Ok, let me explain: it's going to be Angular 4.0 - <AUTHOR> http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-going-to-be.html <comment><USER2> The title "Angular 4 will be the next version of Angular" had me ready to believe they were announcing another breaking change as big as Angular 1 -> Angular 2. (The blog post's title is "Ok... let me explain: it's going to be Angular 4").

It's much more reasonable though: they're committed to using Semver, so even a minor breaking change (like upgrading Typescript) will bump the version number. So they're expecting the version numbers not to matter as much anymore, similar to how you no longer think of the version number of Chrome or Firefox too often.

And so they are asking the community to just call it "Angular", not "Angular 1", "Angular 2" and "Angular 4". I do feel that this will make it harder to search for information, documentation or libraries specifically related Angular 1 though, if Angular 2+ is now just going to be called "Angular", much like all the Angular 1 specific stuff.

<comment><USER3> >It's much more reasonable though: they're committed to using Semver, so even a minor breaking change (like upgrading Typescript) will bump the version number. So they're expecting the version numbers not to matter as much anymore, similar to how you no longer think of the version number of Chrome or Firefox too often.

That's contradictory.

Once you introduce breaking changes, you require people to update, and old code may not work on new systems.

Then you can't just say "Angular" like you can't say "Python" or "C/C++"

<comment><USER4> I know what you mean but it's kind of ridiculous to say that "you can't say 'Python'". There's a reason why the project name doesn't change just because you bumped the major version number.

<comment><USER3> >There's a reason why the project name doesn't change just because you bumped the major version number.

The OP suggested to make an "evergreen" Angular, like an evergreen Chrome. My point is that you can't do that if you introduce breaking changes, because "this will work in C (and just upgrade to a new version if you don't have it)" doesn't work anymore.

Obviously making small breaking changes shouldn't require renaming your language (so PHP4 is still PHP, even though it broke quite a lot of old files relying on register_globals)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real story here is the seemingly casual way they've decided to start treating breaking changes. Deprecation periods are more polite than not having them, but saying that users need to be constantly using the most up to date version to get information about future support, and then introducing breaking changes into the current version more regularly, seems like a step in the wrong direction. Projects who lose a lot of community engagement due to breaking changes should be the ones who understand how much of a self- inflicted hassle that is best.

<comment><USER6> while I don't disagree with your premise, I think a more generous conclusion is that the angular team has learned from the 1->2 disaster, and has decided to focus on the long term, even if that means causing more headaches in the short term.

still, I'm glad I moved to vue.

<comment><USER5> But my concern is about how they are scheduling breaking changes to occur so frequently, and almost two years in advance! Why induce that kind of headache over and over so regularly that the short-term issues become a long-term software maintenance burden?

I cannot imagine working on a software project where I'd want to plan out four distinct breaking change updates. I simply cannot prognosticate my needs that well, nor chessmaster so deeply that I wouldn't just do it in one bigger change. If they're anything like me, that means they're committing to inducing the hassle _without even knowing what the payoff is_!

<comment><USER7> I think they're just being very strict about what counts as breaking. They gave the example of upgrading the typescript compiler they use as breaking.

<comment><USER8> There's a Korean saying for this, it goes something like: "when the navel outgrows the belly".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-guest Angular 1 is NOT Angular 2 or higher.

Angular 1 and Angular 2+ are in essence completely different frameworks.

The "Angular" team should have picked a different name for their post-Angular 1 project.

The vibrant ecosystem of custom directives, etc., that surrounded Angular 1 must NOT be confused with the Angular 2+ project just so that everything can be "one big happy Angular".

<comment><USER9> But as i understand there is a workable update-path ( also automated client? Experiences anyone ) - and as far as i am just starting working with angular2 the general concepts are still pretty close to angular1. I stopped developing ng1 about two years ago, because i ran into concerns i couldn't fix - ultimatly breaking my use-case. But all of them are fixed in ng2, so i will give it another run ( with high hopes )...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think i officially hate semver. I seems a good idea at first. But updating the major version of Angular every 6 months, will not help us.

Or, semver should start to update its major version every 4 months, perhaps Angular devs will understand what the term JavaScript fatigue means.

<comment><USER11> Semver has bitten us several times with node packages. All most of us care about is whether a release is backwards compatible with the package we developed against. There should be one rule: if it's the same major version it is compatible.

We lock all package versions now negating the benefits of semver.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I always say that, if I ever design my own programming language with a central package repository, I will build the repo such that it downright refuses to publish minor version updates that break the API (or patch updates that change the API).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It'll be interesting to see how this change in versioning might impact recruitment for developers to service different versions of Angular projects. I guess this goes especially for recruiters who don't really know (or care about) Semver.

I mean, there's a rather huge rift (i.e. TypeScript, tooling, etc) between Angular 1 and 2, but this might not be the case for future consecutive major versions.

<comment><USER14> _I guess this goes especially for recruiters who don 't really know (or care about) Semver._

Isn't that, well, all of them..?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First Windows, then Node, and now Angular. I worry that soon we'll completely lose the ability to count properly.

<comment><USER16> XBox to XBox 360 to Xbox One.

Could the computer world follow automotive and use dates? 2017 Mustang? (As I type, I remember that Apple does this. Late 2013 MacBook Pro).

Maybe mix dates with semver? Angular 2017.1.2.9

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure Windows (and Apple with iWork) ditched yearly versioning for public-facing version numbers because if they didn't have a yearly release everything looked out of date.

I do think it fits well with "evergreen" software like Angular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Personally I can't wait until Angular 7 is out by Q1 2017

<comment><USER19> but don't worry about version numbers it's just angular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Too often they bring breaking changes. I hoped after stable release they will stop breaking things every two weeks or so, as it was in alpha, but looks like they still don't understand that every breaking change stops development of projects for 1-2 days and this time is not free. I want to write code to solve business tasks, not just patching working code because of one more imperfection they found.

I can run HL1 on Windows 10 but my 5-months code for Angular is outdated.

Please, Angular team, be more pragmatic.

<comment><USER21> Are you using a bleeding edge release? Why not pick a stable release and stick with it?

<comment><USER20> No, I use stable release. It was released 3 months ago. It's too often for breaking changes.

<comment><USER22> I think his point was that you're not being forced to upgrade if your current version is working for you. You don't have to be on the bleeding edge if that isn't working out for your business.

<comment><USER20> Stable version is not bleeding edge. And if you don't upgrade on new versions, you also mix bugfixes and price (complexity) of future upgrades just grows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I write angular 1 and 2 at work, so I like angular, but isn't their a point where the powers that be should stop rocking the boat? All my colleagues who use other SPA frameworks really have their eye on the project's pitfalls when they should at least keep up with its virtues.

</comment><comment><USER24> what a chaos, so not only the internal changes break everything, even the version-numbers do it too, what's the next surprise?

Isn't angular for "enterprise-large-project" that requires stable-API and such?

just use either React or Vuejs

<comment><USER25> Funny that you mention react as they went from .14 to 15 in April

<comment><USER26> [https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/02/19/new- version...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/02/19/new-versioning- scheme.html)

[http://rc.vuejs.org/2016/04/27/announcing-2.0/](http://rc.vuejs.org/2016/04/27/announcing-2.0/)

[https://blog.dantup.com/2014/10/have-the-angular-team- lost-t...](https://blog.dantup.com/2014/10/have-the-angular-team-lost-their- marbles/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There were breaking changes going from 1.2 to 1.3, those weren't any better than the possible breaking changes going from 2 to 4

</comment><comment><USER28> Next next is Angular 8? Neat

</comment><comment><USER29> Now I get to write 'Angular > 1' all the time.

</comment><comment><USER30> Weren't people still trying to adapt to angular 3?

</comment><comment><USER31> tl;dr

Angular takes semantic versioning seriously, and while they will not be doing a 1 -> 2 size change, they will need to increase the major version soon (Typescript upgrade, etc.)

They will also align the npm versions of the core packages. @angular/router is at 3.3, so the next available major version is 4.

</comment><comment><USER32> tl;dr

Angular versioning gets even more screwed up. It's ok though because it's javascript.

<comment><USER33> Not even. It's Typescript.</comment></comment>


How I Learned to Defrag My Brain - <AUTHOR> http://alexhillman.com/defrag-your-brain-with-a-sparkfile

<comment><USER2> I've kept a file called "ventures.rtf" since 2007. Quite simply, it has every business idea I've had that's worth writing down. Every year or so I go through and delete the stupid ideas. To say this has become the most valuable document in my life is an understatement. It is my career, in a file.

I used to keep a larger, more generic "spark file" but I found it got to be too big to navigate. So I throw away more ideas now, and only write down ones that have serious merit, placing them in specific files instead of a "kitchen sink" catchall file.

I also have "possible programmers" and "possible designers" files, which I've kept since 2007. These are just lists of great people that I've found over the years, and may wish to hire at some time. I've initiated relationships with some of these people, knowing that one day I might want to bring them in to one of my ventures.

