Tech Stocks Roar Again in Faint Echo of 2000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-stocks-roar-again-in-faint-echo-of-2000-1509143296 <comment><USER2> I roll my eyes as these tortured attempts to draw parallels that aren't even superficially similar.

2000 was an IPO bubble of companies that had no revenue, no prospect of revenue and no business plan. Analysts went out of their way to justify valuations by inventing new metrics like revenue-to-price multipliers.

What's different today is that the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are money-making machines on a scale probably not matched since at least the era of Standard Oil, the 19th century railroad tycoons and other industrialists like Carnegie.

I mean, Apple is trading at a P/E of less than 19 and it has a market cap of $842B. That is mind-boggling but not at all outrageous.

In 2000 the tech IPO bubble burst. In 2007 the subprime disaster came crashing down. It is absolutely certain there will be another downturn in the future but at this point I have no idea what the next trigger will be.

My best guess is something to do with China. This could take many forms. Some think that the Chinese economy is a house of cards. There has clearly been a flight of capital from China. Who knows where this ends? Also, Chinese money in particular has been flooding into Western real estate markets. This too may come to a head.

Or it could be something to do with North Korea or even Iran.

Or populists movements may drive Western governments to crack down on what they see as excessive power by the large tech companies, particularly in the EU.

Or a constitutional crisis instigated by our current lunatic-in-chief.

Whatever the case I really don't see any significant parallels to 2000.

<comment><USER3> > 2000 was an IPO bubble of companies that had no revenue, no prospect of > revenue and no business plan.

That's half myth. Most of the Nasdaq's value inflation was from companies with substantial revenue, not a thousand DrKoop.com or Pets.com companies.

Just the overvaluation by Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Sun, Nortel, Lucent, Intel, AOL, Yahoo ($1.5 to $2 trillion in overvaluation) - was more than what all the dotcom IPO companies were worth combined.

Most of the largest tech market cap companies of 2000 had real revenue.

Microsoft was sporting a ~50-65 PE ratio in 1999/2000.

AOL was commonly trading for 150 to 200 times earnings, with $8 billion in annualized revenue and over a billion in annualized profit, growing at 100% year over year circa mid 2000.

Cisco was solidly profitable, had $16-$20 billion in annualized revenue and was growing extremely fast. It produced the single largest market cap in history up to that point.

Oracle was commonly trading at 100 times earnings.

Just the Cisco _overvaluation_ alone, at $450 billion give or take, was worth more than most of the zero revenue style dotcom companies combined (companies like Geocities, TheGlobe, etc).

There is once again trillions of dollars in overvaluation among today's largest tech companies. You can easily see that when you look at how they've inflated based on the market moving rather than earnings the last three or four years. For example, Microsoft's valuation tripled over five years on the back of between zero and very little earnings growth.

Appraise Amazon's valuation based on income. Good luck.

Netflix? 150-200 PE ratio has been typical.

Activision is worth $50 billion, trading at 45-50 times earnings, with typical 7%-10% style income growth.

Cisco's valuation has nearly doubled in five years, despite very little income or business growth.

Alibaba is trading for 50-60 times earnings.

Salesforce.com is trading for... oh geez, 400 times last fiscal year's earnings, and a lot more than that based on the last four quarters.

Oracle's stock is up by about 1/3 in the last year, while its business can't get beyond where it was in 2015.

VMWare has a ~43 PE ratio, and is lucky if they can generate 10% growth at this point.

Intel has doubled in five years, with minimum income growth.

nVidia is trading for 60 times earnings. Sales might grow 15%-20% in the coming year, which caps what their earnings growth is likely to do as well.

Tesla's valuation? Ha.

Twitter & Snapchat, ~$35 billion in combined market value, neither have ever earned a profit.

Workday has never earned a profit. $22 billion valuation. In fact their losses just keep growing by the year, over 25% of revenue equivalent for their last fiscal year at $400 million in negative net income. Revenue nearly doubled, losses nearly doubled, versus 2015. This is a company that loses between 1/2 and 2/3 of its market cap in the next downturn as they're forced to slash the bleed out of desperation and the juiced growth implodes with it.

AMD, the poster child for showing up during market bubbles, has an $11 billion market cap and hasn't earned a profit in ... who remembers when. Their stock went up 6-7 fold on hype, while they can't even get sales back to 2014 levels.

Splunk, $9 billion market cap. This is a company that bleeds red ink by the barrel ($800+ million in losses the last three years, on $2 billion in sales). Oh but they're growing fast so it's ok? It won't be ok when the music stops and they have to cap the red ink, then the growth that's artificially juiced by that goes with it.

Broadcom, 50 times forward earnings, lucky if their growth hits 15% in the next year.

Texas Instruments. Zero growth for years. The stock is up roughly 40% in the last year. Pure multiple expansion.

Priceline.com, 40-45 PE ratio, lucky if they can hit 10% style growth in a given year since 2013. Stock is up 50% since 2014, while earnings are still below that level.

This list only keeps going.

Is it as bad as 2000? No, it's merely extremely bad today, not yet dotcom bubble days bad.

<comment><USER2> Your point isn't without merit but a little overstated. A couple of points:

> Microsoft was sporting a ~50-65 PE ratio in 1999/2000.

Today's PEs:

        MSFT: 28.35
        GOOG: 34.74
        AAPL: 18.55
        FB: 38.64
        CSCO: 18.08
        ORCL: 22.18
        T: 16.33
        VZ: 12.54
        CMCSA: 17.56
        INTC: 15.56

As you say there are some outliers too:

        NVDA: 57.80
        TSLA: --
        AMZN: 277.89
        NFLX: 201.87

Now I went through a list of the largest tech companies to produce the above list. What this seems to show is that the sector as a whole isn't overvaluaed, at least in terms of earnings.

As for the outliers, they're all pretty much examples of large bets on the future of the various companies:

\- Nvidia seems to be well placed for GPU driven ML

\- Tesla is a bet on battery tech and self-driving cars

\- Netflix is a bet on Netflix dominated global on-demand entertainment and distribution (they're now in all but 4 countries)

\- Amazon is of course a bet on owning the online retail sector

Like any bet some will pay off and some won't.

> This list only keeps going.

See now that's a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER3> It's not a stretch, the list of companies whose valuations have dramatically increased with between zero and very little growth, is a long one.

That's the part where the market has kicked into bubble valuation territory, when you're primarily seeing multiple expansion driving 40% or 100% type gains.

Microsoft hasn't been able to grow earnings for years. Why do they have a 30 style PE ratio? Why did their stock triple on zero earnings growth? Comparing their growth today versus the multiple, against 2000's valuation, today's value proposition is drastically worse. Or spread it out, compare 1995-2000 MSFT growth, with the multiple they had at the end of that five years, versus 2012-2017 growth and the multiple they have now.

<comment><USER4> Looking at the charts back to 2015, Microsoft has grew earnings pretty steadily. I believe they attribute it to pushing everyone to the cloud.

<comment><USER4> *grown? Ah, geeze.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The coming correction is going to be a big one! Just look at what the stock market has done since the election. The DJIA went from 18,000 to almost 24,000. That's a 33% increase in a year!

The good news is that if you've been in the market for a while, you're way up anyways. The 10-20% correction will come giving you an opportunity to buy low again.

