Ask HN: Developer laptop under $1500? - <AUTHOR>

Hardware Requirements: Intel 4th Gen core i7, 128/256 SSD, at least 8 gb of ram with an option to upgrade to 16, Max Resolution 1920 x 1080, Screen size 13 - 14 inch, weight under 4 lbs, Touchscreen preferably no, OS Linux(Ubuntu).
The latest Ask HN post on developer laptops is dated now[0]. As of now the haswell processor coupled with Intel HD 5000+ looks like the way to go.
Options I have looked at(If you have information about pricing/release date on any of these, leave a comment)
1. Macbook air: Average display, no option to upgrade ram
2. Sony Viao Pro: Reviews say it compromises on performance to be the lightest.
3. System76 Galaga Ultra Pro: Any first hand reviews on this one?[1]
4. Lenovo T440s: Release date unknown, 6 hours of battery life only[2]?
5. Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus: Would be overpriced, QHD+ would be overkill for my needs!
6. Dell XPS 12: Not a fan of convertible tablet + laptop types.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860540
[1] https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1
[2] http://shop.lenovo.com/fi/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t440s/ <comment><USER2> It seems you don't understand CPUs very much. You want an "i7", but you're looking at laptops with a wide range of CPU performance. There are two kinds of i7's: dual core and quad core. Or there are four kinds: low power and regular versions of dual core and quad core CPUs. Getting a low-power dual core i7 is about the same as getting a low-power dual core i5. Getting a regular dual core i7 is about the same as getting a regular dual core i5. (Regular dual core CPUs in Haswell aren't out yet.) You get a small MHz bump, and an increase in the amount of L3 cache. A quad core CPU will get you double the L3 cache of a dual core (generally).

It also matters how well the machine can cool the CPUs.

All the machines you posted, except for the Galaga Ultra Pro (which is actually a rebranded Clevo laptop -- don't buy it from System76 if you value money) will have low power i7's at most.

That might be fine. It depends on your performance needs. Anyway, saying "Intel 4th Gen core i7" as a requirement is basically nonsensical.

<comment><USER3> > Getting a low-power dual core i7 is about the same as getting a low-power > dual core i5

So you're saying the difference in performance is negligible? Would you say this is also the case with the new MBAs i5/i7?

Edit: typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Galago UltraPro:

[https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1](https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1)

\- 14" screen 1920x1080

\- Haswell i7 2.0Ghz 4 cores

\- 8 gb RAM with option to upgrade to 16

\- 256 GB SSD

\- Weight: 3.8 lb

\- Ubuntu

Price with these specs: $1253

<comment><USER5> I ordered one of these which came out to $1462.00 before tax.

\- 16GB of ram

\- 180GB Intel mstata SSD

\- 1TB spinning disk

\- Upgraded the wireless card

It's as portable of a machine as I can get that will still replace a desktop.

<comment><USER6> What's the battery life like for these?

<comment><USER5> They are estimating around 4 hours. I tend to move my laptop around a bunch, but it's just generally from room to room and table to table. So, for my use case, this machine is perfect. If you're a road warrior though... it's realllly hard to beat the 12 hours on the new MBAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Priced at $1549 [1]

3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3537U processor (4M Cache,

2.0 GHz CPU w/ Max Turbo of 3.1 Ghz)

UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS

13.3" FHD 1080p

8GB2 DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz

256GB Solid State Drive

Intel HD 4000

1 Year ProSupport Service with 1 Year NBD Onsite Service after Remote Diagnosis

2.99 lbs

[1] [http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd)

<comment><USER8> Why haven't they upgraded to Haswell? Ugh. I've been waiting for the upgrade for the battery life bump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.amazon.com/Asus-S400CA-DB51T-ASUS-14-Inch- Laptop/...](http://www.amazon.com/Asus-S400CA-DB51T-ASUS-14-Inch- Laptop/dp/B00COQXXPC/ref=dp_ob_title_ce)

<comment><USER10> Great how Asus sells the i7 with a 5400rpm hard drive! That resolution unfortunately is also low.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's due to the graphics card. I didn't find that exact one with a higher resolution. Personally, however, for web dev, it's the perfect sign since it's right in the middle (closer to phone/tablets). I had a 1920x1200 before (Dell) but now I love this and not worrying too much about testing on devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You forgot the MBP Retina 13"?

128GB SSD, 8GB memory, 2560x1600 display. $1499. I don't think the i5 vs i7 makes a noticeable difference (see other comment re. processors).

<comment><USER12> Still awaiting the Haswell upgrade, which seems to be important for the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Refurb MacBook Pro? Just wait for one to come up with the specs you want.

[http://refurb-tracker.com/](http://refurb-tracker.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Look at _refurbished_ Macbook Airs at the Apple Web site. I'm not a developer, but I'm writing a long book using Emacs and LaTex, so the cycle of write text, compile the file(s), review for errors, and edit the file(s) is somewhat similar. I'd always been a Wintel user, but in January I bought a refurbished 11-inch Macbook Air with a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. I love it. I don't even use an external monitor, keyboard, or mouse anymore.

<comment><USER15> You're writing a book in LaTex?!

<comment><USER14> > _You 're writing a book in LaTex?!_

Yep. It's a long contracts-related book with lots of internal cross- references. MS Word seemed to keep corrupting things, so I went back to my Emacs and Scribe roots. It's all much easier with LaTex and Emacs org-mode, plus the resulting PDF files are very nice.

(I wrote my first book in 1980-81 using Emacs and Scribe on a TOPS-20 system. It was a "for Dummies"-type user guide for my fellow law-review editors on, wait for it, how to use Emacs and Scribe on a TOPS-20 system to produce and edit law-review articles. My second book, on software law, was done in 1986-87 with The Final Word, which was a clone of Emacs and Scribe.)

<comment><USER16> How do you handle case citations in latex? I never found a easy way to do legal citations in latex that came anywhere close to bluebook format.

<comment><USER14> > _How do you handle case citations in latex?_

Brute force. I don't even try to use BibTex. I just find the opinion on-line somewhere (Google Scholar if possible, failing that Justia.com or one of the opinion publishers). I make the case name a hyperlink to the on-line opinion. Then in plain, non-linked text I include whatever Blue Book style I can, preferably to the West reporter series if available, failing which the slip- opinion cite. I also include a shortened URL, so that anyone reading a hard copy can type it in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone have any experience with Lenovo's X1 Carbon [0]? I'm looking to get a new developer laptop in the fall with similar specs and operating system as OP, and that was one that caught my eye.

[0] [http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised to see you have a max resolution, but I love my Chromebook Pixel. It's amazing how much clearer things look at retina-quality (and if you're a developer, you really should upgrade; there's a whole class of bugs you won't see if your hardware can't display graphics at the resolution many of your users will encounter).

</comment><comment><USER19> Ive been really happy with my T430, works great with linux, every function button mapped to a command in Mint. My laptop has 3rd gen i7 and 4gb ram and a 256gb ssd(upgraded myself to save money) and runs everything I need as a developer. The only issue I have is its not 16x10

<comment><USER20> I love this laptop - I found a slightly used one on craiglist for around $350 (given - it has an i5). If I had a budget of $1500 I would still have purchased it and gotten a couple of nice external displays. Honestly I think it is plenty powerful for web development. I also have had a flawless experience with Linux on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm personally looking at the following list:

Lenovo U330 or U430

MSI GE40 (gaming laptop with actually decent size and battery life)

Asus Zenbook Infinity or the Haswell Zenbook (probably too expensive)

Acer Aspire S3-392 or S7-392

</comment><comment><USER22> Macbook Air 13" has basically everything you need. Upgrade to 256GB SSD and 8GB ram and just do without the possibility of upgrading to 16GB ram. The Haswell more than makes up for it. Been using one for a month and loving it.

<comment><USER23> I have the 2013 MBA and it's great. Surprisingly the 8GB of RAM hasn't bothered me. It may be the fast swap because of the incredibly fast SSD (800mb/s r/w) though. I have no problems running multiple Linux VMs with Xcode open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> follow on questions:

        Max Resolution

why?

        are VMware/parallels, virtualBox images ok for requirements?

also would add requirement for digital monitor port, not VGA.

Like a lot of people, I prefer macbook Pros and Thinkpads, I've had decent experience with cheaper Dells and Toshibas purchased from Costco (90 day return policy) and I would avoid HP and Sony, too many hardware compatibility issues with linux, especially w.r.t. wireless

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd go with the Macbook Air, really a great machine to run Ubuntu.

<comment><USER26> Macbook Air. Macbook Pro if you can spend a little more.

