Mellow, the robotic sous-chef - <AUTHOR> http://cookmellow.com/

<comment><USER2> $400 is relatively expensive. You can get a 1100 watt Polyscience circulator for that much.

No circulator or water bath I know of requires vacuum sealers; all of them work fine with zips.

Also, not to nitpick, but duck confit only takes 8 hours or so; it's one of the easiest things to do with a water bath.

It looks neat, though. It'll be interesting to see if the cooling feature is useful, or more of a gimmick. That cooling system doesn't look powerful enough to chill down a low-temp cook (you're supposed to ice down anything you don't serve immediately); I assume you use it to delay the start of cooking?

<comment><USER3> Hey tptacek,

A lot of our copy is directed at people who're not that familiar with sous- vide and might have very basic questions when browsing. Let me clarify further:

-$400 is expensive, you're right. And we're not making that much of a margin on these right now. That's because Mellow does so much more than just warming water. Whether those features are valuable is another question.

-On the bags, we're probably the only device out there that can routinely cook using open, unsealed bags. Due to the tall, skinny geometric, you can plop food in non-ziploc bags and use those to cook you Mellow. Huge cost saving in the long run, no floating bags, and a much quicker operation all-in-all.

-You're right on the confit (though I like mine cook at 70c@24h), it's just an easy example. A chicken breast or large fillet steak would be a better example of something you wouldn't be able to cook for 8-12 hours with regular sous-vide.

-Well-supposed on the cooling.

Ultimately, Mellow's the product of almost a decade of frustration with sous- vide non-pragmatism. It won't be optimal for everyone, some people will do better with their Polysci's, but for busy home cooks like us, I think it's a hell of a help. Thank you for the chance to debate.

<comment><USER4> IANAchef but the video has the user selecting a "medium rare chicken breast". Is that a thing? =D

<comment><USER2> Yes. Longer consistent cook times allow you to pasteurize at lower temperatures, so you can serve chicken at a lower temperature than you would in a conventional oven. (I'm not saying you'd want to do that; I don't like pink chicken.)

Chicken is unfortunately one of the less effective things to cook this way. At the times/temps I'm comfortable with, breasts get mushy. Legs, on the other hand, "pink out"; the proteins from inside the bones leach into the flesh and give a bloody appearance which I can't get past.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I think most people equate "medium rare chicken" with food poisoning, so it was interesting to see that used in the video. Never knew that you could actually cook it safely that way.

<comment><USER3> Medium rare chicken is like medium rare pork. If you can get over your upbringing enough times to get used to it, you can never go back. It me took 3-4 times for each, and the only reason I stuck with it was that my snobbery overpowered my mother's education.

But really, sous-vide, medium rare chicken breast has a taste and texture you'd never think chicken breast could have. Same with pork, it's a revelation on all the things you miss out in the world due to prejudice and bad information.

EDIT: I've never gotten mushy breasts tptacek, how long are you cooking those things for? I do 1.5 hours@57-60C or so.

<comment><USER2> 60C is really very low for a chicken breast.

<comment><USER3> It's an acquired taste, for sure. 63C is still worlds away from what most people consider a normal chicken breast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 10 years ago Whirlpool introduced the Polara, a range that could also refrigerate the oven cavity until a timer expired or it was commanded to cook over the internet. It was a huge flop.

[http://insights-2-ignite.com/2013/05/06/3-appliance- flops/](http://insights-2-ignite.com/2013/05/06/3-appliance-flops/)

Obviously a refrigerated oven is a pretty complicated device - more than a cooled/heated water bath. The Polara had it's share of technical problems, but Whirlpool thought they were on to a new trend with this "smart" oven.

I'm a sous-vide enthusiast myself (Dorkfood DSV FTW), but by no means do I consider SV cooking a time saver. It's not going to make my day any more easy by kicking off a cook cycle from the office before I head home. In fact, part of the point of SV prep is that you can hold the cooked food for hours before finishing. Why do I need to precisely time the start if the end doesn't matter? Okay, perhaps eggs ready when I wake would be nice. But I could also kick it off before I go to bed and they would still be at a creamy 144F when morning comes.

The other problem is that you still need to prep ahead of time. Is a busy family going to handle breakfast _and_ dinner prep before going off to work and school? American families barely make it through breakfast as it is.

It's a nice looking product and I wish them well. But the use cases escape me a little.

<comment><USER2> Being able to come home from work with a protein ready to sear (Polyscience and hopefully soon Searzall represent) is definitely helpful. Also, have you held an egg overnight at 144f? That works well?

<comment><USER3> Proteins aside, auto retrograding potatoes is really nice. It's one of those techniques that makes a huge difference, but you'd never use on a regular day.

<comment><USER2> Starch retrogradation is neat, but you can do it with a normal circulator really easily. (I'm partial to the IiF 7 minute risotto trick).

What's the win with potatoes while I'm at work? I haven't done potatoes in the circulator successfully yet.

<comment><USER6> I read the IiF article, and maybe I'm just a newbie with sous vide, but I don't get how you parcook the rice. Based on this thread and other articles, I'm guessing you soak the rice in water first, at room temp, and then stick it in a bag in the water bath?

<comment><USER2> No, you cook the rice at ~150f or so, then cool it, then cook it a second time in boiling stock on a stovetop.

<comment><USER6> So that first time, the rice is dry? I would not have thought to try that at all.

<comment><USER2> Actually, in the IiF technique, no: you bundle the rice in cheesecloth and cook it in direct contact with the water (this is one of the rare cases (other than eggs) where you deliberately expose the heating medium to the food).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All: For some reason, more than one user went through this thread downvoting everything. Abuses like that cause accounts to lose voting privileges.

When you notice substantive and civil comments which have been unfairly faded out by downvotes, please give them a corrective upvote. This doesn't mean you agree with the comment, only that it didn't deserve to be faded. Usually, one or two upvotes is all it takes to get back to par, so each user can make a big difference here. For example, all of the abusively downvoted comments in this thread have now been restored by corrective upvotes. (I just contributed a few, but most were already there.)

HN has long had this self-correcting mechanism, but it's more important since we recently made some downvotes more powerful (cf. sama's recent post about this), so we're asking everyone to do it consciously when they see a need.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry to hear that, dang. If you think my presence here is harming more than helping, I'd be happy to stop posting.

<comment><USER7> By no means! You're doing great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What temperature-safe bags are out there?

I did some digging into this a few months ago and couldn't find anything conclusive. All I found were blogs, quotes, etc by wannabe scientists.

Of note:

• [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/)

Nearly all plastics (even the BPA-free ones) leach estrogenic activity chemicals

• [http://pprc.org/index.php/2013/networking/p2-rapid/do- plasti...](http://pprc.org/index.php/2013/networking/p2-rapid/do-plastic- chemicals-leach-into-food-from-sous-vide-sv-cooking/)

Basically said that there is little evidence in either direction

• [http://www.codlo.com/faq.html#.Ux5Ly- ddWlg](http://www.codlo.com/faq.html#.Ux5Ly-ddWlg) and [http://www.chow.com/food-news/107898/cooking-sous-vide-in- pl...](http://www.chow.com/food-news/107898/cooking-sous-vide-in-plasticis-it- safe/) and [http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Author-says-use-of- plasti...](http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Author-says-use-of-plastic-for- sous-vide-is-safe-2371038.php)

Says that bags made from polyethylene (PE) are safe while bags made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) are not.

• [http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2010/08/cooking-in-plastic- how-s...](http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2010/08/cooking-in-plastic-how-safe-is- it.html)

SC Johnson (Ziplock manufacturer) themselves do not recommend cooking w/ their bags. Note their bags are made w/ the supposedly safe (per the links in the previous bullet) polyethylene (PE)

Right now I'm very intrigued by sous-vide but am too paranoid about the plastics to make the jump.

<comment><USER3> Hey jadence,

The bottom line: No one knows how safe HDPE sous-vide is in the long run. There's nothing conclusive out there, though what little evidence there is points to it being safe. Nathan seems so think so, too: [http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/01/why-cook-sous- vide/](http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/01/why-cook-sous-vide/)

In the end you have to make a personal call. For me, the risk of undiscovered effects is vastly outweighed by the awesome food I serve.

I respect your concern, even if I don't share it, and I'm hoping to solve it soon enough, too. Be on the look out for a new product from us in the coming year.

<comment><USER9> I don't know a lot about sous-vide, I am more of a wood fire and smoking kinda person, but what would prevent you from using a stainless steel canister? That would eliminate the risks from plastic. Perhaps, a ceramic would also work?

<comment><USER2> You still need to put the food in something that keeps it out of direct contact with the water while not leaving enough space for air to insulate the food.

<comment><USER9> I see. So a hard sided container won't trasfer heat properly? Sounds like I need to talk to a friend in polymers to really get a grasp on the right approach because I can't really think of a non-polymer material that would meet the flexibility requirement.

In general it seems like sous-vide would result in food similiar to a braise but without the browny bits and the pan sauce? (saying it that way makes it sound unappetising but I understand it is quiet nice) That said, I think while it doesn't have the asthetic of a wood fired smoker, a device like the op's could replace the slow cooker.