And then in a decade we'll repeat everything again!

<comment><USER6> Past results dont predict the future.

The current boom since 2011 could easily extend for another decade, just like the boom from 1980-1990. If you felt there was going to be a correction then just because "its due" you would have missed the huge boom from 1990-1999.

<comment><USER5> This is very true and why I'm staying in the market.

The only reason why I think we're due for a correction is that PE ratios and the like seem out of wack. But you are right, this could keep going for a long time and maybe the economy would grow enough to start to justify the stock prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2000s was a time when even penny stocks that did similar stuff to real company's, they would go up big just from stock board members pumping them up

<comment><USER8> See: ICO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> the end is near..? ..is everyone in yet?

</comment><comment><USER10> Real wages have not risen in over 40 years.

<comment><USER11> Real wages in silicon valley for the hot industry at the moment have definitely gone up the past 40 years.</comment></comment>


Jamstack Handbook – All things Jamstack with 3 step-by-step tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://jamstackhandbook.com/ <comment><USER2> Who is the Jamstack for in your opinion? I'm a web developer that makes a lot of apps and marketing sites for small to medium businesses and I find it very hard to justify the added complexity of a Jamstack architecture - there's just too many moving parts.

It seems to me you need a few things:

\- A dedicated development team to manage the stack

\- Enough traffic to justify the complexity

\- Regular content publishing to make use of the build pipeline

\- A need for speed beyond what's regularly acceptable

Great work anyway on the book, it's good to see people charging for curated knowledge.

<comment><USER3> Added complexity? At its simplest, Jamstack is just a static site generator. A service like Netlify will do the entire build pipeline for you (for free) just by pointing it at the git repo. Or if you want to DIY the hosting, then all you have to do is find somewhere that can host static files.

Jamstack is largely about removing complexity.

<comment><USER2> At its simplest yes. But if you are proposing this as a solution to a client, they will likely want to edit content. That will have to happen on a headless CMS instance. That's whole new stack to maintain alongside. You then need to set that up and configure the SPA to talk to it (GraphQL/Apollo?). When I come back to client project in a month, is all this still going to be working ...?

Maybe, but it's certainly not less complex then a traditional Wordpress site. So I'm wondering what are the criteria for using Jamstack successfully?

As you said it could be that it's good for simple static sites but not great for more complex content-drive sites - I don't know, that's what I'm asking.

<comment><USER4> Obviously it depends a lot on which CMS you're using and I can imagine there being a lot of complexity involved.

That said, setting up something like Contentful and integrating it with NextJS is roughly a day or two of work if you're doing it for the first time. And it all works over REST so you don't have to worry about GraphQL.

You can even do "previews" now with Next thanks to preview mode: [https://next-preview.now.sh/](https://next-preview.now.sh/)

<comment><USER5> Contentful just abstracts away the complexity (for money). It's still complex, but you're paying instead of dealing with the complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think thats a fair point but there's a lot of benefit from from that. they're able to focus on making a great CMS

there are also some open source solutions that are great. Netlify CMS works really well for a very basic page / blog management solution

a lot of the headless CMS solutions also offer generous free tiers, making it perfect for web devs to spin up a free instance for their personal sites and projects

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The invention of the "JAM stack" is one of the greatest marketing stunts I know of. Kudos to Netlify for rebranding HTML+AJAX

<comment><USER7> The problem that Netlify has is that they are simply a feature of the big cloud providers.

Microsoft is already testing the waters with their own offering and I'm sure AWS and Google are as well. I'm not sure Netlify will survive the onslaught.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think there's a lot of truth to that - but they do is so fantastically well

there are a LOT of pain points to deal with rolling out all that is included with the base netlify offering

hosting a static site is pretty easy - but configuring routing between cloudfront and s3 can be complicated so that the reequests don't always reference the root index.html

creating an autodeploy infrastructure can be challenging as well, tools like github actions might make that a little easier, but there are a lot of considerations there

it also makes these kinds of solutions more accessible to developers who might not have the understanding or interest to set up that kind of infrastructure. front end devs can build sites, connect, and go with little fuss

<comment><USER8> I second this. Players like Netlify and Digital Ocean have a ridiculous amount of mindshare for solving a certain problem faster without the complexity that the big cloud providers bring.

I think the market is larger for simplified services without the IAM and S3 cruft, especially when you have to educate the client on the solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea of JAMstack and will likely use it for simple toy projects. But I do not like the idea of promoting paid products on HN. this link is basically just an ad telling users to "buy the book".

There is nothing for me to read, learn or discuss on the landing page unless I buy the book.

<comment><USER10> The upvoting/downvoting mechanism should be sufficient unless you have a scenario where people are upvoting titles without reading the page.

Note to author: perhaps more enticing would be to have 4 examples, the first being a free preview of the book and rest would require payment. Then people could evaluate your tutorial style.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks - thats a good point - i plan on releasing the first tutorial free actually - i just haven't had the time to get that out yet, that'll be hopefully posted on freecodecamp.org in the next couple of days

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks great. People interested may also want to take a look at Andy Bell's 11ty book, which is more of a general introduction to web development and the jamstack:

[https://piccalil.li/course/learn-eleventy-from- scratch/](https://piccalil.li/course/learn-eleventy-from-scratch/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Andy Bell is fantastic, great rec

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone point me to a good headless CMS solution that doesn't introduce vendor lock in? I've tried Contenful and I only got nothing but good things to say about it. Probably something open source and self hosted.

<comment><AUTHOR> there are a lot of good options here: [https://headlesscms.org/](https://headlesscms.org/)

i personally use Netlify CMS for my website. it's not as feature rich as some other options, but for a personal blog, it gets the job done, and it's open source

<comment><USER12> Thanks for that link, will take a look!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You dont need that much tooling. A static site generator will do. Build your site with vanilla HTML or markdown. Use web micro-services for widgets like search, comments, contact-form, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> for sure - that's definitely a valid solution. it all depends on the goals you're trying to meet

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 'an unexpected error has occured'

I hope you get it up and running again soon, because I am very curious to know what your handbook is all about.

<comment><AUTHOR> :o where are you seeing that, on the homepage? it's loading for me

<comment><USER14> I get it in Safari 12.1.2 (12607.3.10) on the mac. It works correctly in Firefox for me now.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's so strange - sorry you're experiencing that. im not having any issues on my mac's safari :( glad FF is working for you though

i'll try to see if i can figure out a way to reproduce

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess there's some use case for Jamstack static generators but unless you do frequent builds just building vanilla HTML is my preference.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's the expected knowledge before you read this?

<comment><AUTHOR> For the book - I don't think there really is a high expectation of knowledge, except maybe just general web development from a high level. The hope for the informational part is to get anyone acquainted with it

For the tutorials - the expectation is familiarity with Javascript and probably React, given the examples are React, though I walk through each steps with the code changes

<comment><USER17> Edit: Pardon me! I think I encountered some weirdness on mobile, I couldn't scroll very far down. After a reload I'm seeing more.

——-

I'm seeing very little about the actual content of the book on the page. Could you please detail a little bit more about what's actually covered? What apps are you building in those tutorials? Etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry i heard there are some issues with the site but i haven't been able to reproduce to fix :(

please let me know if you hvae more questions!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google adding gamified check-ins to G+? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/02/19/googles-new-latitude-leaderboards-suggest-gamified-check-ins-are-coming-to-google/

<comment><USER2> Noone "plays together".. People use Foursquare to broadcast where they are to the world, not play a silly game. Google Locations and Facebook already have this. Adding a gamified layer won't do much to attract users. On the other hand, putting a link in front of Google.com will.

