Naming is an act of creation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coaching-notes/naming-is-an-act-of-creation-3510b3b16ef5 <comment><USER2> I find that while coding I practice lazing naming where I am able to start writing `function foo` and which allows me to bypass the upfront naming deliberation. Once I have my code written I can assign an accurate name to function and if the name is too long or convoluted I consider revising the code. So naming for me ends up being a useful tool for self-reviewing my code.</comment>


Vice UK journalists in bid to unionise amid industry-wide job cuts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/mar/30/vice-uk-journalists-in-bid-to-unionise-amid-industry-wide-job-cuts <comment><USER2> Maybe if journalism actually went back to journalism they'd have a job?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a good  alternative. <comment><USER2> I (and a lot of other people around here) are enthusiastic FastMail customers. Hit any of us up off-site if you are interested in a referral code (10% off). It costs money, but you get a really solid webmail experience with real human customer support. The CEO is active here on HN and posts pretty solid things like this: [https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your- electroni...](https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic- memory/)

I have a strong belief that FastMail's business model is aligned with my interests/values, and they're a strong open source community member with initiatives like JMAP.

<comment><USER3> One issue I have with FastMail is the reuse of email addresses. It is possible to "hack" accounts on websites which were registered to expired email addresses by simply registering that email address anew and doing a password reset. This is very common in the domain space, where email addresses are publicly listed.

<comment><USER4> Does this affect custom domains, or is it only an issue with @fastmail.com accounts?

<comment><USER3> Well, with custom domain email addresses this is always true regardless of service provider.

If you ever abandon the domain, someone else could come along and buy the domain and create the same email address. They could then receive any mail intended for that email address (e.g. password resets). This is why I consider any domains purchased for email purposes to be lifetime investments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Zoho Mail and RunBox. Zoho has dedicated EU branch if you want that:

[https://www.zoho.eu/](https://www.zoho.eu/) [https://www.zoho.com/](https://www.zoho.com/) [https://runbox.com/](https://runbox.com/)

FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc).

RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works.

Zoho Mail is also available free too and it's extremely generous for ad free hosting:

[https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html?src=zmail](https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html?src=zmail)

Scroll down the page a bit under the paid for price listings and it's headed 'free plan'. Includes hosting your own domain too.

<comment><USER6> I'm also using Zoho, since it was the only provider I could find that let me use my own domain for free. It's been working great so far.

Up until fairly recently, I was using Pawnmail ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548307)), but it became very unreliable. Half of my sent mail bounced, and then it just stopped working altogether.

I use Thunderbird as a client.

<comment><USER5> I started off free, still have a couple accounts there free I think, but moved to paid because it was worth it to me.

Without the free offering i probably wouldn't have ended up on a paid plan so I'm glad they do it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is setting up email for elderly relatives, take a tip from me: don't use Gmail. Google is constantly changing (allegedly improving) the interface, gratuitously moving buttons from one weird location to another, and monkeying around with the UI. Certainly no problem for Hacker News techies, but once you've trained an elderly person on how to attach an image, print, forward, or reply, all your training goes out the window. The smaller paid mail services rarely fiddle with their UI. The $30-60 per year is a life saver for your time and your relative's frustration.

It would be nice if Gmail had a setting for _simple mode_ : very limited operations, minimal UI that almost never changes, and looks identical on any device, app, or browser.

<comment><USER8> That's strange to hear, I thought it hadn't changed in ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have run my own mailserver for not quite 20 years. My preferred mail client is mutt, but I use K9 on Android several times a day and I set up rainloop, a web mail client.

When people ask me for advice and they are not in a position to run their own mail server, I generally recommend Fastmail.

<comment><USER10> ya, i used to run webstar on a mac in the 90s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gmail's labeling system is hard to beat. In particular, any given email can be in several "folders" (a.k.a. labels) at the same time.

All other services I have tried out so far do not replicate this approach so that an email can only be in one folder at a time. Of course, you can copy an email into several folders but then they are physically different emails on the mail server.

Despite this, I switched to the German provider www.mailbox.org as they do not index or process your emails in any other way. And in Germany, the authorities still have a hard time getting access behind the scenes. Further, mailbox.org allows the creation of mail aliases and also temporary addresses. The service is 3 € per month which is totally acceptable.

I see mailbox.org as a main competitor of Protonmail and Posteo.

EDIT: additionally, I am using my own domains that are redirected to my mailbox.org account.

</comment><comment><USER12> I moved to Runbox a week ago and am happy (so far at least). Before I switched from Gmail I worked out what my requirements were and evaluated a few services, wrote up my findings at [http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g- suite/](http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/) . Fastmail is the obvious competitor, but I wanted a mail service that didn't have servers in the US (Fastmail have US and Amsterdam, but replicate across then instead of letting one pick a region as far as I can see).