<comment><USER27> Also take into consideration portability between these two. I use a MBP for my main machine - It's a beast, but if you're lugging it around it could get heavy (Although, I could find much heavier laptops). If you want something you will have zero issues with carrying around - The air would be a good choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Developer Laptop" What are you developing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Web, mobile dev and occasionally computation intensive stuff(read ML algorithms/large csv files/matrix computations)

<comment><USER29> My advice: don't run ML algorithms on a laptop. At least not one with a cheap processor (top of the line Core i7 is a different beast I imagine). From my experience, you're better off buying the cheapest laptop and running stuff on a server purchased/rented in part with what you saved. Or maybe renting an EC2 HC instance. Disclaimer: I work at a (ML/NLP/IR) lab so I didn't pay for the servers but it's often the difference between something taking 12h on my 11"2012 MBA, 6h on the slow servers or 6mins on the best one (which just has a better processor than the others).

<comment><USER30> > 6h on the slow servers or 6mins on the best one (which just has a better > processor than the others).

60 times differences? What kind of CPUs do you have in slow and fast servers?

<comment><USER2> Presumably it's parallelizable. Double the clockspeed, 16x the cores... that'll get you 32x improvement right there, but you've also got way more L3 cache, which might help considerably.

<comment><USER31> plus much more ram, faster drives and the fact that newer cpus get more done even at comparable clockspeeds ... and there's your 60x

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> dell xps 13 with fhd is an awesome laptop. with even i5 or i7 it is simply very sleek and very good .</comment>


Organic agriculture is a colossal hoax - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2015/07/29/why-organic-agriculture-is-a-colossal-hoax/

<comment><USER2> " In a classic study, UC Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues found that "99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves." "

This is on the same level of "co2 from trees is a major contributor to global warming", and I wasn't at all surprised to see that the author is at the Hoover Institute.

<comment><USER3> The article from Scientific American that this article links to has much more scientific detail on the pesticides that are used in organic farming, and seems fairly trustworthy:

 _Are lower pesticide residues a good reason to buy organic? Probably not._

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science- sushi/pesticides...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science- sushi/pesticides-food-fears/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice try Monsanto.</comment>


How You Can Make $20 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125823321386948789.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLEThirdNews

<comment><USER2> Lesson 9: Count on the federal government bailing out the company insuring your credit default swaps. Otherwise, your "investments" will be worthless.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good tips, but they are definitely not sufficient to make $20 Billion :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is disgusting. Hedgefonds and other similar financial gambling is the root of so much suffering and evil. If you are making money without actually working but by betting on money or even the failure of others you are a pest to society.

<comment><USER5> But this is what VCs like YCombinator do. They give the money to people who can create value, and get more on average back, thus letting them invest in more people later. And they get rewarded for it.

Isn't this just the same, but more abstract?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Important lesson:

Debt markets can do a better job predicting problems than stock markets.</comment>


Curry Before Columbus - <AUTHOR> https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-columbus/ <comment><USER2> I've lived in Peru which also has a very spicy cuisine (many chilis come from the Andes). However, you'd be surprised at the amount of locals who confessed to me they didn't like food that is too spicy (they like it mildly spiced, or white people spiced as the article says) or spicy at all. It wouldn't surprise me if these two combined would represent 50% of the population. Could be the same in India.

<comment><USER3> There's a tendency to conflate "spicy" flavor with "chilly" or "hot". They are two orthogonal parameters, you could dial (up or down) them independent of each other. Most spices aren't chilly, they add unique smell and flavor without burning the tongue.

Coming to India, almost every cuisine is spicy for sure. At least I don't know of one that is not. Indians grow up immersed in spicy food and can't live without it. And to be honest once your palette gets used to spicy flavor it's hard to go back to bland food. Anecdotally I've heard many westerns complain about blandness of their food once they are used to Indian flavor.

Very few Indian cuisines dual up "hot" knob. Andhra Pradesh cuisine is an example of that. It's almost at the limit of not killing the flavor.

So to summarize about India, we almost universally love spicy food. Some of us like it hot too

<comment><USER4> Hotness is relative though: they may not "dial it up" by Indian standards, but chili still makes its way into almost everything. A Russian colleague of mine visiting Delhi, not generally regarded as a hotbed of hotness, found virtually everything except dal makhani inedibly spicy -- because she was used to Russian food, where chilis traditionally don't feature at all.

India is also one of the few places I've been to where chilis are regularly used for breakfast dishes and even drinks like _aam ka panna_ (spicy green mango juice).

<comment><USER5> Sure but did she find it spicy as in "having copious amounts of spice" or spicy as "a taste similar to food that is of a high temperature" or spicy as in "off-gassing something that irritates one's nasal passages" (I don't really consider this last one "spicy" or "hot" but many people do so I'm including it)?

To reply that "hotness is relative" without clarifying which usage of the word you mean or implying that your friend in the anecdote even made that clarification is exactly what the person you are replying to is complaining about.

This limitation of colloquial English where the word "spicy" is overloaded to refer to all three axis of "spicy" at the same time and hot is also (though less frequently) overloaded in the same manner is exactly what we're discussing.

You can have something that's not very "hot" be very "spicy" on one of the other two axis. Try eating a tablespoon of cinnamon or that Chinese mustard that comes with takeout.

European food that is "spicy" on one axis but nearly zero on the other two is rare hence why this overloading exists and isn't really a problem when discussing food from anywhere that doesn't have a rainy season.

<comment><USER6> Can't speak for the rest of the anglosphere, but in the US, when someone says "spicy", they mean "this has too much capsaicin". If someone were referring to the strength of the taste, they would probably just say "I don't like this flavor", or as a stretch, "the spices in this dish are too strong". Not sure what point you're making here. I assure you, even though there may not be dedicated words for them, English speakers are quite able to articulate the differences between the different categories of plants that are added to food to make it taste better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ... curry leaf gets a mention. So let's talk about curry leaf in the context of curry not being a 'thing' ... I have a curry leaf plant and we use it in our dal, and in rogan josh (a curry but also not a curry) and spinach and potato diahes

</comment><comment><USER8> Although I don't read medieval Persian, my guess is that "burned vegetable oil" would be better translated as "mustard oil heated to its smoke point". Mustard oil was (and still is) a common cooking oil in the region, and heating it to high temperature reduces the pungent taste.

</comment><comment><USER9> Indeed the versatile tomato could almost be seen historically as a calling card from the Portuguese. In Brazil one can eat Moquecas which are a spicy tomato-based stew which sometimes resemble the the spicy fish curries in the South of India. And in the US red chowder which is often inexplicably called "Manhattan chowder" is actually Rhode Island clam chowder, Rhode Island being a state with a large Portuguese population. And in Portugal itself Refogado is tomato sauce that forms the basis of many wonderful stews, soups and rice dishes there.

</comment><comment><USER10> 2 other potential sources of the word "curry"

\- kadhai (Indian wok)

\- Kari patta: a spicy leaf, staple in South Indian cuisine (and very tasty)

<comment><USER11> So no connection to "cury" then:

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

<comment><USER12> According to Wiktionary, the existing Middle English word "cury" (= "cooking") may have influenced the word.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As Sri Lankans, "Curry" for us would be a dish made by mixing a variety of powdered spices with coconut milk and made into a sauce. If this sauce is cooked along with chicken it's called chicken curry and so on. But it has to be a dish made out of coconut milk and spices.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just before the lockdown I threw away some hing that had been on my spice rack for a long time. Way longer than one should keep spices. So I went to the local spice shop to stock up on some items, including a fresh jar of asefetida. I had forgotten how pungent it is when fresh. Now when I open the cabinet it hits me.

<comment><USER15> Interesting! I have never heard of this particular spice before, although I may have already eaten it at an Indian restaurant. As to the "pungent" part, it's already in the name:

> _The English name is derived from asa, a latinised form of Persian azā, > meaning "resin", and Latin foetidus meaning "smelling, fetid", which refers > to its strong sulfurous odour_

The German names are even less flattering:

> _Asant (Ferula assa-foetida), auch bekannt als Stinkasant oder Teufelsdreck_ > \- "stinking asant" or "devil's dirt"...

<comment><USER16> I only learned about it when attempting to cook Indian food via YouTube recipes. A game changer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An ad hominem side note: the author should try probiotics

<comment><USER18> They've had serious digestive problems since they were three years old and appear extremely well educated. They almost certainly have tried probiotics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Curry is curry due to it containing tumeric, and tumeric is native to India.

