Obama Offers Millions for Muslim Tech Fund - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Obama-offers-millions-for-Muslim-tech-fund/articleshow/5158238.cms

<comment><USER2> Funding for technology projects as part of foreign aid to countries with predominantly Muslim populations != "Muslim Tech Fund". We don't call foreign aid to Israel "Jewish aid".

<comment><USER3> 2 Things here...

1\. This is marketing. The Obama administration is attempting to use this as an olive branch to the Muslim community in these countries so that those Muslim's who hate America might say "Hey, maybe those Americans aren't so bad after all". Hence the name.

2\. Israel is one country while this is to many countries. The only thing those countries have in common is that they are predominantly Muslim (and in fact, as I said in Point #1, that's why we're giving them the money in the first place)

<comment><USER2> Who called it the "Muslim tech fund"? Not, it appears, Obama. They're overtly targeting Muslim-majority countries, but there are people of many different faiths in those countries.

This news article also begs a question. The fund targets the Mid-East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Given that Europe, Russia, Japan, and Australia don't particularly need foreign aid from us, what does that leave aside from the "Muslim nations"? South America and Southern Africa. I think we may sometimes lose sight of how broadly influential Islam is in the rest of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I like the idea of trying to inspire the (radical?) muslim countries in the middle east to develop out of the oil market, I don't think our $150M--or even $1.5B--will change anything.

The leaders in the middle east need to make these investments with their endless piles of cash.... and historically they haven't (Dubai for finance being a notable exception).

The truth is we should be disengaging from these countries on a business level by putting massive investment into solar, wind and nuclear. The investments in our recent wars in the region could have easily made us energy independent by now..... if Bush or Obama were true leaders they would have focused our resources on the goal of energy independence.

<comment><USER5> Excellent points, but there will be an ROI on that money. America has a big image problem abroad, Obama is a big difference from Bush but it will need more than a 'pretty face' to change attitudes.

And the fact that this gesture gets broad play in the targeted countries means it is already paying off.

For the price of less than one day of war in Iraq (255 M or so ?) it seems to be pretty cheap.

The independence of oil for energy can't come soon enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a country that is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy this is a prime example of poor money management.

<comment><USER5> Au contraire, it is excellent money management. The PR value of this is easily orders of magnitudes larger than the money spent.

A country that is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy should not start wars it can't afford, that is a prime example of poor money management.

<comment><USER6> Good PR won't save you from bankruptcy!

<comment><USER5> It may actually. By doing some good PR now you will be able to save yourself a multiple of that at some point in the future.

The US needs allies, what better way to get them than through good PR. Wars don't work nearly as well and cost a whole lot more. They also make you more enemies, and the allies that you had may look at you in a new light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like an incredibly poor idea. For whatever reason, people with engineering and hard-science backgrounds are much more likely to become terrorists ([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/engineers_terrorists...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/engineers_terrorists_wikipedia_oxford_sociology/)). And dollar-for-dollar, US companies still seem to get more out of engineering investments than overseas companies do (even when they're using workers who immigrated). And with a deficit like the one we have, throwing more money at uncertain projects is a poor plan, even if it _is_ investment, rather than spending.

So, this is a waste of money we don't have, in order to get worse results that it would get if we spent it here, with the side effect that it could increase the supply of terrorists.

<comment><USER5> > people with engineering and hard-science backgrounds are much more likely to > become terrorists

Of all the out-of-context-nonsense this has to be the best piece ever. Seriously ?

You think maybe that errrm, toddlers or gradeschoolers or writers are going to be as adept as technical people at blowing stuff up or destroying it ?

The Army corps of _engineers_ is just as good at putting stuff together as they are at taking it apart.

Of course technical people would be the ones you find behind successful acts of destruction.

But that does not mean that _all_ engineering and hard-science types are more likely to become terrorists.

It just means that if you take a random sampling of people and you test them for terrorist potential you will find that the technical ones will do better at it.

If this is the 'right attitude', then why bother letting those scary muslims have any education at all ? Maybe we should bomb all those schools, that way they're certainly not going to be engineers and science types.

Bollocks.

What I think is that if having an education will make them less susceptible to brainwashing. Engineering takes skill and critical thought.

If that means that the few engineers that will go through this program ending up as terrorists will be better at it, then that's just too bad, but as a scheme education certainly beats arming opposing groups (the normal way to deal with this problem).

<comment><USER7> _Of course technical people would be the ones you find behind successful acts of destruction._

 _But that does not mean that all engineering and hard-science types are more likely to become terrorists._

Right, but that's not what I said at all. Regardless of _why_ there is a correlation between engineering education and terrorism, there is a correlation; whether you're equipping potential terrorists with the tools to commit terrorist acts, or somehow making non-terrorists more terroristic, the end result is the same.

 _It just means that if you take a random sampling of people and you test them for terrorist potential you will find that the technical ones will do better at it._

That's interesting; I hadn't heard that the same kind of study had been duplicated elsewhere. Do you have a source? Before I saw the study, I was struck by how many of the 9/11 hijackers had an engineering, compared to, e.g., American terrorists. (The Unabomber is the closest analogue, and his academic background was fairly abstract).

 _What I think is that if having an education will make them less susceptible to brainwashing._

And yet that effect is clearly counteracted by whatever else it is that makes engineers more likely to blow stuff up. If they're half as willing but ten times as able to commit terrorist acts, we still lose.

<comment><USER5> Any time you educate someone in technology you increase their potential to do harm.

The high school kid with sharpshooter skills can do more harm than the one without, the professor with a good and solid understanding of chemistry will be able to do more damage than the one that studied English poetry in the 17th century.

Technology is a two-edged sword (for want of a better analogy), you can do good with it or bad. Technology education is neutral as well.

The people that have access to technology decide what they can do with it. And that means that if you educate people in a country where terrorism is high that you will proportionally educate more terrorists.

But that's not a reason to deny the others of that education, in fact that's an excellent reason to educate _all_ of them, which will to some extent level the advantage of technically inclined people bent on destruction.

Check out the high schoolers that are technically inclined, I'll bet you that a good portion of those that studied chemistry got in to it because they liked to play with stuff, and in the process learned a thing or two about explosives, maybe even played with them.

I know I did. And if I should turn 'terrorist' I'd probably make a half decent one, as would anybody else with some understanding of technology.

What stops people from doing stupid stuff though is not just their technical education - or lack thereof - , but their overall education and worldview.

And if you were a terrorist in the making, aged 15 or so and nicely brainwashed by your environment, told to go study engineering, you would do it to and you'd possibly excel at it.

So, that might even be the spot where you might find out who these people are and deflect them before they can do real harm.

You'll stop losing by creating economic parity and making sure that those in the world that would turn to terrorism have too much to lose themselves.

You'll never achieve that goal by denying them an education, that makes the disparity even greater.

<comment><USER8> _I know I did. And if I should turn 'terrorist' I'd probably make a half decent one, as would anybody else with some understanding of technology._

This is (if you'll excuse the aside) one of my favourite hypothetical exercises.

The conclusion I usually draw is mostly that technical knowledge is a lot less important than technical competence. And also that the main "failure" of terrorist attacks (or planned attacks) are due to a lack of this competence higher up the chain.

Whereas the actual bombers or bomb makers (to take a primitive example) might be highly educated they are usually recruited (or as you say sent after recruitment to receive training) to achieve a plan. The planners are almost certainly a lot less technically skilled - they make crazy mistakes or bad choices and it all goes bad for them.

When you consider how GOOD a terrorist you yourself could be (in a coldly logical way) and then think that the vast majority of visitors here are as good or better then I think it puts things in a lot of perspective compared to the fear these people are supposed to instil. The people that do turn to it are, really, no match to our collective might.

<comment><USER5> About 5 years ago, visiting some friends in Colorado living somewhere high up in the rockies the talk turned to terrorism.

So I posed a question to these guys, all of them are pretty smart.

Given a 50 dollar budget, how much damage could you do to society.

Let me phrase the outcome of the rest of the talk like this: We, collectively should be really happy that the terrorists are unable to think as clearly as this group of middle-aged mostly hippies, vets and engineers.

Sabotage is _so_ much easier than construction.

Flying planes into buildings is destruction on a massive scale, but if you sat and did some cold hearted calculations on how to make sure you kill a large number of people with low tech means you could do a whole lot 'better' than that. It wont' get your cause 10 years worth of television coverage though.

The 'love affair' between terrorism and media is for the most part what keeps this whole thing going.

<comment><USER8> Yep done the same thing with a couple of my mates too. We went for a financial/digital attack as the easiest vector.

We actually agreed, in the end, it was lucky these groups have an obsession with causing _deaths_. Callous as it sounds, killing people in large enough numbers is bloody difficult.

> The 'love affair' between terrorism and media is for the most part what > keeps this whole thing going.

Agreed! Ironic really that it's partly that which they crave!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heatmap of your Keystrokes - <AUTHOR> http://www.blendedtechnologies.com/visualization-tricks-generate-a-heatmap-of-your-keystrokes/

<comment><USER2> The results may be accurate if you refrain from using any tools, but who programs that way these days? I've had Esc-/ bound to dabbrev-expand in emacs for the past decade.

I think to really get a good idea of the actual keystroke frequency you need to find a sample of the more prolific programmers in each language and ask them to use a keylogger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, it doesn't take into account what IDE was used to write that code. Do I use Tab in Visual Studio 2005? Nope, all that formatting is done for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> On Emacs heatmap my control key would blind me...

<comment><USER5> Make Caps-Lock an additional Control. You never use Caps-Lock anyway, do you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is quite cool, but would be even better if the opacity of the key matched the opacity of the overlays on the keys.