</comment><comment><USER13> I have been using Posteo for a few year ( [https://posteo.de/en/help?tag=end- to-end](https://posteo.de/en/help?tag=end-to-end) ). Pro:

      - Cheap: 1€/month for 2 GBs mailbox
      - Basic functionalities such as Web interface, SMTP, POP3, CalDav, CardDav are all included.
      - They seem to take privacy and security seriously, including email encryption, 2FA signin or recently Autocrypt[1]
      - The warm fuzzy feeling of using 100% renewable energy for your email.

Cons:

      - No custom domain
      - Might have less features than other providers[2]

[1] I am not a security expert nor I have validated their claim

[2] I use notmuch with emacs for reading email, it works great and very fast so I don't really need any other features.

EDIT: I also run my own email server but the effort involved is just not worth it, IMO.

EDIT2: Formatting

<comment><USER14> If you want custom domain but same high privacy quality as Posteo, try out Mailbox.org - have been happily using both for years

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've tried a lot of mail services over the years and every time come back to gmail, well actually GSuite. Stuff I tried: \- Posteo.de: Great, but you can't use your own domain or groups, which was a dealbreaker. \- Fastmail: Nice enough, didn't really care for the web interface though. \- Postbox: Great, after the merger with fastmail got the fastmail webinterface :-) \- Microsoft hosted exchange: It was ok, S.O. wasn't a fan due to slow webinterface on a tablet. Spam filtering was a weak point. \- MXRoute: Nice service, good price/quality. In the end however I didn't liked that I couldn't control the spam filter (you have some config options but mostly it's global).

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been trying out Protonmail which I'm happy with, but in practice I'm still using Gmail.

I'm reluctant to move away from my @gmail address, and inform all my contacts to use the new one. Besides that, I notice that orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain. I wish I could take my gmail address to another service.

<comment><USER7> > _orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other > domain_

Sure, if you had the foresight to reserve email@example.com twelve years ago, but today you'll have to use email@example.com. Chances are that you won't even get email@example.com.

However, chances are better for firstname.lastname@example.com, email@example.com, etc.

<comment><USER17> I managed to get email@example.com (account created in 2004ish) but for my Proton Mail account I had to add in my middle initial.

<comment><USER18> Yep, that one was taken by the dude that couldn't use @gmail, because you already had it ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very happy Fastmail customer here. Find the web interface more responsive than gmail and the IMAP implementation seems to be play better with apple's mail clients.

<comment><USER20> The web interface is fantastic, to the point where I use my Fastmail account for most of my email because it's less of a pain in the ass to go through.

The mobile app is also fantastic, but I've had instances in the past where I've received no notifications if an unread email is left in my inbox. I'm the kind of person that won't check my email unless I get a notification, so there have been times when a week has passed, and I've gone to wonder why I'm so unpopular, only to find a hundred unread emails from people wondering where I am.

<comment><USER21> The mobile app is pretty basic and doesn't support offline use. It's okay but I wouldn't rate it as fantastic. Outlook seems much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Office 365 Business Essentials. Costs money but get good support and 50GB mailbox. I actually only needed the Exchange Product, but for only a $1.50 a month more I get a whole bunch of things, like SharePoint to play with :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm very happy with [https://mailbox.org/](https://mailbox.org/). They are based in Berlin, Germany right here in my neighborhood. They offer:

* Caldav/Carddav

* Optional at rest encryption using your PGP public key

* Microsoft Exchange API

* Pretty decent web mail interface

* For iOS/macOS: Configuration profiles that make it really easy to start configuring new devices

* Easy domain aliases

* Cheap and affordable (< 20 Euro per year)

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been using Soverin for almost two years now [https://soverin.net/](https://soverin.net/). I chose them because of the their privacy focus and the fact that at the time I was looking for a bare- bones email service.

For the most part it works well, the only (rare) problem I've had was with Soverin rejecting emails from my Google forwarding rule. I've encountered ~10 instances of this error in nearly two years so I'm not that concerned about it.

They use RoundCube for the web interface, which I don't use. I prefer Thunderbird on the desktop and use the Gmail app on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER25> Mail-in-a-box is AWESOME ... for 3+ years without a hitch! [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Fastmail user here o/

Simple, cheap, secure and reliable. Offers a superior alternative to the mainstream services. IMHO. ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> Privateemail works pretty well, 10€/y and I think it's like 3€ or 4€ per each extra email address. As mail client I use thunderbird and K9. I very much appreciate my privacy, so I would always use things that I can understand how they are making revenue without selling my data.

</comment><comment><USER28> My own mail server of course, accessible through IMAP, a stand-alone web mail client (Roundcube) and the mail app buily into Nextcloud. The server supports Sieve filtering (which, for those who use Nextcloud or Owncloud, currently interferes with the mail app necessitating a patch to get it to work). Spam is filtered (through Spamassassin and greylistd) and moved to a separate folder (through Sieve). Any spam which made it through can be moved manually to a spam folder from where it will be used to train the filter through a cron job which runs nightly.