<comment><USER3> (FWIW, the only two people I know who use foursquare actively compete to see who gets the most points every week.)</comment></comment>


Robert Love: iPhone OS 4 and Multitasking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/iphone-os-4-and-multitasking.html <comment><USER2> Could someone explain how switching between apps looks instant.... how is that done if the app is not running in the background?</comment>


Translating from Inner Mongolian - <AUTHOR> 1. Meditate on who and what you are.
2. Go https://translate.google.com/#mn/en/
3. Enter some random garbage (must use Cyrillic letters) in the left window, repeating vowels work the best.
4. Observe a poem emerging on the right side.
5. Share your revelations.
<comment></comment><comment>-
Example input:

    аааа аааааааааа аауу  аааннннншшш
    ээээууушшш
    эээээжж ллллввв
    оооуоуоуоуо оуоуоуоуо оуоуоуоуо уоуоуооу ввваапаааппппоооввв ууууу ппооооо
    аааааууеееееееее еее ееее
    уууууааааа
    эээээее нннн
    лллууууууооооооааааааа еееее ннннннеекк еееееуууввв
    ааааааауумммвваааааааааппппппппооооооуууооооооооо
    ооооуоуоу
 Translates as:

    Be awake
    please
    she said
    if you do not know what you are about to do in the world
    do yourself a favor
    drink it
    Well, I did
    her own life
    Everything is good
    Why?
 </comment><comment><USER2> I feel like this is a joke. I don't get it.

<comment><USER3> I think is for sure a joke, from our lovely friends of Google. Isn't better to give a lovely output instead of just copying the input?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. It's more like a neural net hallucinating in response to noisy input. Copy/paste some legitimate Mongolian text, then start mangling it - you'll see what I mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How. Did. You. Find. This.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seen on Facebook. I think it was [https://twitter.com/oleggp](https://twitter.com/oleggp) who initially discovered it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Make a difference

it's up to you

to be in love with you

announce

I wish I could write that.</comment>


Facebook has acquired FriendFeed - <AUTHOR> http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/08/friendfeed-accepts-facebook-friend.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Press Release @ facebook.com: <http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=116581>

</comment><comment><USER2> As a friendfeed user I must say: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much of it was Facebook stock and at what valuation

<comment><USER4> Don't know about that yet - but techcrunch says its a all stock or mostly stock acquisition. [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/first-interview- after-a...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/first-interview-after- acquisition-with-friendfeed-and-facebook/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did friendfeed have a viable revenue model so far?

<comment><USER5> I think facebook wanted their technology. Facebook has fallen pretty flat on their "real-time" feed whereas friendfeed has thrived. Get ready for facebook to see a spike in how their real-time feed works ;-)

<comment><USER6> Probably wanted their team more than their tech.</comment></comment></comment>


Learning Day - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/learning-day/ <comment><USER2> I think this promotes an extremely healthy environment for personal growth and development. I wonder how this would scale to companies that have higher operational burdens or more customer facing software?

As a side note, this is exactly something I would very much appreciate from an employer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why Thursday and not Friday?</comment>


Show HN: Should the US Accept Refugees - <AUTHOR> http://www.shouldtheusacceptrefugees.com/ <comment><USER2> I agree that the USA and Canada should accept refugees. However, I am disturbed by the fact that most other middle eastern countries are accepting very few or no refugees. I can't help but wonder why...</comment>


The Aggregate IQ Files: How a Political Engineering Firm Exposed Their Code Base - <AUTHOR> https://www.upguard.com/breaches/aggregate-iq-part-one <comment><USER2> article:

[https://gizmodo.com/aggregateiq-created-cambridge- analyticas...](https://gizmodo.com/aggregateiq-created-cambridge-analyticas- election-softw-1824026565)

two main points:

>Trump's digital marketing campaign was illegally funded through in-kind contributions by foreign entities, including intellectual property and software. Trump's U.S. digital marketing company lied about the source of its intellectual property and software to hide the fact that its origin was a foreign entity

[https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/978331761397682177](https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/978331761397682177)

<comment><USER2> looks those two tweets are likely wrong, sorry:

[https://twitter.com/dellcam/status/978345305635770368](https://twitter.com/dellcam/status/978345305635770368)

<comment><USER3> Yeah you really should not be spreading Abramson's rants. They're based on nothing and exist only to go viral: [https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/stop- listenin...](https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/stop-listening-to- seth-abramson-on-donald-trumps-r.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> DUPE. Active discussion => [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16681026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16681026)</comment>


We ran a private crowdfunding campaign and it worked - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jerols/6-things-we-learned-from-running-a-private-crowdfunding-campaign-33ac835de4dd <comment><AUTHOR> This is Jeremy, co-founder of Hours. I would be happy to answer any questions about the campaign here in the comments.</comment>


Show HN: Swiftris – Learn Swift by Building Tetris - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloc.io/swiftris-build-your-first-ios-game-with-swift

<comment><USER2> Digging in now. It's nice to see things like this popping up already. I'm already really liking it because though it does just show copy-pasteable code, the links to the documentation and more in depth talk make me feel like this wasn't completely hacked together in the fastest way possible just for free publicity for Bloc. Great work, guys :) If you're interested in feedback once I get through it my email is in my inbox and I'd gladly share some thoughts.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup i'll make note of your email. mine is prasid [at] bloc.io</comment></comment>


Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad - <AUTHOR> http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most-corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm

<comment><USER2> For some reason I thought this was a pretty well known fact. I mean we're corrupt to the core in our own country. Everybody from the platform vendors to politicians are corrupt. Heck shops refuse to sell cola at the MRP. They always sell it at a premium of 1 or 2 Rs. It's come to the extent where we think of corruption as a way of life.

</comment><comment><USER3> Characterizing and grouping individuals is dangerous for doing business</comment>


Palantir, the War on Terror's Secret Weapon - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/palantir-the-vanguard-of-cyberterror-security-11222011.html

<comment><USER2> For those unfamiliar with Palantir:

"Palantir technology essentially solves the Sept. 11 intelligence problem. The Digital Revolution dumped oceans of data on the law enforcement establishment but provided feeble ways to make sense of it. In the months leading up to the 2001 attacks, the government had all the necessary clues to stop the al Qaeda perpetrators"

As a civil libertarian I would be deeply concerned about this company, but the fact that Peter Thiel is supporting really boosts my confidence. For those who don't know, Thiel is a staunch, principled libertarian. His philanthropy even includes an effort to establish new, freer countries (see Seasteading Institute).

</comment><comment><USER3> For a defence contractor with a mad scientist at the head, they have the coolest name.</comment>


Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/post/17788d573f <comment><USER2> I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Insomnia.

[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

It's an excellent tool that allows defining workspaces and even sharing sets of routes with members of your team. It's one of my favourite tools.