Finally, I have a "rules to live by" file. I've kept this since November 2011, so it is much younger than the rest. So far, it's about 560 succinct adages. I work on it for 30m-1h ever day. I study life and draw conclusions, abstracting the particular instances I experienced into broader maxims.

I review this file before any major decision is made. It's sort of like a file on disk that I can load into my memory; it puts my mind in an optimal state before making a decision. It's like putting everything I've learned into my brain's electro-chemical RAM banks. The quality of personal and business decisions has increased 10000x since starting this particular file.

<comment><USER3> Heh. I call my two files "foundation" and "empire".

<comment><USER4> Mine is called "A little bit of background" and "Biz Ideas"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the biggest issues I've found is that many developers say they are uncreative -- they have the talent, but they say they can never think of ideas that are useful to build.

So, for those of you wondering how you can even start building a "sparkfile", I'll give you my secret: whenever I'm annoyed with something I'm doing, I'll analyze why I am annoyed, and out of that usually comes an idea. A few months ago, I was annoyed that Hacker News was the first place I learned about password leaks, sometimes weeks before the companies emailed me -- leaving me insecure for quite a while. If only a computer could scan headlines across different tech websites looking for the latest companies to have password leaks, and would email you the second it saw anything.

48 hours later, I built leaknotifier.com to do just that.

For me, I crave simplicity. Whenever something that I think should be simple to do takes much longer than necessary, I start brainstorming how I would simplify it. If I ever feel like I'm on autopilot because I'm doing the same thing over and over, I figure out ways to automate it. If you ever feel frustrated and start to think "if only they just _____", start actually figuring out why they don't just do X, and if there is no good reason, start developing it.

<comment><USER6> Why is google not avaliable in the list of services at leaknotifier? That is something many of us use.

<comment><USER5> To be honest, it was because Google kept being a false positive whenever I ran the analysis on RSS feeds, and since Google hadn't had any large password leaks (outside of China targeting a few protestors), along with Google's emphasis on security with IP monitoring and 2-factor, I considered them immune. Still, though, I'll add it in and fix my parsing to get rid of the false positives.

I still need to do a lot of stuff for the app (SSL default, tweaking feeds and parsing), I was more just trying to show how my frustration led to an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To log bits of information quickly I added this to my .bashrc:

log(){ date >> ~/log/$* ; cat >> ~/log/$* ; }

I try to keep it simple but I keep several files. There is one for general ideas which is called "projects", another one to log new words I've learnt called "voc.en" (English is a second language for me) and so on.

For example:

log projects <enter>

write something cool... <enter> <ctrl+c>

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

cat log/projects

Mo 10. Sep 07:16:02 CEST 2012

write something cool...

<comment><USER8> This is a great idea! I've been using text docs like this for a while, but the problem that keeps happening to me is I go open the file to add something to it, and get distracted by reading the stuff in the file and forget what I was about to add!

I'm going to try this CLI method since it'll be impossible to read old stuff and get distracted while trying to add something.

<comment><USER8> Here's my entry in my bash profile:

        log() {
          echo >> ~/Dropbox/NotationalVelocity/$*.txt ;
          date >> ~/Dropbox/NotationalVelocity/$*.txt ;
          cat >> ~/Dropbox/NotationalVelocity/$*.txt ;
        }

We'll see how this goes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I also read the _Where Good Ideas Come From_ book, and I especially like his commonplacing idea. However, I didn't compile them into a sparkfile. Instead, I compile my notes into this personal web page: <http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts>

It's full of random ideas like fear inoculation, legoization, animated qr code, and some half completed essay like _self quantification_ , _synthetic blood vessel_ , and _why choose prosthesis_. I am constantly rewriting them as well as adding ideas and citations. I also reread it everyday.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think a lot of us entrepreneur types have files, Moleskins, txt documents, blogs, etc. that are similar to 'The Spark File.' It's an excellent tool, and keeping track of ideas, inspiration, projects, and more is a vital part of organizing your thoughts.

One thing that differentiates this particular implementation is the consistent (but not constant) review of ideas, as well as the consolidation of ideas that seem to go well together. The creation of "full" ideas vs. "half baked" ideas is a really interesting concept, and I feel that I learned a lot about idea formation, even from just a four minute video.

While ByWord seems great for offline editing (and I'm certainly going to give it a shot), I've had a really great experience using Trello for my "spark file." The separate "cards" that Trello supports allow me to have different categories of ideas that I can then individually consolidate. For example, I currently have cards for:

\- Startup (ideas for ventures I'm considering.)

\- Posts (blog posts I'd like to write; either expanded versions of HN comments, or stories in and of themselves. This comment will likely go right in there as well!)

\- Research (security & appsec research I'd like to conduct, as well as particular technologies I'm interested in. My to-learn queue.)

\- Software (non-startup related software I'm building or would like to build.)

In the end, I can't help but agree and evangelize Alex's post -- the human brain can only keep track of so much on its own, but with help and organization, we can be much more productive!

</comment><comment><USER11> Creative types have cool new ideas all the time.

Some have an idea and think "it would be cool if someone did that", others do it.

The problem most doers have when they get a new idea is they are already working on a cool idea.

These new ideas will distract the driven, unless they write them down in a trusted system.

I always wrote ideas down in notebooks, but I don't like paper's distributed, non-indexed characteristics as a persistent storage medium. Also, being in my 20s I like to move to a new city every couple years by plane and staying completely digital makes this lifestyle easy.

I wrote an app called IdeaList to solve this problem for myself, I was almost finished with it and about to ship when a consulting project with an urgent deadline came by that was too good to refuse.

I've been using it myself and its increased my peace of mind considerably to know all my Awesome Ideas are there.

This post reminded me that IdeaList is something worth releasing because its a slick solution to a critical problem.

I'm going to charge a very small amount to keep the service viable, but anyone from hacker news that might be interested gets a free lifetime subscription if they email me today at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER12> I think doing this as a single document works well...but I like to do this with text files in a dropbox folder. The file name serves as the description of the idea, and the textfile contains any details/updates I have in mind. Ordering by date-created or updated seems to work fine. A little more overhead but allows for "overflow", when some ideas have more meat to begin with.

<comment><USER13> There is software called Notational Velocity that can be setup to use a folder of text files like this. I have mine setup like this on Dropbox and it works great.

<http://notational.net/>

The software presents a reverse chronological list of the files' updated timestamps, has a 'search-or-create' style of file creation, and can have links to one file within another.

<comment><USER14> I really like Notational Velocity - or, for me, ResophNotes on Windows and Simplenote on the iPhone. Before this, I tried MobileOrg on my phone, an Org Mode app - the search in NV is just much smoother and more useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a single OmniOutliner file with all of my ideas and random thoughts. It is _much_ better to have tools that support ad-hoc organization than tools that limit you to a flat space. It's so easy to create outlines in OmniOutliner, that it would be silly not to. Definitely recommend it. Before that, it was emailing ideas to myself with a tag in the subject line.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a whole book on this type of topic called "Making Ideas Happen" that discusses the idea of the "Backlog" for all your ideas. There's also a dedicated website called <http://99u.com/> that supports the materials in the book. Check it out.

<comment><USER16> I should add that I've been using Trello to track my personal "Spark File" (or Backlog) for awhile now. Works wonderfully. And as a bonus makes it easy to "riff" on certain ideas for a couple minutes without committing to anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use Trello for this. I have a board with a few lists, each with a different category of idea on it. When I get a new idea, I add a card for it. As I develop the idea, I add to the card.

At some point I either archive the card out, or I setup a new board/list/card elsewhere to actually pursue the idea.

</comment><comment><USER18> That looks like a weak version of "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think", <http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/> . You don't have to dive completely into Lion Kimbro's system to find parts of it very useful. Especially the use of speeds for quick jottings and the binders for organizing things so you can find them again. No matter how much of his actual system you might end up using though, reading his book about it will open your eyes.

My initial system is similar to his, but I found transcribing everything into computer better, mainly because of easier searching, and because it made sharing information that applied to multiple projects easier.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting how many of us here mention some concept of an idea log across media such as wikis, paper notebooks, text files, the web, and others.

My own implementation is a journal, each day in its own plain text file. I track the major milestones in my day and prefix ideas with "Idea: " so that I could easily grep all ideas into one list if needed. (However, I haven't done that yet. I tend to let them sit and incubate rather than act immediately.)

I'm curious about 3 things:

(1) What motivated the start of such behavior for others?

(2) How do you react to your idea log with respect to balancing focus between current projects / work, and speculative projects?

(3) How do others account for visuals such as sketches or interface ideas which are often easier to create with analog tools?

<comment><USER20> _(1) What motivated the start of such behavior for others?_

I was letting things slip and forgetting things I needed to remember; so it was more of a "hey, I need to be more organized" kind of thing, but it also came with the benefit of capturing EVERYTHING.