</comment><comment><USER29> Fastmail is a great alternative, but I wish their mobile app was more native instead of just a WebView. Not a big deal because the desktop UI is amazing and the service is consistent.

</comment><comment><USER30> I use my own email server (Postfix + Dovecot + OpenLDAP + OpenDKIM + DMARC + Spamassassin) and have SOGo on top of it for calendar / todo / contacts sync.

<comment><USER10> very good sir, same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Office 365, with the native Mac Mail clients; though if you don't like it the web interface (Outlook Web Access) is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm only using it as a throwaway, but ProtonMail seems okay.

(Scraped quickly after posting here in a hiring thread, too: "Good day to you and your family. I apologize if the content here-under are contrary to your moral ethics but please treat with absolute secrecy and personal as that is my business proposal to you.")

</comment><comment><USER33> Thunderbird here.

I am using dreamhost mail with a bunch of domains and a few addresses for these domains that I regularly check.

</comment><comment><USER34> Any downsides to using the email service provided by your webhost, aside from the pain of potentially switching webhosts in the future? I've been using webfaction for hosting and email for 4 years now, and it's been great for both.

</comment><comment><USER35> Fastmail (since 2013) & pobox.com (since 1997). Now they're the same company...

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm trying ProtonMail [https://protonmail.com/](https://protonmail.com/)

Pro :

* There is free limited version (500MB, 150 messages per day).

* Web and mobile app

* Security

Cons :

* By design, the mail search is currently limited (wip)

* Currently no integration with calendar or other usefull app

</comment><comment><USER37> ProtonMail [https://protonmail.com/](https://protonmail.com/) Very good privacy, spam detection doesn't work on content afaik (as they can't read your email)

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm thinking of transferring to ProtonMail. They are insane about security.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have built and have been using this for a few years now: [https://github.com/adaline/dockermail](https://github.com/adaline/dockermail)

</comment><comment><USER40> Hushmail. It is private, local (to me) and non-american which was a big deal for many of my clients in recent years. Data not crossing that international boarder is always a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER41> I pay for an account on hcoop.net. This was back in 2001 or so and my personal domain is hosted there. Hcoop has email. I fetch it to my local drive and read it. This is my primary email.

</comment><comment><USER42> I evaluated a few different services on cost, privacy, access, etc., about a year and a half ago and finally moved to Posteo. I have also been looking at this space once in a while. Almost all the services I looked at focused on privacy explicitly, with some being stronger than others.

I can talk more in detail about Posteo, while with the others I'll stop with what I know from my evaluation and checking on their sites later. The services I evaluated were:

1\. Posteo (posteo.de)

Pros:

* Cheap enough (could be cheaper), good privacy policies, has good help documentation on protecting privacy better, IMAP support.

* The company is highly focused on social good and social justice (this will be abundantly clear when reading through the website). This was another plus to make me switch.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a fourteen eyes country — Germany.

* No custom domains (this could be a pro, depending on one's outlook; as far as Posteo is concerned, this is a pro because Posteo tries hard to avoid collecting any kind of information that could tie an account to you as a person).

* Support is slow to respond.

* No spam folder, since spammy mails are rejected by the server before they even come to the mailbox. Side effect is that mails from authentic senders may bounce, and Posteo support may just report that nothing is wrong on its end after a few days. Posteo retains logs only for seven days. This makes inbound deliverability related troubleshooting highly difficult to handle.

\</comment><comment>----

2\. Mailbox.org

Pros:

* Cheap enough, and slightly similar to Posteo in pricing, IMAP support.

* Custom domain support.

* Provides a cloud office system on the web.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a fourteen eyes country — Germany.

* The pricing is in tiers, and not more like a proportionally scaled pay _as_ you _go kind that Posteo has.

_ Documentation could be improved. Linking a custom domain is a bit tedious to do if one follows the documentation.

\</comment><comment>----

3\. ProtonMail (protonmail.ch)

Pros:

* Custom domains.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is Switzerland (not a 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes country).

* Pricing is expensive compared to Posteo or Mailbox if you need multiple mailboxes (and not just one mailbox with multiple aliases).

* A bit painful to move out of ProtonMail because the main options to access email are to use webmail or mobile apps. For more than two years, there was no IMAP support to mass download and keep a copy of emails. Recently an application called ProtonMail Bridge has been made available that will act as an IMAP/SMTP gateway to your email client. This means that there is still no direct IMAP access, and accessing mail using a client like Thunderbird requires installation of the ProtonMail Bridge (available on Windows and macOS).

\</comment><comment>----

4\. Tutanota (tutanota.com)

Pros:

* Custom domains.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a fourteen eyes country — Germany.

* Pricing is slightly similar to Posteo and Mailbox, but not as granular as those services. So when your needs grow, you may end up paying for a lot more, comparatively.

* Painful to move out of Tutanota since there is no support for IMAP/POP. Such support won't be coming in the near future either.

\</comment><comment>----

5\. Fastmail (fastmail.com)

Pros:

* Custom domains.