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

<comment><USER20> You may as well say curry is curry because it has cumin in it, and cumin is native to India. Curry is really just a word made up by non-Indians to describe spicy gravy, or depending on who you ask, it can be used to describe any sufficiently spiced food. If you google curry potatoes, you'll find plenty of recipes. If you google jeera aloo (which literally just translates to cumin potato) you'll find plenty of very similar recipes. You can also find plenty of recipes for Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian... curries, and the only thing they have in common with Indian curries is use of spice and a gravy textured sauce, but using completely different spice bases and cooking techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've spent about 3 years in India, through a combination of work and family, and rarely see anything called "curry" on menus. Part of what this author seems to be getting at is that "curry" reflects a colonial viewpoint that homogenizes groups outsite the west. Thus, Indians, Thais and Japanese food has "curries" (even though these curries are very different from one another). In contrast Hungarians have "Goulash."

<comment><USER20> To say it's colonial is a bit of a stretch. It's simply a word chosen by a group of outsiders to categorize something they didn't know much about.

The more relevant criticism of the word boils down to the facts that it doesn't really mean anything to Indians, and that it's meaning is so poorly defined that it barely means anything at all. The word can be used to refer to pretty much any Indian food, which is simply a poor categorization, and that use would wind up a lot of Indian people. The other use case is pretty much anything that has a spiced gravy. But a ragu uses spiced gravy as much as a butter chicken does, and most people wouldn't call a ragu a curry. So it must be a spiced gravey with Asian ingredients, but a Japanese curry has more ingredients in common with a ragu than it does a saag paneer, also a lamb tagine dish uses a spiced gravy with Asian ingredients, and people wouldn't call that a curry either.

Basically it's a word that has no definition that would describe all of its different use cases.

<comment><USER22> > To say it's colonial is a bit of a stretch. It's simply a word chosen by a > group of outsiders to categorize something they didn't know much about.

A group of British outsiders who were in India because of the British Empire?

<comment><USER20> There's absolutely nothing uniquely colonial about coming up with words to describe things that are new to you. It's simply a result of one culture coming into contact with another. To say using language to describe new things is colonial is frankly ridiculous.

<comment><USER23> But it brings a certain je ne sais quoi to the sturm und drang of everyday life for the hoi polloi.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toys 'R' Us Is Prepping to Liquidate Its U.S. Operations - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-08/toys-r-us-said-to-be-prepping-liquidation-of-u-s-operations <comment><AUTHOR> Though I've never met him I'm a second cousin of Dave Brandon and we were born a week apart. I knew his grandfather though and my late dad knew his father well.

He'd had huge success at both Valassis and Dominos before flaming out as athletic director at the University of Michigan.

When I heard he'd taken the job at Toys R Us I was baffled. My dad said but he will make hundreds of millions of dollars if he turns it around. I told him with the crushing debt and people buying more toys online it's surely an impossible task and I am stunned he wouldn't know it.

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


Visual Stories - <AUTHOR> Visual Stories helps online businesses and content creators leverage the AMP Stories format to expand their reach. It empowers you to create awesome content in the AMP Stories format. AMP Stories are Instagram-like Stories that are search engine friendly and meant for the web. They are visually engaging, fast loading, immersive user experiences. Get AMP Stories on your website without writing a single line of code, that too for free. Your website will harness the latest of web technologies like PWA and AMP, have technical SEO implemented, and be hosted and fully managed with Visual Stories, freeing you of the technical hassles in its setup and maintenance. You will also be able to earn from your website. <comment><AUTHOR> [https://visualstories.com/info/get- started](https://visualstories.com/info/get-started)</comment>


One way to look at technology education - <AUTHOR> http://freetexthost.com/x3mibxd411

<comment><USER2> do you even internet, bro? what is this jank text host</comment>


Ask HN: How should I find customers for my product? - <AUTHOR> I'm having trouble determining whether I'm selling my product wrong or I'm selling my product right enough and I just need to remain persistent.
What I'm trying to sell is https://choremate.co. I explain how it works in depth here: https://keyankousha.com/the-best-chore-chart-in-the-world.html
So far I've tried a few things: 1. talking to local student housing coops 2. sitting on the UC Davis campus with a sign "free candy for advice" and asking for their opinions on the product/pitching it (I'd get ~5-8 people/hr coming up) 3. reaching out to people looking for roommates on craigslist (but I was understandably banned for doing that)
I was able to iterate quite a bit from the "free candy" approach as that had the most signal but it isn't viable anymore given the pandemic, and it still didn't result in any sales. Similarly the student coops are empty now.
Basically, am I doing this right? Am I supposed to feel this uncertain? Any advice? I'm a programmer by trade and temperament, doing this without co-founders or mentors, so it's hard to know what to do or expect. <comment><USER2> How about providing demo versions to a few purposefully chosen sites (widely distributed geographically)? These would automatically require being updated to the PAID version after X months. If the money starts rolling in, you're on a winner otherwise you should have many users with plenty of feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, thanks for the help!

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what you mean exactly. Do you mean finding someone to white label the product?

<comment><USER2> No, just that distributing the current form of your app (requiring update after X months) to a few sites may generate potential customers and should also provide plenty of feedback from those users. I do find it useful to actually watch a novice user trying to use an app without my immediate assistance. You can learn a lot by doing so, some of it may be useful!

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a difficult niche because you're selling to a demographic that doesn't have a lot of disposable income. There are monetized chore apps, so it's certainly not impossible though.

I would make the app free, try to climb the ranks of the SERP page for "chore chart" or similar. When you have more users there are a lot more options for monetization, including freemium/affiliate products or even just ads.

I'd also change the messaging a bit. Everyone says their widget is the number one widget, it's just kind of meaningless. It would be good if you can provide social proof - real users of the app and the benefits they received after using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought about monetization a bit. I think the move is "you only pay when you don't do your chores." Choremate's big differentiator is small and gradual punishments. The site would collect the financial punishments. As you say, charging money in a form like a subscription might be a nonstarter for the demographic.

I haven't explored SEO in choremate much but I know its a fantastic acquisition channel based on one of my other projects.

The tagline used to be "The Chore Chart for Adults" but I think it read as a practical joke for some people. The big differentiator of choremate is small and gradual punishments for not doing chores, but putting this forefront when talking to users turned them off. They don't want a picture of the sausage being made on the package.

Social proof would be great and I'll definitely leverage it when I have some. My household is the only household using it right now though lol.

Solid suggestions all around, thanks!

P.S. Checked out [http://jack.works](http://jack.works) and [http://jack.ventures](http://jack.ventures). Very cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, did you improve the product based on what the "free candy" people said? Were you able to determine the reasons they didn't buy and then improve your product accordingly?

Seems you should be improving your product/product positioning more. That would make marketing a lot easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the questions!

Their feedback wasn't terribly direct, but what they did say I addressed. They mostly seemed disinterested in a solution while very much agreeing about the problem. From what I gathered they don't buy because they can only buy if their housemates more or less unanimously agree to buy too, and their housemates weren't present. They also have the normal sign up skepticism I assume any product might face.

I'm not sure what features I could add to more easily attract customers, given I have a hard time just getting people to sign up and add housemates. They aren't trying and churning yet unfortunately. Sign up friction is low: your email address and your housemates' email addresses and you're ready to go. It makes more sense to me it'd be a positioning issue at this stage.

I haven't really tried any online marketing channels yet which might allow me to discover better positioning.

That was helpful, thanks!

<comment><USER5> Giving you my email address and then someone else's email address, one that I probably have to look up, and one I should definitely go get permission from before sharing isn't low friction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cells Are Not Computers and DNA Is Not a Programming Language (Stanford Seminar) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPl1XnmAVPM <comment><USER2> As a caveat, I only watched the first ~25 minutes of this video in detail. After that I skimmed every few minutes of the rest. As far as I can tell, the majority of the time is random panel members talking about stuff and very little is truly devoted to the subject alluded to in the title in any meaningful way. I found the video fairly worthless (or at least far too unfocused to be worthy of anyone's time).

At best, the little that focused on the title seemed to define "computers" and "programming language" in a fairly rigid way in order to make the claim in the title true, but everyone already knows that. There are clearly many complexities (known and many more unknown) in how all the different processes surrounding DNA work and many of those processes don't really have simple counterparts in our common implementations of computers and programming languages, but at an abstract level the analogies certainly are there.

</comment><comment><USER3> The relation between DNA and programming is extraordinarily messy and complex as far as I know, and I am far from knowing lots.

Certainly, ordinary programming as it exists now can't be applied with ordinary tech to cells.

But if cell do all sort of computer-like-tasks, if they can be recursive or whatnot, what is a _richer_ paradigm than programming that expresses their qualities. From the video, simply hear vagueness like "evolution" and "curing" and etc.