 _(2) How do you react to your idea log with respect to balancing focus between current projects / work, and speculative projects?_

It's sad but true, you can do anything, but not everything. Most of what I capture are todos, maybe the occasional project or "big idea", but two things have forced me to realize I can't do everything. First, I was forgetting things again, because I'd capture them and never see them again (reviewing wouldn't help; there are simply too many to review them all). Second, to fix the first, I added a default deadline of "today" to my capture template. Then once I started going down my todo list, I would reschedule, only to come across some things again and reschedule again. After a while, I finally started forcing myself to either cancel or indefinitely defer things. I have a core set of "must dos", habits, chores and such, plus short term goals, but haven't quite gotten to the long term planning stage yet. For now, it's all logged, version controlled and archived in git, so I never truly "lose" anything, I just give up on doing everything and prioritize.

 _(3) How do others account for visuals such as sketches or interface ideas which are often easier to create with analog tools?_

I'm mostly an auditory/textual person (code monkey by day), so I don't miss that too much. You could do ASCII art, I suppose (<http://emacs- fu.blogspot.com/2009/01/drawing-pictures.html> ;) Although, I would like to have some nice charts (or at least cumulative stats) for a bigger picture; this is actually yet another project idea of mine, which is very feasible with org-mode: <http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html>

<comment><USER19> I experienced similar "panic scheduling" with (2) myself. I'm trying to forego due dates and deadlines except when completely necessary (often because of procrastination).

I'm trying to take a low-tech approach to my system as opposed to having more tech. It's easier for me to ignore the list of "random things to research someday" when it's on an index card at home than on my laptop and phone everywhere. At the same time, I rarely find myself missing lists like these.

My own sketches tend to pile up physically with the eventual goal of being scanned in and named with the date drawn.

Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER20> As to the easy to ignore, I can always defer or just remove the deadline (then it won't show up in the agenda); I'd rather capture and ignore than lose data. I don't get a lot of "big ideas", but I'm constantly thinking of little things that need looking after, and I will forget them if I don't record them somewhere. This even gets so bad that now I want something voice activated for when I am driving and think of something!

I've also tried scanning, to the tune of 10s of thousands of scans; then you have to manage the scans, and they aren't indexable by default (unless you have some fancy OCR type software like the Neat). It's one of the reasons I really prefer plain text: perfectly greppable, easy to slice and dice with Perl (or Python, Ruby, R, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> i have notes scattered around evernote, dropbox, index cards, moleskines, iOS notes. i think it's time to compile them into a spark file!

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the difference for me, too. If I took notes at all it wasn't in one place (a mix of text files and iOS notes for me). Switching to Byword and a single file was faster and I was more consistent about jotting notes down no matter where I was.

More importantly, I didn't have any habit for reviewing them. Hope it helps you like it helped me!

<comment><USER20> For me, it's org-mode in Emacs and git. Quick idea/note/todo capture combined with time logging, task management and calendar, not to mention the table features. Got it on phone and desktops/laptops.

On a slight tangent, I'm looking for something more touch screen appropriate that I can sync with git (must be text based, preferably compatible with org- mode). While I have Emacs, org-mode and git on the current phone with a hardware keyboard, that won't last forever, and I _really_ need something that makes for _very_ quick idea capture on a touchscreen. Bonus points for something that also tracks/logs time, manages todos and calendars (ideally, I suppose it would be org-mode optimized for a touch screen).

EDIT: Yes, I know about MobileOrg (<http://orgmode.org/manual/MobileOrg.html>) and while it's close (oh, so close), it's not quite close enough (notably, it's lacking logging of time spent on tasks). Although, since it is open source . . .

<comment><USER22> Never managed to learn org-capture, so I use deft instead. Not as immediate but good enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I started doing something like this in paper notebooks in the early '90s. The main difference is that my notebooks keep _all_ of my notes. This makes the review process a lot more tedious. Maybe it is time to start a new notebook for ideas, and keep that separate from the "note" books.

Edit: one advantage of the paper process over the various software / cloud solutions is that I can still read those ancient notes. Love the cloud for business, but it is tough to beat ink and bound paper for personal records that you want to keep for a long time. An added bonus is that you can occasionally entertain visions of holding a bonfire of your old notes and starting fresh.

<comment><USER20> _Edit: one advantage of the paper process over the various software / cloud solutions is that I can still read those ancient notes._

Have you heard of this awesome thing called "ASCII"? Org-mode (among others) uses it, but adds structure, shortcuts and refiling, so you get the best of both worlds. Combined with something like Git and SSH, plus your own server (c'mon, VPS are down to what, $6/month these days?), and you've got replicated, versioned, encrypted, non-proprietary, non-lockin, forward (and backwards!) readable notes.

<comment><USER23> You are right - I should have been running Git in 1993!

<comment><USER20> Kindly ignoring the snide fact that, yes, git wasn't available in 1993, I'll point out that ASCII has been around since, what, the late 1960's? Of course, I will admit I was being a bit snarky too, but backups have been around forever, and text compresses really well. Of course, I can appreciate the permanence of ink, or even stone as a media ([http://books.google.com/books?id=CgeHW- geducC&lpg=PA6...](http://books.google.com/books?id=CgeHW- geducC&lpg=PA6&ots=W-wVe4fKqT&dq=chalk%20ink%20stone%20Anathem&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q=chalk%20ink%20stone%20Anathem&f=false)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I do something very similar but with my research. Ithink Scientists have basically known about this for a while, and it is one of the primary reasons we are encouraged to keep a research journal. It is essentially a diary of all the ideas for algorithms and things to try that I randomly come up with, and it works absolute wonders. I review it completely from time to time and I am almost always guaranteed to find some brilliant idea that the old me had a while ago, and I completely forgot about since. Sometimes an old idea can combine with new context or mindset and magic happens.

</comment><comment><USER25> I started with a couple of flat files. Then I used a notepad, then I moved to Xfce Notes (one of my favourite pieces of software), and lately I've been moving to a folder of text files.

While this is certainly an important habit, I wouldn't call it defragmenting. Sometimes I do refine or rewrite my notes, but occasionally delete them entirely, and sometimes find myself more confused, having tied together too many concepts. One thing I have learned is that my thinking changes so much over time that conveying information, even to myself, is surprisingly difficult.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a very old idea: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book>

<comment><USER27> Johnson actually mentions this idea in his book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I recently read "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning", and the author recommends setting up a personal wiki for stuff like this (and for personal notes in general). A wiki is a good fit for an idea repository because it's easy to link ideas together, have them reference each other, etc. I installed Zim Wiki a few days ago and am already feeling like my mind is less fragmented.

<comment><USER20> Org-mode for Emacs also does this ([http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Hyper...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Hyperlinks.html#Hyperlinks)), and doesn't require any extra software (well, if you already have Emacs).

I don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I do just _love_ org-mode. Of course, I was already using Emacs for development, and org-mode just slips seamlessly right in. Everyone seems to suggest some other service where the data is stored in a proprietary format on someone else's server, but I do very much like keeping control of my own data.

<comment><USER29> I concur -- org mode is fantastic. I've only started using it recently, but I think it'd be safe to say that I'll use it forever.

Just the tables feature (<http://orgmode.org/manual/Tables.html>) alone is worth it, but inline LaTeX comes close. Mixing math in LaTeX with a proper table editor (unlike LaTeX) and being able to export to anything that matters (HTML, PDF and LaTeX) -- bliss!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been using the awesome Notational Velocity to keep track of TODOs, my 'Spark File', expenses, confidential information, personal diary etc. etc.

The contents are encrypted through a TrueCrypt virtual volume and the volume is saved into Dropbox.

I've found this to be a great setup - the searchability and keyboard centric navigation of NV provides a friction free environment to quickly record content.

</comment><comment><USER31> As a songwriter I do this instinctively as part of writing songs. I'll often jot down ideas on a note book or into evernote then revisit everything later. It's a great habit to be in, the revision can be enlightening - as the author says - and can lead to much better insight.

<comment><USER32> Better to evolve a great piece slowly over time than to force a mediocre one prematurely into the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In just skimming through comments, it's interesting to note how many people already keep this habit, myself included - my spark file can be found in the back cover of my notebooks... Keepin' it analog.

</comment><comment><USER34> <http://myide.as> I builded this small app last year as a way to quickly share my "sparks" with friends anonymously or not.

</comment><comment><USER35> I started implementing <https://thoughtstreams.io> the last few weeks for very much this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER36> Separating the doing from the thinking about what to do is the one reason why the Getting Things Done approach works.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have found OneNote to be an excellent tool for this. One of the main apps that make it worth running a VM for me.

</comment><comment><USER38> After keeping a thoughts.txt diary for a year, one of the best things is that I can grep my thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER39> I switched my brain to linux and haven't had to defrag in years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, I didn't expect a novelty account on HN.</comment></comment>


New cool polling tool - <AUTHOR> http://poll.ly <comment><USER2> I don't know, maybe it would be nice to get to the polls directly (you know without the need of entering a username).

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow feels nice and Snappy. How was the implementation made?