* IMAP support.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a five eyes country — USA.

* Pricing is expensive compared to Posteo or Mailbox if you need multiple mailboxes (and not just one mailbox with multiple aliases).

\</comment><comment>----

6\. Migadu (migadu.com)

Pros:

* Very cheap (or the cheapest) if you need multiple mailboxes since pricing is not based on that. If you need four mailboxes or more, none of the others can beat this one on price.

* Custom domains.

* IMAP support.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is Switzerland (not a 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes country).

* Privacy part is just ok. Could be a lot better.

* Most parts of the website were updated in September 2016. The copyright messages were also outdated, standing at 2016 till early this year. Doesn't look like anyone maintains the site regularly.

* Currently the site doesn't even load on the browser (confirmed as a multi-location problem through other services).

</comment><comment><USER43> gmx.com

It's pretty straightforward, short URL and you can setup several aliases which is very convenient. It also has cloud storage. I don't really get what they're business model - so I'm not really sure what the deal is privacy-wise. I think they're based in Germany, so that's probably a plus

</comment><comment><USER44> OVH Exchange. Works pretty well, the anti spam could be better though.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm surprised no one mentions iCloud as a viable alternative. Reasons?

<comment><USER12> It doesn't let you use your own domain, which massively increases the difficulty to move providers in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Mailbox.org with own domain (so I can move if necessary)

</comment><comment><USER10> a static IP, and a home email server.

</comment><comment><USER47> Tutamail + ProtonMail

</comment><comment><USER48> FastMail

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm in the process of migrating to mailinabox (mailinabox.email) right now! Migrated last week, I'm currently in the evaluation period.

So far:

* imap search is inferior to gmail (slow, no "did you mean"), but I can live with it.

* greylisting is a pain, but I can live with it. Actually I'm on HN right now after alt-tabbing to wait for a "confirmation e-mail" to come through. Ironically, for an account on the mailinabox format to discuss spam issues :) which brings me to the real problem:

* SPAM. I assumed the spam filters would be worse, and I could live with that. The real problem is that it's a total black box. I have zero insight into how it works, or even IF it's working. Just drag into "junk" and hope for the best. It's very frustrating, and if this continues, I'm not sure if I can live with it :(

I'm getting ~10 messages per hour from _the same sender_ and they all get through. I have dragged >100 of these to the junk folder, used some incredibly obscure command on the box (from a 4y old github issue) to see if it's actually being "counted" as spam at all: it is. Now what? Clearly something is wrong; either this filter is as dumb as a bag of nails or it's not working correctly. Good luck figuring it out. I have no idea where to start debugging.

Essentially, the promise of MIAB is that you shouldn't have to look under the hood. Hosting e-mail is notoriously hard, and they're trying to abstract it all away. The problem is: it's hard because the old tools have terrible UI. Absolutely awful. Arcane unix commands, weird process names, no visibility into nothing, incredibly unintuitive, config files all over the place, log files all over. Sure, it's open source, it can all be learned. But the mental overhead is equivalent to learning a new programming language. It's harder to learn than something like Photoshop, which, honestly, is not OK for what it is (messaging and spam filtering).

I'm weary of the direction this is going in. I'll give it another few weeks, but I'm afraid I'm taking on a responsibility I don't have time for. I don't _want_ to manage dovecot, spamassasin, and what not; they're a full-time job. But with MIAB, at the end of the day, it's not really abstracting it away. It's just a nice setup script. In the end, you're still managing all that cruft, and when push comes to shove, you're on your own.

I advise against it :( Unfortunately.

Hopefully, one day, someone will make a holistic spam server for the new generation. A holistic system which handles everything: outgoing and incoming, SMTP and IMAP, TLS, spam filtering, storage, backups, user management, attachments, greylisting, logging, catch-alls, domain forwarding, all of it in one tool.

The danger of using different tools for everything is incompatibility. E.g. I'm using a lot of forwarding rules, internally. It might very well turn out that spamassasin has a hard time following those rules. Will it understand the internal forwards are not to be marked as responsible for the spam? that the first external received: line is the one to block? I have no idea. And I don't want to worry about it :(

I'd love to pay for a piece of server software which took care of it all, holistically.

<comment><USER42> > I'm getting ~10 messages per hour from the same sender and they all get > through. I have dragged >100 of these to the junk folder, used some > incredibly obscure command on the box (from a 4y old github issue) to see if > it's actually being "counted" as spam at all: it is. Now what? Clearly > something is wrong; either this filter is as dumb as a bag of nails or it's > not working correctly. Good luck figuring it out. I have no idea where to > start debugging.

Well, if it's of any consolation, I have Outlook365 from work (of course, it's paid), and I have a similar problem where the same sender has been sending spam for several months and I have marked it as Junk (as well as sent a copy to Microsoft for further use) all this while. It still gets through after all these months. I have no idea what the Microsoft email team is working on and how this is even a service for sale to enterprise customers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yandex.