It like cells and biological objects are on the other side of what Paul Allen calls the "complexity brake" but I don't see how that implies they're not like computers, just that they are computers that we will have to develop a variety of distinct tools to program.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see a rebuttal to the other article.

"The [complicated topic] is just like [fashionable technology]" trope is beyond tired.

<comment><USER5> It certainly isn't a rebuttal.

Did you read the article you are referring to? [0] It opens with _"If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail"_ , acknowledging the limitations of the vision it builds.

And the top upvoted comment on HN makes sure to add on another layer: _"Its analogies are pretty solid, even if they are just analogies. It 's a well- described snapshot of the early phase of education where this helps build a grand intuition and relations between disciplines. Just be careful to remember that they're just analogies, and in general can't be relied on to actually discover, invent, design or conclude."_

Metaphors and analogies is one of the ways how humans understand the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as the limitations ( _"can 't be relied on to actually discover, invent, design or conclude"_) of that approach are kept in mind.

The overt cynicism of your comment misses the entire point.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644)</comment></comment>


Indian High Commission to use typewriters for sensitive information - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/indian-high-commission-to-use-typewriters-for-sensitive-information-20130928-2ukkr.html <comment><USER2> Ah. How are they gonna transmit data? What a temporary solution to a permanent problem, using a technology that must have been cracked a century ago. Btw why would you go outside to discuss private matters? Wow. Now instead of playing into one agency's hand, play into all world's. Especially, now that everybody knows India discusses private matters in gardens. Horrific.

India should totally adopt lavabit.

Incompetent and embarrassing bit: They use yahoo address for one of the consulates in Iran: [http://www.indianembassy- tehran.ir/consulates_iran.php](http://www.indianembassy- tehran.ir/consulates_iran.php)

<comment><USER3> > Ah. How are they gonna transmit data?

If there only were some sort of non-electronic version of email.

<comment><USER2> Which means interception and time limits.

<comment><USER4> Send it with a person in a diplomatic bag. If it gets intercepted it will be an international incident and you'll know 100% of the time that you are compromised.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. But it also imposes time limits for critical communication.

<comment><USER5> Yes and they may use other avenues when required. As much as I sing songs about incompetence and ineptitude of most government offices (of my country), they do have a knack to survive (or competing forces are just as inadequate, take your pick).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple of you have mentioned the traceability of typewriters as a downside. In fact that is a primary reason for using them. Like a gun, every typewriter has unique quirks that can be used to uniquely identify content typed on that machine. In the event of a leak, the Russians (for example) hope to use this forensic info to identify the leaker. The general knowledge of this acts as a deterrent.

Moreover, it's a common strategy to step back a few levels of tech innovation to defeat an opponent. Bayonets. Cops on bike patrols. Hipster bike messengers. Insurgents originally used cell phones to detonate IEDs (Iraq or Afghanistan), but then they had their phones jammed by the USM--so they switched to string. Al-Qaeda uses hand written notes, hand-delivered.

FOIA laws and e-discovery also cause people to go low tech. To get around FOIA requests government officials have simply stopped using email (others used webmail under a false name). And in my last start up, serious issues raised on email elicited a response by phone in part to avoid potential e-discovery in a lawsuit. That kind of shady behavior caused me to leave.

<comment><USER7> Not discussing serious/legal issues over email is SOP at large companies, at least in my experience. Not because we thought we were doing anything wrong - it's just what the lawyers advise you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an aside, during the Cold War, Soviet embassies abroad used manual typewriters for all sensitive information due to the various ways in which electronic typewriters could be bugged.

For an example of the sophistication of such attacks, see the Project GUNMAN document on the NSA's history subsite:

[http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_h...](http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/publications/index.shtml)

For seven years the Soviets had bugged IBM Selectric typewriters in the US embassy in Moscow. The bugging device was remarkable, keying-off the magnetic flux of the machine's operation and transmitting this data by burst radio transmission.

</comment><comment><USER9> head explodes: this announced the same day as a paper showing how to use an iphone accelerometer to reverse engineer keystrokes.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6456360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6456360)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hope they remember to keep the ink ribbon. Old school attacks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nobody is going to get it right on the first try, after decades of neglecting data security.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool those tapes will be really easy to read.

</comment><comment><USER13> my Aunty Paige just got an awesome yellow Nissan Rogue SUV by working part time from a home computer... find more information ...................[http://redir.ec/buzz55](http://redir.ec/buzz55)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow. Apu Fuck-knuckles is so incompetent that he deserves to be taken for a ride by every intel agency in the world. (Typewriter sounds are more easily surveilled and decoded into letters than a well-shielded computer. A given typewriter is trivially traceable to a particular office and even individual. Typing paper is somewhat easy to trace. Typewriters requires use of photocopiers, which are a centralized easily-surveilled point of weakness. And going outdoors is what you do when you are so horrifically out of touch and worthless that you have never seen a parabolic microphone on a football pitch. Somewhere an NSA field agent just had a spygasm.)

<comment><USER15> How do you know they won't do a thorough sweep for bugs? How do you know their mode of transportation? If the Russians are doing it, there must be some merit to the solution. Granted it doesn't sound logical. Your worthless assumptions aside, you seem to have a lot of hate pent up there.

No need for name calling, Cletus. And it's sad to see this in someone with 12 yrs of professional experience as a "software and electrical" engineer.

<comment><USER14> Hate? They've got missiles, nukes, a dirty little war with Pakistan, and many regional political challenges. It is not some lolcat site that takes PayPal, it is armies and central bank policies. They were caught with their intel pants down and their response was to make a show of unbuttoning their shirt. It's like a Tom Clancy story ghostwritten by Robin Williams. A little hate is warranted.

<comment><USER16> > They've got missiles, nukes, a dirty little war with Pakistan, and many > regional political challenges. It is not some lolcat site that takes PayPal, > it is armies and central bank policies.

In short, like the USA, which does all of these at far greater scale?

> A little hate is warranted.

And apparently, a little racism and bigotry.

<comment><USER14> I agree! It is exactly like the USA! Like the USA, the Indian foreign service needs to use modern security techniques. Not cargo culting with typewriters and walks in the park like a bad movie script.

Indian is not a race or even an ethnicity. It is a geopolitical affiliation, like Londoner. Nor am I a bigot. If I could read Hindi, I could point you to the Indian IT discussion forums where the thousands of competent security specialists are ripping into their government in ways that make my comment look like high praise. My fury is nothing compared to the people being sold out by the imbeciles at the Indian embassy.

<comment><USER16> > Like the USA, the Indian foreign service needs to use modern security > techniques.

Absolutely, but as another HN user already replied to you:

> Your comment is good. "Apu Fuck-knuckles" is not. You should change it while > you can still edit. It completely occludes your otherwise decent comment.

And please stop with the pointless arguments that "India isn't a race or even an ethnicity" (it isn't, but that's irrelevant) to somehow prove your original comment _wasn 't_ racist. By that logic, no one can ever be racist to Indians, because, hey, Indians don't have a race!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In a country that's stricken with extreme poverty, a caste system that births you into such a fate until death, where women can't walk the street at night without the fear of getting brutally raped or molested, a country that starves while massive stockpiles of food reserves perish due to kafkaesque bureaucracy and corruption; I hardly think that privacy breaches are India's top concern.

The political system is already ineffective and the use of typewriters to "secure" communications only proves that the priorities of the leaders are so misaligned to what the country needs to make any progress with it's problems.

India has great potential to develop into something more than it is, but until there's significant political reform then it's progress will always be slow and its people will continue to suffer.

<comment><USER16> Oh for crying out loud, not the "India is so poor that they shouldn't bother with expensive luxuries like space programs and Internet privacy" argument again!

Pray tell me, what is the connection between "extreme poverty, a caste system, the safety of women walking the streets at night and massive stockpiles of food" with better Internet privacy measures?

Are the two a zero-sum game? Will implementing more secure email and Internet communications across all government departments somehow make Indian women more likely to get raped or molested? Or entrench the caste system even further?

> India has great potential to develop into something more than it is

Thank you for your vote of support. Do let us know when we'd become eligible for Internet privacy though.

<comment><USER17> Did I say they should do without expensive luxuries and internet privacy? No. I did say that prioritising using typerwriters for internal communications of a handful of their government offices above the fundamental issues that affect hundreds of millions of their countrymen is ridiculous.

The article isn't about internet privacy for their residents. if it were, are you saying that the rights of women and the starving population is fine as long as no sneaky NSA is reading your emails?

