you're right. My comment was really based on my experiences, in particular with misogyny (racism and to a lesser extent homophobia are definitely more taboo where I live). Generally, (but not always) misogyny requires men.

The thrust of my comment though is really that the entire group conversation is often dictated by the lowest common denominator. Generally that person is someone that's realised that saying something offensive will get them more attention from everyone than actually trying to engage in interesting discussion would.

<comment><USER4> >My comment was really based on my experiences, in particular with misogyny (racism and to a lesser extent homophobia are definitely more taboo where I live)

Of course if you classify everything under the sun as misogyny than it will seem more common. Misogyny has an actual definition, which is the hatred of women. When it is used in cases where there is clearly no such hatred, it devalues the word and makes it meaningless. Thus you can't point out actual misogyny any more, like the boy who cried wolf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I for one am tired of hearing about this guy, and even more tired of hearing how evil and terrible reddit supposedly is.

<comment><USER4> But didn't you read the article? Reddit allows _men_ to discuss their rights! Most of them are probably even white!</comment></comment>


Redis 2.8.9 is out - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/redis-db/32VPw9X46Sg/GxHLzKeqRc0J <comment><USER2> I'm about to deploy a new autocomplete on my site, probably with 10s to 100s of millions of records, at least 100 users at once. Would the new Redis commands help here? How would the memory usage be? Is it better to just use something else like Cleo for autocomplete?

<comment><USER3> Can't reply on the comparison with other products since I myself have still to compare and build an experience about this, but as far as how Redis performs, there is a demo here: [http://autocomplete.redis.io](http://autocomplete.redis.io). Basically for 8 million records it takes 1GB of memory (32 bit system), however here the records are source code lines so the average length is bigger than the usual search-term length. Definitely no problems in the ~10 millions range even with just a few GBs of memory. For +100 millions you need to either split the range across servers or use a machine with some non-trivial amount of memory, like 16-32 GB or alike.

<comment><USER4> Also with that much data is sensible to set up redis in a master-slave fashion for better availability. Once you have that up and running you can split the work between the two, since autocomplete searches are intrinsically read operations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking at search.php, you could use the native json_encode() function available from PHP 5.2 onwards. (I know, it's just a demo)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I'll do this.

<comment><USER6> I just replied with an improved version.

Good job by the way...

<comment><USER7> If you create a code block with ```php I think you'll get php syntax highlighting in a GitHub comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> HLL eliminates read before writes in many cases and that's great.Would love to see the same data structure in cassandra and PG.

<comment><USER9> I have a vague notion of what you mean but could you annotate that with an example or something, please? I'd like to make sure :).

<comment><USER10> What he means is something like non-reading-increments in hypertable.

How they function:

You write a+=1

      if it doesn't exist in memory:
        a=1
        append +1 to commit-log
      else:
        a+=1 (in memory)
        append to commit-log

After some time, 'a' is written to disk and the commit-log is checkpointed (so if a server crashes it doesn't have to read a very large commit log), and 'a' becomes immutable.

But you have to increment again the 'a' key, and it is immutable. So you create a new 'a':

And repeat again. After some time this is again persisted on disk and the commit log checkpointed.

Now you want to read the value of 'a':

If a merger has run, it reads different versions of data on disk and merges them, counters are merged and written as 1 key. So it reads 'a'.

If the merger has not run, it reads both versions of 'a', merges them in memory, and returns the value.

Now change '+1' to add_to_set(5). This is even better, because it updates the in-memory value, and if the hll doesn't change because '5' was already added to set, it doesn't even have to write/commit to log because no change is made.

<comment><USER9> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm currently learning the MEAN stack (and just started learning web development a few months ago) and I'm using mongoDB/mongoose as a post storage database. The project I'm working on is basically a 4chan-like image board with tags. I'm not expecting it to go public, but if it did it shouldn't have more than maybe 20,000 posts at a time.

I want to do something like stack overflow does where they have a pop-up come up when users start typing tag names. Does anyone know if redis would be suitable for this or have a suggestion for something even better? Keep in mind I'm trying to stay away from really advanced databases and would prefer a noSQL solution.

<comment><USER12> If you want to do something more complex than the Redis option, you may want to look into Elastic Search. Especially if you allow text submissions and want to provide the ability to search them...

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I'll research it. I'm trying to stick closely to KISS principals though so hopefully it wont over complicate things too much. Even if I can't use it in this project it sounds like something that would be useful to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Redis still keeps on amazing me. Can't wait to try those new handy sorted set functions

</comment><comment><USER14> Well done! I'm really looking forward to the further development of cluster and sentinels - IMO at the moment Redis' clustering (or lack there of) isn't ready for production use so that'll be great.

</comment><comment><USER15> 2.8.9? That sounds way too mature. What pre-alpha data store does HN recommend replacing redis with?</comment>


Ask HN: Should i room with a potential co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

So, I have to decide rooming situation for next year at my college in a couple weeks, and I'm not sure whether or not to room with a friend of mine who I may start a company with in the near future.
My current roommate is not a technical person, so I won't be co-founding with him, but we get along great.  It's also a possibility that I continue rooming with him next year.
Will I be missing out on opportunities by not deciding to room with someone that I could start a company with?  I see a lot of potential productivity occurring when I live with the person I'm working with because I hear about everyone saying "When you're starting a company, starting the company is your whole life."
So what do you think HN, is it a good idea to room with the potential founder, or would I be more productive with the startup if we roomed separately. <comment><USER2> If you room with your potential co-founder, you risk the danger of creating an echo chamber ( [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=echo%20chambe...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=echo%20chamber) )

Plus starting a company is enough stress, don't add to it by having the stress of rooming together.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, a couple notes:

1\. Living together doesn't necessarily increase productivity. If you actually started a company together, one of your homes/rooms would probably become the startup's 'home' anyways.

2\. Living with him will quickly tell you how well you'll get along in the long run, something crucial to business. If you find out you don't work/live well together, you can move elsewhere next year.

TL;DR- Go for it, live with him. Worst case you learn that you don't really want to start a company with him.

</comment><comment><USER4> Think through this carefully:

(As the wise man said,) familiarity breeds contempt.

A lot of familiarity could potentially accelerate the breeding process ;-)

Also, time away from each other's company may provide both of you with opportunities for some fresh ideas.

HTH

</comment><comment><USER5> Co-founders living together often makes sense economically, but otherwise I would think having the ability to spend some time apart would be good - occasionally/regularly/as needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Go for it!</comment>


Anatomy of SSDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7590 <comment><USER2> The author is incorrect about Linux TRIM support. The kernel has been supporting it for nearly a year, and ext4 currently supports the TRIM command.

[http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kernel- adv...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kernel- advances/index.html)</comment>