<comment><USER7> I know I got lazy! You can certainly edit the utilitie's code if it bothers you too much.

Someone else also suggested I use a color gradient. I can't figure out how though.

<comment><USER6> When I posted this, I didn't realize it was a utilitymill script. I just thought you had done it and posted the results. It's neat though. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool.

As for the physical heatmap, I'm showing wear on my control key and "e" key.

</comment><comment><USER9> nice, zero wear on the backspace key in all of those languages.

<comment><USER10> sarcasm FTW</comment></comment>


50 things [everyone] should know - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamiewieck.com/visual-essays/the-50-things-every-graphic-design-student-should-know/

<comment><USER2> Lovely illustrations and great content!</comment>


The FCC warns Internet providers they're on the hook now for user privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/05/21/the-fcc-warns-internet-providers-theyre-on-the-hook-now-for-user-privacy/ <comment><USER2> > Drawing from the same law that regulates legacy phone service, net > neutrality prohibits the sharing of your subscriber records with third > parties unless you give explicit permission to your carrier.

For those wondering about the "explicit permission" mentioned here, there are two methods ISP's we be able to use to use your information, if they indeed follow their telecommunications privacy model[0].

> "Opt-Out" – Your company sends you a notice saying it will consider you to > have given your approval to use your customer information for marketing > unless you tell it not to do so (usually within 30 days.)

> "Opt-In" – Your company sends you a notice asking that you expressly give it > permission to use your customer information for marketing.

Regardless though, this article left me wanting. If you're curious about the details, Ars[1] has a great introduction to it.

[0] [https://www.fcc.gov/guides/protecting-your-telephone- calling...](https://www.fcc.gov/guides/protecting-your-telephone-calling- records)

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/isps-really-dont- wan...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/isps-really-dont-want-to- follow-new-customer-data-privacy-rules/)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if "third parties" in this case includes the NSA and certain other 3 letter government agencies...

Oh who am I kidding, of course not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we also repeal the law that gives carriers and ISPs _immunity_ when sharing customer data with law enforcement agencies? Why in the world would they need immunity if they simply _obey the law_? (that says they need to give that data when _properly_ requested)

Oh, that's right - because they often _violate_ even those laws to help the NSA or FBI or the police, and they don't want to be on the hook for it.

Giving immunity like this to companies creates such terrible incentives. Hopefully after the USA Freedom Act (whether it passes or not) the civil liberties organizations will fight to roll-back that immunity as well - _especially_ if the USA Freedom Act passes and allows carriers to keep the data for NSA.

<comment><USER5> You realize that, in the context of a cyber attack, customer data is not what you think it is, right?

No one's giving away your browsing history, they're giving away C2C server IPs, md5s of malicious files, etc., and guess what? The bad actors who move this data are customers too.

Comcast _still_ can't share your library books with the FBI.

<comment><USER6> Well they could and they have no oversight and immunity. That's the problem.

<comment><USER5> They couldn't legally, no, as data protection laws still apply, and every proposal I've seen includes very strong language about how specific and pertinent the intel must be in order to be shared.

But they could illegally, just like anyone could illegally take your car, or charge up your credit card, or any of the other numerous things that are physically possible but illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Targeted ads? How is injecting ads into/over the content I'm looking at possibly a good idea? As a common carrier they should be required to just deliver the bits, not insert their own.

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of a dumb bumper sticker once seen on a ratty old pickup truck that said... "Don't steal! The government hates competition".</comment>


Measles vaccine doesn't cause autism, new, decade-long study - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/05/measles-vaccine-doesnt-cause-autism-says-new-decade-long-study-half-million-people/ <comment><AUTHOR> A link to the paper:

[https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2727726/measles- mump...](https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2727726/measles-mumps- rubella-vaccination-autism-nationwide-cohort-study)</comment>


Resources and Tools for Designers and Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.colorffy.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hiii HN! I'm Gian and with my friend Eli, we are college students very proud and happy to announce the launch of Colorffy v2.0 after months of hard work!

[https://www.colorffy.com/](https://www.colorffy.com/)

It's a design website, where you can search for color gradients and palettes, get color codes like hex, rgb, hsl and cmyk. Here are some cool features:

Some cool color gradients and palettes with some color codes like hex, rgb, hsl & cmyk.

Preview UI elements (buttons, badges, navbars, cards), with differents gradients, css codes and images downloads.

We have some cool generators like for color gradients, random colors and get colors from images.

Thanks!</comment>


Show HN: Electric Car Lease Prices by US State - <AUTHOR> https://electrification.cc/ <comment><USER2> Link goes to a listing page, not the page the title mentions. (At least on my iPhone)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi! This uses data from this site: ev-vin.blogspot.com, and allows you to filter it by state, added images, etc.</comment>


Google's AI can now translate your speech while keeping your voice - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613559/google-ai-language-translation/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19935480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19935480)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone seen technical papers on this? Interested in the training regimen and data used...</comment>


CircuitHub partners with Altium CircuitMaker for one click manufacturing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.circuithub.com/2015/08/introducing-circuitmaker-integration.html

<comment><AUTHOR> CircuitHub co-founder here. Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


Ask HN: What tags do you give your AWS resources? - <AUTHOR> I am primarily interested in general naming conventions (tag:Name) for resources and additional tags when accounting for multiple regions.
For instance, do people "roll up" region/service/environment/instance into a single "name" tag ? This seems ideal for high-level reporting but also verbose and clunky:
e.g. "west1-ec2-prod-apiserver" <comment><USER2> You can get up to 50 tags per resource; use them. Multiple tags are your friends; you can group them later.

Usually Project, Application, Environment are the common ones. You might also see Cost Center, Service, and some others. You're going to want to chat with Finance to see if they have any asks as well.</comment>


First paypal vulnerabilieties and now this they seem to be on drugs or something - <AUTHOR> https://cybernews.com/security/report-unidentified-database-exposes-200-million-americans/ <comment><USER2> From the Guidelines: "... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

</comment><comment><USER3> Forbes has just reported the same leak, insane if you think about the scale of it, but on the other hand, our data has been leaked 100x times already

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeh, but I hope they start to shine a light to less techy users about these issues as they are getting hit the most I guess</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What does your development stack look like in your favorite language? - <AUTHOR> We are living in an incredibly time with respect to programming languages; the choices and diversity available are amazing. But it's often difficult to get up and running.<p>What's your recipe to get from a fresh OS install to the minimum viable development environment to do "real" work (not just a helloworld program) in your favorite language?<p>(include as much or as little detail as you want) <comment><USER3> I use macOS as a development machine but usually deploy code to a headless Ubuntu Server instance in the cloud.

Primary API server development is in Elixir since it's just an elegant beast and can handle the vast majority of "pure" business logic.

If I need a database, in-memory store, or anything that can run in Docker I use Docker compose to run it. If it needs a bigger box or something managed in production I'll just use whatever the hosting provider exposes (e.g. DigitalOcean's Managed Databases).

Some stuff like bulky user data, random binary files, etc. goes to AWS S3.

Automated tests are developed alongside features and get run with GitLab's continuous integration. This configuration usually reflects the dependencies that are run in Docker in development, but sometimes for low-impact tests I'll just have it hit stateless production services.

Documentation gets auto-generated by Elixir's ExDoc, or whatever language's mainstream solution. Generating this for production documentation gets handled by GitLab CI of course.

Clients that hit the API are variable based on my needs but I usually make a React + Redux SPA or something in the Unity game engine. Web development is always set up with Gulp so that I can run and forget about whatever Webpack, Sass, and the files are doing underneath, it just updates automagically. Depending on the size of the project I often have multiple clients accessing overlapping subsets of API actions.

If this sounds like what your company is using or wants to use, please feel free to reach out at sam (at) mangane.se (I am in the USA even though the TLD is Swedish).

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Install Windows 10 Pro 64 (15 minutes or so, possibly shorter) and run updates.

2\. Install Firefox and Chrome

3\. Install Git

4\. Install Visual Studio

5\. New Asp.Net Core Project with MVC

6\. a few hours later get bored and install Netflix and turn on the Office.

</comment><comment><USER5> \- install git

\- install Emacs

\- clone my dotemacs repo

\- clone dotfiles repo with a single org file (that comprises my entire machine configuration)

\- Run M-x org-babel-tangle. That "extracts" all the dotfiles - gitconfig, bash settings, mail, environment variables, language specific settings. Depending on the machine, either Linux or OSX specific settings, etc.

See, my entire machine configuration is an immutable thing - whenever I need to make changes I'd do it in my .org file and run org-babel-tangle.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a link to a description of this? It sounds like a great way to manage dotfiles with actual context.

<comment><USER5> No, I've been hoping to write a blogpost about the process but been procrastinating for ages. Unfortunately I can't make my dotfile public - <USER2> are things in init that I rather keep private. Essentially you just need an .org file with source blocks with headings like this:

#+begin_src gitconfig :tangle ~/.gitconfig

You can even do it for different systems like so:

#+begin_src gitconfig :tangle (when (eq system-type 'darwin) "~/.gitconfig")

if you need file to be tangled in nested dirs you can add this header:

:mkdirp yes

if you need the content to be encrypted:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :tangle ~/.authinfo.gpg :mkdirp yes # - _\- epa-file- encrypt-to: ( "firstname.lastname@example.com") -_\- #+end_src

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most responses so far support your view that it's difficult to get up and running. So many pieces and parts, which doesn't just mean getting an MVDE up and running, but learning and using all those tools, libraries, polyglot-based environs, and domains they each inhabit. The fact that you asked this question is telling.

As far as choices and diversity, how different are things, and how have they changed from what we had 25 years ago? That sets the context for my answer.