<comment><USER16> Allow me to quote you:

> In a country that's stricken with extreme poverty, a caste system that > births you into such a fate until death, where women can't walk the street > at night without the fear of getting brutally raped or molested, a country > that starves while massive stockpiles of food reserves perish due to > kafkaesque bureaucracy and corruption; I hardly think that privacy breaches > are India's top concern.

Your infering that privacy should hardly be India's top concern is a non- sequitur.

Privacy doesn't need to be India's "top concern" for its government to fix it. And neither is there a link between fixing it and all the other (valid) ills you described prior to it.

<comment><USER17> Exactly, privacy shouldn't be India's top concern - but evidently it's the only item on the checklist that they've ticked. I'll add it's also one that doesn't help address any of the fundamental issues, and as I mentioned only slows things down in an already burdened government.

<comment><USER18> Privacy, or security, or both?

Nations can rarely afford to have mutually exclusive streams of work. You don't see the U.S waiting till they solve their economic crisis to figure out what to do in Syria.

One of the major problems with the rank generalizations in both domestic and international media about India is that it reduces the problem to a simple combination of inept leadership, useless bureaucracy and abject poverty.

The fact, though, is that there also a lot of good people doing good work at levels (government, leadership etc.), but there is also a large number of people who are doing crappy jobs.

And as far as something like poverty goes, the causes, extent and solution for it differ from region to region. The concept of India is one of the greatest abstractions the world has ever seen. Take away the tricolour, cricket and the movie industry and you'll find people who rarely have much to identify with each other at a national level.

Consequently, any solution will take time and it will be chaotic; at least until a better genuinely progressive leader emerges, which looks unlikely for a long time to come. Waiting for all that to fall in place till measures are taken to ensure data security and privacy may well mean those won't happen in my lifetime.

p.s: The state of IT in the government is terrible in India. Any smart citizen have to live under the assumption that everything is compromised, by the state itself and by other states.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kids Coding: Simple Java - <AUTHOR> https://www.murrayc.com/permalink/2017/07/03/kids-coding-simple-java/ <comment><USER2> I wrote a book (free minimum price) to teach my son programming, starting in Terminal, and using Ruby.

[https://leanpub.com/programmingforkids](https://leanpub.com/programmingforkids)

It's currently Mac-only, because of the `say` command, and so that I could write instructions for just one platform. I have ideas about how I'm going to fix that, but that won't be in the near future.

My son was about the same age when I started writing it, but the book scales nicely for any 9-14 year old, I think. Please feel free to give your son a copy, and let me know if it's helpful.

<comment><USER3> On Linux, there's `espeak`, which is essentially equivalent to `say` on Mac.

<comment><USER4> Somehow I don't think he was too worried about 9-14 year olds using Linux. Probably was mostly thinking about Windows.

<comment><USER5> Your comment sound like you think Linux isn't appropriate for 9-14yos ... could you explain, all major OS are pretty much equivalent for simple uses AFAICT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Always feel when a software developer tries to teach coding to kids they seem to more wrapped up in the process and doing things the "correct" way (often over complicating things with typing, language nuance and command line rituals) than actually trying to teach what's really going on and more importantly empowering being able to step off and create something truly of their own which is the path to self sufficient learning.

The self initiated work I've seen kids create out of Scratch is seriously impressive and creative.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm trying to get my kids to play Human Resource Machine. I hate the name but the game is okay. Because it's basically drag and drop assembly language the amount of steps for the challenges quickly rises. That's a bit of a shame, but the upside is it does sort of teach how a primitive computer would work at a low level for a kid who was grabbed by it.

The blog author and a commenter make a good point about how back in the day getting the computer to do just about anything was thrilling, whereas now expectations are a lot higher but so is the knowledge and effort required to make that happen.

Switching on a computer and getting nothing but a ready prompt somehow made it easier (or more necessary?) to make your own fun.

<comment><USER8> Definitely necessary. I remember those days, and the realization that I _could_ run an existing program, or I could sit and make my own, and the latter was pretty appealing to me.

I picked up Human Resource Machine when it came to the Nintendo Switch a few months ago, and I loved it pretty immediately. I think it does a great job of abstracting out the fact that you're writing assembly, masked by their very dark sense of humor (Little Inferno, anyone?). Whenever one of my friends (other grown-ups, not even kids) say things similar to wishing they knew how to program, I suggest they pick the game up and give it a try. It's like jumping in the deep end, but does a good job of showing how to think like a computer would think.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's more for grown-ups who don't know how to code. One of my sons is doing pretty well but I'm keeping a few levels ahead to see what's coming and I'm not sure he'll grok indirect addressing all that easily!

Another son is going through Swift Playgrounds and finding that easier to understand. He couldn't get HRM at all but immediately understood what simple functions were for in Playgrounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think Kotlin would be a much better language to learn programming. Kotlin avoids much of the noise and is very readable.

The hello world example is symptomatic:

        public class Example {
            public static void main(String ...args) {
                System.out.println("Hell, World!");
            }
        }

vs

        fun main(args: Array<String>) {
            println("Hello, World!")
        }

Some more examples:

        // java
        for (Element element : collection)

        // kotlin
        for (element in collection)

        // java
        (OtherType) somehting;

        // kotlin
        somehting as OtherType

        // java
        a.equals(b);

        // kotlin
        a == b

        // java
        Color color = x < 5 ? Color.RED : Color.GREEN;

        // kotlin
        val color = if (x < 5) Color.RED else Color.GREEN

And some more like constructors just named "constructor", init blocks are name "init", varargs are prefixed with "vararg", type checks with "is", ranges with 1..9, strings wicht embedded variables ...

<comment><USER10> Kotlin or not, I feel like Java is just the wrong choice. Even Kotlin, there's a lot of noise to start with. What's a function? What's an Array? What's a String? I have to either explain all those things, or handwave it as "magic; ignore it for right now" to students. I would find that incredibly frustrating as both a student, and a teacher.

I TAed an intro to CS class in Python for a number of years. I am rather ambivalent toward Python as a developer, but as a first language to be taught it worked pretty well. There are others, but having the minimum amount of noise for some basic coding examples I think is incredibly helpful (though I admit, I think I'm basically just saying "I think dynamically/optionally typed scripting languages > statically, explicitly typed compiled languages for this task").

<comment><USER11> I started with Pascal in school (6th grade I think). The book contained a few lines of code and said: This is the smallest program possible: it does nothing.

      program HelloWorld;
      begin
      end.

I was puzzled: why would you need to write something for it to do nothing? But it becomes clear very easily: all programs need to have a special structure to be correctly defined. This structure happens to be a block of code with a name. And that explanation was enough to satisfy me for the moment. I turned a few pages, and sure enough all examples had that structure with something else inside. I was already feeling good with myself for being able to recognize well structured programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty nice "Processing via the command line" trick. The API at [https://processing.org/reference/](https://processing.org/reference/) is much more friendly than the Java API at [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/)

</comment><comment><USER13> In the system we have been working on at [https://build.games](https://build.games) (an engineering platform for kids to learn and make software) we have avoided git and complicated project management systems carefully so far. Sometimes, to really appreciate some tools, one has to live without them first

</comment><comment><USER14> How to turn a kid off programming for life - choose Java as the teaching language. This kid had already started with Python, which is the natural choice for a first language, so why not just:

      import typing

<comment><USER15> I do not see Python as the natural choice for a first language. I've even had adult colleagues squint when I tried to explain decorators, or objects and all the self/static/class/method binding nonsense.

OOP in Python is something I really cannot like. I teach the language to children and as soon as I get to objects (which is not avoidable in Python, as many libraries and the language itself use objects) the number of concepts I have to explain is too much and I get the dreaded blank stare. I haven't so far found a short explanation that gives them a good enough grasp on objects that they can start making their own.

Ideally I would like to have to explain few orthogonal concepts, as learning a new concept in the abstract is hard and their mind has little patience for it, and let them experiment as soon as possible. But experimentation needs the minimum mastery required to combine the concepts and get some result. Pyhton's objects tend to expose their functions+struct guts, which does not help.

And don't get me started on warts like the "global" keyword, which makes simple scripts with global state and a few functions (a step into learning functions and structured programming) a frustrating and buggy process. I still cannot understand async/await enough to be comfortable with it, and if Armin Ronacher doesn't either... Meanwhile, languages like Oz do concurrency, with _actual_ parallelism, beautifully.

I'm starting to think Scheme and Smalltalk would be excellent beginner languages. "Here's how to make an s-expr; these s-expr are applications, these are definitions. Now go."

<comment><USER16> I disagree, I think Python is an excellent first language. While there are many oddities, I think Python lets you ignore them, or defer them to later in the learning process. Python can be pretty much as simple as you need it to be, and I think that's important for teaching programming.