<comment><USER50> I've used it for custom domain mailboxes as well. It's ok, has 2FA as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Google Inbox</comment>


Days with my father - <AUTHOR> http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/#/0

<comment><USER2> What a wonderful story and presentation - thanks for telling it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole page is just one big flash blob?

<comment><USER4> If you don't have flash installed then you really should install it or get on a computer that does.

This is a gripping and heart wrenching story.

<comment><USER5> non-flash version [http://www.mrtoledano.com/days-with-my- father](http://www.mrtoledano.com/days-with-my-father)</comment></comment></comment>


The Asymptote of DevOps Utopia - <AUTHOR> http://omniti.com/seeds/the-asymptote-of-devops-utopia

<comment><AUTHOR> Follow up and further suggested reading/study over on my blog. [http://liberumvir.com/2012/03/28/seeds-article-for-omniti- th...](http://liberumvir.com/2012/03/28/seeds-article-for-omniti-the- asymptote-of-devops-utopia.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> I suggest you read <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabola>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok... Is there anything in particular you were wishing to point out, in a constructive manner?</comment></comment>


Four Minutes in the Morning - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/09/four-minutes-in-the-morning.html

<comment><USER2> Brad also has a policy of answering his phone when his wife calls, _no matter what_. (He checked his phone mid-sentence when it rang while he was speaking at Google I/O). I think it's awesome that he has his priorities in life set out so clearly.

<comment><USER3> When I was in my last year of school and attending a bunch of recruiting events there was one CEO from a mid-sized consultancy who impressed us all by taking a call from his wife in the middle of his presentation in front of couple hundred students. He'd get the whole group to say hi to her and then said he'd phone her back, hang up, and continue with his presentation. Gave a good sense for the work/life balance.

Of course, we then heard that every term he gives that recruiting talk and every time his wife calls right in the middle...

I kind of became enamoured with his evil genius ways.

<comment><USER4>
      I kind of became enamoured with his evil genius ways.

I think I would not. Screw manipulators.

<comment><USER5> You have no reason to suppose he was being manipulative. You'll be happier thinking good things about people, instead of second-guessing everything they do.

<comment><USER6> >>Of course, we then heard that every term he gives that recruiting talk and every time his wife calls right in the middle...

>You have no reason to suppose he was being manipulative.

Did you miss that bit?

<comment><USER5> No, but I rather believe he honestly feels such a thing should be possible and wished to demonstrate that such a thing was acceptable to him. The folks that didn't find out it was set up, may live happier lives because of that demonstration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know Brad and I've honestly never met anyone more in love with a significant other than he is (and visa versa). I would strongly recommend taking any and all of his relationship advice (and finding the perfect mate for you also helps :-). I am going to start this ritual tomorrow.

<comment><USER8> You may need to convince your significant other for that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think I understand. Is this the only time he spends with his wife? My S.O. gets upset if I don't spend at least an hour or two of quality time with them per day, let alone four minutes in the morning! If the only time we actually talked throughout the day to discuss our lives and problems was for a few minutes, I believe I'd find myself single. Am I in a weird relationship or something?

<comment><USER2> I think it's more that they have a bare minimum that they spend with each other, and only each other, _with no exceptions_. Too many couples spend hours together, but watching TV, or cooking, or any numerous other activities that distract them from just enjoying being with each other.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue that watching TV together and cooking together are entirely different things. Passively watching TV and never talking is awful. Cooking together should involve interacting, talking, asking questions, conversation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just hang up on my gf who is, literally, in the other side of the world (i'm in seoul, she is in costa rica) and were discussing the same stuff.

we work together, at the distance, she spent the first 7 months of this year here with me and now we have a few months aside... and quality time, distraction-free, thru skype makes wonders and is needed no matter what.

when were together here we'd go to momments of solitud where we'd focus on each other, this not only made us relax and forget about all the project's stuff it nurtured our relationship.

I don't know if Brad's policy of answering the phone is wrong or good, but seriously guys work is just a mean to be happy... been with ur SO is been happy.

I think us as entrepreneurs will tend to let ourselves go with all the crazy stuff that goes on launching a project or staying ahead of the google's, apple's and facebook's stilling our thunder... but we cannot let all that take our life just as well.

nice post and thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER6> >I just hang up on my gf who is, literally, in the other side of the world (i'm in seoul, she is in costa rica) and were discussing the same stuff.

Hope you finished the conversation first. ;0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Similar to his talk at TEDxBoulder, CO some weeks back (which I attended): Quarterly Week off the Grid. One solid week away with his wife: no cell, laptop, etc. [http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/03/the-rhythms-of- life....](http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/03/the-rhythms-of-life.html) [http://boulderreporter.com/tedxboulder-lets-hear-it-for- the-...](http://boulderreporter.com/tedxboulder-lets-hear-it-for-the- creatives/)

Good prioritizing in a routine, but the argument becomes..is "4 minutes" (4, 15, 1hr) / 1 week a quarter adequate? How about daily several hours with the people you love? Her opinion?