<comment><AUTHOR> We used golang for backend, it runs on the appengine, so it scales easily. To keep the costs low (minimal reading calls), we use just one poll object. To deal with the writing problem, we sharded the poll objects ([https://cloud.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counter...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counters)). This is very cool stuff, it was completely new for us.

<comment><USER3> Thx for the fast answer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> sweet thx for sharing :)</comment>


Anatomy of Hypertextual Web Search Engine[google '98] - <AUTHOR> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

<comment><USER2> _In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results)._

I've forgotten what the web was like pre-google so this is rather shocking. I do remember the giant collection of "keywords" tacked onto the end of pages, often when I was searching for warez[1].

[1] wow haven't used that word in a looonnnngggg time.

<comment><USER2> This is also a gem:

 _With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm._

Obviously I don't blame them for going the commercial route (though a world with the wikipeda of search could be very interesting) but is this evidence of a change in thinking on their behalf after the writing of this document? Or is it just embroidery to help the reception of the paper?</comment></comment>


Wired.com lays of 25% of staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.inquisitr.com/7974/condenet-cuts-wiredcom-lays-of-25-of-staff/ <comment><USER2> Hi jwilliams.

Just a suggestion from a pseudo-newbie here. This blog post from Inquisitr doesn't add to original posts, maybe it would've been better to submit the original links? (Please don't take this in a bad way!)

[http://valleywag.com/5083534/digital-dealmaker-and-a- dozen-o...](http://valleywag.com/5083534/digital-dealmaker-and-a-dozen-others- out-at-wired)

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10094014-93.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> True. My bad.

<comment><USER2> I said don't take it bad! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well that should have a lot less impact on the economy than GM laying off 25% of it's staff.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but HN being a North California and tech-centric site this is quite relevant, IMHO.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Shadow at a startup for a day - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I'm 21, learning to code, and interesting in working at a startup. I'll be attending Fullstack Academy (S12) starting September 15th, but I'm taking a trip out to SF this Wednesday for 5 days (7/20-7/25).
I want to get a feel for what work at a startup is like. Would anyone who works at a startup mind if I shadowed them for a day? Or does anyone know anyone who they think would be interested? I'm not sure if I'm good enough to be useful, but if I could be of any use I'd love to write some code for you! (I've been teaching myself to code on and off for the past year and a half or so. I'd classify my skills as a strong beginner/weak intermediate developer. I know HTML, CSS, JS/jQuery, Ruby and Rails. I built a few sites before - https://github.com/adamzerner?tab=repositories.
Edit: I'm also considering moving to SF after Fullstack. There's a lot of good tech companies there, and I really like the culture. So I also want to get a feel for what it'd be like living in SF. I've visited before and have done all the touristy things, but I want to get a feel for what it'd be like living there. I was thinking of visiting a hacker house and some co-working spaces, but don't know what else would be useful. Any ideas?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You might be heading towards an adverse selection problem here. For every viable startup, there are 10 that aren't. It's more likely that a non-viable startup would want code from someone who is going to be gone in a few days or weeks or even months. So you might be selecting for the wrong kinds of organizations with an offer like this.

A full-on internship might be a better bet.</comment>


The Endangered Internet Archive Is Full of Treasures - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/the-endangered-internet-archive-is-full-of-treasures-1844145442 <comment><USER2> We need an archive for the archive.

Was thinking about this when dwelling over archive.is's habit of blocking Cloudflare DNS users due to Cloudflare not sharing specific types of identifying info on user traffic. I like archive.is but that practice smells so funny it makes me believe the entire site will go dark or paywalled/private in time.

In contrast to the greasy nature of archive.is the owner of archive.org is a data nerd in the purest form. This guy archives, he makes other people want to archive. Archive.org has been such a smashing success that its now too large for it's own good.

We need more alternatives, in the same vein and spirit as archive.org. Please keep all venture capitalist/disruption/innovation agitators away from making the issue over complex or stilted towards a commercialized end game. Just archive.

<comment><USER3> > We need an archive for the archive.

Would a distributed version work? I mean I can't dedicate much bandwidth or enough storage for the whole archive but I could dedicate a few terabyte. Is there anyone working on such a thing?

<comment><USER2> >a distributed version

Its really hard for me to define when we're over-complicating the premise that made Archive.org flourish, but I would love to distribute the data to alleviate the dangers of centralization in general.

I believe something like ipfs, a strong search engine, coupled with the activism that brought traffic to archive.org initially would be wonderful:

[https://ipfs.io/#how](https://ipfs.io/#how)

<comment><USER4> Always be cautious of a technological solution to an organizational problem.

A distributed file system would build robustness into the system and keep the data from getting deleted, but only at appropriate scale. Even assuming enough scale, how do you ensure ongoing operation of the data collection aspects of archive.org, or the development of the distribution tools like the wayback machine. I've also seen enough distributed files systems come and go to have concerns about data rot.

As important as a distributed technological solution is setting up legal entities and ownership structures to ensure the archiving activities continue even if one of the entities does something risky.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A mode for password hashing - <AUTHOR> http://bramcohen.com/2014/11/18/a-mode-for-password-hashing <comment><USER2> Wishy washy, hand wavy, security mumble jumble:

> This operation is repeated some number of times until enough work has been > done, and then output is extracted. It's reasonable to set the number of > rounds to be be double the number of blocks stored in bulk memory. It might > be okay to go far lower, but that feels sketchy. In particular, going lower > might result in custom hardware being able to effectively pipeline the next > block being uninitialized (which might be able to produce a small speedup on > a general CPU anyway, further research needed).

"Some number of times", "reasonable", "feels sketchy", "further research needed"...

> There's also an encryption function used, probably AES128...

"Probably AES128"... If there's one thing that you shouldn't tolerate in security, is relying on your feelings about mathematics. You can DO the math, your feelings on what the result might or might not be are not very interesting.

The scrypt paper does all the research and math that this article doesn't do. It even includes dollar cost estimates for breaking passwords hashed with various algorithms. Yes, the scrypt algorithm itself already does what you need. The paper is highly recommended for developers who ever touch passwords.

[http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html](http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html)

I also consider PBKDF2 acceptable for general password hashing.

<comment><USER3> PBKDF2, bcrypt, and scrypt are the three that most people find acceptable.

This blog post isn't meant to be an in-depth research paper, its tone is more, "hey, I have a neat idea, what does the community think?"

<comment><USER4> PBKDF2, BCrypt, and SCrypt were _also_ "Hey, I have a neat idea. What does the community think?"

Just some people are more precise at writing, and offer better mathematics than other people.

<comment><USER3> Scrypt also came with an academic paper in PDF format. Maybe one will follow when the ideas are more solid.

<comment><USER4> I don't have time to even follow well thought academic ideas. Why should I be bothered trying to develop ideas of other people who don't put forward even a little bit of effort?

The concept is similar to SCrypt. He wants to utilize a memory-hard problem to make the difficulty of creating ASICs more difficult. However, this blog post has no ideas on how VLSI circuits work, nor any crypto calculations, nor any math or proofs that describe his thoughts.

He has a supposition: that using maybe AES (or any block cipher) as a random- number-generator, he can randomly traverse memory to increase the difficulty of hashing. (I'm assuming he's just using any ol' block cipher for this process). He leaves a component of the calculation in one memory block to keep it "inside the cache", presumably to keep it working quickly on modern CPUs.

Maybe. I dunno. He has no example code, which makes this sort of thing _very_ hard to discuss. I don't even know if I'm reading his post correctly.

But assuming this is how he's doing it (and mind you, I really don't know what he's talking about because he's so imprecise), my $0.02 of "serious" criticism is that its not obvious that these calculations cannot be pipelined and simplified in an ASIC or FPGA... at least any more than SCrypt (or BCrypt) was.

And remember, SCrypt has ASICs coming out of the pipeline, and also ended up being much much faster on R9 290x GPUs than your standard CPUs.

Honestly, the X11 proposals from the alt-coin community are better researched and more precise than what this blog-post proposes. This proposal here is so obscure and wishy-washy that I can't even discuss its merits.

<comment><USER3> > I don't have time to even follow well thought academic ideas. Why should I > be bothered trying to develop ideas of other people who don't put forward > even a little bit of effort?

You shouldn't and I'm not saying you should. I'm suggesting everyone is taking this more seriously than it needs to be.

"Might be a novel idea, here's some things to consider, needs work," is appropriate.

But this idea is clearly stuck in rough draft hell and needs some serious fleshing out before everyone pulls out their magnifying glasses.

Going balls-to-the-wall with scrutiny and criticism before it's warranted does nothing constructive and only discourages people from tinkering. Bad for the community, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bit irrelevant, but I remember reading about storing password hashes independent of the account information. I can not find it now..

The idea is that you have a passwords table and whenever someone sets a new password / registers, you insert something like "hash(userid + password + salt)" into the table. There is no link between the account and hash, when the user logs in, you need to check the existence of the computed hash on the table. If someone dumps the database, at best, they have some password hashes with no way to connect them to user accounts.

Password changes would require asking the old password but I guess there is no way to implement 'forgot password' functionality here? How would you invalidate old passwords?