<comment><USER3> Personally using Nightingale when on Windows and couldn't be happier. I don't need or want another electron app running on my machine and currently all the cool kids in the space of API clients seem to be using just that, including Insomnia.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/nightingale-rest-api- clien...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/nightingale-rest-api- client/9n2t6f9f5zdn?activetab=pivot:overviewtab)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the tip! I will try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm just a user of this, but if anyone is looking for a truly native MacOS version of Postman, you should take a look at Paw.

[https://paw.cloud/](https://paw.cloud/)

<comment><USER6> Can it use postman collections?

<comment><USER7> Yes, it supports plugins, one of which can import Postman Collections. There is also a plugin for exporting Postman Collections in case you work with people who use Postman.

[https://paw.cloud/docs/migrate/postman](https://paw.cloud/docs/migrate/postman)

[https://paw.cloud/docs/exporters/postman- exporter](https://paw.cloud/docs/exporters/postman-exporter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I use a low-end PC and can't possibly afford to run another Electron app

> That's why I created my own API request builder with pure JavaScript (I used > Vue.js) + HTML + CSS

So... the only differences are not running this as a separate process and NIH?

<comment><USER9> Presumably lower memory usage due to not running in a separate process. On a low-end PC this is a completely valid concern. Chrome is memory hungry. Running one instance might be viable. Running 2, 3 or 6 probably isn't (and you can always choose a less memory-hungry browser).

<comment><USER10> If performances are a concern I would build it in QT, not Javascript. Just opening Firefox eats like 400 MB ram on my PC !

<comment><USER11> It makes me question, is there any way to run a slim browser for these kind of tools?

It would be cool to have a tool that would: * run a very slim browser tab for each tool * I cloud load/save sites into tools (So I can really run them offline) * Could have a shortcut or a starting page that's just links to my saved tools

<comment><USER12> Considering this tool uses JavaScript rendering, I'm not sure you could get away with a "slim browser". You're going to need all the bloat that makes CSR work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't CORS restrictions basically render this whole tool useless?

<comment><USER14> I suppose it's useful for APIs with permissive CORS headers. Maybe there's also some way to run it locally as a separate app with SOP disabled?

Maybe something like:

      $ chromium-browser --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="/tmp" --kiosk https://liyasthomas.github.io/postwoman/

Unrelated, meta note: why does indiehackers need a separate interstitial splash screen, visible for ~4-5 seconds to load a simple article page?

<comment><USER15> Then you're launching a second chromium instance and practically recreating Electron.

<comment><USER14> Yes, indeed. Sort of defeats the point of Postwoman being more performant..

Still, this seems safer than the various extensions that have been recommended in order to disable the SOP. I'd rather the user's data wasn't on the line.

<comment><USER15> Right, so I don't see any reason why I would ever want to use this tool when far superior alternatives (like postman) exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Github: [https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman](https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman)

Back Story: [https://dev.to/liyasthomas/i-created-postwoman-an-online- ope...](https://dev.to/liyasthomas/i-created-postwoman-an-online-open-source- api-request-builder-41md)

</comment><comment><USER17> After Postman lost all my saved queries after an upgrade I switched to Insomnia - [https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/) and am quite happy with it.

<comment><USER18> I'm curious to know what gives you the confidence that Insomnia won't lose your saved data? Are you paying the premium for the data sync?

<comment><USER19> Not OP, but since Insomnia is a native app, it'll probably store its data and preferences in ~/Library. That is of course backed up via Time Machine.

<comment><USER20> It is not nattive , very hard to find native apps [https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia](https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Since it was added, my favourite way to do API requests is IntelliJ Http client

[https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in- product-c...](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-code- editor.html)

You just write the requests. That's it. Not much of an interface or anything.

It also supports creating requests from a cURL command (so in Chromium devtools you can copy the cURL request and then paste it in IntelliJ).

<comment><USER22> This is also what I use. Others mention insomnia, but it does not support testing responses (validating them) with a script. With the Http Client in IntelliJ you can do that, as well as with Postman. But with Postman you need to import/export everything and put it into you projects, so you can check it in with your source code. Using IntelliJ you don't need to do that anymore too.

Having used Postman, Insomnia and the IntelliJ Http Client, the last one is the best out of them all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like wuzz. An ncurses interfaces for HTTP requests that allows me to save my configuration. It's super lightweight and all I need.

[https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz](https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this affiliated with Postman? It seems disingenuous to reuse their name if not.

<comment><USER24> Came here to say the same. Seems needlessly antagonistic.

<comment><USER25> But inclusion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Navigating to the site[1] and asking me to install it on my Chrome browser without providing any relevant information is a big security no-no. I think the developer should have provided more information on the product and link to a trustworthy site where the binaries could be verified and added (safely) into the browser.

[1] [https://liyasthomas.github.io/postwoman/](https://liyasthomas.github.io/postwoman/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Hm, web based so defeated by CORS (plus privacy issues unless you install it on your own server, but then Postman itself is closed source …). Fortunately there's an Emacs package for this =P [http://emacsrocks.com/e15.html](http://emacsrocks.com/e15.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm pretty happy with the features of the vscode-restclient called VS Code extension. [https://github.com/Huachao/vscode- restclient](https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient)

</comment><comment><USER11> Opening the link I was hoping that this would be a postman with better support for file uploads. I have a long lived desired to be able to have postman request which embeds a file to upload. I really like postman features and UX but when I need a test suite for a file upload endpoint it doesn't match.

Tried several hacks to achieve to embed files but none worked. If the endpoint supported Content-Transfer-Encoding it would be kind of easy to do.

<comment><USER29> You don't need a hack. I do it all of the time.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16015548/tool-for- sendin...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16015548/tool-for-sending- multipart-form-data-request)

<comment><USER11> That doesn't work for the test runner, just for one time off requests. Just closing and opening postman it looses the file you had choosen.

<comment><USER29> Use the export functionality to create a script in your language of choice? (c#, Java, Curl, etc.)?

<comment><USER11> In my opinion that would defeat the purpose of the tool. I like to have a postman suite file that I can share... using other tools and integrations would kind of break that.

Postman best thing is that an easy enough tool for beginners and customizable enough to be a test suite for an API. The cost of leaving the tools for it's pretty high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's a neat side project, and I like the idea of having a quick website I can go for testing quick requests rather than having to open a full-fledged app.

</comment><comment><USER31> Working on integrating other companies APIs and find declarative approach easier like VSCode has this extension where you could write all API calls in code. [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest- client)

<comment><USER32> If you're already in VS Code I prefer the rest extension as well. It's great for making quick one-off calls but is a little under-powered for organizing larger sets of endpoints, credentials, etc

<comment><USER31> You can create env variables, local variables, use response results in next request etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How does performance compare to PostMans laughably bad performance? I'd love to drop postman.

<comment><USER34> Plenty of alternatives. Paw[0], Insomnia[1] to name a few.

[0] [https://paw.cloud/](https://paw.cloud/)

[1] [https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Great, You can host your open source API on www.inventrust.com as well. This is a blockchain enabled, collaborative Exchange for Trusted software code.

</comment><comment><USER36> Don't forget to paste your auth tokens into a random website today.

<comment><USER37> Everyone: don't use existing please make new, unique keys for services like this. Time-box and revoke!

<comment><USER38> Can you please elaborate on what you mean by time-boxing and how you achieve it? I'm assuming it means to assign a time scope to a key and then revoke it's access outside of that time period. This would require access to the API authentication methods, correct? Otherwise, for API's that you don't have backend access to (e.g., GitHub API) you should just generate a token for testing and manually delete it when you are done?