My language of choice is Red, a direct descendant of Rebol. You've likely never heard of either. And Red is still Alpha software. That doesn't mean we don't do real work though. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am part of Team Red, so I'm biased. :^) One of our taglines is "Fighting Software Complexity", which is what makes software development so painful today. The sad part is that it's not necessary (at least in most cases). I'll try not to evangelize, because anyone using _any_ tool or language to fight software complexity is on the right track in my book.

Reducers (what we call Red Users) have widely varying setups, as Red is cross platform, with syntax configs for a number of editors and VSCode plugin. Any editor will do.

I like the short responses a couple gave: `PyCharm` and `Go+Plan9Port`. Simpler is better. Red falls into that category, as you just need to download a single 1MB EXE, which contains the entire toolchain. It will self-build GUI and CLI REPLs from that. Cross-compiling and a cross-platform GUI system are built in as well, not separate. No dependency on GCC, CLANG, JVM, or others (though we may add an LLVM back end, and compiling service to use it, this year).

We'd like to be even smaller than 1MB, but want to include useful features too, so it's a balancing act. We also give up features others get for "free" by resisting external dependencies. This comes back to avoiding difficulties. You can compile Red apps that have no external dependencies themselves, and will be ~1MB (I won't go into Red/System here, but it's like C in EXE size and speed). This is important if you consider deployment as part of real work. How do you deploy your apps? In the case of Red desktop apps, you just give the user an EXE.

That's about as non-evangelistic as I can get it seems. :^) This isn't meant as an ad for Red, but to provoke more thought about our entire ecosystem mindset. We can have recipes for swaths of tools and libraries, but how big is the entire dev/deploy/runtime system, how many places can things go wrong, and how much do you need to know to keep it all working?

Good question. Thanks for asking it.

</comment><comment><USER8> If I needed to build a quick app that I would feel extremely confident with, I would launch a Digital Ocean droplet running Ubuntu or similar and set up Nginx / MySQL / PHP.

I would use Lumen (~Laravel light) to build the API, probably using JSON web tokens for authentication.

For the front-end, I would spin up a Redux-less Polymer build (web components) with a service worker.

That would probably be my go-to stack, because I know it very well and can develop rapidly in that context.

</comment><comment><USER9> I do mainly macOS and iOS development. In the last 20 years, I don't remember ever doing a fresh install because I just haven't needed to. I simply install (well update) macOS and Xcode. That's it. That's everything I need to do my development. Honestly if I needed more, I don't think I'd bother anymore. I'm amazed at the sheer number of extra crap developers on other platforms are forced to install just to be productive.

</comment><comment><USER10> \- Windows 10 (What can I say I play games on my big beefy desktop and I'm not going to run another OS for coding).

I code in 2 envs

\- IntelliJ Idea + IntelliJ Rust plugin (steps: install+run rustup, install IntelliJ, install Rust plug-in)

\- Visual Studio + C# (steps: install vs, Done)

Mostly low level techy things like audio plugins, raytracers and similar.

For the occasional (rare) web project I do backend in one of the above and frontend in vs code, using whatever framework became most popular that morning.

</comment><comment><USER11> I keep all my config source controlled and have my own setup program that creates symlinks and so on, along with a "bootstrap" script that starts from a clean Mac and installs and configures everything I need:

[https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/bootstrap.py](https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/bootstrap.py)

There are still some things that are manual:

* some macOS settings that can't easily be set via "defaults write"

* VS Code makes it hard to source control its settings, so I use the settings sync extension, but that requires manual config of the gist id and access token. It's super frustrating that a programmer's editor makes it hard to source control its settings!

* iterm2's config system is frustrating as well, with user-level config (eg. colors) mixed in with things like window positions and "last time checked for updates" timestamps. So I pretty much set up my last good config for it and then run 'git update-index --assume-unchanged' on its config so I don't have to see the file constantly dirty in my repo.

</comment><comment><USER12> My own machine if possible, ask for ThinkPad or Dell XPS Dev. Ed. if client insists on their machine. Worst case, for short periods: anything with a decent keyboard.

Arch Linux on my machine. Kubuntu latest (LTS is acceptable, if not preferred) on client's. Worst case, for short periods: anything close to Linux with an up-to-date stack (say, homebrew on macOS).

ed25519 SSH keys, preferably my own. ssh-agent (GnuPG, when on Linux) with compulsory confirmation on every sign. SSH certificates a must for host authentication, preferred for client authentication.

ZeroTier or Wireguard strongly preferred for VPN access to client networks. OpenVPN et al. begrudgingly accepted, but only for short durations. TeamViewer et al. strict no on own machine.

LXD and/or systemd-nspawn for containerisation. Docker strict no on my machine.

Terminal Emulator: Konsole or Konsole-based if possible. Worst case: anything with decent colours and keybinding support.

Font: Whichever suits the display, resolution etc. the best among: Iosevka (family), Hermit, and Fantasque Sans Mono.

Editor/IDE: At minimum — Vim or Neovim; Preferred — Emacs 26 with own spacemacs-based config.

Version control: Minimum — git; maximum — magit.

Plugins: On vim/neovim — few, if any, in-editor plugins; on Emacs — custom config tuned for specific stacks; Out-of-editor — stack-specific CLI tooling.

Almost every stack I use I try to stick as close to latest vanilla as I can (e.g., C/C++ is just ordinary text editing with compilers in -Wall -Werror etc. modes). Some stacks that are somewhat non-vanilla:

Python: 3.7 strongly preferred; 3.6 begrudgingly accepted; 3.5, 3.4, and 2.7 only for legacy maintenance. flake8, pylint, et. al. with possible Emacs integration. Sphinx (with a tuned config) for documentation, autodoc favoured.

SQL & DB: Emacs's org-mode+org-babel for playing; Sqitch and pg_tap for committing.

Racket: Emacs with Geiser. Org-mode (and thus org-babel) for small scripts/projects.

Common Lisp: SLIME (with small extensions in elisp, primarily for remote editing), sbcl (always built from source and installed with sources), quicklisp (augmented with small, private dist), erudite (+ private extensions) for literate programming (rendered, via Sphinx, to PDF).

</comment><comment><USER13> Absolute minimum:

1\. MacOS or Linux

Do everything in Terminal.app Configure it nicely: grey on black, 13pt monaco, etc setup shell w/ tab completion (bash or zsh & oh-my-zsh)

2\. Install homebrew (osx package manager) 2a. brew install git 2b. brew install vim (optional, nice to have newer version)

3\. install vim-rails (which gives us syntax highlighting for ruby & js)

4\. use rvm to install specific ruby versions etc as needed.

Ready to work with ruby, rails, javascript.

</comment><comment><USER14> Getting up and running on a Linux environment after the first time is pretty fast. Here's how I'd set up a new machine for C, CPP, Rust, and documentation

\- install arch (partition, video/wireless setup, etc)

\- pacman -S i3-gaps polybar termite compton base-devel gdb rust vim firefox pandoc textlive-most evince git

\- git clone mydotfiles.git && sh mydotfiles/install.sh

</comment><comment><USER15> There is [https://usesthis.com/categories/developer/](https://usesthis.com/categories/developer/) , where people describe the hardware/software they use.

The site was fairly popular a decade ago. I'm glad it's still up and doing new interviews.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm a full stack developer who usually work with Go, Rust, .Net Core or Haskell + some frontend stuff. I got two laptops for development, one running Arch and one running MacOS and often switch between them.

1\. Install Emacs, kitty and Neovim

2\. Clone dotfiles and my Doom Emacs config

3\. Install Go, Rust, .Net Core and NPM

4\. Install Docker and kubectl

5\. Get my secrets from my secret source

</comment><comment><USER17> I use Windows 10 Pro with WSL.

Setting up WSL (Ubuntu 18.04) from scratch to be a tweaked out Vim / tmux environment involves running 1 Ansible command.

I also use Docker for Windows but configure WSL to connect to it. I have a bunch of real world projects in Flask, Rails and Phoenix running in this environment. Switching between all of them only takes seconds thanks to tmux's persistent sessions. I'm switching a lot too since I juggle a bunch of freelance and personal projects.

Overall I'm happy with the set up. The single workstation is responsible for full time development, audio / video editing and gaming.

An up to date list of all of the tools I use can be found here: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i- use](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use)

</comment><comment><USER18> I code on a mac using BBEdit.

I develop locally on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian and deploy to a DigitalOcean VPS running Ubuntu 16.04 or !8.xx

Both the Pi and the VPS are running:

Apache Web Server and CouchDB

My apps are written almost entirely in Javascript running in the user's web browser.

On the client side I mostly use PouchDB.js, jQuery, and Bootstrap.

On the server side I use Perl.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1\. Fresh install of Ubuntu

2\. Clone my dotfiles repo: [https://github.com/mkaz/dotfiles](https://github.com/mkaz/dotfiles)

3\. Run install script: ~/dotfiles/init-linux.sh

Sets up dotfiles with my preferences, and packages I need for Go, Node, LAMP

</comment><comment><USER20> Nowadays: Typescript + React + Postgresql + Visual Code + macOS + github | Gitlab + digital ocean

</comment><comment><USER21> I do API development for the web. My machine runs Ubuntu 16.04, and my work is almost completely in JavaScript and TypeScript.

I have Node.js setup, and I have TypeScript installed as my first npm package, since the scale of my work is made so much more manageable by it.

Locally, I run WebStorm by JetBrains. It has a lot of useful plugins, and it's build in Debugger is invaluable when debugging large, complex code. I use Docker for MongoDB and Postgresql. PGAdmin is extremely valuable for Postgres.