Is this something viable? Anyone uses anything like this? I thought about adopting it on some new auth systems we are working on but losing password recovery is downer.

edit: Changing the salt on account information would take care of invalidating old hashes I guess..

<comment><USER6> It's interesting, but it has issues that I think make it more worthwhile to just focus on not getting the tables dumped in the first place.

<comment><USER7> If we followed that logic then why hash and or salt at all? Instead just "focus on not getting the table dumped in the first place."

<comment><USER8> The greatest benefit to hashing is to protect the user's privacy from yourself (and other authorized administrators of the application) and as a guarantee that after the point hashing is implemented nobody can get easily expose plaintext version.

Even if all of these fancy hashing algorithms are implemented, it only makes it slightly more difficult to crack weak (common, short, dictionary word) passwords.

<comment><USER7> If I'm an admin I could just dump the raw HTTP POST requests as they enter, bypassing hashing entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It frustrates me to read stuff like this because as much as it is technically sound, and will make a hash marginally more difficult to crack, I worry that complex criticisms of hashing algorithms can have the effect of discouraging application developers from using any hashing on passwords at all.

Now I am going to mention something that will be very unpopular, but it is 100% true, so try to open your mind a little before reading.

Let's compare not hashing, the _worst_ hashing algorithm, and the _best_ hashing algorithm. The _worst_ will be something like MD5 with no salt, and the best using the most advanced hashing, random salts, and CPU-heavy calculations. We'll compare the effect of database compromise by a cracker on a user with a weak password (4-character dictionary word) and one with a strong password (15-character random a-Z, 0-9, and symbols)

* No hashing - weak: cracked; strong: cracked

* _Worst_ hashing - weak: cracked; strong: safe

* _Best_ hashing - weak: cracked; strong: safe

The _best_ hash will protect more medium strength passwords than the _worst_ but there is no hashing algorithm strong enough to protect the weakest passwords, and MD5 with no salt still protects the strongest.

But there are other benefits of using any hashing over none: It protects your users from yourself and other admin-level people on your team and guarantees that your application cannot expose plaintext passwords even after you leave the project.

tl;dr The difference between no password hashing and weak password hashing is significant and the difference between weak hashing and strong hashing is small.

<comment><USER9> Your comparison is invalid because with 'worst hashing' a strong password is still cracked; there's simply too many workable attacks, the algorithm is too fast, and FPGA implementations are trivial.

A password function is _the last line of defense_ , and never foolproof. Looking at the history of successful password exfiltrations over time, attackers have about a month or two before somebody notices they got away with your data. So your password functions should ensure that passwords are strong enough that with current-day technology they can withstand at least that much time out in the wild; otherwise, don't even use a hash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I particularly like reading this, and then comparing to something like this: [http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf](http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Whatever people think of this idea, it's probably a bit late to be coming up with new designs. Any future adoption of a different password hashing algorithm will probably be determined by the PHC[0]... at least, I'm not aware of a more comprehensive ongoing effort to improve the state of the art.

[0] [https://password-hashing.net/](https://password-hashing.net/)

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what I think of it, but don't dismiss it because it's not established by X or Y person.

Judge it on its merits, if any. If we can't poke holes in it, then maybe its worth those same people's time to look at.

<comment><USER3> PHC isn't about pedigree, it's a formal contest that was open for submissions for a while now. Now they're in the elimination phase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has he coded it? In what way is it better than [bs]crypt?

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there any way to measure empirically the safety of a hashing algorithm?

<comment><USER14> Get a large site to adopt it, leak the password hash database. Voilà!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Over 100 tested iOS code samples - <AUTHOR> http://ioscodesamples.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept, here are some issues in my opinion:

1) No price shown on the first page, I have to click on Buy to see that it is $99 CAD

2) No mention of the source of the code, where it is coming from, what makes it tested, who tested it.

3) What about the license. Do you own it and are you granting it, is it open source code that you have scoured, what are the individual pieces of licenses and will I have to worry about that too.

4) What code samples are there? The image doesn't tell me much, need a list of code samples, including the sample of code so that I can figure out the quality before shelling out $99 CAD.

<comment><AUTHOR> those are some good suggestions, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The picture shown on the homepage is kinda scrunched, <http://i.imgur.com/oHK40.png>.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I'd need better sample images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very weary about this conceptually. If you don't know what a piece of code is doing, then you shouldn't be putting it into your project; because when it breaks, you wont know how to fix it. So a cookbook with explanations would accompany this nicely.

Licence concerns me, the page states (We've searched so you don't have to) are you certain you are legally allowed to publish these code samples? Creating your own is fine, but if you've searched places like blogs, stack overflow, etc, you could be infringing copyright. I'll release code samples for free use, but you aren't allowed to re-publish them or make a profit off of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've added descriptions of what the code does for each of the samples. Also the idea is that people are paying for my curation of the content, not the content itself, every sample has a link to the orignal source so that a user can get the code for there.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A SSH client and connection manager in your favorite terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cuonggt/zzh <comment><AUTHOR> This is useful if you are:

\- Having too many server credentials to remember

\- Feeling hard to use SSH config file

\- Wanting to connect to your servers easier using your favorite terminal (no more other terminals)</comment>


X-Stream.ly launches - <AUTHOR> http://blog.x-stream.ly/post/11653511568/x-stream-ly-launches

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, X-stream.ly is a push messaging PaaS that requires no servers to use.

We'd love for people to check it out and give us your feedback.

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER2> Very Cool!</comment>


ASK HN: How do you notice Company Smell? - <AUTHOR>

I think Company Smell is the direct cause of Code Smell.
Company smell is where no-one really cares about developing software, where the company allows ridiculous concerns to get in the way of good practices, where you won't learn anything from anyone.  Companies with Company Smell can have good software, good interviews, even pass most of the Joel test, but you get inside and everything's slightly off.
One of the most obvious smells is when people think they're agile because they are cargo-culting some aspect... Features are on index cards, or they hold a standup once a week.  It's an almost physical pain when you're in this situation and you know Agile can work, you have experience that it's better and people all around you are either dismissing it offhand or only pretending.
Obviously it's helpful to be able to detect company smell before starting at a company, but how do you develop that sense?  What are some indicators during an interview that the company you're applying for smells, and how do you go about calming any fears?
(Edit 201118011259 - Changed Title) <comment><USER2> Here's an answer I gave to a similar question on programmers.se that I think is applicable to you: [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/32754/how- to-...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/32754/how-to-avoid-to- be-employed-by-companies-which-are-candidates-to-dailywtf-stories/32819#32819)

</comment><comment><USER3> Look for the revenue. That stuff stinks like hell.</comment>


Rare 1967 Rolex Submariner Ref 5512 with Still-Radiant Zinc Sulfide Markers - <AUTHOR> http://quillandpad.com/2014/11/25/afterglow-a-1967-rolex-submariner-reference-5512-with-still-radiant-zinc-sulfide-markers/

<comment><USER2> Please stop spamming HN with links to your web site.</comment>


There Are 101 Americans with Over $1M in Student Loans - <AUTHOR> https://www.vetr.com/posts/6498190136-There-Are-101-Americans-With-Over-1-Million-In-Student-Loans <comment><USER3> > Any balance remaining after 25 years is forgiven, effectively covered by > taxpayers. The forgiven amount is then taxed as ordinary income. -WSJ

It's going to be a pretty penny still to pay the federal taxes on a $2m+ loan (like, $400k, and that's not a loan, that's IRS money at that point).

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is Mark Meru allowed to pay back only 10% of his discretionary income? He has a $225,000 income and can pay back more than $1,590 a month for the education that got him to this salary level. Then he could make a dent in the principal.

<comment><USER5> Because... those were the terms the lender agreed to?

<comment><USER6> And because he realized how things were going, and refinanced at the right time, in a smart way.

<comment><USER7> And according to the article it is not that simple: the forgiven debt amount will be taxed as ordinary income. Which means he'll also need to plan for å substantial tax charge at the point when his debt is discharged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was discussed in depth in another post a few days ago. This guy also lives in a 5000 square-foot home, and based on a little digging by others, it appears he has more of a spending problem then a debt problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Bottom line: with so many borrowers set to default on their student loans, > those who can't make ends meet will be able to pay roughly 10% of their > income for 25 years. The remainder, such as Mark Meru's $2 million balance, > will be an obligation of the United States taxpayer.

Is this generally true now? I mean, "10% of income for 25 years"? That's not so bad, really. Only half of 20% income tax bracket.

<comment><USER9> _That 's not so bad, really._

That 10% is what middle-income people would typically use to save for things like a 401k, a house deposit or a car. If people can't afford those they'll be much poorer in retirement, stuck renting for much longer which will keep them poor, and for many it'll mean they choose not to have children because they're financially unstable. On an individual level these things are unfortunate; on a societal level they're catastrophic. An aging population can ruin an economy. Tax receipts don't cover basic services. It's happening in many places already (Japan, UK, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does anyone think it's a good idea to take out $1M in loans for an education? Yes, tuition costs are ridicules and in general students have no control over them. In general, I feel like students are taken advantage of. HOWEVER, students certainly can choose not to attend a certain school. If you choose to rack up $1M in debt, I feel like that's solely on you and your (obviously) poor decision making skills.