<comment><USER2> Noooooooo. Food is not similar to a braise. The point of low-temp cooking (sous vide is low temp under a hard vacuum) is that the cook locks in a perfect temperature for the food and the water bath never exceeds that temperature. In practice, you aim never to exceed the temperature at which the protein expels all the water from the food; think: absolutely perfectly cooked steak --- or, more magically, think a short rib, cooked to the doneness of a perfect steak, but with all the collagen converted to gelatin as if in a braise; it's the best of both worlds. Because a short rib cooked to the temperature of a perfect steak in an oven would be tough as nails, it's something you can really only achieve in a water bath.

There are other tricks too; you can simultaneously cook a dozen eggs to perfect running or "walking" yolk, without paying any attention; you can cook veg to a temperature between the breakdown of pectin and cellulose; you can heat-temper carnaroli or arborio rice and set the starches, so that you can make bulletproof risotto in a pan by dumping all the liquid in at once.

It's a pretty nifty tool.

<comment><USER10> Can you elaborate a bit on the risotto? I've never gotten a clear answer on how that's supposed to work.

<comment><USER2> The premise is amylopectin retrogradation. Heat a starch to the point where it breaks up and liberates its network of amylopectin. Cool it, and the starch crystallizes in a much stronger structure. Heat it again, or (in the case of, say, potatoes) beat the hell out of them in a blender, and they'll retain their structure; they become somewhat bulletproof.

Retrograded arborio is stable enough that you can dump boiling liquid onto it, stir it, reduce the liquid, and end up with perfect risotto --- rather than carefully tempering the rice with small amounts of slowly stirred liquid. Hence: 7 minute risotto.

It turns out you can also simply hydrate risotto rice (soak it in cold liquid for a couple hours) and do the same thing to it, but it doesn't hold long term the way the retrograded risotto does.

These ideas are due to Ideas in Food, a really amazing blog. The authors have published a couple of books; their first (I think it's just "Ideas In Food") is one of my favorite cooking books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been debating trying to make a sous vide machine that can chill and uses a smartphone/tablet for control for two years. I ultimately decided it just wasn't worth it because the only application I could think of for the chilling was egg poaching, and even sous vide I prefer to gradient poach rather than equilibrium. (75C for 12 mins gets a firmer white with a runny yolk than I could at equilibrium).

But I can't wait to see what they and their community come up with. The UI on a smartphone at least has to be better than the current state of the art. And I'd love to hear how they're cooling the water.

<comment><USER3> Hey matt,

I knew other smart people out there had the same idea, great to meet you. Mellow comes out of the frustrations of having the knowledge and equipment to cook great food, and never using it because of lack of energy. We started with the problem and ended up with this technology.

Feel free to reach out to firstname.lastname@example.com, or even preorder a unit and join the gang. (shameless)

<comment><USER11> I will reach out! I really can't wait to see what sort of uses you come up with. Every now and then I get annoyed by a 36 hour cook, because I'm rarely awake 12 hours before dinner time. But I'm sure you guys will come up with better uses for the cooling than that even.

<comment><USER3> I'm excited to ship units and what more creative cooks come up with, I'm boring, I only think about products these days.

<comment><USER11> You might want to talk to professional chefs about a pro version. They'd love to not have to have someone come in at 6 a.m. to start a 12 hour cook for that night's service, at least the ones I talked to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your payment form is not secure, even though it makes a submission over SSL, the fact that it is hosted on a non-SSL page exposes it to Man in the Middle attacks. An attacker may, for example, change the iframe URL to something controlled by the attacker but looks like the payment form on your site, and trick users into giving them their credit card details.

The fix is simple, make your whole site https and redirect all http traffic over to https. There are cheap SSL certificates out there (as low as $99 a year) and its pretty easy to setup.

<comment><USER3> Happy to say we should be fully secure now, all the traffic is going through SSL-hosted pages. I can't thank you enough for bringing this to our attention.

Could I ask you one more favor? Would you check to see if we're as safe as possible now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The timed refrigerator -> cooking -> {refrigerator / warm} cycle alone makes this a really, really nice idea.

The thin clear container and large volume of water is going to be a bit rough on power consumption for that use-case though.

<comment><USER3> Hey mapt,

The water bath's double-walled, so that power consumption isn't heinous. We're looking at nonofficial steady-state heat losses/gains of 15-30 Watt at the most common temperatures.

<comment><USER13> Fantastic.

I do have a suggestion on the thermodynamically disfavored process of changing the water temperature rapidly though. Could you simply hook up one or two other reservoirs? Drain the 'cold' tank to one of those, preheat the other, then pump the other in and suddenly you're cooking.

Or just accept hot/cold faucets with a once-through system for rapid changeovers, followed by precision temp control on recirculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Founder/designer/actor here, glad to see HN pick Mellow up! I tried to post it myself to little success earlier. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

<comment><USER14> A small detail: Centigrade!!!

Only old people and Americans use whatever that other temperature unit is, for the rest of us '195 F' means absolutely nothing. Is it what a warm day feels like in 1957? Or boiling water? Or just below the boil, a simmer?

In your web page just put what the temperature is in normal Centigrade units underneath. We will then be able to relate to what it does properly - temperature is a huge thing in cooking as I am sure you know.

I know you aren't selling to The Rest Of The World yet, but a lot of people from The Rest Of The World go to the United States and it is only a small amount of text that is asked for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As an owner of a $2k+ Thermomix (which can do sous-vide in a very confined and limited fashion) this interests me and $400 doesn't seem outrageous if it can become a regular tool in the kitchen. I do wonder how much is covered by a slow-cooker though.

Going on the TM, my concerns would be cleaning (doesn't seem like a big issue) and how much of a meal it can actually do.

With the Thermomix, we found it went from gimmick to regularly used device quickly enough - marinades, sauces, pureed baby food, mashed potato, etc. Besides weigh, heat, blend, etc it can also work to a set temperature (though with broader increments) and I eventually tried some steak sous-vide. Vacuum sealed bag, into the basket (to prevent the blades from rupturing the bag) and away it went. It worked OK though the steak obviously needed to be seared at the end. That left me rinsing the TM and still having to wash the pan/griddle, etc.

If you still need to prepare/cook your sides, I wonder how much time has truly been saved? I've had reasonable success with the slow-cooker too: one-pot dish so cleaning is easy, sides aren't much of an issue, etc.

I imagine that the value in Mellow will come once the community strengthens and people work out a set of go-to recipes that minimise other mess and prep.

<comment><USER3> We've learned a lot from using TM ourselves. I'd encourage to try cooking proper sous-vide somehow; the TM version doesn't do it much justice. The temperature control just isn't there.

You're right that a lot of the value in Mellow is going to come from the community, but it's already massively nice to have a device cook your ingredients to their peak before you step in and finish the process. You're going to have to cook, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For some definition of robotic... I guess networked crockpot doesn't have the same ring.

<comment><USER3> Hey andrew,

It fits! I think defining robot as an anthropomorphic thing that moves around is too constricting. Mellow is an electromechanical machine that performs complex actions, based on natural language requests, taking into account its environment and context.

I think that's pretty robotic, but I welcome the debate. Didn't mean to be at all misleading, sorry if it seemed so.

<comment><USER17> I expect a "robotic _sous-chef_ " to clean and chop ingredients for me, then prepare the food. This is much better described as a smart _sous-vide_ cooker.

<comment><USER18> I clicked the link imaging a moving robot that chopped/prepped food. It was the _sous-chef_ part that made me think that. I don't think I would have interpreted robotic _sous-vide cooker_ the same way. That being said, I definitely think 'smart sous-vide cooker' is a better description and more useful tag-line.

<comment><USER3> I understand that, and I'll admit I didn't mind the ambiguity when I was choosing headlines.

Ultimately,what made me choose the "robotic" one was that we're not trying to build a smart sous-vide device, sous-vide is just technology. We're trying to build a quiet servant. And that won out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great looking web site. Perfectly in tune with the product; at least that was my impression. I wish I could eat it.

<comment><USER3> Thank you! We have a great web designer, I'll pass it along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Relevant reddit discussion on r/hwstartups: [http://www.reddit.com/23mshg/](http://www.reddit.com/23mshg/)

tl;dr

\- Uses the Electric Imp platform for wireless communication

\- cannot be used without smartphone/tablet/computer/internet connection

\- heats in about 10 minutes

\- not to be used for cook -> chill

<comment><USER3> We also have a thread full of great questions on PH: [http://www.producthunt.co/posts/mellow](http://www.producthunt.co/posts/mellow)

<comment><USER21> Best Product Hunt AMA yet.

<comment><USER3> Thank you! Happy to field questions wherever I find a smart audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this is the first internet connected kitchen device that I have seen actually make it's use case for having an app or being connected.

I'm really impressed and while not having any prior experience with sous-vide I can really see making it part of my cooking process.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, I notice that it's quite possible to set on autopilot, but is there an option to have more control, in the case of recipes we find separately?