I would not expect to get to objects _properly_ (maybe things like list()) in an introduction to programming course, I think you can get very far with just functions and simple data types.

Then, once you do want to introduce objects, I think Python's class system can be kept simple enough to begin with, and the parts that are inherently tricky (like self) have equivalently tricky parts in most other languages anyway.

I think a course teaching programming that goes into async IO, needs to discuss 'global' (something I've still used only twice in 5 years of Python), talks about decorators, etc, is doing something seriously wrong.

I don't know a lot about Smalltalk, but Scheme is an interesting idea for a first language. I think it could be a good first language, but I would be concerned about what the next step is. Having learnt Python, there are lots of next steps because it has a large and active ecosystem with plenty of opportunities, I'm not sure Scheme has the same, and I feel learning a second language, while Scheme might be good preparation, is not going to be straightforward for someone who has only just learnt to code.

<comment><USER10> You can. Georgia Tech's intro to CS classes for non-engineers are both Python (the engineering one is Matlab). Objects are introduced at the end, but as a concept OO is largely deferred to the following class, in Java. GT actually used to have the intro class be in Scheme, but switched it to Python a number of years ago, which they've stayed with. I agree though, Scheme would be a good language, but the impedance mismatch to get to more popular languages would be higher (plus have students asking "who uses this?!" Being able to reply "Google" tends to satisfy that question pretty well)

When I was there, at least, the focus was on basic programming concepts, functions, variables, loops, recursion, conditionals, and library interaction was largely imperative, more focused on successful execution than on the organization of the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Takes a Java programmer to over-complicate three lines of shell script:

      processingRun() {
          $HOME/processing/processing-java --sketch=$1 --run
      }
      alias processing-run=processingRun

How about just:

      processing-run()
      {
        ~/processing/processing-java --sketch="$1" --run
      }

I suppose things must be hyper-confusing when there is no "public class" wrapping a "public static void main".</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a way to access kindle content for a speed reading app? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to read my kindle books using a speed reading interface like this http://www.spreeder.com/ but I can't find an API to access the books.  I have seen some iphone and android apps that can read content like that, but none of them can access kindle books.  Is this possible and nobody has done it yet, or is this forbidden by Amazon's terms of service? <comment><USER2> Why don't you use PDF files, or another e-book format, instead? It's likely the target app will accept formats like PDF more readily than Kindle.

> Is this possible and nobody has done it yet, or is this forbidden by > Amazon's terms of service?

You mean a special reader that changes the basic page format? That's doubtful, and implausible -- I don't think Amazon would want to forbid a potentially market-increasing technological advance.

It's more likely that the reader designers are interested in keeping their media free and open-source, and therefore don't support the Kindle file format.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the books I bought from amazon are already in the kindle format. Amazon already lets me read them on a kindle app from a computer, an ipad, and an android as long as I'm authenticated. I figured they would let me authenticate via an API and read them from some other app. The issue I have is I want to consume my content using an interface that is not like a book, and doesn't have pages or page formats. If you look at the interface I linked, [http://www.spreeder.com/](http://www.spreeder.com/), they show you one word at a time in rapid succession, so you don't have to move your eyes in order to speed read.

<comment><USER2> Oh, well, in that case, I guess you'll have to wait for someone at Amazon to decide to include this reading mode as an option. Or an independent software developer who has an arrangement with Amazon to read and decode the Kindle format.

> ... they show you one word at a time in rapid succession, so you don't have > to move your eyes in order to speed read.

For a novel, this arrangement might work, but in technical reading, I find that I need to reread difficult sentences, sentences that express new ideas, over and over, until they sink in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would definitely not read a tech book like that, I want it to read history books and fiction, the kind of reading I do to relax. I was thinking of writing something that would let me speed up and slow down or back up with simple finger movements, and I could use that to read tech books, but for that I need to access the kindle content. If Amazon won't let me, maybe it's time I reconsider where I buy my books from.

<comment><USER2> > If Amazon won't let me, maybe it's time I reconsider where I buy my books > from.

I want to encourage this on general principles. Many deserving book outlets are suffering because of Amazon, and Amazon deserves to feel some competition -- that can only improve their business and the marketplace in general.

So, as the Australians say, "Good on you, mate."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Truly Makes a Senior Developer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/what-truly-makes-a-senior-developer-74b608847d7e <comment><USER2> A wife and kids by all accounts

</comment><comment><USER3> Grey hair, probably.</comment>


Researchers wirelessly hack a Corvette's brakes using an insurance dongle - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/11/9130203/wireless-hack-corvette-brakes-insurance-dongle

<comment><USER2> Other article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042834) (wired.com)

\---

The hack requires the car have an OnBoard Diagnostics (OBD) probe installed.

 _The specific dongle in question is made by French company Mobile Devices and distributed by a San Francisco insurance startup called Metromile, the latter of which has a partnership with Uber._

After that it's an SMS attack to root the dongle. The dongle lets them into the CAN bus, which is how the Jeep and other cars have been attacked.

 _"If you put this into a Prius, there are libraries of attacks ready to use online. "_

\---

Think you're safe if you just don't use one of these dongles? You're only as safe as the other cars on the road:

 _An executive order from the White House in March called for federal agencies with fleets of more than 20 vehicles to use telematics systems whenever possible to improve vehicle efficiencies. That could mean many thousands more government-owned cars and trucks using Internet-connected dongles in the near future._</comment>


Facebook Betrayed America - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/152253/facebook-betrayed-america <comment><USER2> This all seems to have gotten utterly out of hand and gone a bit crazy.

I stopped using Facebook when my friends started to express political views more than social content. I wanted a place to hang out with friends, not rage. People don't do that in real life. Not that much, anyway.

Somehow it seems like over the next five years or so it all descended into madness and everyone became a politician.

What went wrong?

How can Facebook even be used to 'spread a narrative' if it's just my friends? Why are my friends posting this nonsense rather than stuff about their lives?

Something just doesn't add up to me. I don't understand what other people want from a social platform.

The same seems to apply to Twitter. Everyday, normal people, seem to be spending their lives raging at each other. What gives?

I want a pint now. Damn. The real world is stranger than fiction.

<comment><USER3> I think the relatively simple answer is that it turns out most people are far more subject to simple tribalism than we previously wanted to admit. Memes are incredibly powerful mind viruses and we (collectively) have done a really great job of weaponizing them over the past 30 years.

I don't think this is Facebook's "fault" in isolation since we see the same trend across most social networks, but I do think it suggests that social networks ought to be regulated, if for no other reason than that it's pretty clear that the default behaviors we're already seeing emerge en masse are not good for society or for us on an individual basis.

<comment><USER4> Books are incredibly powerful mind viruses and we have done a really great job of weaponizing them over the past thousand years.

<comment><USER3> I know you mean this in jest, but for a good part of the last century this was absolutely true.

<comment><USER5> What would be examples of such books?

<comment><USER3> The bible? Uncle Tom's Cabin? Das Kapital? It's not that hard to find books that - by themselves - caused revolutions or major social change.

<comment><USER5> They referred to books weaponized in the last century. As far as that goes, The Bible and Uncle Tom's Cabin, sure. But "Das Kapital"? Was that even widely read? How was it weaponized, e.g. did people refer to it, even though nobody had read the book?

As for a book causing change "by itself":

One thing about the Bible is that the content itself is nothing compared to the claim that it's the word of God. It could have completely different content, as long as there were people seriously devoted to it being the word of God, it would have an effect. That's why it usually it involves missionaries or being raised into it. Is it even possible to encounter that book "by itself"? And it didn't exist for a few centuries when the things it supposedly causes already were done.

A book breaking a taboo for example, and that in turn faciliting social change that was a long way coming, is not the same as a "book causing social change by itself". I don't know enough about it and the context, but it says on the Wikipedia page about Uncle Tom's Cabin:

> _Uncle Tom 's Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in The National Era, > an abolitionist periodical, starting with the June 5, 1851, issue. It was > originally intended as a shorter narrative that would run for only a few > weeks. Stowe expanded the story significantly, however, and it was instantly > popular, such that several protests were sent to the Era office when she > missed an issue. Because of the story's popularity, the publisher John P. > Jewett contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book._

So at the very least, there was something there already. I'm sure it was weaponized, but how did it _cause_ social change? Did it cause people who loved slavery to now dislike slavery? Did it make formerly happy slaves unhappy? I honestly don't know, and since my asking for examples is taken as the claim "there are no examples", I would ask you to treat my questions as actual questions.