<comment><USER39> They mean to assign an expiration date to your tokens. Then when you're done testing, still revoke the token, even if you haven't reached the expiration date.

<comment><USER37> This is exactly what I meant, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> this is pretty cool! I've needed a tool like this all week to mess with the GitHub API

</comment><comment><USER41> Rested firefox extension is quite nice too.

</comment><comment><USER42> Here is the definition of trademark infringement directly from USPTO [1]: "Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a trademark or service mark on or in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services."

I'm not affiliated with Postman in any way. But if I was, I'd already have sent a note to my lawyers to collect evidence, issue a cease and desist letter, get your project kicked off of github, and prepare for the possibility of lawsuit.

Given the nature of your project and the extreme similarity to the name "Postman", I would strongly urge you to change your project's name before you expose yourself and your family to potential financial ruin.

[1] [https://www.uspto.gov/page/about-trademark- infringement](https://www.uspto.gov/page/about-trademark-infringement)

<comment><USER43> First, doesn't even look like it's a commercial product.

Second, the creator says they don't have the money right now for a domain name. You can't squeeze blood from a turnip. And they may not even live in a country that respects US trademark law.

Seems like a polite request from postman would be a good place to start.</comment></comment>


Inhale- USC Startup looking to solve indoor/outdoor air pollution - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys would love to hear your feedback on a startup I've been working on called Krafft IT. It is is an environmental tech startup in Los Angeles focused on bringing cleaner air to communities. Our objective is to provide localized data on air quality both indoors and outdoors and allow users to purify the air in their homes,thereby removing harmful toxins and reducing preventable hospital visits while also advocating a healthier lifestyle. We want to integrate air quality as a central component of the "smarthome" through integration with NEST, Rachio, and other "smart" products. We want to help people with asthma, respiratory air allergies, and promote overall awareness about air quality. Our first product which will be released in our kickstarter campaign in about a couple of weeks is called Inhale. I've included the specifics below. Our website is www.krafftit.com<p>INHALE- Smartphone Application - ios, android (FREE) Inhale is a software product that aggregates air quality data from the government (ozone, pm 2.5, pollen) and displays it in a patent protected intuitive way for users to plan outdoor activities based on the air quality in their area. Our algorithm also provides predictions for up to four days to let users to be aware of the air quality and potential for overexposure around them. The final component is the ability for the software tool to measure the total amount of ozone, pm 2.5, or pollen inhaled through the duration of an outdoor activity by using the pulse meter on a smartwatch o smartphone. <comment><USER2> You should consider distilling your pitch into something more digestible for consumers. I had to reread those 2 paragraphs twice and I still don't fully understand what product or service I'm supposed to buy into.

Hope that helps.</comment>


Daring Fireball's Impressive Traffic Stats - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/daring-fireball-2011-3?op=1 <comment><USER2> Regardless of whether you like what he writes, you can't knock the hustle here. Gruber found his audience and a way to monetize.</comment>


Statistical Undecidability (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1691165&download=yes <comment><USER2> Epic self-citation (the ONLY citation) but this looks like a major cautionary exposition for fields where expected effect sizes may be very small (eg genetics).

<comment><USER3> What do you expect from Taleb?

<comment><USER2> He is amazingly arrogant. Possibly several nanoDijsktras

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given that the statistician's mantra is that no model is true, it's just that some are useful, I would expect to see a sensitivity analysis of any claim being made as to the effect of choosing the wrong model on the accuracy of parameter estimates or predictions. Instead, what we get here is mathematical smoke and mirrors, 'cause ultimately what the paper says is that even when you have a very large sample, people might reasonably disagree about how to model that sample and that the data itself won't be sufficient to decide which model is best -- hence "statistical undecidability". Okay, yeah, sure, interesting point, but not exactly shocking to anyone who has ever used any sort of statistics.</comment>


Impostoritis: A Lifelong, but Treatable, Condition - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/03/imposter_syndrome_how_the_president_of_harvey_mudd_college_copes.html

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's just a woman's issue. I've struggled with this myself until recently when I got 3 out of the 4 jobs I applied to a couple weeks after getting laid off.

<comment><USER3> Yep. impostor syndrome never was associated with gender. She just picked the low hanging fruit.

Impostor syndrome applies to everyone who still lacks close friends in a particular social occasion. So it's very common on all steam folks since most have social anxiety, hence take a long time to make close friends.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on the relation between imposter syndrome and lacking close friends?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why does it seem like STEM grads disproportionately suffer more from impostor syndrome while business grads seem to disproportionately suffer less?

<comment><USER6> Probably the nature of the work - it's easier to feel like an impostor if success is primarily defined by detailed knowledge of the field. I suspect that in the business field you can't succeed unless you're comfortable portraying incomplete or speculative information as fact. Just guessing, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Her department would get more varied backgrounds if she did her job and improved teaching and update the curriculum instead of doing the campus therapist job.

All the smart people, whatever the gender, are probably applying elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> What makes you qualified to say that? You think smart people aren't applying to Harvey Mudd?</comment></comment>


A new micro blogging concept built on top of social networks - <AUTHOR>

Hello people, we have just launched this new website with a new concept of micro blogging on top of social networks. would be great if you would be from our early birds to try Pngine out and give us your feedback. http://www.pngine.com <comment><USER2> Please get yourself an SSL certificate.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure we will got it very soon , what do you think about the interface ?

<comment><USER2> The interface looks nice.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: replacements for blogger service? - <AUTHOR>

I point my blog on blogger to blog.MYDOMAN.COM and I was interested in available drop in (or at least easy) replacements.
I thought of using a Wordpress host for just my blog, but the few I checked don't let you register with a sub-domain.
I also looked into running Apache Roller (blog server) on my same server that runs my main domain (a web app written in Clojure + Compojure) but it si not clear how easy it is to import the Atom data exported from blogger.
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Install WordPress on your website and self host it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what I am doing right now, thanks.</comment></comment>


Congratulations to Tesla on Their First Public Step Toward GPL Compliance - <AUTHOR> https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-ccs/ <comment><USER2> Pile load of propaganda. «Burn Baby Burn»</comment>


The digital nomad's notebook (the quest) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/searching-notebook-for-a-digital-nomad/

<comment><USER2> The top of the line T440s should fit your requirements. I actually ordered one yesterday for running linux on.</comment>


Trend line for new flash developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/?q=flash+tutorials&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

<comment><USER2> Trend line for new JavaScript developers: <http://www.google.com/trends/?q=javascript+tutorials>

Trend line for new Java developers: <http://www.google.com/trends/?q=java+tutorials>

Trend line for new C developers: <http://www.google.com/trends/?q=c+tutorials>

In fact that seems to be the trend for all tutorials: <http://www.google.com/trends/?q=tutorials>

What's going on? Are people resorting less and less on tutorials? Are the "tutorial" sites that show up on Google so spammy that people do not bother to search for "tutorials" anymore?