<comment><USER11> This article focuses on a man who took out ~600k in loans to become an orthodontist. That interest has since compounded to 1mm. I would imagine he took the loans out because becoming an orthodontist was his highest-paying career option. Had he known that the variable-rate loans would be impossible for him to pay off he probably would not have taken them out. We should not be putting aspiring medical professionals in this position.

<comment><USER12> While we are at it let's stop artificially limiting the number of medical professionals.

<comment><USER13> So the state will be increasing the budgets for university medical departments, then ? In contradiction to what has been done for decades now ?

So, what I mean to say is that we will be increasing taxes some amount (not much, but let's say 0.5%) to allow for this and other subjects to train more people ?

(medicine is actually one of the most expensive things to train, requiring lots of tools, infrastructure (literally entire hospital complexes), ...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Costs are out of control and university interests are not aligned with student interests in this matter. It seems like federal educational lending should be capped at some lifetime maximum ($200-300k per student?). The higher ed industry will figure out the cost side of the equation in a hurry when students no longer have unlimited access to credit.

<comment><USER15> The state should get out of the business of guaranteeing student loans entirely and instead only give grants. The loan guarantee system is exactly what misaligns university and student interests in loans. Universities have no disincentive to give students loans they can't pay back.

I don't think a cap would change university behavior - it would only affect a few students, who would be tossed out by the university to make way for the next students.

<comment><USER13> But the rub is in congressional abuse of accounting practices.

A loan guarantee "costs":

1) in reality: the future default rate, times the average loan that gets defaulted on

2) in theory: the past default rate times the average loan amount

What's wrong with this:

a) default rate : the default rate under very different circumstances: the default rate for guaranteed-by-the-state loans vs the default rate for large- personal-consequences loans

b) amount of the loan: average loan amount vs average amount that gets defaulted on. Everyone who's ever had a late credit card bill knows the vast difference here.

So congress got to vastly overspend, giving the money to banks (>72% of the dollars spent will be at the banks in the end, according to one study), while pretending to give it to their constituency (students, overwhelmingly democrat), in a way that will drive a wedge between them and republicans for decades ...

So of course they did this ! I mean, sure, it will throw a decent number of those people into destitution constantly for decades, but it's not like that's going to make those guys change their vote. Oh, mor... ? M-what ? Oh, morality ? I donate extensively to my self-owned charities !

I mean, let's give credit where credit is due here. Democrat party : I bow to your absolute genius.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I worked at a university that frittered away $150 million on a software rollout that was eaten by consultants and ultimately failed in every regard. Also, the same university is on a building binge, replacing donated buildings barely 10 years old with shiny new ones. Given the cost of CIP projects, that's why tuition is so expensive... the universities playing "Keeping Up With the Yales" by pouring money into construction. If it weren't for building binging, tuition would be much saner and in the realm of affordable for the taxpayer to prevent stalling the economic futures of students to be chained in debt with a degree that doesn't help them enough to escape white-collar poverty.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's absurd that becoming a medical professional requires saddling yourself with an exorbitant amount of debt. My doctor friends advise people contemplating med school not to go for this reason. It's incredibly sad that the economic situation is incentivizing intelligent people to stay out of medicine.

<comment><USER17> I'm willing to bet that the AMA caps are keeping more smart people out of medicine than the costs are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like the US finally have a government-financed higher education - <USER2> some sorts...

</comment><comment><USER19> Next congress will pass a law forcing these debts to be transfered onto your children.

</comment><comment><USER20> Herd mentality: if everyone is getting a degree, i must too. If getting a degree is an investment, why don't put as much money in there as possible, if ROI is constant?

Both wrong. Most people who are getting college degrees nowadays simply can't make enough use of them to even break even. People have to stop! They are the only ones to blame; capitalism has no checks in place to prevent people from harming themselves, maybe that's bad, but ultimately, it is their decision to get a diploma they don't need and can't hope to put to good use, is to blame.

<comment><USER21> I come from a country with free education and the latter part is just plain wrong.

Autodidact people are nearly always terrible programmers because they haven't learned how to think. The few of them that actually understand CS principles are typically unable to work in teams because they've never been taught the fundamentals of working together. If they do have the right sort of personality (extremely rare in CS) they wont have the business side of things, making them unable to work with the people they are making systems for.

Of course I lead teams in digitization where, self management, team work, business and customer interaction is part of what my programmers need to do.

I've hired a lot of people by now, back between 1995 and 2005 a lot of them didn't have much of an education behind them, and we've frankly spent 5 years cleaning up their mess since.

Today we simply require a degree.

It's a little different in the IT department, they prefer certificates over degrees, but a lot of university engineering programs know this and give their students the essentials.

We do have a mix of technical degrees. There is the candidate or bachelor(people typically never stop here) at the universities for the full education, but we also have various academy degrees that are "almost bachelor" programs, which focus less on the theoretical and science things and more on practical application. Both roads are perfectly fine, but you really need that piece of paper if you want a job that requires any sort of thinking.

<comment><USER22> What does learning to think mean? People who haven't gone to college can't think?

<comment><USER21> Part of an education is learning theory of science, analytical methods, best practices and scientific reasoning. At least that's part of a higher education in Denmark.

I'm sure people without degrees can learn in this on their own, but they are much less likely to have done so. So why would I bother taking the risk?

It's about probability. People with no degrees are a bigger risk than people with degrees. That doesn't mean there aren't people without degrees who aren't better, but it does mean I won't allocate the resources it takes to find them.

I'm not looking for the _best_ candidate, I'm looking for a _good_ candidate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you owe the bank $10,000 the bank owns you.

If you owe the bank $1,000,000 you own the bank.

Probably not entirely accurate for this situation but I would still love to see the risk calculations for allowing a ~mil in student loans.

<comment><USER24> The numbers are a little outdated -- multiply by 10 or 100, then it's more relevant.

<comment><USER23> No argument on that I should probably just write it with variables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My ingenious solution: don't buy so much education, if the loans are too much.

You know you shouldn't buy a house, a car, or a business asset which you know you can not afford or leverage to pay for itself, why do you take on debts (and make other decisions around payments) that you know you can not repay? I have to hope that people aren't counting on bailouts, but given the political rhetoric that gets tossed around, it's hard to imagine that doesn't factor in to people's poor decisions.

<comment><USER26> I think this is too black and white of a perspective.

First off, plenty of people buy cars they can't afford out of necessity. Or, rather, they NEED a car for work and buy a cheap used car that inevitably needs repairs and sucks up money they need for food, rent, etc.

I think attending college is a similar type of decision. We're told over and over that college is the only path to decent life, and in many ways it is. There's very little hope of someone without a degree making more than minimum wage and even less hope of doing meaningful work. If they're already poor, getting a job right out of high school won't pay enough to help improve their quality of life.

So they go to college hoping things will be better.

<comment><USER25> > _I think attending college is a similar type of decision. We 're told over > and over that college is the only path to decent life, and in many ways it > is._

You're also told that Harvey's makes your hamburger a beautiful thing, that smoking Marlboros will make you a man's man, that Tesla will deliver the Model 3 at the promised rate, and that you can keep your doctor. If your contention is that people should not be judged for believing what they are told, then I guess you could make that case. I certainly don't agree.

> _There 's very little hope of someone without a degree making more than > minimum wage and even less hope of doing meaningful work._

I think there is something wrong with this, I have had 10th+ percentile income since I was 17, and I never attended high school. I get the impression that a number of people who have gone to college may have spent money and time better on books and begging for an internship. The people who benefit from college don't need assistance paying it off.

I'm aware I lost something by not going to college, but I figure it can't be too bad, if I can't really tell what that something is.</comment></comment></comment>


"Human Error" in high-frequency trading temporarily causes AAPL to plummet 9.4%  - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/23/apple-trading-halted-resumes/?iid=SF_F_LN

<comment><AUTHOR> there is no way this is an accident.

from the article:

 _As it happens, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day that the Securities Exchange Commission was investigating the high-frequency exchanges -- including BATS -- as part of a broader probe into whether the new trading platforms are using their high-speed links to the major stock exchanges to gain an unfair advantage._</comment>


Vulnerabilities in Heroku's Build System - <AUTHOR> http://titanous.com/posts/vulnerabilities-in-heroku-build-system

<comment><USER2> _Heroku offered me a paid penetration test contract, but required that I sign a retroactive non-disclosure agreement which would have precluded publishing this article._

Worth pointing out: virtually _all_ paid pentesting engagements are delivered under NDA. In fact, more often than not, they're done under the far-stricter terms of a master agreement with detailed IP clauses.

If you're talking to any firm about having your app tested, get an NDA in place, and don't feel bad about asking. Nobody who thinks they need it should forestall having their app checked out because they think the firm they're going to work with is going to try to make news out of their findings.