Git is used all the time to check in code, and most of my code is self- documented/JSDoc, since I'm not really a big fan of writing external documentation unless it is user facing.

</comment><comment><USER22> My favorite configuration for my day job (big tech company, writing high availability storage firmware):

\- Ubuntu

\- Git, mercurial, fd-find, ripgrep, exa.

\- Vim + spf13 + ctags + cscope as a fallback for text-only sessions.

\- Eclipse CDT: most of my work is C/C++, huge code bases, kernel and userspace. Nothing beats CDT in terms of navigation (go to definition, call hierarchy, class hierarchy, to name a few). It's a little tricky and involving to get the indexing right, but totally worth it.

\- Gdb and crash (life savers!).

For my side projects (mostly rails), it's pretty much the same as above on a mac and vscode instead of eclipse.

</comment><comment><USER23> Using a fresh install of MacOS

1\. Install Git

2\. Install Rustup

3\. Install Visual Studio Code

4\. Install Rust (rls) VS Code extension

<comment><USER24> Doesn't git come with macOS

<comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure it is only installed when you open xcode for the first time and it asks you to install "additional programs".

<comment><USER26> You can just try to run git in the terminal and you'll get that prompt. You don't ever need to install Xcode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Install Windows 10

2\. Install Chrome

3\. Install Git

4\. Install Java

5\. Install Maven

6\. Install IntelliJ

7\. Create a new Spring Boot project using Spring Initializr

</comment><comment><USER28> 1\. Install Windows (7/10 Pro 64-bit)

2\. Install Java 8

3\. Install Eclipse; configure eclipse.ini to use jvm.dll for launching and set max heap to not all my RAM

4\. Install Tomcat; configure Eclipse to use Tomcat installation

5\. Install MySQL 5.7

6\. Install Toad for MySQL Freeware (no longer available; might break under MySQL 8.0 when the time comes to upgrade...)

6\. Eclipse -> New Maven Project

</comment><comment><USER29> For SPA or UI

      1) Install VSCode / GIT (Mac or Windows)
      2) Install Create-React-App
      3) Start Developing the App

For Serverside APIs

      1) Install Visual Studio / GIT (on Windows)
      2) Create new ASP.NET Core Project
      3) Get started with Development

<comment><USER30> Just curious: Why do you write "GIT" in all-caps when it's not an acronym or initialism?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> 1\. Install nix on MacOS or Linux (or use NixOS)

2\. Git checkout dotfiles, repos

3\. home-manager switch (sets up personal dev environment, down to vim plugins and GTK themes)

4\. nix-shell -A shell (enters the shell for my project)

5\. deploy-to-minikube (builds everything and deploys locally to kubernetes on a VM... No prior setup needed)

6\. push-to-prod

</comment><comment><USER32> I recently had to set my development environment up again, and I've gotten it to the point where on macOS I

1\. Run `xcode-select --install`, accept prompts etc

2\. `git clone` my dotfiles repo

3\. `cd` into it and run `rake`, which automates the install of Homebrew, various packages my dotfiles use, Emacs, etc.

<comment><USER25> Would you mind sharing this dotfile? Interesting concept

<comment><USER32> [https://github.com/lynlevenick/dotfiles](https://github.com/lynlevenick/dotfiles)

Here you go! As it says on the top, it only works on macOS right now unfortunately.

<comment><USER25> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been fully on Linux since 2015. For C, C++ and Rust: Visual Studio Code with appropriate plugins (previously, until ca. 3 years ago - Eclipse). At work we have CLion. For quick editing I'm content with Kate, the text editor bundled with KDE.

</comment><comment><USER34> For C:

Any OS

package manager => compilers, autotools, joe, dev libs, git, ...

emacs (with my .emacs since 1985)

lsp-mode with clangd, magit

<comment><USER35> I created an 'Ask HN:' [0] based on this comment, would love to see your .emacs config.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690819)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Usually dev on a debian or arch derivative. i3/ranger/vim with near vanilla rcs. I favor go and typescript but am happy to use near any language (one in specific I will not touch).

</comment><comment><USER37> 1\. Linux (usually Ubuntu)

2\. Install Emacs.

3\. Install Git.

\- Set git's core.editor to Emacs.

4\. Install Chromium and Firefox.

5\. Write JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER38> Windows Os.

Backend: Visual Studio Dotnet core Dapper FluentMigrator Azure SQL db Azure app services

Frontend:

Visual Studio / Code Stripped down Bootstrap/Materialize Vanilla js Chrome f12 Firebug Fiddler

</comment><comment><USER39> On MacOS:

1\. Install VS Code

2\. Install iTerm

3\. Install RVM and setup a gemset with the latest ruby version.

4\. Install Rails

5\. Install Postgres.app

6\. Start building

</comment><comment><USER40> 1\. Linux (Manjaro i3-gaps)

2\. Install/update termite, neovim, git, python3, pip3 and Firefox.

3\. Clone config from dotfiles repo.

4\. Log in to Firefox Sync and let it install all the extensions.

</comment><comment><USER41> macOS

1\. Install Homebrew

2\. Brew Install Git

3\. Brew Install Emacs

4\. Git Clone dotfiles

5\. cd ./dotfiles && bootstrap.sh

This gives me my spacemacs config and all the MLPA packages, java, clojure, elixir, python, and a few others.

</comment><comment><USER42> MacOS for Ruby, Elixir, and VueJS

Clone and run thoughtbot/laptop. Install thoughtbot/dotfiles and then personal dotfiles. Done.

</comment><comment><USER43> \- Visual Studio

\- Resharper

\- Visual Studio Code

\- Python

\- Node

\- Windows Subsystem for Linux with Ubuntu

\- AWS CLI

\- MySql WorkBench

\- SQL WorkBench (AWS Redshift uses the Postgres protocol)

\- TortoiseGit (so sue me. I don't like using git from the command line)

</comment><comment><USER44> Very simple, install Python. Install Flask. That's it! I just use the development server.

</comment><comment><USER45> MacOS + Brewfile (with cask & mas). Up and running in a few hours, almost fully automated.

</comment><comment><USER46> MacOS Mojave Xcode 10.2 Sublime Text Tower (for Git) Charles (I do iOS and MacOS)

</comment><comment><USER47> \- Install nix.

\- I usually have a default.nix lying around somewhere for the rest.

</comment><comment><USER48> 1\. MacOS

2\. brew install elixir

3\. mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.4.3

4\. Install VSCode

5\. Install ElixirLS VSCode extension

</comment><comment><USER49> MacOS:

\- git

\- JetBrains Rider

\- .NET Core

\- PostgreSQL

\- Sublime Text for text editing

Windows:

\- Same as above except I prefer Visual Studio 2019 + Resharper to Rider

\- Cmdr (Console Emulator)

</comment><comment><USER50> 1\. MacOS

2\. Install Vagrant

3\. Install VirtualBox

4\. Install Git

5\. Clone Repo

6\. run "vagrant up"

</comment><comment><USER51> atom, git, vim, redis, memcached, mongodb

</comment><comment><USER52> pacman -S git gcc gdb make vim gtest

</comment><comment><USER53> \- Install Go

\- Install plan9port

done

</comment><comment><USER54> PyCharm

</comment><comment><USER55> Ubuntu since it's the most widely supported Linux distro

Dub with DMD since my favourite language is D

GDB for debugging

Atom with autosave and D syntax highlighting

Git

Zsh with oh-my-zsh, mostly for the amazing history & tab completion.

Chromium with ublock origin

My GNU Nano autosave patch & everything I need to compile that.</comment>


Codecon is back, who's excited? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codecon.org/2009/cfp.txt

<comment><USER2> I'll be there, but more for the people than the content. The biotech stuff is particularly uninteresting to me.</comment>


The Metric System Is Lost On These American Olympic Viewers (TWEETS) - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/02/14/2014-winter-olympics-metric-system_n_4784638.html

<comment><USER2> Really? Give us 4-decimal-place conversions and that's supposed to solve something? Insulting if it isn't meant to be stupid, else stupid.</comment>


Making an AI-Generated Recipe, "Taco Soup Soup" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2Meta/comments/eogg2c/i_made_taco_soup_soup/ <comment><USER2> All I can say is that all your base are belong to us...</comment>


C#/XAML for HTML5 new Beta 10.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cshtml5.com/private/download-beta/ <comment><USER2> As much as I love C# & XAML, I have trouble imagining why I would use this stack instead of writing JS/HTML5 directly.

<comment><USER3> _I have trouble imagining why I would use this stack instead of writing JS /HTML5 directly_

To develop cross-platform code (e.g. for desktop and web targets)?

<comment><USER4> But why not just write JS/HTML5 code which inherently works on web, and use something like Electron to make it work on desktop too?

<comment><USER5> C#/XAML probably works much better on the desktop than Electron. Each has it's pros and cons. Also, C# is a much better language than js.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking at the website, I'm at work on OSX, so can't download... but it's unclear if this is free, open-source or commercial software... the marketing of this page/site is pretty hard to tell, and hideous overall.

If it's commercial the lack of any pricing or licensing information leads me to want to avoid at all costs... I'm assuming it's a commercial product, and it's completely not clear short of giving your email address to download.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe link to the main page [1] should be better and more clearly.

This project is obviously still in development. You can see their roadmap almost on the bottom of the main page [1].

[1] [http://www.cshtml5.com](http://www.cshtml5.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> C# has some advantages over JS but Xaml styles and templates are so much easier than CSS.

Around 2010 when I was a WPF dev moving back to web I looked so hard for a tool that would do this.

I'm guessing this renders as SVG but CSS (mainly flexbox) and tools have improved so much that it's not needed so much now.