Is there some sort of way to know if the power went off? If so, does it check the temperature to see if it was just a surge or if it went into the danger zone?

I'm trying to reduce the amount of meat in my diet, personally, and most applications seem to be for meats. Are there significant advantages to getting one for anything short of slow carmelized onions and a few soups?

<comment><USER3> Yes, yes, and yes. It's worth it for what it does to fish and seafood alone.

You're right though, meats have traditionally been the main focus in sous- vide, but it's by no means limited to them. Pears are amazing, eggs too. Risotto, potatoes, and carrots are insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Surprised not to see any positive comments here – this is exciting stuff. The IoT should be changing the kitchen faster than any other room in the house (it's the room with the most gadgets to begin with, with the potential for the most time savings / life improvements). There's not a lot of serious projects in the kitchen yet, and there should be so many more!

<comment><USER3> Thank you dftf. I blame twitter-fridge and the stupidity of most kitchen gadgets for numbing people to the power of well-designed products in the kitchen.

Most of the groundbreaking stuff has been with us so long that it's become invisible. Who really appreciates have access to cold storage these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The first thing that sprung into my mind:

 _That thing will be a bloody mess to clean_.

There's a reason why most kitchen appliances aren't rectangular and don't sport a lot of grilles, if any. And it _will_ have to be cleaned at some point, like anything in a kitchen (or closed rooms, for that matter). Rectangular fluid containers are the worst.

(Other than that, seems to be a fine idea).

<comment><USER3> We're expecting cleanup to be very easy; mostly a wipe-down every once in a while. But you're right of course, kitchens are messy places and we certainly took that into consideration. The grille is entirely necessary for Mellow to function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This looks really cool!

I've been interested in getting into sous-vide for a while, but I'm not sure where to start. Could anyone point me to some introductory resources? (websites, maybe cookbooks?)

I'm interested in learning the difference between different equipment setups, and also understanding what works well for sous-vide and what doesn't.

<comment><USER27> I enjoyed the sous-vide section of Cooking for Geeks, (and the rest of the book is great too!) That's enough to get started.

<comment><USER26> Thanks! I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to say, this product sounds pretty cool, but for myself, I got really excited about sous vide, even made my own immersion circulator from Scott Heimendinger's plans a few months ago, but when I fried two aquarium pumps due to long times at high temps, I knew I had to get a commercial model. I ended up ordering an Anova, and at $200, it's just at the high end of what I feel I can afford. A $400 machine could easily be twice as good, and I'm still not sure I could convince myself to part with that much.

In addition, the new crop of immersion circulators (Anova, Sansaire, etc.) don't need very much space- they just clamp to an existing pot or whatever. It seems to me the Mellow has a very hard fight for precious counter space on top of the price.

<comment><USER3> We're designing Mellow to be used every single day, and optimising for that means a constant presence on your countertop.

Our idea is that instead of making sous-vide as cheap and simple as possible, we want to make it as useful and effortless as possible. I hope there's room for both types of product.

<comment><USER6> I hope you're right. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is exciting - I think the fact that it has cooling built in easily puts it apart from crock pots for convenience - allowing you to go from the fridge to the stove is really cool.

Now I just have to resist getting a peltier module and making one of these before 2015...

<comment><USER3> Hey Alex,

I'd encourage you to! Can I help in any way? (Mellow's designer)

<comment><USER28> Thanks! I'll just try to be patient though :) Good luck with the product :D

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I'm already lucky, look at this page :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Admittedly, I don't know much about state of the art sous-vide, but I'd be really interested to see a device with two reservoirs that can be held at different temperatures and fill/drain the main water bath.

Hypothetically, this would allow for cook->chill methods, though the overhead may not be worth it except for a small niche of customers.

<comment><USER3> We actually played around with that idea a year ago at the insistence of a local VC.

Result: wasted a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Any plans to open the device up to API access? I know a lot of cheese makers who need a specific series of heating steps and it's currently a major pain in the ass with available SV setups as it all has to be done manually. A way to program it in would be awesome.

<comment><USER3> It's a definite possibility, but we're 100% focused on delivering the feature- set we promised before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Shouldn't the title be renamed a bit. I was expecting a rosie the robot type sous-chef robot. This is a smart sous-vide appliance, not a "robot" in the traditional sense.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it just me or are a lot of the comments on this post getting greyed out? I thought that was only for flagged/sufficiently downvoted comments? What the heck is going on here..

</comment><comment><USER33> I am curious since I have never cooked sous-vide. I see pieces of meat being cooked in the video, so does that mean I would have to come home and prepare the side dishes?

<comment><USER2> For the most part, yes. Vegetable cookery tends to happen at temps north of 175, and protein cookery tends to happen at temps south of 140 or so, so you can't really use the same unattended water bath for both.

<comment><USER34> I typically do the veg in bulk for the week and ice bath->fridge them, then reheat in the water bath while I'm finishing the meat, but yeah, it wouldn't work to do simultaneously (unless you e.g. wanted traditional-texture braised meat, which works quite well in a veg-temp water bath).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's this cost? The pre-order button doesn't actually bring up a pre-order screen for me.

<comment><USER3> Crap, that's happened for some people and we can't find out why. Could I ask you to try out the direct link? Sorry about that:

[https://www.trycelery.com/shop/mellow](https://www.trycelery.com/shop/mellow)

<comment><USER36> Happened to me too, on Chrome 35.0.1916.47 beta. I've seen the same issue with other sites using Celery as well.

<comment><USER3> Sorry about that, I'm on Celery's case about it. hopefully they'll fix it soon enough.

<comment><USER37> This bug is not really one. At least not in my situation. I'm using Disconnect chrome extension ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacaf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacafpbcihiomhlakheieifhpjdfeo)) to block all sorts of tracking. When the website is whitelisted the pre-order screen works. Not tested, but I assume this could also happen with other ad- blockers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Looks like a great improvement on the sous vide. Is there a prototype?

<comment><USER39> Did you watch the video?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is basically a Mr. Coffee.

<comment><USER3> Pretty much. The video was a trip to walmart + a quick 3-d printed cover.

</comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit Already posted yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622369)

Edit: I always love when people get offended by facts.

<comment><USER7> When a story hasn't yet gotten significant attention, a small number of reposts (2 or 3) is ok. Otherwise, many more good stories would get lost to randomness and churn.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Yes. And some times you guys merge them and the original submitter gets the credit. And some times you just kill the dupes. I was just pointing out that previous thread like so many people do every day here. I wasn't being a dick about it. No need to flog me for it. But what ever. HN has its finicky moments.

<comment><USER7> I certainly didn't mean to flog you! Was just trying to clarify what sorts of reposts we allow vs. kill as dupes. Merging wasn't an option in this case because the prior submission was too old to make the front page.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Thnx. You were not the flogger. I was referring to the handfull of people that were so pissed about my post they needed to downvote it to nothingness.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Am I living in a parallel universe to think my idea is super awesome? - <AUTHOR>

So I  thought one day while searching for some code snippet on the web (because that's what developers do), how cool it would be to have a website where for a particular problem I can see a list of various implementations in one place. And the code snippets are already validated with test cases and I can try them online to see if it suits my purpose.
I tried searching for such a website. Nothing found.
"I can make this and its an awesome idea" I said to myself.
"I need to be careful, all the traffic I would get would overload my server" the naive self said.
So a few a weeks later I deployed a first version, initially for c#
http://volatileread.com/UtilityLibrary?id=1083
And then I waited..... And waited.. No users.. Shared the link on HN.. Din't even make it to the first page. Opened Analytics, saw 10 sessions. Digged deeper, they were all from me.
Is something wrong with me to still think this is an awesome idea? <comment><USER2> I like the idea. Some thoughts:

\- Microsoft built this as well, it's called Bing Code Search: [https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9-4a48-a5fd-504ff4ad1b65). It fetches popular snippets from StackOverflow and it should come with nice integration in Visual Studio, but unfortunately it doesn't work for me. I don't know what they're doing with the project but it seems they abandoned it.

\- I never heard of your project. I can't use it if I don't know about it.

\- It's probably too much of a hassle to search for your site and then search for a snippet. I'm better off just searching for the snippet on Google, much faster. StackOverflow usually provides multiple different ways to solve a problem.

\- You don't want people to submit their snippets to your site. Too much effort, won't work. Just get the data from stackoverflow if you're going to pursue this idea.

\- How will you make money? Or isn't that your goal?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. I would like people to submit their versions of code. The snippets then can be then be compared on the basis of perf & mem (in progress) based on test cases as they share the same contract. But all this would require a community which I don't think the site is capable of.

Making money is secondary, I just need to cover the server costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the idea is average. If you search on Google, you'll likely find a code snippet for most questions. StackOverflow has the advantage of comments and opinions, which add more value, instead of just a block of code. Right now, you have no content, and the idea looks like an afterthought added to your existing site. If you want to give this a try, then...

1\. Get a catchy name, like Snippr.com.

2\. Setup categories for different programming languages.