<comment><USER13> I think it's understood that by these rules you ensure the _minimal_ time spent with the important people. Neither the 4 minutes a day, nor the 1 week a quarter are adequate, they just build the low threshhold in stressful times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing this. As entrepreneurs we (especially myself) tend to forget about the importance of the support we receive from our partners. But, life just isn't quite complete without spending quality time with our "other half". Four minutes a morning is definitely worth the effort!

</comment><comment><USER15> Your spouse is (should be) your anchor, your foundation, your one trusted person in the world. You get to have a special relationship with that person. You get to give it priority over everything else, unconditionally.

Other people, if they're wise, know this and make accomodation for it.</comment>


World Cup results for Node hackers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/simoami/worldcup

<comment><USER2> any very simple way to run it on a mac? thx.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Install NodeJS for mac (www.nodejs.org) 2\. run "npm install worldcup -g" in the terminal

That's it.</comment></comment>


Dealing with feedback when it's personal – Coding with Empathy - <AUTHOR> http://codingwithempathy.com/2016/04/19/dealing-with-feedback-when-it-turns-ugly/?utm_source=news.ycombinator.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=hackernews <comment><USER2> I read the previous piece. I suspect it was useful to people with interests other than being an asshat...and on Hacker News that's a disproportionate number of people relative to the internet at large.

Thanks for writing it and posting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for taking the time to read not one, but two lengthy posts AND commenting.

your encouraging words are well-received :)

<comment><USER2> Via HN, I became a fan of Derek Sivers and so I listened to his interview recently on Software Engineering Daily. He described the common internet behavior of a person saying "I like X" and a bunch of people reacting with "You are wrong. I don't like X".

There's a big space for empathy in programming. And on Hacker News. And elsewhere. It's probably a project that can keep one busy for as long as they choose to write about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, yes Derek Sivers is a wonderful inspiration. I'll have to listen to that interview you're referring to. Thanks so much for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This guy seems to have fully embraced the "Haters gonna hate" mentality that he advised against in the last article.

Amazing what happens to some peoples' minds when they get hit with a little criticism.

The "supportive comment" is just a 2-sentence opinion telling him exactly what he wants to be told.

I would urge people to take any advice from this person with a healthy dose of salt.</comment>


Hierarchical File Systems are Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/papers/hotos09/ <comment><USER2> So, yes, ontology tends to break down. Are we going to throw out all existing filesystems, though? Heck no. Fortunately, it's not hard to layer search and non-hierarchical indexing on top of existing filesystems.

I wrote a simple (Lua + SQLite) script that tags files, searches all known paths by tag, etc. It's really not hard. It hasn't been hard for decades. Why hasn't it caught on? Beats me.

Using directories as contexts + symlinks to merge them works around many issues, but the same ugly breakdown appears in e.g. statically-typed OOP class hierarchies. ("Is a platypus a mammal or an amphibian?") Sometimes, _is_ isn't.

Basically, I see where they're coming from, but "normal filesystem, with tags" probably makes more sense to most people than "fully non-hierarchical* filesystem". And, hell, I keep _spelling_ hierarchical wrong.

<comment><USER3> It is not hard but it hasn't caught on because having userspace scripts or daemons running tagging and indexing passes on the files in an existing file system is nowhere near transparent. Even if you use inotify or something to keep track of teh changses in real time, the illusion of transparency _will_ leak sooner than later. And that's when your users' confidence and trust will vanish into the air.

Indexing has to be built in to the filesystem to make the searchs match the state of the filesystem 1-in-1. There's no other way.

I've seen this working live only in the Be Filesystem, or BFS. There you can be sure that if you add an image somewhere, another view of the filesystem will instantly contain the new file and removing it will again banish the image from all other views. The file either exists or doesn't, and you will never notice that a search returned information that isn't no more.

<comment><USER4> Spotlight fulfills all those requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone who doesn't know, Margo is the co-inventor of BerkeleyDB and sold her company, Sleepycat Software, to Oracle. She's quite knowledgeable as an academic, a programmer, and as a businesswoman.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think hierarchies are one of the most common ways to organize data and most systems in this world are organized hierarchically. Governments, socioeconomic systems, taxonomies, literature, organized religion, and nature, are all often organized hierarchically. Humans seem to think in hierarchies better than in many other systems of organization. Sure, search is great, but even sites like Newegg and Amazon prominently display hierarchies to organize data, and I appreciate it. I don't think hierarchal file systems are dead at all. I think they are a very good way of organizing most file system data, and that search can be of utility even in a hierarchal file system.

<comment><USER7> Every computer system that uses tagging is a counterexample. We humans think in tagging as often as we think in hierarchies, but I agree that we tend to think of hierarchies as more well-defined and organized. This tendency can be incorrect.