Still going to have a good look into it though.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish there getting started showed a little code sample instead of a giant horrible screenshot with text everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some examples with source codes: [http://www.cshtml5.com/samples/showcase/index.html](http://www.cshtml5.com/samples/showcase/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unless I see monodevelop or sharpdevelop support, I gotta say this project seems quite silly to me.

<comment><USER10> Are the XAML designers in [mono|sharp]develop good? This project seems obviously aimed at people who love visual designers.</comment></comment>


Thoughts on Learning Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://wideaperture.net/blog/?p=3058

<comment><USER2> The hardest thing about getting started with emacs is finding information about getting started with emacs. You get the "learn emacs in 10 minute" guides that show you how to open a file, and move up a line, and then after that everything goes off a cliff into installing packages and writing lisp.

It's hard to get a sense for the "overview" of what emacs is about - what you should learn first, how to customize your setup, and where you should go next. It feels like walking in to a party full of really really really smart strangers.

Like a party full of smart strangers, once you get going it's fine... but most people don't stick around that long.

<comment><USER3> One way is to commit to using emacs for everything, now, and then slowly 'dig your way out'.

<comment><USER4> That is how I had to start. I just decided I would use it and be completely overwhelmed for a couple weeks. It also helps if you have a proficient Emacs use sitting nearby that so that you can constantly ask how do things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The single best thing I did to become proficient using Emacs was to switch my CapsLock key to Ctrl. Learning to touch type comes a close second.

<comment><USER6> I would've thought it'd be the other way around. Why would you bother with a text editor if you're not motivated enough to learn how to type?

<comment><USER5> Learning to use a text editor(or atleast trying) is easier than learning to touch type but anyway people kept touting the power of Emacs and how extensible it was and I decided to give it a shot. On trying Emacs, I loved features such as being able to run a shell, a really good python mode and the extensibility using .emacs files.

However since Emacs has a lot of key sequences for navigating between text, modifying text and doing pretty much anything involves not using the mouse, it got really frustrating looking at the keyboard every 2 seconds courtesy my typing illiteracy. So I decided to learn touch typing just so that I could use Emacs properly.

One interesting little tidbit.. I had tried around 3 or 4 times previously to learn touch typing but failed. However after I started learning both Emacs and touch typing simultaneously, I succeeded. So I guess the relation is somewhat symbiotic, learning to touch type helped me learn emacs and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I started out with technomancy's emacs-starter kit, but I started to roll my own (complete rm -rf .emacs.d) when I tried to then add functionality myself, ran in to trouble and got yelled at in #emacs for using the starter kit. Installed package.el and everytime I missed something from the kit, I'd install it myself (paredit, winner, ido, ...).

I would still recommend the starter kit for absolute beginners because it gives you a running start and a good idea of what kind of stuff is out there.

</comment><comment><USER8> There were thoughts, but they weren't about learning Emacs.

IMO, it was just another Emacs advocacy article. The only thing I learned is that there is an org-mode iPhone app.

</comment><comment><USER9> Oo boy! I hope no one brings up the comparison to Vi now. (Ooops!)

Let the holy war begin.

<comment><USER10> How times have changed. I have discovered that we are friends with vi & Klingons, and we are at war with eclipse, netbeans, and the borg.

<comment><USER11> Eclipse has an emacs mode built in.

<comment><USER12> Eclipse has a set of Emacs key bindings, but it's hard for me to use because I have muscle memory of features that don't exist in Eclipse (prefix arguments, buffer manipulation, and so on). The Emacs+ plugin is better, but I honestly prefer to use the normal bindings rather then get tripped up repeatedly by fake Emacs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should a fledgling SaaS website consider internationalization? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN. My friend and I are working on a SaaS project. We're about 2 months from launching, and wondered if we should consider translating into other languages (eg cn, de, ru, jp etc) to help reach a wider audience. This type of service  would likely have appeal in those countries too.<p>Or would it be better to only focus on USA/CA/UK for the first year (or two)? Hope to hear other HN'ers comments and experiences with this :) <comment><USER2> I wouldn't worry about actually translating, but I for sure would do as much as possible to build out the infrastructure necessary to support it. In most cases I think it would be more work to shoehorn it in after the fact than it would be to get it done up front.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, Ty. We've at added support in code and data for the LTR languages.

While that means Arabic and Hebrew won't be supported without refactoring, it should be an appropriate compromise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It might be ideal to validate your idea in one market first before expanding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'd agree with that.

In this case there is an established market (eg competitors) which would suggest there is ongoing customer demand. Whether visitors will like our service though is anyones guess, but we hope so!

We're placing most of our effort into making it simple to use, and helping users beam with happiness</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Learning nuts and bolts of Internet - <AUTHOR>

This may be addressed in previous threads but I could not find. I'm a "self-taught programmers" and jumped in by learning PHP and building stuff. I would not describe myself as computer-savvy and this was my intro to programming. I would like to improve my knowledge of the basics of the Internet and web development (e.x. HTTP overview, understanding web servers, how scripting languages are abstractions on lower-level languages, etc..)<p>Are there any good books that you guys have read? I know there are plenty of books on these topics individually but I was looking for something that tied these topics together and made it understandable / relevant for a novice <comment><USER2> My two cents...one of the benefits of learning the Microsoft stack is that there is a lot of vertical coverage in books about it...e.g. a book on C# will often cover everything from arrays and loops to RSS syndication and processing http under asp.net.

Linux could be similar, but there really isn't the market share to drive the same level of dead tree publishing for beginners nor a single source to facilitate the same sort of vertical organization of books.</comment>


US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021 - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/us-citizens-need-visas-to-visit-europe-in-2021/index.html <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346012) which has more comments.

(Worth mentioning 57 countries are affected, including all countries that had Visa Waivers with the EU - the US is not being singled out.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Quid pro quo I guess?</comment>


RSS isn't dead it just needs to be repurposed. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.embed.ly/rss-isnt-dead-it-just-needs-to-be-repurposed

<comment><USER2> The problem isn't RSS itself, its shitty RSS readers.

Think about the way RSS feeds are handled by browsersfor a second, because that's the most likely place a user is going to encounter RSS feeds anyway ...

Google Chrome sends you to Google reader or another RSS reader of your choice ... if you've never messed with RSS, you're going to tap out immediately (what the heck is an RSS reader?), Firefox adds it to your bookmarks, and you can't even tell when new items have arrived etc, The RSS feeds in IE are an absolute joke ... only Opera even gets this remotely right.

Even on Feed Demon which is _by far_ the best RSS reader on the market, the way it is initially set up, makes consuming content rather awkward unless you know exactly what you're doing. The View Port is half or a quarter the normal size of a browser window (until you adjust the reader orientation in the options), and you're forced to click twice to read content since the actual article isn't usually shown in the window ... Unless you're a determined user, you're not going to care very much for all the hoops you have to jump through to actually read content in an RSS reader ... when you can just keep using a browser.

That is the problem.

Google reader is nice, but why should I go to a web page to read content that I could be reading in a browser anyway?

If someone sits down and makes a kick ass RSS reader (feed demon with smart defaults is pretty much there already), and sells the fact that you can now read, tag, annotate and bookmark your content as easily as you would with email ... and like email ... have the ability to get access to all these bookmarks, notes, read/unread articles regardless of what machine they were on ... I think RSS would get a lot more traction.

So, lets focus less on the technology (how many email readers really care if they're using IMAP or POP, for example) and just get users a new, smarter way of consuming content.

I bet there's some money in it even ;)

<comment><USER3> First, Google Reader is the best RSS reader I've tried. The reason one would go there when one could be reading the source website in the same browser instead is because presumably we're subscribing to more than just _one_ RSS feed. So you go to Google Reader in place of visiting every single website whose RSS you subscribe to. Isn't that the original problem RSS tried to solve, anyways?

Second, there are a slew of native clients for Google Reader, all of which synch up with it. Meaning, you can read your feeds on your smartphone, your iPad, your computer, your computer at your work, someone else's computer and everything is just synched. This works great for me, and there are some great native clients for Google Reader out there.

Third, I don't understand the problem of having too many feeds. It's just a matter of removing the ones you don't want to read much, or categorize them into things that you must read, and things for when you are just bored.

I think RSS reading is a tool for pros. It's not for those who just visit a handful of websites every day, it's for those who are interested in many _many_ more, and who want to automate the task of finding out what websites have been updated; not an everyman a tool, it's one for advanced users. It doesn't matter how simple RSS useage is made, if you don't find the job of _checking_ your sites for updates tedious and laborious you're not going to _need_ an RSS reader.

<comment><USER4> _I think RSS reading is a tool for pros. It's not for those who just visit a handful of websites every day, it's for those who are interested in many many more, and who want to automate the task of finding out what websites have been updated; not an everyman a tool, it's one for advanced users. It doesn't matter how simple RSS useage is made, if you don't find the job of checking your sites for updates tedious and laborious you're not going to need an RSS reader._

I agree with most of your post, but I think this is somewhat off. It's less to do with pro/casual than the style of content consumption. Say Mrs Housewife usually just browses the front page of Yahoo. She doesn't need an RSS feed for that; she's fine with missing items. In fact, keeping up with all the content would probably be tiring.

But then her friend Mrs Awesomecook starts a great blog sharing her recipes. Mrs Housewife wants to try each one, but Mrs Awesomecook only seems to update once or twice every week.

 _This is when you want RSS_. She wants to see every single item, but checking the site can become a chore. It's annoying to check this and her other friends' blogs when there's nothing new, but she also wants to see all of the new stuff and in a timely manner. By subscribing to an RSS feed, she can make this easier.