Obviously, if your customers find vulnerabilities themselves, all bets are off!

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course there was never any question that any new penetration testing I would do with them would be under NDA. What worried me is that the disclosure may not be made public if I was under a NDA that prevented me from publishing it. I didn't want to have any professional or ethical conflicts.

<comment><USER3> The retroactive part of the deal was a clear ominous alarm and you acted accordingly. I find great joy in knowing that you showed a pristine level of ethic behaviour in your security research. Well done.

<comment><USER2> Nothing ominous happened here at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Heroku's official response: [http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/7/3/codon_security_issu...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/7/3/codon_security_issue_and_response/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Very glad to see this not only documented, but patched extremely quickly. Heroku continues to impress, and Titanous is a credit to the security profession.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for taking the high road and exposing the issue rather than giving them the option to hide it (not saying they would).

<comment><USER6> This is the concept of Full Disclosure. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a really interesting insight into the way someone found access to a system but could someone explain to me why he needed PGP keys from heroku? I'm sure there is some good reason but if someone could tell me that would be great.

<comment><USER8> It's standard practice to encrypt your emails when sending potential security notifications to the party that you're notifying. Not only does it keep out prying eyes, it ensures the person sending the email is who they say they are.

<comment><USER9> "it ensures the person sending the email is who they say they are"

Although, if you're going to trust the pgp key you get sent when you mail someone asking for one, you don't have any more assurance that you're encrypting it to the person you intended, and you _almost_ may as well have sent it in cleartext in the initial email...

Get your pgp fingerprints in some out-of-band method of communication. (When was the last time anybody even heard of a key signing party? I attended on at the Perl Conference in '98 or '99 - don't think I've been aware of one happening in any of my circles since)

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case I was able to confirm the key by matching it with a copy they uploaded to <https://policy.heroku.com/security>

<comment><USER9> Good to hear.

Now the paranoid in me is wondering - if there's an attacker deeply entrenched enough to be reading their plain-text email, either on the wire between them and you or with sufficient root privs on their infrastructure, they could probably have arranged their own pgp key to appear there for you as well. If I were trying to ensure I was doing my utmost best diligence, I'd have tried to include a completely non-internet backchannel - perhaps a call phone number for Heroku sourced from a dead-tree phone book (if such a thing exists anymore?) and get someone to read out the key fingerprint.

<comment><USER10> if they're that owned, it's highly unlikely that you telling them about some additional vulnerability is going to help their attackers. and you'll figure it out soon enough when none of your proposed fixes are enacted.

<comment><USER9> True - but if they're _not_ that owned, TLS encrypted email probably would have been sufficient. (Though I'm not sure how easy it it to force/ensure TLS in common email clients…)

<comment><USER11> TLS only protects a single link; from your client, to your server. It doesn't prevent you from disclosure on that server, on any relaying servers in between, or between their server and their client (remember, they may be reading email on wifi in a coffee shop).

S/MIME email is another end-to-end encryption scheme, like PGP, but it isn't as popular among a technical crowd as PGP is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's a nice way of handling it, both from heroku and you who found the exploit. I feel content with my choice to use heroku.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm happy to see both parties in this situation acting with a great deal of professionalism. It feels good to be a part of this community.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a minor point, but one of my favorite details: the use of a simple table for the "Disclosure Timeline", which is really the clearest way to illustrate the step-by-step sequence of events. I would love to see this be a standard practice for any narrative in which order/visual comparison is vital. HTML tables are so easy to include (or, even bulleted lists).

A masterful explanation, on top of being an altruistic deed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps a fantastic example of why keeping detailed configuration in environment variables is probably a bad idea. Your private SSH key isn't part of the environment. It's configuration. Treat it as such.

<comment><USER9> Not sure that would have helped much in this case - he used dumping the environment as the particular avenue to get the "private" data, but he mentioned he had source code access and the ability to run untrusted code. If important credentials were in or available to the code, it sounds like they would have been vulnerable anyway.

It's a hard problem trying to secure credential that code needs to work, from other code running as the same user when someone has source code access to "authorised" code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well someone could have easily discovered the environment variables vuln without getting the source code, although it is unclear why so much was disclosed in env vars. It suggests that everything runs as the same user, or you would not get anything.

</comment><comment><USER17> the page is well composed</comment>


Ask HN: Why the "So long, Reddit" Post Removal? Just Curious - <AUTHOR>

It seems to have made a few good points on monetizing a community driven site along with caveats and all the other things that come with it including ethics associated to what's being monetized. This is a facinating topic and it should not be squelched.
I don't think we should pretend the underbelly of the net does not exist.
I noticed the "child porn" post was not removed from HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9868352
Original "so long reddit" article http://braythwayt.com/2015/07/11/so-long-reddit.html <comment><USER2> Users flagged them. User flags cause a post to rank lower; also, when enough users flag a post, the software kills it. We review those and usually unkill the ones that have an ongoing discussion (so discussion can continue), but don't usually override the rank penalty. That's what we've done with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149).

Please don't make posts to HN about HN post rankings. It's off topic, and the HN guidelines ask you not to do it, but rather to email us at email@example.com. We can't always answer right away, but we do answer, and if something needs to happen we'll usually take care of it sooner. For example, we got an email about the same post last night and although I haven't had time yet to answer the email, I did unkill the post right away. User flags ended up killing it again (I made a mistake and didn't turn that off), but that's atypical.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author here. One of the things that brought me back to HN has been that it has felt less dramatic than in times past. Whether that's flagging, or moderation, or the community changing its tastes, I don't know, but I value it.

I stand by my post as worthy of being written, but that doesn't mean it belongs on HN today. It could be that it does not address an issue that the HN community finds valuable, especially in a startup context.

It could be that it is a good post, but hey, it's the seventeenth similar post today. That happens, I recall some talk years ago about bundling posts so that there could be one discussion, but Hn doesn't, and there isn't room for seventeen posts on the same subject in one day.

It could be that it's a little heavy on my personal feelings and light on objective information. That's fine, a blog ought to contain subjective experiences, but a site like HN ought to weight towards information on the whole.

It could be that it reads like an SJW having a hissy-fit and rage-quitting, and we don't need that 'round here.

Either way, I just want everyone to know that I appreciate that some HNers value its existence, but I am not dismayed that it isn't going to be on HN. Regardless of what is happening to this specific post, on the whole I value the arc (heh heh) of HN's growth.

<comment><USER4> What did you mean by your statement "The practical reality is that Reddit seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world's largest White Supremacy community."

I took it as a probable statement of fact: more White Supremacists use Reddit than use any other single forum on the web. That is, while the percentage of total Reddit users that are White Supremecists is likely low (although much higher you desire), the total number is larger than any other single site because even a small percentage of a gigantic userbase means there are an awful lot of racist Reddit users.

Others seem to be taking it as an indictment of the entire Reddit community, and assume you are claiming that everyone who uses Reddit is racist.

What did you intend by the comparison?

Anecdotally, when I went through recently subscribing to specific subreddits, I don't recall hitting any overtly racist groups in the dozen or so pages of offerings I clicked through. I was surprised though by the amount of porn that was offered to me. It seems likely that by some metrics Reddit must be one of the largest pornography sites in the world.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to discuss this further, but I have a feeling that it's playing "dirty pool" to use a discussion about why the post was moderated as a side- channel for discussing the post itself :-)

<comment><USER4> Likely a good intuition, although I think it would depend on whether "moderated" means that after deliberation the moderators decided that HN was not the right forum to discuss your post, or whether a small minority of individual users decided that the discussion should be removed from the site.

I was hoping to see an official clarification, but haven't yet seen one, even though several hours have passed. Maybe this is the one weekend a year that Dan's briefly allowed out of the dark and damp HN dungeon where he is kept permanently chained in front the glowing green VT100 that is his only contact with the outside world? At least that's how I've always pictured him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic, but I generally found that most of the recent Reddit related submissions have served no real purpose other than give people another channel to complain about Reddit, the closure of the subreddits, Pao's actions, etc.

Any counter-opinions or questioning of the behaviour of the community, particularly those comments and actions which are now being identified as bigoted, receives downvotes or flags.

This might not be the time, or HN the place, to have a constructive discussion about Reddit's future.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think these were removed by a moderator. Rather, they are [flagkilled] because enough individual users flagged the article to pass some threshold. While it's possible that Dan has reviewed and approved this, I think it's more likely that he is off duty for a bit, and that original post will be reinstated when he's back. But we'll see.

In the meantime, could those who flagged either of these posts please explain their reasons?

<comment><USER6> I've been on the site for almost two years and I haven't seen something quite like this[0]. Do you think Darn or another admin (are there other admins) would reply to this question so we could know for sure?

[0] I don't say it with the connotation that I'm surprised given my experience, but the opposite: I haven't been around long enough to witness the response of the community during the heyday of such a controversial topic and want to know if the admins would actually respond

<comment><AUTHOR> I also noticed that this very post here was on the front page a few mins ago and now it's nowhere to be found on the first, second, third or fourth page. This is strange and begs some answers.