<comment><USER3> My guess is people stopped publishing amateur tutorials and focused on spending time on facebook. Lots of beginner creativity got flushed down the facebook. When I learned HTML or PHP long time ago everybody's first ambition was to get good enough to write his own tutorial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flash tutorials.</comment>


Rochester Made website cheers benefits, ingenuity of area - <AUTHOR> http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20111226/NEWS01/112260317

<comment><AUTHOR> The story behind the site we launched last week or so: <http://rochestermade.com></comment>


Netflix's Ken Florance: The Man Who Keeps the Video Streaming - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-24/netflixs-content-delivery-chief-endures-isp-streaming-fees

<comment><USER2> Here's the non mobile link: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-24/netflixs- con...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-24/netflixs-content- delivery-chief-endures-isp-streaming-fees)

</comment><comment> chad-lundgren The author of the article is following the lazy and tired "Point at that hippie and laugh" formula, complete with a "Right on, man" ending. Maybe that's expected for a mainstream publication like Businessweek?

Other than that, the article is interesting.

<comment><USER3> Didn't you get the New Media Strategy Memo? You kick up controversy and write as aggressively / polarized as possible and you gain page-views (i.e. money) as people on both sides come to read the article before running off to social media sites to argue endlessly about it.

<comment><USER4> Is an improvement from people having these disparate opinions and not discussing them at all I hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> talk netflix gave at NYCBSDCon NYCBSDCon 2014: Serving one-third of the Internet via FreeBSD [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the FCC should get involved and ask the simple question of why can't ISP's use Netflix open connect .. as it seems that would fix a ton of problems the ISP are having with netflix incoming traffic.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't really solve the fundamental issue: Because of the volume of traffic Netflix generates, ISPs are highly sensitive to the size of Netflix's audience and the bitrates Netflix chooses to stream. Both of those have the potential to grow faster than their capability (or desire) to expand the capacity of their networks.

<comment><USER3> ... on the other hand, the ISPs wouldn't be complaining about their own video- streaming offerings expanding exponentially. The conflict-of-interest in this whole back-and-forth between Netflix and large ISPs is so palpable that you can almost taste it (very bitter :P).

<comment><USER8> The difference is that lots of ISPs have invested in IPTV networks, and those are designed not to eat your bandwidth and clog the network.

<comment><USER3> Netflix has offered to setup devices within the ISP network that will cache the videos so that the ISP's users will stream from the cache rather than directly from Netflix. The ISPs have refused (presumably because it competes with their own offerings).

Everyone pretty much agrees that traffic over the ISP's internal networks aren't really an issue; the big issue is the traffic over the network connection points. There are solutions to alleviate this, but the ISPs aren't really interested in these solutions. They feel that their monopoly position gives them the power to dictate terms to everyone else, effectively holding their (paying) customers hostage for ransom.

<comment><USER7> _Everyone pretty much agrees that traffic over the ISP 's internal networks aren't really an issue_

Everyone agrees with this? How did we get to that conclusion? Netflix is 1/3 of primetime internet traffic. If they double their average bitrate * average viewing audience in, say, two years, that won't be a problem for ISPs' internal networks? They're that over-provisioned?

<comment><USER9> Obviously, you can't say something that broad for all ISPs in all locations. But in a recent dispute Verizon posted a graphic[1] showing that the max average peak utilization in their network was 65% of capacity. So if Netflix is 1/3 of that (say 22% capacity) and it doubles their average bitrate to all customers, it would still not saturate the link.

[1] [http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/verizo...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/verizon-netflix-chart-640x498.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> HTTP? What does it mean? all HTTP requests except for the following domain?

<comment><USER11> I wondering the same thing myself. I did a bit of searching and found this: [http://allthingsd.com/20130514/netflix-still-eats-a-third- of...](http://allthingsd.com/20130514/netflix-still-eats-a-third-of-the-web- every-night-amazon-hbo-and-hulu-trail-behind/)

According to that article it does mean all HTTP traffic other than the specific sources listed in the chart.</comment></comment>


Next Big Tech Corridor? Between Seattle and Vancouver, Planners Hope - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/technology/next-big-tech-corridor-between-seattle-and-vancouver-planners-hope.html <comment><USER2> > and an international border divide the two cities, keeping them farther > apart than their geographic and cultural identities would suggest.

For real, crossing into Canada from the US at Vancouver is probably the toughest English speaking border I've dealt with as an American. England, Ireland, the Anzacs, I've never had an issue, but damn, every time I visit Vancouver I budget extra time to deal with immigration. I go through Toronto a lot, too, and never have issues there, but nearly everyone I know gets harassed on both sides of the Canadian/US border up at the Couv.

<comment><USER3> True. I live in Seattle and had a friend visiting early last month and I wanted to take him to Vancouver for a day trip. We drove to the border and I explained to the border guard we are just sight-seeing for the day. The guard directed us to pull over near their facility and they made us give them our keys, cell phones, and wallets while they went through everything in my car. We were put into two different rooms and questioned for 1.5 hours. They even went through my laptop bag and found paperwork about an upcoming surgery in a week and accused me of not giving them details about that. They left my car in a mess.

All in all, the day trip wasn't worth the feeling of violation.

<comment><USER4> I think what is frustrating is not the stopping and questioning but the attitude. I have been stopped on the way to Vancouver. For the most part Canadian border control is professional and polite.

On the way back a few times I have encountered surly demeaning behavior. Being a border patrol officer would be a tedious job at times and I don't expect a smile but outward hostility is ridiculous. For non citizen encountering this it is a terrible and lasting bad first impression of the US.

<comment><USER5> Honestly the day trip people would annoy me if I were a border patrol officer. Commuting in and potentially exploiting economic loopholes or something. That or smugling drugs across the border.

Especially given the strength of the USD over CAD these days

<comment><USER6> Then perhaps you shouldn't be a border patrol officer. It would be like waiters being annoyed at being asked what's in the food they're serving.

<comment><USER5> True. :)

I suppose that's why I'm not!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone even read the article? They're opening the tech corridor in Canada due to Canada's "friendlier immigration policies" so they can import more workers from China and India, not to spread the difference. They complain about not enough tech grads from US universities, but the reality is they don't want to pay for them.

It is far cheaper and easier to import their labour force or offshore more jobs than it is to try to hire and pay "qualified tech grads" in the US.

The tech corridor has nothing to do with a tech corridor per say, and more to do with Canada's lax immigration policies. They used up whatever h1b they were alotted in the US and now want to use Canada's more lax immigration equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER8> A Highspeed rail link would be incredible.

I've ridden the Amtrak to Seattle and Portland a few times. It's a much longer trip but its so convenient to not need to bring down a car and be able to use wifi the whole way. If there was a faster rail link I'd go down to Seattle all the time.

<comment><USER9> Try the Bolt Bus! It's a nicer version of a Greyhound bus. Wifi, comfy seats, way fewer stops, I love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seriously, Vancouver needs to deal with housing costs. As the article points out, junior developers are comfortable renting a cheap apartment. But executives want to own a house - and not a house two hours out in the countryside. Vancouver houses are just ludicrously expensive; this keeps good people away.

<comment><USER11> 2 hours is a pretty big exaggeration. To put in perspective, ~2 hours drive from downtown Vancouver is Yale BC, or if you went northwest down the 99, that would put you in Pemberton, which both are really in the middle of nowhere. I don't know of any large city where you can buy a detached singe family house cheaply anywhere close to the downtown core.

<comment><USER12> Not wanting "ludicrously expensive" housing does not mean expecting "cheap" housing...