3\. Write code snippets for the most common functions people are looking to find. For example, visit Google and type... 'PHP how to', and you'll see frequent search terms, people wondering how to connect to a MySQL database, how to send an e-mail, how to upload a file, how to get the current URL, how to redirect to another page. People are looking for these answers, and they're easy to write. You can write hundreds of these snippets in a day and start building content.

4\. SEO. Right now your links are [http://volatileread.com/UtilityLibrary?id=1084](http://volatileread.com/UtilityLibrary?id=1084). They should be [http://snippr.com/php/how-to-get-the-current- url](http://snippr.com/php/how-to-get-the-current-url).

With that being said, I don't think it'll work. People don't open their browser and visit a site of code snippets. Instead, they have a problem, and they search Google for the answer. Showing up on the first page of Google for these common terms is not an easy task. You're competing with successful sites that have existed for the better part of a decade. I honestly don't think you'll be able to outrank them, and therefore you'll receive little to no organic traffic, and that's the traffic your site will rely on.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a fairly popular site that's similar to your idea - [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Programming_Tasks](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Programming_Tasks)

Your idea is good. You need to figure out how to incentivize users to submit code.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is an awesome idea. You just have to turn into an awesome product now. Even though the software is there, the product still lacks development (like said here already: SEO, Marketing, etc.)

You need to translate your goals into KPIs and optimize for those.

That being said, I think your idea would be incredibly amazing if it offered some kind of IDE integration. I believe Visual Studio had something similar a few years ago, but I don't believe it ever caught traction. Maybe worth it to research and see why it didn't work, and how you can improve on that.

From my perspective it would be amazing to read discussions about code, and get the most used (upvoted) snippet into my code, without ever leaving my IDE.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nope, this is an awesome idea, I've had it myself several years ago.

My immediate reaction to your implementation:

\- C# is icky.

\- Would be cool to automatically compare performance of solutions, e.g. timing, memory footprint, etc.

\- "Run" button doesn't appear to provide any output?

When I had this idea, I also wanted to be able to provide sample inputs and outputs, and have all potentially matching functions run, to see if any match.

In general, you've hit the problem of building a community without an actual community magically appearing. Keep at it.

<comment><USER6> Ok, played with this a bit, and added the Hamming Weight snippet. Seems to work fine in the solution-tryer, but I can't add a test case; even the blank default gives:

[CS1501] No overload for method 'TestCase_0710c06f5bfa4a9b9b44678df9dd933e' takes 0 arguments

Again, I'd say keep at it, and try adding a lot more content. Hell, I wonder if this is something you could even hire random CS students to add content to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey.. Thanks for trying it out. I'll see what is the problem with the test cases.. You see nobody was using it..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My impressions:

Build this into a collaborative desktop app instead. I'd much rather have an incredible UX built on top of code snippets I can drag out into my IDE.

I think this already exists; I've used something similar, but the UX and searching was poor, and their was no collaboration.

You'd have to nail the indexing.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't see a real difference to stack overflow.

You should also learn about online marketing. Having a great product isn't enough to get traffic. I don't want to be offensive but your product isn't even very awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for a honest feedback.. But I think I'll continue working on this.. May be some day I'll have a few contributing users..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea, but you need to execute and position much better. Here's a book that will help you do that: [http://brainaudit.com/](http://brainaudit.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think you need some serious SEO, because most developers I know just take the first or second applicable result from Google.

See also, StackOverflow. How is your site different from that (except for being more focused)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stack overflow doesn't allow you to run solutions nor compare different solutions for the same problem. I know google isn't being nice to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Your idea is fine, and looks useful. But as with any idea, the implementation is what matters.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a great idea, but C# is not popular with the Hacker News audience.</comment>


RSS feed aggregator for European Web startups - <AUTHOR> http://europeanstartups.com/aggregator

<comment><USER2> no aggregated RSS stream?

could have made this in Yahoo Pipes..</comment>


Real-time tech support with Olark integration into your client-side app - <AUTHOR> http://breakthebit.org/post/75335427347/real-time-tech-support-with-olark

<comment><USER2> Love the use of the !command feature, great post, and excited that it's helping you out so much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice work! Keep hustling guys.</comment>


A calculator for the Terminal that renders beautiful math - <AUTHOR> https://kary.us/nota/ <comment><USER2> Ah, such a nice set of features, _and_ case-insensitive identifiers?..

I mean, if I do math or physics, I usually follow conventions, so I expect G to be usable as the gravitational constant, while _g_ to be usable as the free-fall acceleration, maybe in the same formula.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that seems a very strange choice (stranger than spaces in identifiers!). TikZ allows spaces in some identifiers, and it can be quite nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stay tuned and I will push an update for you guys to have lowercase/uppercase single letters. You can currently use single letter latin instances like Beta and Beta'

<comment><USER3> Why "Beta" and "Beta'", not "beta" and "Beta"? (Following e.g. Latex.) It seems like it would be useful to be able to define identifiers like "Φ'" (though maybe that's "Phi''"). It also seems a bit inconsistent to not allow an identifier π to be defined - some people use the symbol π for other purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is because the language is case insensitive and therefore normalizes the words so Beta and beta will not differ once they pass the parser.

<comment><USER4> That's a bad idea - every system that is case insensitive has eventually regretted it because it just leads to confusion. E.g. Mac's filesystem, Cmake ([https://stackoverflow.com/a/35034125/265521](https://stackoverflow.com/a/35034125/265521)). Almost all modern languages are fully case sensitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been making languages for quite a while now. And between all of them I've really like the idea of case insensitivity. Nota is mostly about what I wanted to have and couldn't find in other places. It's way of identifiers too was an important thing that I wanted to have. Having apostrophes, case insensitivity and spaces was an important thing that actually even effected the rest of the grammar design

<comment><USER5> I think what you've done is very beautiful and I hope you'll accept some feedback with equanimity.

You haven't made a language here, you have implemented one. That language is mathematical "Nota"tion.

You've implemented it incorrectly, because mathematical notation is case sensitive. A doesn't mean a, any more than it means α.

It is, of course, your project, and your sense of aesthetics which must ultimately be satisfied. I hope you will consider what I and others are trying to communicate to you, because I would use this, if it weren't broken from my perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not that I don't like or respect your ideas. Truth is that what I ultimately wanted on my end was to do the challenge of rendering notations with Unicode and then I thought let's have a simple calculator with it. Nota is not a super capable calculator, to what I see it's only the bare minimum. It's for the times when you need quick thinking and wanna do a few quick calculations.

I personally love case insensitivity because it is really hard for me to remember the cases. I love macOS for its case insensitive file format and each time I design a language—and Nota is not mathematical notation, it is its own language with its own grammar. Just like the way Mathematica is its own language—I seek to see if having case insensitivity is possible. I loved it that with Nota, because the language was so simple I could even have spaces in the names. These are awesome for quick doings.

I haven't resisted to the idea of case sensitivity though. But to be honest never thought about it.

For the sake of beauty nota renders each word in first-letter-Upper/rest-Lower since this was the most beautiful representation I experimented with. I will add the A and A' to have both a and A (and the rest of the letters) this was if someone really loves to have the distinguished cases they can and I can keep my easy to write and beautiful in print style.

I think this solution is the win-win. And also I think if you regard Nota as a separate language with separate ideas; You can have more fun with it. It's like watching How I met your Mother and trying to use it to replace Friends, it'll make a bad experience, but regard it as a its own series and you then can see its beauty

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use _Insect_ [0][1] as my calculator and it is great and does not have the odd choice of having case-insensitive identifiers plus does not require me to have _Haskell_ installed. I would prefer if _Insect_ was written in a compiled language but I am glad that it exists and JavaScript is really not a deal breaker for me as I need _nodejs_ installed anyway (the same cannot be said for _Haskell_ and this is going to be true for most people) plus you can get "compiled" single binaries for it from the release page[2] that you can put in `~/.local/bin` and not worry about it. I highly recommend trying it out. A bit slow to start but if your window manager supports hiding/showing bound windows through user defined shortcuts (like bspwm, awesomewm, i3, sway, herbstluft and most other tiling window managers) then you can just have it launch in the background on startup and you will have a convenient calculator just a few keystrokes away.

[0] [https://insect.sh/?q=%3F](https://insect.sh/?q=%3F)

[1] [https://github.com/sharkdp/insect](https://github.com/sharkdp/insect)

[2] [https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/releases](https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/releases)

<comment><USER7> Also python with pint installed can be a handy calculator similar to this. Many people have python installed, but don't use it as a quick calculator.

<comment><USER7> And sympy installed of course...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks a bit like Mathcad for DOS back in the 80s:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad#/media/File:Mathcad_25...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad#/media/File:Mathcad_252_screenshot.png)

[https://books.google.com/books?id=zjAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA63&dq=m...](https://books.google.com/books?id=zjAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA63&dq=mathcad&pg=PA64#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER9> My favorite tool to double-check O:) my math homework was derive [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_\(computer_algebra_system\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope that we will eventually get image support in terminals, and then projects like this can be much easier and still much nicer and more powerful, e.g. also plotting graphs, and much more, similar as what you get in a Jupyter notebook.