I think it boils down to this: for hierarchical data, use hierarchies. I believe that files on a modern personal computer will almost certainly _not_ be hierarchical, so it's not ideal to store them hierarchically. Videos, for example, may be movies, tv shows, screencasts, music videos, etc. Videos may also be standard definition, 720p, 1080p, etc. It's difficult to say, for example, which attribute should be the root directory for your videos, since it's reasonable to want to browse by many different attributes. A hierarchy does not apply to videos, but attributes could easily be represented by tags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's a filesystem? -sent from my iPhone

<comment><USER9> It's a scary monster living outside your walled garden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anybody remember WinFS? It's really promising technology back when it's announced, but Microsoft failed to deliver, along as many of the Vista stuff.

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

<comment><USER11> That's one impressive piece of vaporware... The first paragraph suggests it's coming in Windows 8...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Escaping file naming hierarchies was the original motivation of Namesys aka ReiserFS[1].

1- [http://reference.kfupm.edu.sa/content/n/a/the_naming_system_...](http://reference.kfupm.edu.sa/content/n/a/the_naming_system_venture_66797.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> This awareness I saw it growing at Enterprise Search Customers/prospects from early 2000's on. I was part of Vivisimo (spin off from CMU) which created a "clustering engine". In the beginning we always had the "Librarians", pro categorization & classification, dismissing the interest of Clustering (or maybe they were justifying their job). Then more people in the organizations (government or corp.) said yes those 2 approaches (automatic "on the fly" clustering vs human generated taxonomies) are complimentary. Finally couple years ago, in the same week, I visited the Government of Israel which said "we just need clustering" eg. on the left side: <http://search1.gov.il/govilt?query=israel> and then Ferrari competition in Maranello (yeah:) even if I don't like cars;) and there their CTO explained to my surprise [was trying to tell him "we integrate well with your existing taxonomies, ontologies..."] "forget about any hierarchy or classification tree in our File Systems, we just search!". Reality/information is much more diverse & evolving than any predefined categories.

<comment><USER14> You can combine the two approaches, with "just search" which also uses human "categorisation and classification". This helps an awful lot with relevancy ranking.

In smaller data sets (eg not Google scale), where all the items are about roughly the same thing, you need some human classification for your search to work well.

<comment><USER13> Yes you are right. I was a big Friendfeed fan and proposed ideas which we implemented: humans could modify the search index on the fly with ratings, comments and tagging of the search results. Eg. people were able to search documents based on people's comment or rating for instance.

<comment><USER14> I think the lesson from "web 2.0" apps is that if you make something easy to use and useful, people will use it. So the rise of folksonomies is about usability, not doing away with structure.

In my experience, if you can make entering more structured metadata just as easy, people _will_ enter it, and you get a big return in the ability to use the information you've collected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've spent the last 3.5 years building a platform for "information applications". The key observation which prompted this was that hierarchical file systems didn't work well for organising information within an organisation.

However, hierarchy itself is still incredibly valuable. People think in terms of hierarchies - it's just that they think in terms of multiple hierarchies and an item will almost always belong in more than one place in those hierarchies.

If you allow users to describe items in the way which makes sense to them, and then search and browse by any of the terms they've used, then you've eliminated almost all the frustrations of a file system. In my experience of working with people building complex information applications, you need:

      * deep hierarchy for classifying things
      * shallow hierarchy for noting relationships (eg "parent company")
      * multi-values for every single field
      * controlled values (in our case by linking to other items wherever possible)

Unfortunately, none of this stuff is done well by existing database systems. Which was annoying, because I had to write an object store.

</comment><comment><USER15> Whenever I hear these proclamations, I always wonder what a 'source tree' would look like in a non-hierarchical file system.

<comment><USER16> Your source wouldn't need to be stored in a tree, necessarily. Files in your source code could be tagged with the module name they belong to.

<comment><USER15> True, but what about when you have multiple copies of the same source tree? (though I guess this could be less of an issue of everything was using a dvcs)

<comment><USER17> Git e.g. solves that by addressing via content hash. Which is more or less inevitable for non-hierarchical storage, since that's one of the few ways you can disambiguate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> (snark warning) I pointed out years ago, that hierarchical file systems would eventually be unnecessary on Windows, since the clear direction from Microsoft at that time was to store every file in the entire system in \windows\system32, than manage it via an extremely deep and complex hierarchy in the registry... (end snark)

Fortunately, Windows moved in a better direction since then, with user home directories and most user data stored effectively underneath then, more organization to the Windows directory, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER19> Without having actually read the paper yet (still downloading). I always feel like these sort of things are nice, but you still want a hierarchy underneath it all.

For example, I have a document which I want to put onto a USB stick for a friend. I have no idea how their search metaphor lets me do this. I search for the document, but now how do I "move" it? Does "moving" even make sense? Now I'm not doubting that they do have an answer for this, but is the answer something that will be easy to explain?

If you just start with hierarchy, and put a working search over the top of it, then it has a nice model that is easy to explain. All files have an address (like a URL), but if you don't know (or can't be bothered to type) the address, then you use the search box (like google).