I think part of the problem is that Mrs Housewife has no idea what an RSS feed or reader is, much less what it's useful for. Furthermore, to learn a new technology like that, she'd have to see a benefit worth taking the trouble for, which usually has to be pretty high for non-technical users.

Edit: And apologies if my examples seem prejudiced/sexist, it was just the first thing that came to mind since it's somewhat similar to why I taught my mom to use Google Reader (which she now loves).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the substance of the article, it's not "repurposing" RSS to use it in ways beyond traditional feed readers. RSS has always been an open syndication format, and still has plenty of uses.

On to less productive comments...

RSS may not be dead, but punctuation apparently is. I thought there was a typo in the post on HN, but it turns out that this little run-on headline is in the actual post. The rest of the post is even worse grammatically.

Hey guys, if you're going to write on your company's blog, invest in a bit of proofreading. Bad posts reflect negatively on not only you, but your startup also.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if they've rewritten it somewhat; the headline now has a comma, and most of the post isn't too far from being entirely grammatically correct. It's closer to conversational English than many blog posts, but that's no crime against language.

They _could_ use a few semicolons in place of some of those periods, though; especially where it starts to get period-heavy near the end.

<comment><USER7> While we're on the topic, you shouldn't have a semicolon in that last sentence; the right side is not an independent clause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can't call it "repurposing" when you're using it for its designed purpose! RSS readers from day one have only ever been one aspect of the larger ecosystem around the format.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't around then, but I'll take your word for it. In any case, the main point remains valid. We may see the decline of RSS readers, but RSS is alive and well.

<comment><USER10> If you don't know enough about a subject, you shouldn't write about it. Or at least do some research.

P.s. looks like you could have put your point in a tweet :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> RSS is not dead, there simply is no good alternative to it. The only other programmatic ways of to getting updates from a website are either e-mail or HTML screen scraping.

<comment><USER12> If you assumed that the label "RSS", included RSS of various flavors, Atom and PubSubHubHub, how would you describe a good alternative to that?

My assumption is debatable for sure, but I'd like to hear what folks think is lacking.

<comment><USER13> The use model.

Twitter works for many more people because there is One Place for those data streams. CNN, Comcast, Oprah they're all at and on "Twitter". If you want to subscribe to a Twitter stream there's a clear and unambiguous way to 'hook in' and the data stream is of a consistent form.

RSS, on the other hand, involves hunting about pages looking for feed streams that may not exist, possibly installing plugins to simplify the process of adding those streams (once found), getting a reader, having no idea what type of information you'll be getting back [1], nor the form of the posts [2], nor having any consistent method of feed interaction [3] and no easy way to delegate your list of sources to one or many friends who will then curate the source news for you.

Basically, RSS allows specific readers to suck, it allows specific feeds to suck and it allows the whole experience to suck. Twitter isn't the best, but the whole thing is easy-to-use, consistent and dependable. Similarly with the 'like' functionality of Facebook.

[1] filtered list of content? way more than you wanted? old? buggy and re- spamming you with old stories? buggy skipping stories?

[2] full content? abbreviation? uselessly-short abbreviation? sane links for sharing? short links? ads? obtrusive ads? poor formatting?

[3] Do I click the RSS headline to see the full post? The link the post referred to? Some lame on-site redisplay of what was already in my reader, because I was expected to click some image button in the summary?

<comment><USER14> Strange, I kind of feel the opposite way about Twitter.

I can paste any website's URL to Google Reader to subscribe to that site's RSS feed.

What kind of a standard way is there to find out the Twitter feed of a random website or blog I happen to run across and want to follow? Do I search for the author's name on Twitter? Can I be sure I get all the posts and not some other crap he's tweeting?

<comment><USER13> Sure, it's potentially as tricky to find a twitter stream from a website, as to find an RSS feed. But that's not the primary use model. And where there is a twitter icon, the one-click-follow is a universal secondary use that requires no clients or third party services.

The primary use for Twitter is to find feeds directly on Twitter. Either by searching or by seeing who your friends follow. Which is what most people do. They sort through what their friends follow and pick and choose from that. Adding a few additional feeds here and there, but those being the minority.

That's what Google Reader's social widgets were trying to replicate. That's what Buzz was trying to replicate. Discovering feeds from friends. Because most users don't discover new sources for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > For many people, like me, Twitter has replaced most of the functionality of > a reader. I still get the same information, but it's pushed to me, nicely > curated, by people I follow.

I'm completely baffled by comments like this. I've tried subscribing to feeds that have just headlines or headline and one sentence and I end up never reading them. Almost all the feeds I read have full text and the rest have at least 100 _words_ of the content per post, not 140 characters, so I can tell if it's worth clicking on.

Sites like reddit (or HN) which have voting and a decent commenting system add value, but Twitter? I'm actually turned off when I read some thoughtful blog post somewhere and at the end it says "if you liked this, follow me on Twitter." Yeah, thanks, but no, I must have mistaken you for someone who could form complete sentences.

</comment><comment><USER16> And RSS readers don't naturally hook into the underlying comment systems on the content they present, so if you want to read/write comments, you need to click through anyway.

It's okay for consuming newspaper articles that don't support comments, but frustrating for blogs where you want to be part of the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER17> RSS sucks because it's the bastard child of long content and short content.

Until publishers can figure out how to write for medium length content, it will be tucked away for use by self professed nerds who like to access and manipulate information quickly.

</comment><comment><USER18> new purpose for RSS and cause for last weekend's project:

<http://www.pclapper.com/GetRandomRssSummary/></comment>


Ask HN: Will you be my Advisor? - <AUTHOR>

A few weeks ago I started out on a new startup.
As you know, I am a sole developer and work out of my home. As such, I have nobody to bounce ideas off of.
Would you be willing to be on my volunteer advisory board? The job is very simple:
1) I will email you each day with my status update
2) From time to time I will ask your opinion, you are free to ignore these emails if you are too busy
3) You promise not to release any details about the application unless I ask you to
That's about it. More than anything, it gives me a feeling that I'm not just all by myself here and also allows me to have another set of critical eyes look at what I'm doing.
Your opinion is valued! I could really use the help.
Let me know. <comment><USER2> What is your startup? If you're doing something which I find technically interesting, I'd be happy to advise; if you're writing software for printing bingo cards, it would be a waste of both your time and mine.

(No offense intended to patio11 -- bingo cards was just the first example which came to mind of a successful startup which doesn't have the sort of technical challenges which I find interesting.)

<comment><USER3> If you think Patrick's startup is actually about bingo cards, you need to re- read pretty much everything he's written here. His technical challenges aren't about putting random words on a page.

You _in particular_ would benefit a lot from what he's writing about.

<comment><USER2> _If you think Patrick's startup is actually about bingo cards, you need to re- read pretty much everything he's written here._

I guess I must have been mislead by the URL "<http://www.bingocardcreator.com>.

 _His technical challenges aren't about putting random words on a page._

I'm clearly behind the times. I thought bingo cards had numbers. :-/

 _You in particular would benefit a lot from what he's writing about._

Patrick's blog seems to be far more about marketing and business strategy than it is about technical issues. I'm sure I could learn a lot from him -- those are definitely not my strong points. But they're also not particularly areas which I find interesting... and they're _definitely_ not areas where it would make sense for me to be advising someone else!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommend you adjust your first job step: emailing each day. You should email when you have something to say and not be bound by the rotation of the earth.

Other than that, I'd be happy to provide feedback if I'm able.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea. Will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To any of you that are looking for an adviser, I can offer some assistance the only caveat is that I have to find the technology you are working on compelling. If you shot me a high level via email (in my profile), I will shoot back an I'm interested or a good luck.

Full disclosure, I do work with a venture group from time to time and an incubator, but any advise I give will be no string attached until said time that I tell you that strings would be attached to continue the relationship.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your email is not in your profile.

<comment><USER5> Sorry I thought it was it is ksmeltzer@ the Google email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Totally in the same boat. I started work on my own idea this past week and it would be great to discuss ideas and the usual startup issues. I'd be happy to help out.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sure. I'm in a very similar situation, so we might be able to give each other a heads-up.

</comment><comment><USER8> You should convene your group of advisers at <http://AskMyBrainTrust.com>

</comment><comment><USER9> I will be glad to help, but I'm not sure if my area of expertise is interesting or useful to you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Also -- I'd be happy to help.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looking for an advisor too.

</comment><comment><USER11> I suggest you bring your search for an adviser to real life. The advisers you initially have at your start up don't need to be gurus. Yes, they should be more experienced, more knowledgeable, and more connected than you are. But they should be someone who's opinion you trust and rely on. If probably know someone who will be a great adviser, just pitch them.

</comment><comment><USER12> will you be my advisor?</comment>


World's largest bee 'rediscovered' after 38 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/february/the-worlds-largest-bee-rediscovered-after-38-years.html <comment><USER2> Alfred Russell Wallace, the namesake of this bee, was a very interesting character and largely forgotten next to Charles Darwin. There's a rather great documentary with comedian/naturalist Bill Bailey that I would recommend watching if you're interested in this area of the world and Wallace's history: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2968430/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2968430/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Specimens sold to collectors for several thousand pounds, don't think they're going to survive long unless some enterprising "poacher" breeds them.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't bet on a thick order book.

The first one sold for 7,000 pounds; the second one sold for 3,200. Continuing that trend would mean an infinite number of bees would sell for less than 14,000 pounds total.

There just aren't that many rich bee collectors.

<comment><USER3> Well let's say there's one hive, would someone sell 7000 bees -- the price floor appears to be £6-8 (based on pinned stag beetle price on eBay).