Das Kapital was written to prove an scientific underpinning for a labour movement that already existed, long after the Communist Manifesto. So here too I'd ask, what social change did it cause by itself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not going to defend Facebook but one of the problems with media criticism of Facebook (and Google) is that Facebook (and Google) has crushed a lot of media. They have become vassals of Facebook (and Google) in order to harvest the clicks they desperately need. They have very little control of their advertising and distribution model now.

This has also driven Madison Ave. nuts. Anecdotal but friends I have working in that space have no lost love for Facebook (and Google).

My point is there is incentive for media to criticize Facebook and we just don't seem to see this disclosure.

<comment><USER5> That may be true, but what does this add to or remove from the criticism itself?

<comment><USER6> I agree but full disclosure on how they rely on Facebook may be in order. This gives the reader a fair chance to assess if the article or authors may have a bias in how they report the story.

For instance, could Facebook begin to offer these publishers and/or authors incentive to not publish these things in the future? Either with stick or carrot. Could that influence how and what they publish?

<comment><USER5> Speaking of full disclosure, are "old media" _just_ jealous, or do "new media" not want to be scrutinized, in ways they cannot easily lead people away from, drown out with spam, or even outright delete?

> I agree but full disclosure on how they rely on Facebook may be in order.

They dislike Facebook because it cuts into our margins. That in and of itself doesn't have to make reporting inaccurate.

If anyone writes an article about cancer, should they also make known they have friends that died of cancer? Maybe cancer is getting a really bad rap because _everybody_ who writes about it doesn't like it? Wouldn't research best be done by people who don't find it particularly horrible? And if you wanted to factual information about human traffickers, would you rather ask a detective on a task force dealing with them, a human trafficker, a victim, or a random person who has "no bias"?

It's not like the media always said/wrote mean things about Facebook and Google, is it? When I compare to techy people on the internet, it seems they came way late to all of the parties, and wrote a lot of gloating things, too.

Why the bias about when bias matters, when "old media" criticize "new media"? Wouldn't it make more sense to point out distortions or falsehoods if see any, and then say "that shows this publication/author/article is biased"?

So you want them to admit bias you assume they have. Okay, and then what? You already assume it anyway, so for you nothing would even change. What's the functionality here?

> For instance, could Facebook begin to offer these publishers and/or authors > incentive to not publish these things in the future? Either with stick or > carrot. Could that influence how and what they publish?

So what is any particular publication supposed to write? Can you give me a concrete example of what to add to this article so that "the reader has a fair chance to assess if the article or authors may have a bias in how they report the story"?

I mean, yes, Facebook could begin to offer things to them or others for that or other things. And yes, that could influence things. That depends on who they are, and what is offered, to do what. and _anything_ "might" have a bias. That's just a given, I don't understand what could be added to every single article that would help here. "when we wrote X, it's actually Y in fact, but we don't like Facebook so we're not saying that"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Options:

1\. I will decide for myself what is reliable and what is not

2\. FB will decide for me

Why would anybody want option 2?

<comment><USER8> Option 3:

Strangers you never interact with will decide, based on extremely competent propaganda, and their decisions will determine:

\-- The outcome of elections

\-- Whether to commit genocide

\-- ???

<comment><USER9> I don't think anyone "decides" as such. It's just the incentives within the system promote whatever content people engage with most. As it turns out, negativity bias wins out.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand why people don't get this. "Hey we do X with the news feed algorithm and revenue is up 2.17%." That is how it works. It is up to humans to logically decide if this is moral or not. Algorithms just know numbers and morality is difficult to quantify.

<comment><USER9> these algorithms hold a mirror up to us, and we don't like what we see. Outrage bait is so prevalent because we are easily drawn to outrage so it generates more clicks/engagement/revenue. I think cognitive dissonance is a powerful factor in this - we don't believe we are capable of irrationality, immorality and naivety so when we see these things happening we say "some evil faction that isn't like me must be at play here!"

Said evil faction is taking the guise of Facebook and Google right now but it's the oldest rationalisation in the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Betrayal implies loyalty to something. Companies have zero loyalty to anything except their stock price.

</comment><comment><USER12> Question about PR, when an event like this happens, why not be transparent?

Unless facebook is actively working to help one side, this could be resolved by telling everyone what they know, and any new information...

What I'm most concerned about is that they knew it was happening and were okay with it.

</comment><comment><USER13> This seems super click-baity. I'm going to draw my own conclusions from the original NYT report.

</comment><comment><USER14> But where can I post pictures of my baby so granny can see them? Sure I'll have to wade through the Russian misinformation to do it and have my entire data file stolen by a shady right wing political entity but I refuse to send baby pics via email.

<comment><USER15> How about creating a Flickr account?

You can store up to 1000 pictures of your baby and even granny should be capable to click on an URL you supply by email.

<comment><USER14> It was sarcastic. It's one of the excuses my family gives for not deleting their FB.

<comment><USER15> Sorry then,

Sarcasm is sometimes hard to decipher on-line.

Add to that one of my pet peeves: Folks claiming that they can't quit Facebook because how should they stay in touch with their 600 friends and family members without relying on this truely evil company.

For the record: I "deleted" my account some 5 years ago, when it became obvious how despicable this company actually is.

<comment><USER14> No worries.

I deleted FB long ago and most recently fully weaned myself off Google.

The reality is Gmail, Facebook, et al are ploys to get people to store their data on an ad companies servers. No thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Profits over country.

</comment><comment><USER17> Confirming what sane people already knew - that the reflex answer of "Russian hackers" has always been bogus.

<comment><USER18> How did you get that from the article? Seems like the point was Facebook wasn't trying to get rid of Russian agents on it's site as much as it was trying to bolster it's image.

I think most of us have experienced the Russian "trolls" in one way or another, and there is very strong evidence that they have been, and continue to be, sponsored by the Russian state.

<comment><USER9> everyone has experienced trolls, but most of the time it's 4chan people trying to upset you for laughs.

<comment><USER18> [https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/politics/russian-troll- instru...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/politics/russian-troll- instructions/index.html)

Also, below is a recent article about professional Iranian trolls, but mentions that the same cybersecurity company has been tracking Russian disinformation campaigns for years. There are thousands of people in Russia, in Iran, in other countries who go into the office every day and earn their paycheck by trying to move opinion in the USA and elsewhere in a certain direction, or spread FUD.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/technology/fireeye- facebo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/technology/fireeye-facebook- disinformation.html)

> FireEye's information operations analysis team was formed in 2016, when > hacked emails from several political figures were beginning to appear on the > site DCLeaks. "All through that period, we were tracking the Russian effort > to influence U.S. elections," Mr. Foster said. "Obviously, social media is a > very important kind of medium by which these campaigns are undertaken."

<comment><USER9> yeah absolutely those people exist, I'm not denying it. But they're likely not the ones you've interacted with on twitter. Do you think Russia pays people to post inflammatory content on twitter, or to advocate for the Russian perspective like RT do? My money's on the latter.

<comment><USER19> > Do you think Russia pays people to post inflammatory content on twitter, or > to advocate for the Russian perspective like RT do?

People generally are far behind on what's public knowledge about the Russian internet propaganda efforts. Yes, that's exactly what they've been known to be doing, including interviews with former participants.

> The agency has employed fake accountsregistered on major social > networks,[2]discussion boards, online newspaper sites, and video hosting > services to promote the Kremlin's interests in domestic and foreign policy > including Ukraine and the Middle Eastas well as attempting to influence the > 2016 United States presidential election.

As of last known count, they had a $15million/year budget. But they've been reported to have grown significantly since the success of the US election.

[1] - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency)

<comment><USER9> my implication is that these agents do the latter rather than the former. I'm suggesting that you can divide the "twitter trolls" set into two - 4chan users who post inflammatory content, and Russian agents who aim to help bring politics that are of interest to the Russian government into the mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm no fan of facebook, and obviously there's a lot we need to examine regarding social media impact on society at large, etc, but I wonder to what extent this recent demonisation is a result of the existing press powers flexing their muscles. For example, [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook- rupert-murdoch-thre...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert- murdoch-threatened-mark-zuckerberg-in-2016-with-a-war.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Serious question, is someone bombing facebook in the press for some reason. I have seen no less four discussions bashing facebook on HN in the last day. Not defending or attacking FB in anyway, but the sheer coincidence warrants suspision.

<comment><USER22> It's easy to write about and insanely popular. Anti-facebook press is the equivalent of UK royal gossip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like how you can tell the specific kind of criticism that a MSM article on FB will contain by looking at the unflattering stock photo of Zuck appears in the masthead. Here, the photo says "incompetent bureaucrat".