<comment><USER20> hmm. first thing that popped in my mind: I'd say you don't "move" files. You can only "give" them.

does that make sense?

<comment><USER2> Hierarchical filesystems have an inherent sense of place, but are non-HFS about _meaning_. "This has to do with to these ideas." That doesn't translate to storage, though - if it has to take up space, _where does it go?_

This is why I think non-HFS ideas work better as indexes _on top of_ existing systems. We don't have the right metaphors yet.

<comment><USER21> I'd think the opposite; if you were combining hfs and non-hfs at a visible level, the way to do it would be to have a non-hierarchical storage system underneath with superficial hierarchical (and other) views. This would give you the flexibility to change your schema without breaking file paths while still being able to organize and name things sanely.

As far as metaphors, I'd say think of calling someone on a landline vs. a cell phone. With the cell, you don't have to specify where or who joe is (/people/friends/joe/house|work|carphone|vacation|etc.) in order to reach him since joe's 1 cellphone number rings wherever he happens to be.

Another example is folders on the iphone -- moving an app into a folder with other apps doesn't actually move the app from /homescreen/app1 to /homescreen/games/app1 on the iphone hard disk (as far as I know...), it just changes the superficial hierarchical view of the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want to know more about how their "thin POSIX layer" would actually provide backwards compatibility. How could you get a directory listing, look at every single file's POSIX tag to see what its path is?

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems like you could fake tagging in any hierarchical file system by using directories for tag names and _hard_ links to files (not symbolic links).

A hard link basically gives multiple paths to the same data, sharing attributes like the owner and permissions. Using any linked path will change the file. The exception is that "rm" deletes just one link (hence the system call "unlink"), and the file is only lost when all its links are gone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was thinking about this a while ago when I was writing my own personal finance software. Rather than embedding any notion of hierarchy, I allow all transactions (regardless of the source) to have an arbitrary number of tags. Hierarchy is simply the conjunction of sets of tags. I can easily re-tag transactions and rollback tagging schemes. Seems to work well for all of the processing I want to do.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not a security expert, but surely there are security implications for a non-hierarchical file system.

</comment><comment><USER26> one of the issues with non-hierarchal filesystems is that the idea of tagging stuff seems like too much effort. for this to appeal to me, there'd have to be some big shift in the GUIs for it to be easy to tag/group files

<comment><USER11> And that says nothing about non-GUI operations...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I thought Harvard professors were above trolling in paper titles.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you have a real-life use scenario for this DB-FS paradigm?

</comment><comment><USER29> Funny that their paper is organized as a Hierarchical File System:

        1 Introduction
        2 The Hierarchical Namespace Albatross
            2.1 Irrelevance
            2.2 Restrictiveness
            2.3 Performance Limiting
        3 hFAD: A New File System Architecture
            3.1 API
                3.1.1 Naming Interfaces
                3.1.2 Access Interfaces
            3.2 Index Stores
            3.3 OSD Layer
            3.4 Implementation
        4 Open Questions
        5 Conclusions

<comment><USER30> But they are academics. As most people familiar with computers and their technical usage, I also tend to organize things in a hierarchical manner. But I cannot ignore that most people around me do not: they just put everything on desktop and one or two other folders.

<comment><USER7> I keep things fairly well organized on my file server, but I've definitely encountered times where my folder hierarchy is insufficient. Wanting to get away from hierarchies isn't just for academics and the disorganized. Here's two examples:

I naturally have a Movies directory and a TV directory. Under each I have two directories SD and HD. Sometimes I may want to simply browse all the HD _video_ on my system.

Where do music videos (i.e. live concerts) go? They're certainly Music, but it's fair to imagine wanting to see them listed when I'm browsing through Movies and not listed when I'm browsing my mp3's. Add in tutorial videos for music production software (I have a lot of these) and it's even more of a guessing game.

<comment><USER31> It would be cool to navigate by file type sometimes.

ie: have some \sound\mp3\all "virtual directory" automatically populated will all the mp3 files of my system.

Now that I think of it, it would be cool to be able to express such "virtual directories" by way of declarative filters.

eg: mkdir ./bigfiles ./ -r 'file.size > 100mo, subdir by file.year/file.type, file.type isnt tmp' -- ..., you get the picture

<comment><USER17> It's almost like "Smart Folders" in spotlight ;)

(Yes, I get what you're saying - you want to impose a _structure_ on that smart folder via the metadata. It was just too tempting to make a stupid comment ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How The World Butchered Benjamin Franklin's Quote On Liberty Vs. Security  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-benjamin-franklins-quote-on-liberty-vs-security/ <comment><USER2> This article is little more than an attempt to apologize for paying for safety by giving up freedom. No matter what the original context, or indeed, who wrote it or said it first, it resonates _now_ , because the US government is pretty much usurping constituionally guarenteed rights by making empty promises of safety from something that may or may not even exist.</comment>