So, I reckon someone could get a minimum of £7k for collecting the hive. No need to collect infinite bees!

<comment><USER4> Absolutely wrong. The fact that stag beetles never trade below 6 pounds on eBay does not indicate that you can sell as many as you want at that price. It indicates that nobody finds it worth their time to make sales at a lower price. How many of those sales actually occur in, say, a 12-month window?

If you have 7,000 dead bees, you can try to sell them for 1 pound each, but you'll quickly run through everyone who wants one and be stuck with a bunch of leftover bees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Wallace's giant bee (Megachile pluto), which can reach four times the size > of a honeybee

Something is weird. They head the article with a big image captioned "Wallace's giant bee in comparison with a honeybee"; it shows the honeybee as being much less than a quarter the size of the giant bee.

<comment><USER5> It looks about 4 times its length.

<comment><USER4> By that argument, the White House is 90% of the size of the Empire State Building.

<comment><USER5> Think thats a pretty typical way of describing animals though, by a single dimension, rather than volume. If the ESB and WH were animals you'd naturally compare heights rather than widths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's very interesting how this bee relies on termite mounds to live in and specific kinds of tree resin to build termite free sections. Since there's a finite number of termite mounds on the couple islands it lives on there's not many of these bees in the world, nor will there ever be. Also interesting that the bees, being near extinct, are worth a lot of money to collectors at auctions, and that the people who live on this island have very few sources of outside income.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks, I hate it. :)

<comment><USER8> Don't worry, we will soon have it killed off along with the rest of the insects.

<comment><USER9> Do you really think we can create a greater extinction event than the ones the insects have survived? And yes, that includes some serious climate changes.

<comment><USER10> All-out nuclear war?

<comment><USER11> A nuclear war can only be fought to the point where nobody has the capacity to keep fighting. You can't actually obliterate the planet. The global climate would be altered but it wouldn't be close to the worst the earth has seen. Insects, plants, rodents, and humans will all almost certainly survive a nuclear war. Animals in the wild are largely unaffected by high levels of background radiation because they don't live long enough for that to be what kills them and they reproduce before that anyway.

Nuclear war would suck for people but life on earth and a lot of the life on it would be just fine.

<comment><USER12> AI could keep fighting, and replicating more weapons, long after humans are dead.

<comment><USER9> You mean futuristic AI, like Skynet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is it about this particular environment that allows this mutation (i.e., larger in size) to survive here, but no where else in the world?

Also, in theory, could it be even larger, or is there some limit to how large a bee could be?

<comment><USER14> Insect size tends to be limited by oxygen availabiltiy (since they don't have lungs, and must absorb oxygen passively). Hence why the biggest insects are found in oxygen rich rainforests.

<comment><USER15> I know insects used to be much bigger when the atmosphere had more oxygen.

But I'm _very_ skeptical that there is more oxygen in rain forests. For one thing, I don't think they actually produce more oxygen than they consume, since there is an equilibrium of plant mass being created and being consumed. Also, the planet is quite windy.

Still, I'm interested in seeing any evidence to the contrary!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Alternate title: "Bee finally declared winner of world's longest running game of hide and seek!"

<comment><USER17> "38 year old bee loses game of hide and seek"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here in Northern California there's Carpenter bees that big. I see them all the time...

</comment><comment><USER19> I've seen carpenter bees in California as big as that.

</comment><comment><USER20> it would probably hurt like hell to be stung by it

<comment><USER21> And its size is comparable to a domestic pussycat.

<comment><USER22> Ohhh, you haven't seen nothing until you've seen the Asian giant hornet. Nearly two inches long, with a quarter-inch-long stinger that's gauranteed to cause immense pain, and may kill you even if you're not allergic. These insects are as vicious as they are huge. If just one invades a honeybee hive, it turns the hive into an insect-scale scene from _Attack on Titan_ , forcing its way in through the entrance, slaughtering bees left and right with one snip from its mandibles. European honeybees have no defense, but Japanese honeybees can defeat a single hornet by surrounding it with a ball of bees which vibrate their wings until the hornet overheats and dies -- and even then many bees inside the ball will be lost. If the single scout hornet makes it out alive, it will return -- with friends. Even a hive of tens of thousands of bees cannot mount an effective defense against just a few hornets, and the hornets will lay waste to the colony in a matter of hours.

Nature is a merciless bitch, and some of her creatures are downright horrifying.

<comment><USER23> This video amazed me when I first saw it. (I hope there's a better quality one out there)

[https://youtu.be/JDSf3Kshq1M](https://youtu.be/JDSf3Kshq1M)

It's just amazing how much stronger the hornets are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I fully expected this to be a resident of The Land of Misfit Animals, AKA Australia.

Quite surprised it's not. Indonesia is close enough that it might have escaped it's confines, though.

</comment><comment><USER25> Where was he hiding?</comment>


What Is Sub-Surface Laser Engraving or a 'Bubblegram'? Technology Explained - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOrby692Uag <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt from Thom1218's comments on YouTube:

"The lasers in these machines HAVE to be pulsed, using a method called Q-switching to obtain high peak-power pulses that can couple their energy into otherwise transparent material. These pulses, incidentally, are in the megawatt range and over a very short time span, usually a number of nano seconds. These lasers use several IR diode lasers to "pump" a Nd:YAG laser crystal, which is frequency doubled from 1024nm to 532nm (green) in order to be able to pass into the glass target object. Interestingly, this laser technique is used in tattoo removal machines to penetrate skin and oblate sub dermal ink . CO2 lasers can do a continuous etch on glass because glass is opaque to the near IR long wavelength of CO2 lasers, and therefore they can only etch the surface. Also, because glass is opaque to CO2, more energy is transferred directly to the glass, rather than passing through it, which allows the CO2 laser to remain in CW operation (continuous wave, i.e. not Q-switched). So, the operators of these bubblegram machines do not have the option to do a "continuous blast". However, using fewer dots/bubblegram will shorten processing time and wear on the laser components."

My thoughts: Absolutely fascinating!

Also, I wonder if it would be possible to condition glass in some way to act as a transistor, whether optical, electrical, or for some other particle/wave phenomena. Like maybe lead glass, or other glass which contains metal particles in it -- would change its waveguide properties at points where a laser etched it... thus, maybe it might be possible to etch some kind of transistor (for a specific wavelength/wave phenomena) into it...</comment>


Ask HN: Friends and Family? With Money? - pauli-exclusion Being a minority founder who grew up in a low-income neighborhood, asking "friends and family" for money was not an option. When everyone I knew is just barely getting by, asking them for money is fruitless.
It makes sense after looking at some founder stats. 77% white, many went to Ivy Leagues and come from higher-income families.
(Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/untapped-opportunity-minority-founders-still-being-overlooked/).
Is that the way of the world, or should there be more effort into supporting founders without "friends or family" that can kickstart their ventures? Does anyone have any literature on this topic they can point me to? <comment><AUTHOR> "Startups" of this type are for rich kids. Most people don't invest in ideas and expect a working product with traction before they put any money in, so if you don't have rich parents your best bet is to get a job and build an initial prototype on the side.

If you build something good and people notice it you'll get angels reaching out to you looking to invest.

Other options include building the product while you're in school, joining an incubator or getting a job at a company like Google, where you can make "friends" who might have disposable income that they could invest into your idea.

Another thing that a lot of people miss is that not all ideas/businesses are venture scale. Most VCs are looking for companies that have a shot at doing >100mil in revenue per year, which eliminates 99% of potential business ideas. Your goal should be to build a successful and sustainable business, not to raise money from outside investors.

</comment><comment><USER2> "Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not" [1] I've had countless hours of discussion with a few friends on this. Seems to sum up quite well how I see it. [1] [https://ourworldindata.org/talent-is-everywhere- opportunity-...](https://ourworldindata.org/talent-is-everywhere-opportunity- is-not)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you live in the states, Look into SBA funding. Its slow funding, but if you can find a fit there is a lot there. Also, because its slow, most founders don't take it seriously (there is less competition)

</comment><comment><USER4> I came from a low income situation in Appalachia. Friends and family had zero money for such things as well.

I have one central piece of advice: build something that matters, something that is good, something that can get attention. It doesn't have to be giant in scope. It's a leveling thing, if you make yourself hard to ignore by being great at something. There are few literal barriers to doing it other than doing it (there are infinite life & work friction points that will try to slow you down). With the Internet you can pick a technical subject and become good at it and then keep going, becoming great at it. If you're great at most anything in tech, you can open a lot of doors.

I grew up in technical poverty (government healthcare and food stamps included), although it didn't feel like it (I didn't know we were poor). The Internet was a revelation for me, circa 1994. Lightning from Zeus himself. I had only a passing interest in computers growing up. The Internet however, I immediately got it, its enormous potential was obvious. Computers were tools, the Internet was the platform to reach and access the world, a canvas to paint anything on and immediately distribute it with few barriers. I'm still in love with it.

I started a small wannabe gaming company in the late 1990s with people I met online. I had zero network, just the willingness to put myself out there and try. I gradually got to know a bunch of people by running a gaming blog (basically that's what it was) and hanging out on a lot of IRC channels. These things were points of contact into a field I had no connection into initially. I didn't mind failing, I never thought much about it at that age.

I was infatuated with the world of the Web in the 1990s, it seemed incredible like a brilliant light show. I got to know some Silicon Valley people just by emailing them and learned a lot about how to pitch / sell (broadly speaking). I learned that so much of it is just being willing to do it and have doors slammed in your face repeatedly (most people won't do it out of fear of rejection). In those days you could email almost anybody, from Michael Dell to Tim Berners Lee, and get a reply. HN is now a great resource for that same premise, there are thousands of prominent builders on HN that you can freely email and they will reply, they will offer sage advice.