<comment><USER7> That's what happens when people flag posts, and it's especially common on posts asking why other posts were flagged -- it keeps too much meta discussion from taking over.

I didn't flag either of the other two submissions -- mostly because I've got pretty strict personal guidelines for flagging, and also because most such content doesn't have a long shelf-life on HN anyway -- but it would be easy to justify flagging them.

@raganwald is a great guy. I'm really grateful for his participation on HN. He's articulate and tends to carefully consider his positions. But, I don't think this particular article from him is going to lead to very valuable discussion. With all due respect to his experiences, it's a somewhat shallow, low-effort article. It doesn't say anything new about the balance between hateful speech and free speech, which really is the conversation that needs to happen. It doesn't acknowledge that Reddit is often the largest online community for any subject, including hateful ones. And, if it inspires any conversation at all, it's likely just going to be a lot of drama between the "anti-hate-speech" crowd and the "anti-censorship" crowd.

<comment><USER3> I agree with everything you're saying. There is a thing that applies to scientific theories, a question of whether they are _fecund_ , do they provoke more insights and thoughts and productive debate?

Some things I write might be very true, or very heartfelt, or very emotionally powerful, but not fecund. And fecundity is an important criterion for a site that uses posts as a catalyst for productive discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I had to take a guess, there's more than a few people that are tired of reading about reddit's staff shuffling this week, especially on sites that aren't reddit. It only takes a few people flagging a submission to kill it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This was one of the top-rated posts for a while, I'd imagine it spurred enough people to flag it that it got flagged:

>Karunamon 1 hour ago

        >The practical reality is that Reddit seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world's largest White Supremacy community.

>Are you kidding me? Flagged. And shame on whoever thought it was a good idea to bring this insulting garbage to #1 in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was certinaly not the import of the write-up and I think most would agree. The meat of the article addressed an underlying management and ethical issue with any community driven site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Links to the last two posts which have both been flagkilled:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872386)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149)

</comment><comment><USER11> Anything that talks about sexism or racism in the tech industry or website usually gets flagkilled here.

That is because it is more political than technical. This is Hacker News not Political News.

I made a comment in that thread and then saw it was flagkilled so I deleted my comment least it get downvoted. What I basically talked about is that racism exists and we should teach people to be tolerant and empathetic towards other races. That is Reddit or 4Chan banned their racist areas, they'd just go someplace else. That some subreddits have guidelines or rules that say no racism or whatever and enforce it.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it common for interviewers to know nothing about you? - <AUTHOR> I've been doing the software interview circuit lately, lots of phone screens and 1st and 2nd stage interviews. What I am finding is that the people who are screening/interviewing me know nothing about me, despite many of them reaching out to me directly. Why does this seem to be common?
I've made an extra effort to make sure my online portfolio documents things that I've built in a clear and concise way, but the traffic analytics on my portfolio tells the same story: nobody is investigating things I've worked on before they interview me.
In the interviews themselves, very few people have mentioned anything I've worked on, even when immediately relevant to the conversation. I'll ask if they saw "X", which shows my experience around the thing we're talking about, to which the response is always "no". The silver lining is, yes, it's an opportunity to talk about it now.
Am I being too self-centered to want this? I feel like my successes/failures in the interviews come from my ability to sum up my professional experience in 60 seconds, which is why I've gone through the efforts to have a strong online portfolio in the first place. I can understand that people are busy at work, and so they probably put minimal effort into the interview preparation, but to base their decisions about me on only an hour's worth of programming puzzles—without considering the body of software I have produced and made easy to review—feels dismissive to what I offer as a candidate. <comment><USER2> Same here. I recently had an interview where I was 100% qualified for the Job, it went swimmingly good most of the interview, but I realized afterward there was a discrepancy in terminology that made me look like I didn't have experience in what they were asking for.

The problem was that, with my experience and resume listing those things clearly, and the company in site need to fill this position, why didn't the interviewer ask a single question, even challenging my resume based on my answers.

I get it could've been a thousand other things, but this single exchange really stood out to me as something I would've delved deeper into in the interviews I've conducted.

In my opinion, as douchy as it sounds, the company lost out on not hiring me. They still have the posting up 3 weeks later, and wanted to spin someone up in 30 days because of a 4 month work backlog. Had the person asked maybe test more questions, they would've had someone in that spot.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get pulled in to do interviews and while I'm provided a resume/portfolio I'm never allocated time to review it in a through manner. I'll have a normal days workload scheduled and required to be completed then an interview meeting will be dropped on my calendar. If I'm lucky it will be a day or two out but usually it's the same day.

None of this is your fault as a candidate, and I only have the reference point of two places I've worked at where I was part of the interview process but both of the HR departments functioned this way.

While I wish there was more time to prepare the recommendation for hire or no hire really comes down to how well you can answer the trivia questions and how honest and genuine the candidate comes across.

This usually works out well but not always. Very much not ideal.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want to address your direct question: no you are not being self centered; that someone meant to be assessing you has a passing familiarity with your resume is an extremely reasonable expectation.

It might not be the interviewers fault if they aren't given adequate preparation time but that just means the place isn't taking hiring particularly seriously, or that they interview tons of people.

I realize it's not always possible to do so, but you and everyone else deserve to work at a place that treats them with respect, don't feel bad for desiring this most basic thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some people dont interview well. Some people are not a good fit for the current team etc. Try again and move on.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's worse when it's your doctor.</comment>


RetailXelerator: an accelerator focused on bringing startup products to retail - <AUTHOR> http://retailxelerator.com/ <comment><USER2> startups.co is promoting them [https://www.startups.co/articles/five-tips-for- startups-pitc...](https://www.startups.co/articles/five-tips-for-startups- pitching-retail-a-retail-executives-point-of-view)</comment>


Visual Studio Code 1.17 released - <AUTHOR> https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_17 <comment><USER2> Just a thank you to the VS Code team for the awesome work (and really love the new Terminal updates).

</comment><comment><USER3> Why was the icon color changed from blue to orange? Does Microsoft Word have color ownership of that particular blue? (then again, the color of the Insiders build is Excel Green)

<comment><USER4> It's not even a real Visual Studio, not to mention it's mostly used for writing scripts rather than code. So color can be any at this point.

<comment><USER5> Nor is Visual Studio for Mac - it's just repackaged Xamarin Studio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I really want is to be able to use vscode in a client server architecture. Kind of like a forwarded session, but with client code living on the client machine. Plugins, linters, etc, all living and running on the server. VNC is too slow on hires monitors.

<comment><USER7> The architecture largely if not entirely supports that. Extensions and language services in VS Code exchange a flavour of JSON-RPC 2 and can run over HTTP.

Check out "Monaco" ([https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco- editor](https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor)). Easy to drop into any project, and easy to back with OOTB or remote services. I use it in a few different projects for live config editing of custom JSON and XML schemas and excellent auto-complete capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A tip for anyone who's not used it: it's one of the best powershell environments I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish vscode could be a better PHP editor, some of the features I read are only applicable to JavaScript

<comment><USER10> What are you missing? I recently switched from Atom to VSCode and do both PHP and JavaScript in it without issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another post to just say thank you for this great product! Awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER12> Good stuff. It's attention to needs like "Import path quick suggestions" and "Folding Regions" that make VSCode a pleasure to use.

</comment><comment><USER10> Only gripe I have with VSCode right now is the fact that snippets have to be in arrays and not a single block.

</comment><comment><USER13> The new terminal looks great. Was there anything done to make it compatible with accessibility tools?

<comment><USER14> Hi I'm on the VS Code team, this is one of the next focuses for the terminal.

<comment><USER13> Excellent! Thanks for your reply. I look forward to learning how it's implemented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does VS Code have something similar to Sublime's Ctrl-Q macros?

</comment><comment><USER16> Great release as always. Thank you Microsoft and contributors!

</comment><comment><USER17> VS Code rulz.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice!

</comment><comment><USER19> Rant: Now they just need to get their shit together and get VS2017 to perform at least as well as 2015 again for large codebases or i'm sticking with Rider...

<comment><USER20> Visual Studio Code team and Visual Studio team are completely separate, AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Visual Studio Code: Wellp, at least it's better than Atom.

<comment><USER22> You're just a little bit special, aren't you?</comment></comment>


Anyone Know a Good SMS Payment Gateway? - <AUTHOR>

The ideal process is the user would put his phone number into the web app, he would receive a text message, "text back <some PIN> to pay $X," and then payment would send a message to the web app server, maybe GETing something like Y.com/payment?from=5555555&secret_key=ZZZZZZZ<p>I'd like to get recommendations on who to use, and it's be great to know if anyone has used SMS payments in their own projects, and how it worked out. <comment><USER2> Sounds a lot like what Venmo is doing (<https://venmo.com/>). I don't think they have an API yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com if you would like to play with our beta API.

</comment><comment><USER4> Twilio, Msgme.com</comment>