There is a long ongoing discussion about an upcoming standard for image support in terminals: [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal- wg/specifications/is...](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal- wg/specifications/issues/12)

<comment><USER11> Kitty

<comment><USER10> Kitty also has their own custom protocol for images. That's exactly what they try to accomplish in this discussion thread, to get one common protocol which is used by all modern terminals. The developer of Kitty is also in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dan-robertson I guess the Unicode output is nice but I feel like my biggest issue is one with input. One thing that is annoying is you get half way through your line and realise you need an opening paren several terms ago. It can take a load of time to find the place to put it and a load of effort to make sure things are correctly balanced. I feel like the operator I wish I had is something like "extend the left operand leftwards" e.g. go from this (with cursor represented by a bar):

      a + b * x + c /|
      to this:
      a + (b * x + c) /|
      And apply again to get this:
      (a + b * x + c) /|

It (e.g.) let's you write fractions without needing to use loads of parens (which have a cost as they must be balanced) or needing to think about whether the numerator will have more than one term.

I guess with rich input I'd also want to see the output in "big" mode.

Another way to try to make input easier is to use rpn. This has advantages and disadvantages.

Currently the calculator I most use is gnu Calc (I also use R occasionally for calculating quantiles). GNU Calc is the calculator built into emacs. It has an rpn interface and an algebraic one. A nice feature of the algebraic interface is that you can use $ to mean "the top entry on the stack" and so you can incrementally build up an equation. A second feature is selections. Their internal implementation is weird (based on hidden "functions" and rewrite rules) but they work fantastically well for modifying and manipulating the inside of a formula or equation. It also has a "big" display format which looks a bit like this one except that it predates Unicode symbols being common and so is pure ascii. (It also has tex output and emacs has image support but no one has put the two together yet)

Mainly I use Calc because I'm in emacs anyway and it has a ton of features that are easy to access (eg arbitrary precision floats, bignums, modular arithmetic support, complex numbers, interval arithmetic, vectors, matrices, algebra, curve plotting/fitting, unit conversions, ...). I feel like the variable support isn't great. I feel like I want to eg have some set of variables, defined to be various input numbers, and write formulae in terms of them and then get the formula on the left without variables substituted and it's numeric evaluation (with them substituted) on the right. There's something weakly like this using => but it doesn't compose well. If you add a => 1 to b => 3, you don't get a + b => 4, you get (a => 1) + (b => 3). (I think. My memory is a bit rusty for the last example).

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks really cool, but this statement

> Nota approaches identifiers much differently than any other language.

is not actually true. Goldman Sachs have an internal language, Slang, which also allows internal spaces in identifiers, and where identifiers are case insensitive. I believe it originated as an MIT research language so probably there are others with a similar approach.

<comment><USER13> > Goldman Sachs have an internal language

I think we can forgive them for saying that if the exception is not readily available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very good design skills.

<comment><USER15> I slapped my forehead seeing the dashed borders... Why didn't I think of that before?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice to have all that power on the command line. The system uses the notation with square brackets for function calls, e.g. Sin[x], so ppl familiar with Mathematica will feel right at home.

The SymPy Unicode output mode also does a pretty good job on the command line. You can try here [https://live.sympy.org](https://live.sympy.org), for example [https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=(1%2F2)%2F3%20%2B%202%2Fsqr...](https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=\(1%2F2\)%2F3%20%2B%202%2Fsqrt\(sin\(pi%2F2\)**2%2Bcos\(pi%2F2\)**2\)%20%2B%20floor\(E%2F2\)%0A%23--%0A\(19%2F6\).evalf\(\)%0A%23--%0A) (see Settings on the side to turn off LaTeX rendering)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah but it wasn't the prettiest. What I learned through my experiments was that not all of the notations render beautifully and so I chose a subset that is pretty and kept the rest rendered just as functions. This honestly wasn't a try to have full mathematical notation rendering, but rather my own preferences of notation rendering. Yet, I hope you enjoy it :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks very neat, but why does the project have zero tags or releases? I also notice the GitLab instance isn't even accessible over https.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quite right. I used to be on GitHub and they banned me because of my nationality. So I had to make my own server. I still haven't had the chance to made the SSL work, sorry for that, but issues were really bigger than that so...

<comment><USER18> Oh, hey! I worked with you on a Racket VSCode project a while ago and wondered why you suddenly stopped responding. The GitHub ban might've been the culprit there. Glad to see you working on another interesting project!

<comment><AUTHOR> How cool! Nice to see you again. Yeah I had an overflow of issues coming and github ban and then a personal trauma that made me put down so many of the project. Please email me and I'll add you to my GitLab. We can resume the progress there if you still like :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The use of brackets to denote function arguments and pretty text output in the terminal reminds me very strongly of using _Mathematica_ from the command line.

[https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UsingATextBa...](https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UsingATextBasedInterface.html)

<comment><USER20> I always found it odd about Mathematica that a low level programming language like C gets closer to mathematical notation with sin(x) than Mathematica with Sin[x]

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two reasons; first is that I tried to render parentheses in the terminal and they didn't look good, it was brackets that looked good. So that is the actual reason but also writing brackets do not require shift so I prefer it myself to type more easily

<comment><USER21> > but also writing brackets do not require shift

So your target audience is strictly (US) English?

<comment><USER22> This, and issues like it, bug me so much. So many keyboard shortcuts are unusable by default on QWERTZ, for example any shortcuts involving /, [ or ]. They require modifiers to be typed, so those are swallowed for shortcut purposes.

Of course, it is (almost) impossible to account for the enormous amount of keyboard layouts that exist, so I wish we could agree to use key positions over the characters they produce for shortcuts, so we can cover a significant portion of the population with ANSI/ISO layouts. I'm honestly not sure what keyboard layouts are used in countries with entirely different scripts, but my cursory Google searches suggest the physical layout is the same as ours.

Sure, you might lose some mnemonics on layouts that aren't QWERTY, but at least the majority of shortcuts would be usable by default compared to having to remap them in every application. The application could even resolve what keys are actually mapped to the physical keys and display the correct shortcut in menus.

Destiny 2 actually seems to do this and does, as far as I was able to tell, an excellent job of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> view-source:[https://kary.us/nota/install.sh](https://kary.us/nota/install.sh) -> [http://codes.kary.us/nota/nota.git](http://codes.kary.us/nota/nota.git)

<comment><USER24> Or fix the SSL. One of those must occur before this works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised the gitlab page has no issues, and the Nota.cabal file still points to what appears to be a stale github repo.

</comment><comment><USER25> Parts of this reminded me of Calca ([https://calca.io](https://calca.io))

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow you're absolutely right! It was a big inspiration for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A beautiful language with a beautiful notation and beautiful ideas is perhaps a bit too much beauty for my taste

</comment><comment><USER27> A mirror for those who are unable to git clone:

      https://github.com/pmkary/nota

<comment><USER28> That is out of date.

* [http://codes.kary.us/nota/nota](http://codes.kary.us/nota/nota)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shameless plug: If you prefer java, try [https://github.com/stefanhaustein/expressionparser/blob/mast...](https://github.com/stefanhaustein/expressionparser/blob/master/README.md#tree- building)

Bonus feature: symbolic derivation

</comment><comment><USER29> It does look nice, but it seems to be missing complex numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. those beasts. I really like to have them implemented someday!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Neat!

One documentation nit: "Parenthesis" is singular; the plural is "parentheses".

<comment><USER28> "Expect for the Pi" instead of "except for pi" is another.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks I'll fix that too :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Beauty sure has a low standard these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or we may call it different tastes :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's beautiful! It's a real shame that Haskell isn't portable.

<comment><USER33> What modern desktop or server platforms does it not run on?

<comment><USER34> It seems not to run well on some platforms like the minds of developers who don't want to take the time learn it.</comment></comment></comment>


Solar Orbiter's first images reveal 'campfires' on the Sun - <AUTHOR> https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_s_first_images_reveal_campfires_on_the_Sun <comment><USER2> I love how explosions that would be rated in gigatons of TNT are described as "Campfires" when we are talking about the sun!</comment>


Senate takes another stab at privacy law with proposed COPRA bill - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/senate-takes-another-stab-at-privacy-law-with-proposed-copra-bill/ <comment><USER2> Once again we continue to look at data privacy and identity theft in the wrong way in my opinion. To me the solution is very simple. If you are reselling my data, allowing access to my data, or deriving data / servives from my data that identifies me in any way and then selling that to a third party for a profit or giving it to them as part of a license so that they can generate profit from it (including ad targeting or analytics) then when I visit your site or use your service there should be a big box in simple to understand English, not legalese or a lengthy EULA, that says "we [do one of the things listed above], are you ok with that?" If I say "no", then you cannot descriminate against me and you cannot do those things. You still have to let me use your site or service; you still have to provide me with identical services; etc. You can still show me ads (non-personalized), charge me a bit more money commensurate with the value of my data, or introduce a different monetization method, but you can't deny me service all together.