Pretty much everyone agrees Vancouver is needlessly expensive. I mean it's not Tokyo, Hong Kong, NYC, SF, etc where there's an inherent justification for paying lots of money to live there. I've heard the nightlife is nothing to look forward to nor is it known for it's culture.

The problem could easily be solved by simply building more. Unlike SF or Manhattan, Vancouver doesn't even have artificial land growth limitations for being on an inlet/island to rationalize the lack of growth.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure what you mean by artificial land growth limitations. If you're talking about building height or city size limitations, Vancouver certainly has height restrictions, and it's surrounded on all sides too (UBC, Burrard Inlet, Burnaby, and the Fraser). You could build more outside of Vancouver proper, but then executives wouldn't want to live so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The growth will occur on the USA side of the border, Everett and Bellingham, simply because the obstacles to founding a startup company anywhere in Canada are ridiculously unfriendly.

<comment><USER15> You're being downvoted over this, but I'm curious to know what you think those obstacles are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> With salaries and housing prices as they are in Vancouver, the case to stay on the Canadian side of the border instead of leaving for Seattle is awfully weak.

<comment><USER12> I'm hoping Victoria turns into an active startup scene soon. I want to move west for proximity to Seattle/SF but Vancouver's cost of living was a big turn off. $2k/m in Toronto goes a very long way compared to most big cities (thank you liberal municipal building policy!) where I'm not sure it's worth the trade off.

Not having to deal with months of winter (I don't mind BC's rain) and a 1-2hr ferry to Seattle/Vancouver does sound alluring though.

<comment><USER16> Victoria is much more affordable than Vancouver (although rentals are currently tight), and has less summer rain (rain shadow from the Olympic mountains).

See [https://github.com/sendwithus/vic-startup- jobs](https://github.com/sendwithus/vic-startup-jobs) for local startup jobs.

It could be considered more of a Salish Sea triangle for startups, with Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle all being close and each having advantages and disadvantages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about Bellingham? Beautiful, affordable, and half-way between.

<comment><USER18> Shh. Don't tell them about Bellingham. Haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I had no idea the border cuts right through a suburb like that

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-122.7413957,3a,46.4y...](https://email@example.com,-122.7413957,3a,46.4y,270.59h,90.54t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sRppSGXNWTpXxpw1ndtaM6Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en)

Kids could lose a ball in the bushes and become illegal aliens running to pick it up.

<comment><USER20> Yep, I used to live 5 miles from there. Looks about right. Thousands of miles of wire fence makes up most of the border. Not very secure. Easy to walk over or through if you wanted to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As if Seattle needs any help.

<comment><USER21> I live between Seattle and Vancouver, and I would like to offer my [http://mind.sourceforge.net/theory5.html](http://mind.sourceforge.net/theory5.html) for [http://ai.neocities.org](http://ai.neocities.org) Strong AI free-of- charge to the entrepreneurs of the Next Big Tech Corridor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> nice area! I took the train between vancouver and seattle to avoid possible border delays and it was a very relaxing journey with only two problems,

1) freight has right-of-way and if they are having problems then you are having problems

2) you pretty much need a car in seattle since everything is so spread out. (not so much in vancouver).

<comment><USER23> When I moved to Seattle I sold my car because everything was walkable :)

Mind you, I was coming from Atlanta, GA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is it always the cold areas? Why can't a tech corridor be further south... :(

<comment><USER25> Um...Bay Area?

<comment><USER26> SF is extremely cold. You can't ever spend the whole day in a t-shirt, not even in the summer.

<comment><USER27> Extremely cold is pushing it. Chilly is probably more apt.

It generally has a mid-level UV index, so you feel warm in direct sunlight, but the humidity is very low so the 'breeze' feels cold. Some may find this unpleasant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do You Wanna Touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/do-you-wanna-touch.html <comment><USER3> > _How wonderful it is to flip open the Surface and quickly type a 4 paragraph > email response when I need to ... And switching between the two modes of > interaction – sometimes typing, sometimes touching – is completely natural._

OK, let's assume that the Surface's keyboard completely solves the problem of not being able to write properly. That still leaves us with the problem of not being able to point properly.

I can't even imagine how the touchscreen could ever rival the precision of the mouse as a pointing device. The average adult human finger is simply too thick to select 5 characters from the middle of a word displayed in 10 points, or to drag a Photoshop layer 1 pixel to the right. Even a conventional trackpad on a cheap laptop has better precision than your finger does, though good luck finding actual graphic designers who prefer trackpads to actual mice. Styluses (styli?) aren't much better, unless your stylus is sharp enough to damage the screen. The fact that touchscreens don't allow you to fine-tune your aim before you click makes it even more difficult to achieve precision.

How do we address this issue? How do we make touchscreen devices useful for those who need spatial precision? What would be the most natural way to add precise pointing abilities to a tablet computer without compromising the advantages of the touchscreen? Carrying around a cordless mouse doesn't seem to be a particularly elegant solution. What do you think? Is touchscreen+keyboard the future of personal computing, or is there always going to be a place for mice as specialty items for graphic designers and some other professionals?

<comment><USER4> > _"How do we address this issue?"_

The way people have _already done so_ in touch software to date?

You program 'un-pinch to zoom' to zoom the desired elements allowing increasing levels of accuracy as needed. And in the cases that you need 'pixel perfect' accuracy [1] you simply include "bump" UI controls or expose explicit pixel coordinates that can themselves be altered to affect the desired movement of the layer or selection or what-have-you (something even keyboard/mouse UI usually offers).

Precision is a largely solved issue in touch software. The real problem that will keep mice around in a largely-touch-driven world, is the simple ergonomics of spending eight hours at a desk. (i.e. Gorilla-arm.) [2]

[1] 'Pixel perfect' is a concept that makes increasingly less sense as displays reach and exceed 300dpi. Pretty soon we'll all be dealing with vectors and things will be better for it. 'Pixel perfect' accuracy is of mere transitory usefulness until then.

[2] Barring the development of a drafting-table-style variant of the original surface and either some sort of flawless arm/palm/accidental-touch rejection or a switch from 'any' touch to 'explicit-object' touch.

e.g. the desk ignores all contacts except from a pre-ordained 'pen', 'thimble' or 'glove'.

<comment><USER5> I'm afraid this doesn't work in all cases. When working in a reduced physical area, irrespective of pixel count, zooming in and snapping to boundaries is counter productive. Audio wave editing for example is an operation on cyclic ( obviously ) information, and when zooming in as a means of rationalising location, important context is lost.

Imagine a time line with a periodic wave, interrupted only by a one or two cycle click. Zooming in to normalise the ratio of object to finger leads to very easily losing context. That is, relative positioning left or right is lost. So it becomes frustrating zooming in and out in order to get your bearings again. Even attempting this on a trackpad is quite difficult, when compared to high resolution mice.

There are many cases where it's much better to have a large display area, combined with a high resolution mapping to that area. I could edit waves on a postage stamp sized display with my finger if I put my mind to it. I don't think I would be as productive as on a tablet sized display though. In other cases I need to increase yet above that ratio. I'm afraid stubby fingers on compensating scaled objects is not adequate always.

<comment><USER4> It sounds to me like you're conflating "the trouble with touch" with "the trouble with too-small-screens" and deciding the problem is touch.