This sort of attack is nothing new. Did FB have any obligation to do anything other than follow the law? No. There's no betrayal here.

You have to keep in mind that outlets like The New Republic are dying, paying writers peanuts, and attracting a contributor group that has the same sort of uniformly authoritarian and strident political philosophy that's damaged the freedom of expression on college campuses and in larger tech companies. They see disagreement with their worldview as morally repugnant and they demand that institutions use their power to censor this disagreement and punish the critics. It's a philosophy I reject.

To be smeared by The New Republic as "betray[ing] America" is kind of an honor.</comment>


Ask HN: Found stolen code in our Git repo. What should I do? - insider-info I work at a startup founded by a former Google engineer. He claims to have single-handedly written the original software before raising VC money to build a team. I was super impressed by our CEO's technical talent and incredible productivity. But I recently found from the git history that many files had Google's copyright notice and authorship annotations before they got deleted by the CEO.
Should I confront him? Should I contact the press? Should I inform our investors? Should I get in touch with Google? (Will they even care? We're not Uber. We are a tiny startup in a market they chose not to enter.) Should I just look for another job?
What should I do? What are your thoughts? I really need guidance, thanks!
(Check my profile page if you want to send me private messages.) <comment><AUTHOR> You might want to see what the license for the software is; it might have been open sourced by Google.

</comment><comment><USER2> 0\. Talk to an attorney familiar with these matters.

1\. Consider looking for another job.

Good luck.</comment>


If Version Control Systems were Airlines - <AUTHOR> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/698-if-version-control-systems-were-airlines

<comment><USER2> The link in this to the famous (?) "Operating systems as airlines" joke has a different version from the one I'm most familiar with.

Here's an alternative: <http://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue45/orr.html>

(The punchline to the Linux airline is priceless, I think.)

Edit: If you like this sort of humor, Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has a great extended analogy where operating systems are car dealerships. A link and a snippet:

 _Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free._

<http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html>

<comment><USER3> _Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free._

After they RTFM for how to start it. Attempting to drive away without that may result in seemingly random explosions.

That, and the consensus for anyone not in the consensus is that they should go fork themselves. The forked ones frequently agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> it's time to drop the prejudice against git's UI. The time where git was incredibly hard to use and required total knowledge of its inner workings are long past.

In it's most basic pattern of use, it's not more complicated than subversion, but of course, then you are not using the majority of the features that make git so nice to work with and that help improve the quality of your code base.

But even if you are using this additional features (rebase -i, add -p, bisect), it's not hard to use and for sure it's never acting in unexpected ways.

Sometimes, the opinion about git feels like all the people saying that PostgreSQL is hard to use and slow. Can't people get over paradigms of the past?

I lived and worked in days when git was hard and PostgreSQL slow. Didn't stop _me_ to see the change happen and to begin using them. Why can't others see and don't stop retelling the same old and obsolete stories over and over, be it in an earnest of funny (like this one here) package.

(disclaimer: I'm in a really bad mood today and I don't know why. I don't want to troll. I'm just bitter)

<comment><USER5> I think git's UI is terrible for one main reason: each git (porcelain) command can do a whole bunch of unrelated things.

Want to switch to a different branch (or tag/revision hash)? 'git checkout'

Want to change a single file's contents to a previous version? 'git checkout'

Want to create a new branch? 'git checkout'

This becomes a problem because 'git checkout' has to have many different options to be able to do all of these things and all of these options can interact in different ways.

This makes the 'git help' for every command enormous because it needs to document the interaction between all the different options. Large help docs are hard to read when you're in the middle of working and just want to know how to do something specific.

Contrast git's help with Mercurial's equivalent helps:

        $ git help checkout | wc -l
            236

        $ (hg help update ; hg help branch ; hg help revert) | wc -l
            100

Mercurial's docs are less than half the length of git's. This isn't because Mercurial isn't well documented -- it's because Mercurial splits up functionality into small, independent commands that do one main thing each. Mercurial's help doesn't need to waste time saying stuff like "if you use --foo then --bar means X, but if you use --bar on its own it means Y, and neither of them can be used with --baz".

 _This_ is why I hate git's UI. There's so much functionality crammed into every command that the docs for each command become impossible to scan (try 'git help log | wc -l' for laughs).

<comment><USER6> If you think of "git checkout" as "update the working copy", doing all those things with a single command makes a lot of sense.

The "create a new branch" functionality doesn't really belong in your list, since branches are created with "git branch". The -b switch is provided for checkout because _updating the working copy_ and creating a new branch is a very common sequence.

To be honest, I have yet to find anything I particularly dislike about git's approach. For some things, it took a while to see why it is the way it is, but in the end I find it fairly sensible. In my opinion, git just does things right on a fundamental level[1], which I find more important than UI issues.

[1] Compared to hg, especially the 'a branch is just a pointer' approach. I know of the bookmarks extension for hg but in the end I just used hg-to-git for the one hg repository that I follow.

<comment><USER5> > If you think of "git checkout" as "update the working copy", doing all those > things with a single command makes a lot of sense.

The problem is that "update the working copy" isn't accurate.

When you 'git checkout my-feature-branch' you "update the working copy" AND "switch the current branch to my-feature-branch".

When you 'git checkout fa230bc -b new-branch' you "update the working copy" AND "create a new branch".

> The "create a new branch" functionality doesn't really belong in your list, > since branches are created with "git branch". The -b switch is provided for > checkout because _updating the working copy_ and creating a new branch is a > very common sequence.

It absolutely does belong in the list. The problem is not simply that 'git checkout' can do a lot -- it's that the documentation is very hard to scan _because_ it can do a lot. Adding the -b switch adds to the problem because now you have to mention how this option interacts with the others (and give examples of how to use it in the Examples section).

Sure, if I want to create a new branch at a specific revision then the -b switch saves me a few keystrokes -- but it also makes the documentation for 'git checkout' harder to quickly find what I'm looking for whenever I want to look up something, even if it's completely unrelated to branch creation.

<comment><USER7> I always looked at -b this way: git checkout <branch> updates my working copy to some branch. -b just means "Implicitly create the branch if it doesn't exist yet."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love the SVN brick + merging room analogy.

"Magical" indeed, precious. They wants their code in the trunk, doesn't they, yes they do. Stupid, fat, filthy geekits, they want to ruin the precious! We must stop them, we must.

</comment><comment><USER8> They got it right on about Git Airline. I use it but I never understood it completely.

 _though sometimes they secretly wonder if the Mercurial flight got there faster_

I think that this airline thingy is the kick in the ass that I needed to finally at least try Mercurial. I hate git since the beginning but felt like "I had to use it".

<comment><USER9> I am a big fan of mercurial for single-developer projects because at that level it is extremely easy to setup, learn, and use. With Tortoise HG I was using the basics effectively long before I got around to reading the manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So where the hell is ClearCase?

Try to google 'hate ClearCase', alas, it's not that bad. Just expensive as hell, requires iron to run the reservation system of a major car rental company and a couple dozen adminsitrators to keep it running. This is not much of an exaggeration.

<comment><USER11> Clearcase Airlines is run by one of the largest megacorps in the world and usually only have business executives flying in them. They are a pretty old airline whose ownership has changed hands many times over the years, each owner adding a new carpeting and furnishing layer without removing the old one.

This resulted in a lot of customers complaining about the speed of the journey but since its control is under singular management, change has been slow. There is frequent time lag of messages between the control tower and the airplane though this does not seem to affect the dependability of the flight. Its usually considered more reliable than the Sourcesafe airline where the communication loss between the tower and the airline results in an immediate stall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "there's one right way to do it" misquoting/misunderstanding of the python mantra is starting to annoy me.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nothing from Microsoft? No TFS? They missed a golden opportunity to lay into Visual SourceSafe too ;0

<comment><USER14> If version control systems were airlines VSS would be a bus.

<comment><USER15> A bus that always manages to lose your luggage.

<comment><USER16> Bus plunge!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> +1 for the porcelain reference.

</comment><comment><USER18> Which version control system would prevent Kevin Smith from checking in code because he's a "danger to the code base?"

<comment><USER19> Git, for going over the 100 MB free Github account? (I know, Git partisans, Bitbucket has a similar, not much larger limit on free accounts)

<comment><USER5> Actually BitBucket gives free accounts 1 GiB of space now: [http://blog.bitbucket.org/2010/02/11/disk-space-is-cheap- hav...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2010/02/11/disk-space-is-cheap-have-some/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They missed out SCCS. Anyone remember that?

<comment><USER21> A long time ago I had to use some legacy scientific code stored in SCCS repos on a Solaris server. It's even more arcane than RCS.</comment></comment>