Further, if you collect my data, YOU are liable for it. Breaches should not be the user's problem. Meaning, if someone walks off with the contents of your database containing my PII using anything less than a crazy number of zero days, you are liable for a set financial penalty per user's info lost (in the way HIPAA does it) and / or you are liable in perpetuity for protecting against identity theft with an insurance policy. I don't need to prove attribution. If I ever have a problem that could plausibly be linked back to the data exposure, you are liable for damages.

Finally, it should not be the user's problem to clean up identity theft, ever. If a bank opens an account in my name without properly authenticating me, that is the bank's problem, not mine. It should be up to them to conclusively prove it was me that did it, not up to me to prove that I didn't. Does this mean it will be more complicated to open up various accounts and credit? Yes. Does it mean that there will be lost business for these institutions? Yup. Tough luck; that is the price we have to pay.

The entire point of this should be to heavily disincentivize collection of PII unless absolutely necessary for core business function.

<comment><USER3> So it sounds like you're okay with Google collecting all your data because your description doesn't cover them

> If you are reselling my data

Google doesn't resell data

> allowing access to my data,

Google doesn't allow access to user data

> or deriving data / servives from my data that identifies me in any way

Google doesn't let people be identified from the data they collect.

> and then selling that to a third party for a profit or giving it to them as > part of a license so that they can generate profit from it

Google doesn't sell data to a third party for profit.

I'm 100% for a law that prevents that scammier companies who do all the things above to stop doing those things. Just pointing this doesn't cover HN's most hated company.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that makes what they're doing ok. I know this is a really unpopular opinion on HN but I think google is actually a really good example of ethical data collection. Sure they scrape up just about everything they can get, but they hold onto it themselves and have repeatedly demonstrated that (unlike facebook etc) they try hard to protect it and won't let an arbitrary 3rd party access it. They just let advertisers target demographics, so long as you don't actually click an ad your data is never accessible to advertisers.

Someone has to pay the devs to make their services, someone has to pay for the server farms (and the electricity to run them), someone has to pay for their open-source efforts, etc. They have to make their money _somehow_ and people have demonstrated over and over again that they're unwilling to pay for services like gmail (remember when hotmail used to charge a monthly fee for email service if you wanted more than like, 500mb or something?)

(I don't and have never worked at google)

<comment><USER5> There is no such thing as ethical data collection, as long as that data contains personal information about individuals. The very act of collecting data is problematic because, as history has shown us, data troves cannot be protected long-term and that eventually the company and others will abuse that data.

This already happened to Google. Not only they got hacked, but various governments successfully get access to all that data both by asking and by taking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Summary: [https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/COPRA%20One- Pa...](https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/COPRA%20One-Pager.pdf)

Press release, including endorsements by EPIC, law school professors, Consumer Reports, Georgetown Center on Privacy & Technology, and others: [https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/news/press- releases/cantwell...](https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/news/press- releases/cantwell-senate-democrats-unveil-strong-online-privacy-rights)

Bill text: [https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/COPRA%20Bill%2...](https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/COPRA%20Bill%20Text.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like it was written/sponsored by four Senate Democrats. In other words, no chance this is even going to get to a vote, unless/until the balance of power in the Senate changes.

<comment><USER7> The article agrees with you.

I do wonder if this could be a bipartisan issue, as it really does concern a lot of people online. It could easily become a wedge issue, "protect your children from the evil internet corporations—look the other side is doing nothing about it!"

<comment><USER8> Can anything be bipartisan right now?

<comment><USER9> Plenty of things, we just don't often hear about them because that'd be boring news.

<comment><USER10> The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act has been all over the news and passed with only one vote against it in the House.

The DMCA was also bipartisan, which has made me very skeptical anytime that word comes up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this law only applicable to some definition of "online" companies? Why not a generic privacy law that applies to all?

</comment><comment><USER12> Title is misleading, as usual for Ars Technica on politics.

> group of Senate Democrats

Not "Senate".

Minority parties don't get partisan bills passed into law.

<comment> munk-a > Minority parties don't get partisan bills passed into law.

I don't really see this bill as partisan in nature, though it only currently has Dem support consumer protections are something both parties should be able to get behind.

<comment><USER13> It is partisan at the moment because, while it is neutral in nature, it only has support of the one party. They may get (enough) Republicans on board, but given the current political climate, I'd guess it's rather unlikely, unless Trump decides this is a good way to fuck with his nemeses i.e. FAA(N)G.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's a truly awful acronym.

<comment><USER15> Maybe the'll trim it down and call it COPRA LITE.

<comment><USER16> I vaguely felt that with the meh name the bill's not gonna pass. But now, seeing as I'm not a native speaker of English, I have a definite need for someone to explain the pun.

<comment><USER17> Coprolite is the name for fossilized poop

Copro- is a suffix that generally applies to poop-related things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _COPRA also seems to take the challenges the EU and consumers have faced > since the GDPR went into effect into account, as it specifically tasks the > FTC with making sure those rules not only require "clear and conspicuous" > notices to opt in or opt out of data collection and transfers but also "to > minimize the number of opt-out designations of a similar type that a > consumer must make" (such as an "accept cookies" warning on every single > website one visits)._

I think I need a cigarette after going through the dependencies and embeddings in this sentence.

</comment><comment><USER18> I assume the privacy law they're trying to stab is CCPA?</comment>


Swap Space in Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.bytetrap.com/blog/2008/06/02/swap-space-linux/

<comment><USER2> The rule of thumb (swap should be 2-3x RAM) has survived because it has minimal downside (you don't generally miss that amount of disk) and a small upside (you see performance degradation as the first symptom of memory overloading, rather than processes dying due to failed allocations).

Yes, if you know your workload very well, you can trim off the spare space and make it smaller. But the risk you run is that a change in circumstances will make itself known by failing jobs, rather than slow-running jobs. And the benefit you gain is very small.

A keen sysadmin could also trim swap down, if they're sure they'll notice warnings early enough in the event of a problem.

(This assumes 'normal' amounts of disk+RAM in a box (i.e. diskspace at least two orders of magnitude bigger than RAM, so you're sacrificing of the order or 2-3% diskspace). Unusual devices might reasonably make different tradeoffs).

</comment><comment><USER3> The article misses a lot. Swapping happens often even when there isn't directly pressure on memory. Because Linux very aggressively keeps recently touched files cached in memory (usually, although not always, a performance win), it will swap out unused processes—again, even when there's plenty of memory to go around.

How aggressively Linux swaps stuff out can be tuned via /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, although it's arguably still too aggressive even when swappiness is given a low value.

<http://lwn.net/Articles/83588/> is a little dated at this point, but overall still correct.

</comment><comment><USER4> I still don't follow the article's conclusion that you need 2x as much swap as physical memory. I generally go with physical memory + 100-200MB. That leaves enough space to suspend to disk even if you use a bit of swap in normal operation; I've never had problems with that setup on systems that have enough RAM to be tolerably fast. If in doubt, buy more RAM - it's dirt cheap at the moment.

<comment><USER5> I agree that having a lot of RAM is a good idea.

However, I also think you should make your swap space as large as possible-- many times larger than RAM, if possible. Then, instead of having on-disk indexes, on-disk caches, and on-disk temporary files, have your applications cache everything in memory-resident data structures. The operating system will automatically swap stuff in and out as necessary. The better your operating system's VM, the better the performance will be. Save explicit disk usage for things that must be persistently stored like database tablespace files.</comment></comment>


How Facebook killed spam - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1721252/how-facebook-killed-spam

<comment><USER2> Should have been "How Facebook permitted all kinds of spam as long as the market could bear, then stopped and got lauded by FastCompany for fighting spam". Sheesh.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get a lot of spam on facebook. The main categories are:

1\. Applications unwittingly installed by naive friends that post annoying updates all the time to my wall, effectively hiding the little signal in there. Each time a friend uses a new application I get more spam until I hide it. A variant of this is the unhideable notification that a friend started using a new application; getting rid of these requires hiding the friend forever. Both these examples require an action not simpler than using gmail's "filter messages like this" function to mark them as trash.

2\. I have some relatively popular friends who are often unwillingly tagged in cheap promotions, religious events (they're atheist), musical events they're not attending, etc. This effectively spams all their friends with a "this person has been tagged" notification until they decide to remove themselves from the list.

3\. I have also received unsolicited facebook messages of a very dubious comercial purpose that I would report as spam in gmail.

All in all the signal-to-noise ratio in facebook ends up being so low I have a twitter account specifically for keeping up with friends, and it ironically enough makes it easier to do the low-cost maintaining people usually associate with facebook.

Most of this comes from the fact that, while I mostly trust my friends, I can't trust all of them (as refusing friend requests is usually seen as very rude), and while I can (and do) hide friends, I can do nothing about the bad friends of my good friends, and those end up being a regular source of spam.

<comment><USER4> the best way to increase the signal to noise ratio is to install a third party filter program. FB Purity, is an excellent example, it filters out all the previously mentioned application spam, and also lets you filter out events, facebook places, tagged in messages, etc etc. You can hide as many message types as you like, you will notice a huge improvement, you can get it here: <http://www.fbpurity.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "(Indeed, search Google for "stop Farmville notifications," and you'll get over 50,000 results.)"