I messed with programming and Web development throughout the 1990s. I ran a small consulting business at around 19-23 years old. That taught me the value of not spending my life making money for everyone else by building their platforms, and instead building my own. Consulting / freelancing also doesn't scale effectively as primarily a billable hours service business. It's useful as a personal funding resource to enable you to build on your own dime, and can be particularly effective today (back then it was hyper local still; now you can far more easily reach around the world and find business clients).

I went in search of a lever. With the modest experience at building things that I had accumulated, I started working on systems that would scale, at around 24 years old.

So the prior seven or eight years required zero venture capital and very little funding. It required a shitty PC and a dial-up account. No Ivy League necessary and I required no permission. I was free to learn and build to whatever capacity I could. I was constantly turned down when asking friends & family for money for ventures, nobody ever said yes. It was always embarrassing even to ask (I realistically knew the answer ahead of time), my own grandmother turned me down. It was a combination of them not having it and the few that did (successful small business types) being very conservative financially (investing in a tech related venture was far beyond their shores).

I raised my first formal venture capital with the first platform type service I built in 2004-2005. It was a serious undertaking that took about 9-12 months to build, in the ecommerce space. The VC raised was modest, like a YC seed round. It was enough, mostly, though.

Having a product will often open a lot of shut doors. They don't have to bet on you as an unknown, they don't have to bet that you can build this thing that you claim you can. With a product in hand, you've already demonstrated that and removed that risk factor for the investor. Then they have to evaluate and decide if they like what you already have. The investor will now view it as you possessing an actual asset, rather than an idea (most astute investors know what those are really worth). I've found walking in the door with a product, even a modest demo, makes an immense difference.

If you can build product on your own (again, even something modest), you can raise money from all sorts of diverse sources these days. The last venture capital I raised was from a billionaire courtesy of a cold email I sent, backed with a modest demo of the product. Nothing enabled that other than my accumulated experience at pitching (getting told NO a million times and learning from it) and an ability to build something to show.

If you can't build you're fucked, basically. Unless you either have a network / reputation (Ivy League etc), friends & family with money, or you're special in some way (a talented salesperson for example, that has a jobsian gift for convincing people). Teach yourself to build things and do it over and over and over and over again. You will fail a lot most likely; that is a required point of suffering more often than not and is useful. Persist.

</comment><comment><USER5> Even if parents are wealthy, I don't think it's wise for them to throw large sums of money at businesses started by their kids.

At least if you're a venture capitalist, you have a large portfolio of businesses, and if 1% of them become unicorns, you might win. But a parent acting as a VC for one child's business is almost certain to lose their entire investment.

Other advantages that VCs have over parents, besides diversification:

\- VCs are playing mostly with other peoples' money.

\- They are more selective about who qualifies to receive funding, and better equipped to evaluate whether a business plan has any promise.

\- They can offer guidance to founders on how to run their businesses.

As someone whose parents didn't have a lot of money, I don't think I missed out on anything by not having parents who could fund a business that I started. On the contrary, I think I benefited from having to work my way through college and learning how to live independently off my own earnings.</comment>


Have you found what you want in life? - <AUTHOR> There are so many things out there. Are there anything in particular (whether it is physical or abstract) that you are willing to spend your life to obtain? Why?<p>I am in a situation where I want to learn everything I possibly could. But my greed leads me nowhere as I am constantly switching subjects. Sometimes, deciding what to learn kills most of my time. <comment><USER2> Unless you're one of the few people who knows what they want from an early age, the only way you figure out what you want in life is to try a bunch of stuff and pay attention to how it goes. Eventually, you'll start piecing together the most enjoyable and important things for you. In all likelihood, many of those things will change over time, but some of them may stick.

For me, I found surfing at the age of 26. It's a crazy hard sport to pick up at a late age, but I sort of fell in love. Surfing replaced meditation, journaling, and other forms of exercise, and it gave me even more than any of those things could. It produced a level of zen and fulfillment that only two or three other activities do. I only figured that out by exploring like a mad man in my twenties, and I got lucky to stumble upon surfing.

It's the people who are too afraid to look and who get stuck in a comfortable path who don't ever figure out the real joys of their life.

<comment><AUTHOR> This definitely gave me a firmer reason to continue exploring and learning more things. What I am doing differently from what you've said is that I am not paying adequate attention to what I am doing.

Thank you for your perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most people want to be happy but they go about in a way that is tangential/orthogonal to that primary goal. For example; some pursue getting rich, being famous or retiring early thinking that will make them happy.

Instead pursuing that, find a job/work that makes you happy. You'll get more happiness "under the curve" than say, retiring early. Avoid any sort of "I'll suffer for years so I can be happy at some time in the future."

I only have 2-3 years left to live and I have very few regrets. I've always taken a moment to stop and smelled the flowers. (The smelling thing may be because I think I might been a golden retriever in my last life.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for sharing Chris. I am with you on the idea of getting happiness from doing fulfilling work. Like you, I also appreciate flowers, other plants and beauty in things. Hope you enjoy every moment. Take care.</comment></comment>


This Roman Emperor's Motivational Advice Will Definitely Get You Out of Bed - <AUTHOR> https://curiosity.com/topics/this-roman-emperors-motivational-advice-will-definitely-get-you-out-of-bed-in-the-morning-curiosity <comment><USER2> Clicktease title rescue: It's about Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations".

Also, contrary to what the end of the article implies, there's no need to sign up for Audible to get the audiobook, it's available for free here:

[https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus- aurelius/](https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/)

<comment><USER3> I've had mixed experiences with the quality of Librivox narration. Would you say this one is good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously this article just cherry-picked one quote from Meditations about sleep but focusing just on that...

There has been a lot of technical solutions to waking up earlier such as: smart alarm clocks, lights that mimic sunrise.

I found since nothing beats intrinsic motivation, it helps to always have a project with a defined goal you're working towards and want to achieve. This makes you driven to want to start the day.

When you don't have a project from outside forces (example: client project), you can easily turn something for yourself into a project.

Example 'project': curating playlists for different moods and activities of your life. By mentally framing and treating something as a project, making progress towards a defined goal helps you feel productive, better about yourself and gives you more willpower to start your day.</comment>


Simple user styles - <AUTHOR> http://connors.github.io/simple-user-styles/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this, although the title is bit misleading.</comment>


The post-Google appocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/109029-the-post-google-appocalypse

<comment><USER2> We now search for flash games using Angry Birds. What? Seriously? And we now search for reviews using a film/restaurant/book app? Ok sure. But it's not like this was the main use of Google in the past. Rather than using the IMDB app, we went to the IMDB website. Same with Amazon, ePinions or anything else. And if we don't know where to find a particular kind of review, we're still going to go to Google.

</comment><comment><USER3> I honestly don't understand the argument.

The post-Infoseek apocalypse: why search when you can visit slashdot.org directly, and use Quake 2 instead of searching for first person shooters?</comment>


Venetian Cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://vcrypto.tonyo.info/venetian_crypto/website/index.php <comment><USER2> If I may, Leon Bat _t_ ista Alberti (with two t's, you have a typo in page [https://vcrypto.tonyo.info/venetian_crypto/website/index.php...](https://vcrypto.tonyo.info/venetian_crypto/website/index.php/palgorithms) ):

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

belongs to (early) Renaissance and definitely not to Middle Ages (unless you specify "very, very late" middle ages).

He was born in Genoa, lived and worked for long years in Florence and Rome (where he died) and in a number of other cities but has NO connection whatever with Venice.

Johannes Trithemius was German and had very little connections with Italy, and not particulalry with Venice.

Giovan Bat _t_ ista Bel _l_ aso (also two t's and two l's in the surname) actually published his "La Cifra" book in Venice, although he was from Brescia, there are no evidence of particular connectins with Venice and his other works were published in other cities.

Blaise de Vigenère was obviously French, and while he traveled to Italy, he only lived in Rome, again there is no particular connection with Venice.

<comment><USER3> I imagine the site is using the SCA's definition of the Middle Ages, given the reference to SCA kingdoms in the polyalphabetic cyphers page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From around the same period and close by in Northern Italy is the Voynich manuscript. Written in an unknown writing system which has yet to be deciphered.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript)</comment>


Kde.org gets a facelift. Check out KDE's new landing page - <AUTHOR> https://kde.org <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a bit in a blog post about the new webpage and the blog includes a slideshow of the kde.org webpage from 1998 till now. [https://carlschwan.eu/2020/04/18/a-new-look-for-kde- org.html](https://carlschwan.eu/2020/04/18/a-new-look-for-kde-org.html)</comment>


Cybersecurity and Log Management with SQL - <AUTHOR> https://easysiem.com <comment><AUTHOR> A SaaS Platform powered by osquery and opendistro ES. Get a Hosted Elasticsearch kibana and osquery fleet manager to manage logs, metrics and cybersecurity at a highly affordable price.

The platform is a one-stop-shop for anyone looking for managing logs/metrics, compliance(PCI, GDPR, etc), fim, vulnerabilitiy mgmt, VAPT, etc.</comment>


Ideas Are Not Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/asimjalis/status/13212092357

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea>

The term idea is thrown around a lot. One should separate, idea from business idea, to business plan. Business plans may be an expression of core ideas and a lot of relevant information to support it. Plans have worth that people sign NDAs on. Some ideas are even patented. Thus, to say 'idea' can refer to many formats. An idea in someone's head unexpressed can be worthless, but put down on paper, thought out, funded and built upon can have tremendous value. Knowledge can also be worthless too, or priceless. It depends on the context.</comment>