Why do people always insist on citing the number of Google search results as a measure for popularity?

<comment><USER6> It's worse in this case since the author didn't include the double quotes around her query string. Doing so, I get 8680 results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't seem like too hard of an accomplishment (compared to traditional spam detection), I mean, all of the spammers in this case are registered and accounted for by Facebook.

Granted, the end effect is actually quite nice. I block every application that pops up. I even think I turned them off blanket fashion. Kudos to FB for allowing this.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't see how this is different than the typical spam fighting tactics used in email. Email providers like gmail take action on messages that are flagged as spam across their network.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be very useful to share those per application analytics to Facebook developers so developers know which messages are getting reported as spam / liked / etc instead of just telling developers after the fact that their message is now blocked (or their app got killed).

<comment><USER4> that would be a boon to the spammers though, as it would let them fine tune their messages until they can get through the filters</comment></comment>


Ask PG: How many YC W13 applications submitted for the next batch of companies? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, how many women submitted applications? [Encouragement for my daughter.]

<comment><USER2> Might I humbly suggest that there are better ways to encourage your daughter?

Here's one: [http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/01/sacca-styleseat-is- likely-t...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/01/sacca-styleseat-is-likely-to- become-my-third-or-fourth-best-investment/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good article (sent link to my daughter). Unfortunately, 500startups and many VC's in general don't accept/seriously-consider direct online applications without referrals from someone they know like YC does.

<comment><USER3> Thats right. Though,as pg says, your choice should not be a subject to you being chosen</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New tool streamlines the creation of moving pictures - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2018/10/24/new-tool-streamlines-creation-moving-pictures <comment><USER2> Much better examples are found in the authors' supplemental materials [0], showing the input to the program (the raw image annotated with circles and an arrow) and the results. I particularly liked the Calvin & Hobbes animation [1], which shows a couple different types of movement that this algorithm can do.

[0] [https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/supp/ind...](https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/supp/index.html)

[1] [https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/supp/dat...](https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/supp/data/music.html)

However, as far as I can tell, the shown inputs for the Calvin & Hobbes image are incomplete; I think it must've had multiple different object extraction steps, as seen in [2] to separately animate the rotating arrows, falling rain, and rising evaporation.

[2] [https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/supp/dat...](https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/supp/data/water.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we download the tool anywhere?

<comment><USER4> I don't see it in their zip file...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just watched the video, but is it correct to assume the inputs to this are:

\- Manually specifying layers in the image by depth.

\- Manually specifying all the objects you'd want to animate.

\- Providing an animation direction and type.

Then it generates an animation?

<comment><USER6> From the abstract[1], the only input is selecting a few of the repeating elements, and drawing motion lines. Depth and background are detected automatically.

[1] [https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/](https://pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Willett_2018_AMI/)</comment></comment>


Fifth of world's food lost to over-eating and waste, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10570.html <comment> entrance-right Most people on Earth will certainly be forced to change their eating habits because of increasing prices. The more people we are, the more food must be produced. But space on Earth is limited. All prices are defined by supply and demand. If supply is low, but demand is high, prices will increase.

Everyone should have seen the film "Soylent green". It shows us our future. And i don't like this future.

I think we should try to reduce the world population to 3 or 4 billion people. This would solve a lot of problems. We also wouldn't be forced to think about food security, genetically edited or modified foods or crop losses because of climate change.

I am ready to help.</comment>


EU passes Article 11 and 13 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/the-eu-votes-on-a-confusing-new-copyright-law-tuesday/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is still the vote in the European Council on the 9th of April, so it might still make sense to contact your MEPs or anyone who can pressure the heads of state in your country.

For anyone in Denmark, here are contact details for the Danish MEPs:

\- Margrete Auken - +4561625450 - firstname.lastname@example.com - [https://twitter.com/MargreteAuken](https://twitter.com/MargreteAuken)

\- Bendt Bendtsen - firstname.lastname@example.com - [https://twitter.com/BendtEU](https://twitter.com/BendtEU)

\- Ole Christensen - +4522200830 - firstname.lastname@example.com - [https://twitter.com/oleeu](https://twitter.com/oleeu)

\- Jørn Dohrmann - +4561623349 - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/mepdohrmann](https://twitter.com/mepdohrmann)

\- Rina Ronja Kari - +4526701816 - firstname.lastname@example.com - [https://twitter.com/rinakari](https://twitter.com/rinakari)

\- Rikke-Louise Karlsson - firstname.lastname@example.com

\- Jeppe Kofod - +3222837463 - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/jeppekofod](https://twitter.com/jeppekofod)

\- Morten Løkkegaard - +4521608001 - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/loekkegaard_mep](https://twitter.com/loekkegaard_mep)

\- Morten Messerschmidt - +4561624232 - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/MrMesserschmidt](https://twitter.com/MrMesserschmidt)

\- Morten Helveg Petersen - firstname.lastname@example.com - [https://twitter.com/mortenhelveg](https://twitter.com/mortenhelveg)

\- Jens Rohde - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/rohde_jens](https://twitter.com/rohde_jens)

\- Christel Schaldemose - +4540768626 - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/schaldemosemep](https://twitter.com/schaldemosemep)

\- Anders Primdahl Vistisen - +4553860080 - email@example.com - [https://twitter.com/AndersVistisen](https://twitter.com/AndersVistisen) reply</comment>


Why play when you can code? MakeGamesWithUs helps the new generation make games - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/26/why-play-when-you-can-code-makegameswithus-breeds-next-generation-of-gaming-prodigies/

<comment><USER2> Link to game making website: <http://www.makegameswith.us/>

Unfortunately it's Facebook login only to sign-up and use this currently.

Does anyone from makegameswith.us know if they'll be changing this anytime soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, removing the login wall is on the TODO this week. Account creation will be Facebook only for the time being, but you soon won't need an account to browse the site's content.

<comment><USER3> Are you also going to support Android in the future, or even desktop gaming ? Not everyone is interested in iOS. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Desktop gaming I don't know. Android yes.

<comment><USER3> Good to know. I assume you may be interested to do tie-ins in the future with the other YC-funded company, Humble Bundle :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly off topic, but the title intrigued me.

I love coding. For me, there is nothing more satisfying than sitting down with a project, identifying problems and trying to solve them, and emerging victorious some time later. It can be something as small as writing a parser for a fictive language (with the hopes of writing a compiler eventually): The rush when I can finally run "parse sampleProgram.prog" and I get the desired AST is amazing.

However, coding is something that takes considerable time, not to mention the large amounts of mental energy needed to work on even small projects, and sometimes I simply don't feel like I would be able to complete anything of significance. How many times haven't I sat in front of my computer at 10pm, knowing that I should head to bed in an hour or two, with plenty of coding projects I want to work on, but knowing that starting probably wouldn't lead very far, simply because of the investment of time and energy needed to produce anything.

Those are the times where I resort to games, movies, TV-shows, books or similar. Lately I've been trying to focus more on reading books, since they almost always leave me with a more lasting feeling of satisfaction, but in the past most of this time has been spent playing games.

I want to get better at coding and I want to work more on some of my projects (I am notoriously bad at finishing stuff, something else grabs me and I lose interest, or maybe it's because I get demotivated every time I encounter something hard), so I wish that I could get more stuff done in those late hours.

Have others experienced the same, and how have you dealt with it? I realize that sometimes your brain needs to unwind, but I feel like I'm not getting enough out of my evenings. Does anyone have any suggestions for cool programming projects or exercises that could be worked on when you're a little bit tired at the end of the day? How do you motivate yourself to work on those little pet projects when all you want is to kick back and watch a silly movie?

<comment><USER5> gagege, you have been hellbanned. When you post comments, very few people can read them. I checked your comment history and my guess is it was the "thank you, captain obvious" comment that got you hellbanned.

Sorry to be offtopic, I just hate to see people wasting their time here when their reason for being hellbanned is a bit dubious (there was only that one bad comment that I saw). It makes me paranoid; perhaps I am just talking to myself!

<comment><USER6> I suggest a system where users like us with "showdead" enabled can flag accounts that we think were hellbanned unnecessarily.

<comment><USER7> How is hellbanning supposed to be better than, say, a mod telling someone off or banning them and giving a reason for the ban? Assuming hellbanned users are actual spammers, they're still generating spam. Assuming they're not, legitimate and potentially interesting content is being stifled.

<comment><USER6> A lot of them are just idiots who post stupid stuff. Hellbanning stops them from creating new accounts.

Of course there are still plenty of them who seem like decent users who got off on the wrong foot.

<comment><USER7> Killfiles probably wouldn't solve that specific problem But I think they might be more equitable. Maybe if users could spend karma to upvote them out of a hellban?

<comment><USER8> I feel like I'm a responsible user and someone just didn't like one lighthearted comment I made. It's pretty upsetting actually. It's a shame but, I guess I'll just not post anymore. Will anyone even see this comment?

<comment><USER6> You appear to be unhellbanned, congrats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mean any offense to MakeGamesWithUs by asking this, you guys seem cool, but this is an honest question:

Why are developers, especially game developers it seems, so enamored with iOS? It seems like you'd get a bigger user base and less proprietary-API and marketplace-acceptance induced headaches if you developed for Android, Windows or browsers or something.

What is the draw? Is it just the thought that you might make more money on iOS?

</comment><comment><USER9> I haven't looked too closely at their tutorials. Last I looked they seemed pretty simplistic. Do they actually teach you objective-c? I saw maybe 3 or 4 pages of actual teaching, and then saw a link to some example, at that was it really... Maybe I'm wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> We assume you know some object oriented programming and we do teach you all the Objective-C you need to know to make an iPhone game with Cocos2D. Our last tutorial/project involves making a one-level Angry Birds clone. All of our games (<https://app.makegameswith.us/>) so far were built by students who learned through our tutorials. Nobody had touched a line of Objective-C before we got to them as far as I know.

<comment><USER9> That's cool. I'll take a closer look at it. I appreciate the response. Good luck with your firm!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Legality of hosting a subtitles site - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if somebody can clarify some of the copyright laws involved. Is it legal to host subtitles of translated lines? Is it legal to host subtitles in their original language (containing exactly the lines the actors said, for example)? I was thinking, since synopses of a lot of movies are available on wikipedia, that it would be legal to host something like translated lines, which are not originally written by the copyright owner, but i don't know about the original lines. Thanks :) <comment><USER3> If your question is about the legality of something, for god's sake, ASK A LAWYER.

Seriously.

And, by the way, if you have a medical condition, don't ask random strangers about that, either-- ask a doctor.

<comment><USER4> You are right of course, but I still think it makes sense to post a question like that in here to get some idea of whether it may or may not be legal. Consulting a lawyer is expensive and getting a feel of the territory - <USER2> least of which questions to ask - is a good strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Disclaimer: IANAL.

Answer: Of course it's probably illegal. A fair use argument could theoretically be made, but I don't think there's been an actual court case over it, so I would put any such argument in the "dubious" category.

But in practice, most publishing companies don't care; in some cases they will even support your actions. The only exception is when the original text _is the work in and of itself_ , such as with translating novels. Legal threats _have_ been thrown around in that case, particularly in the case of American companies licensing foreign works and then threatening fan translators who had been working on translations independently (see the "Support JAST USA's official localizations of Nitro+ games!" fiasco in which many translation groups were sent takedown notices).

That's pretty much the only case in which legal threats fly around period, as such companies view fan translations as a threat to their profits, while the original company who made $movie would love for more people to buy it, regardless of the language in which it is purchased.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is a little copyright intro for you. This is not legal advice; if you are in need of particular answers for your situation, please consult an attorney directly, as other commenters have indicated.

Copyright protects original creative expression. This is in contrast to general ideas, which cannot be protected by copyright. The difference between ideas and expression is hard to define, but a common example is that the concept of a story about two lovers torn by warring families is an idea (and thus unprotectable), whereas the particular story "Romeo and Juliet" is an expression of that idea (and thus protectable).

I think that most people would agree that the words of a movie are creative expression, and not general ideas.

What does someone else's copyright prevent you from doing? Copyright gives the author of a work four main exclusive rights: the right to make copies, to make derivative works, to distribute copies, and to publicly perform the work. If you perform an act that is within the author's exclusive rights during the term of a valid copyright, then you may infringe the copyright.

Subtitles and translations of subtitles would probably be considered derivative works, since they are derived from the original work, namely the movie.

There are also defenses to copyright infringement. Two come to my mind: fair use and the DMCA.

Fair use permits you to perform acts that would otherwise be infringements, because of certain public policy interests. It is extremely difficult to determine what constitutes fair use. Two considerations that are important factors are whether your use of the copyrighted work contributes something new to society and whether your use is taking away from a traditional revenue source of the author.

The DMCA provides a shield for website operators who accept user-provided content. If the website operator complies with certain requirements regarding taking down infringing content promptly, then the operator will be protected from many claims of copyright infringement.

Keep in mind that this is purely based on US copyright law, so things may be different if you are elsewhere in the world. Plus I am not considering the business side of things.

<comment><USER7> It's much simpler than that actually, copying subtitles is a direct infringement on the rights of the script writer.

Whether someone read the script to you over the phone and you copied it down or you took it from the movie makes no difference.

No need to get into derived works.

<comment><USER6> (No one's going to read this comment, but we might as well get it right.)

It is a derivative work when you transcribe subtitles because you put in your own creative (and copyrightable!) elements into it. You choose how to represent sound effects, how to disentangle crosstalk, how to transcribe dialect, and so on.

So, if the movie creator decided to rip your subtitles off and sell them, you could actually sue the movie creator!

As a practical matter, it makes little difference. Most judges won't parse this finely, and you are equally liable whether under the copying or derivation right.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, but that's a really thin layer to argue your 'original contribution' over. I think the script writer would have a pretty good case.

And hey, at least one guy read your comment :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't really matter if it's legal (thought it probably isn't) if it's going to piss off the copyright holders, they'll come after you anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of subtitles are extracted from DVDs and Blu-rays in theory content owners could claim copyright.</comment>


You can't trust the iOS Files app - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1218417506697850880 <comment><USER2> I sort of agree with the twitter poster, but, the iOS Files app seems to be getting better and more robust. My bet is that in a year it will be robust and very safe to use - I hope so because I find myself using my laptops much less and my iPad Pro for more of my writing and work.</comment>


Feature: non-YC startups to post to jobs.YC - <AUTHOR>

Obviously, YCombinator doesn't want its job board to turn into a free version of Dice.  ...yet I suggest that it would be a big boon to the community of people interested in startups, at little or not cost to YC, to allow firms that have, say, less than 5 or 10 employees, to post to jobs.YC.
To give an example (and, yes, you caught me, this is a large percent of the reason that I brought the topic up) HeavyInk is looking to hire a Ruby / Rails rockstar to help us do something amazing in the comicbook space.
http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1/topics/30
 <comment><USER2> You could help this along by requiring a karma floor before you can post a job.

However, I believe that the jobs tab is a significant competitive advantage for the YC portfolio companies.

<comment><USER3> Instead of a minimum karma, how about a karma cost.

If you contribute to the community you can expect the community to give back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why no requests for contract work or remote positions? I'm actually in your area, but I'm always curious what peoples' thoughts are on remote work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no moral opposition to contract work - I've been a contractor, and I've hired contractors.

There's a trade off.

Contractors cost more per unit time than do employees (in the short term), and are usually looking for the next gig. At a startup, we don't have tons of free cash, but we do have tons of potential. We'd rather reward someone with a promise of sharing in our success (which we have) than with twice as much cash (which we don't have).

As far as working on site versus off site: again, I have no moral objection to this, and I've done it myself. However, I'm not just hiring engineers to produce lines of code: I'm hiring them for their wide-ranging intelligence, their ability to contribute to the ideas bouncing around the office, and their ability to tell me when my ideas are full of shit. All of this takes place much more easily in an office. Finally, while most people who work remotely are professional about it, I have noticed that it becomes easier for someone to disengage, grow tired or frustrated, and mentally "check out"...and it's harder for me to detect this, and take appropriate action (a word of encouragement, an announcement that we're all bagging work for an hour to go get a burrito on the company's dime, or whatever else).

As much as I like the IDEA of remote work, and easily compartmentalized tasks, I have come to believe that humans have evolved to be highly social, and to work best when they are immersed in a social environment.

I note that Joel Spolsky has company lunches every day, and considers this important.

<comment><USER4> Those are good points. It's just frustering for someone in DC that all the good jobs are in SF. (Except for yours of course :-) but I haven't done any RoR )

Here's another thing that's really bothered me as a job seeker.

Most employers will say something like you did "I'm not just hiring engineers to produce lines of code: I'm hiring them for their wide-ranging intelligence.." but then proceed to ask me excruciatingly detailed trivia during the interview, or require someone have X years of experience in some technology. If you're hiring for intelligence, should it really matter if the employee hasn't use technology X before? He should be able to learn quickly.

Perhaps your case is different though. RoR is more like a movement than just a technology so maybe it's a good indicator of sucess for a candidate to have already used it.

<comment><USER3> When large companies say something like "I'm hiring them for their wide- ranging intelligence.." they are usually lying their ass off but in startups that usually is true.

From my experience in startups, most of them care just as much about your 2 cents as about your LOC.

Because startups are much more malleable and prone to change their direction, strategy, market & product every input matters and sometimes you can recoup your entire hiring cost for an engineer from a single sentence he says offhand in some discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just post your jobs in the news area. If people like it, they will vote up (hopefully). Actually, it's a good benchmark for your job description - whether it will float on ycnews.

<comment><USER6> I disagree with this. I could see the main page getting bogged down with job offers. However, being able to vote up/down on the jobs page isn't a bad idea and I think it'd have the same effect you were looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe this has been requested before and PG rejected it, wanting to keep the jobs page exclusively YC. Fortunately, there is an alternative and you've come across it right here.</comment>