But I'm guessing you don't edit waves with a keyboard/mouse on a 3, 4 or 9.7" screen either. So maybe "touch" isn't the obstacle you're really battling in the situation described.

Also, haven't people long had solutions where a 'work area' is zoomed for precision selection/editing while one-or-more 'larger context' views are maintained (or operates on its own zoom level) in another chunk of the screen?

Do wave-editing tools not behave like that?

<comment><USER5> Well, keeping to this example, there are sometimes conflicting requirements. A transient with a long train decay, such as a crash cymbal or knock, explosion or gunfire for example requires a wide view to properly observe the full affect. The trailing decay can last for quite a while in this scenario. The optimum situation here is to include a segment before and afterwards, or perhaps even more than that, depending, as some modulation becomes clearer the more you zoom out, not in.

At the same time, operating on selected segments is more efficiently done with finely controlled hairline cursors, where an obscuring object like a finger doesn't contend, generally. After this of course, zooming and other means of fine control and selection come into play.

In scenarios like this it is very much a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees if making a representation too large.

There are solutions to the problem of precise location, which I think include touch and gestures, though not necessarily solely through touch. In practice I use the right hand for precise hairline location and the left to zoom in with gestures, zoom out again for context and then iterate.

I'm not arguing for mice over touch. I'm looking at precision. I always find it quicker to type on my Bluetooth keyboard than on my iPhones screen keyboard. The reason for that for me has just to do with the ratio between active elements. Keyboard keys are larger than my fingers, on screen keys are smaller.

I actually think that in some cases gestures in the z plane, as well as x and y would be a way of adding capability.

These opinions are based on having to give up the USB mouse in the field, using JTAG's and external drives in a two port only MBP. Using the trackpad leads to much longer work times, simply because it's a less precise device.

<comment><USER4> Let me start off by saying I was originally taking issue with the idea that touch precision is a _problem_. That it _can't_ work in certain cases and that we'll always _need_ mice. And all that in a complaint that demonstrated a pretty narrow understanding of what has already been done with touch interfaces.

It was never my intention to argue that touch is always the _preferable_ interface for all workloads (something I tried to convey by pointing out how mice will remain relevant for quite some time, due entirely to day-long workloads).

As applies to your concerns, I was just trying to suggest that workable solutions exist, even if they'll always be less-than-ideal for larger quantities of work.

As to your specific concern, I still think a workable solution may be out there, even if it remains undoubtedly less efficient than a mouse and a larger screen.

e.g. Wouldn't the sorts of drag and off-axis drag controls that are used for seek in many podcast/audio-player apps [1] address precision-selection in cases where too-much-zoom presents problems, and also obviate the concern about fingers obscuring the wave itself?

[1] click to 'grab' the selection-marker/nubby on the wave/timeline, drag across the x axis to seek and then _down_ on the y axis to control the speed of seek -- typically doing more and more fine-grained seek for a given x-axis drag length, as the finger gets further from the wave/timeline

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He is right about the future of interaction being touch + keyboard. I have been using my Transformer Prime for about a year now as a laptop replacement. It doesn't do everything I ask of computers ( but then again neither would any laptop ), but it does have this great interaction where I can switch between windows with the Honeycomb switcher app ( replaces alt-tab ) I can swipe between tabs in the terminal and use the touch screen to scroll back text. It is still the best device for reading any E-mails and its good at writing all but the longest. However the coup de grâce of it is that I can use it for 12 to 18 hours without even thinking about plugging it into something. I can leave it unplugged for weeks and come back to a decent charge on it, and to my knowledge the only time I have ever turned it off was when I flashed CM10 on it. If the surface can provide those kind of experiences then I think its just a matter of time until it becomes a standard piece of kit for computer users.

<comment><USER7> I just cannot imagine spending my entire day holding or reaching up to touch a device. I work at a desk. I code. I write documentation. I send emails. I don't see how touch fits into my workflow at all.

<comment><USER8> "Gorilla arm" is how your arm will feel after reaching up to touch a screen/device. <http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html>

Touching my desktop screens would involve moving my hands to around eye level. I hold my phone/tablet a lot lower.

My real problem in the new world order is that tablets seem to have topped out at 10 inches. While that may be comfortable for many, my hand span is the same width as the screen and I'd prefer something a lot larger.

<comment><USER9> Rejoice - a 13" tablet does exist already and will be on the shelves soon: <http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/25/toshiba-excite-13-review/>

<comment><USER8> I'd be all over this except for several problems:

* Extremely low resolution

* Old Android version and Toshiba have no history of staying fresh with Android

* Tegra 3 based, and will be released just as Tegra 4 devices come out

I do like that is has an SD card slot, micro USB/HDMI etc. Sadly all they have done is take a mediocre tablet and scaled it up, and then delayed releasing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I loved this article as it clearly demonstrates Jeff's love of all hardware. There is no real hatred for any brand here, and he complements all the major devices while remaining objective.

One comment I would make is regarding this, "I knew that the Nexus 7 was really working for me when I gave mine to my father as a spontaneous gift while he was visiting, then missed it sorely when waiting for the replacement to arrive.". I know that Jeff is above my pay bracket, but even still, this makes me wonder what sort of money stream this is, if he can simply hand away Nexus 7's. I earn a respectful living but that sort of money is still substantial enough that I can't afford to simply give one away.

<comment><USER11> Say he buys these gadgets in a year:

      1 high end laptop - $1500
      1 netbook - $500
      2 phones - $500 X 2
      2 tablets - $500 + $250
      1 ereader - $100
      1 cool TV device - $250
      accessories $500

      Total: $390 per month

It's a lot more than I spend but it definitely isn't super rich level spending. If someone spent $390 owning a nicer car, a fancier kitchen, slightly better apartment, a Harley Davidson, etc. you wouldn't even think about it. I knew students that spent $390 more than me (I spent 0) on clothes.

He has money. He likes computers.

<comment><USER12> Wow, you just absolved me of a lot of guilt over my tech purchases this year so far.

<comment><USER11> de nada

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This post feels too short for the argument he is pushing. If the surface is a laptop killer, what is radically different about it compared to the other countless tries of putting a keyboard with a touchscreen ?

I am asking genuinely, because I haven't touch or seen one yet. So far the reviews aren't stellar, there seems to be the same shortcoming as before (always moving between the keyboard and the screen to type and click on things), and the software doesn't seem to push the limits of what you can do on a tablet.

My question would be, my parents hated using an iPad with a keyboard, would they be better off with a surface?

<comment><USER14> He's not arguing that The Surface is a laptop killer, he's arguing that the hybrid touch/keyboard idea is a laptop killer.

<comment><USER7> Still a very weak argument. I look at the ways I use a laptop and none of them would be served any better by a touch device.

<comment><USER15> What it comes down to is that eventually it's better to have 1 thing than 2 things that serve a similar purpose. Many (most?) computer people today have 2 things because the gap is too great. Eventually the gap closes a little, and although it will never close completely, it is better to have 1 thing than 2 things, so you make compromises. I think that is what Jeff is saying here, the gap is closing just a little, and eventually a tablet becomes good enough as a PC.

<comment><USER14> Yes, exactly. What often happens to me now is 1) I do something on my tablet...an email comes in, I start to respond, then I get in a little deeper and need to research something for a proper response....then 2) I reach for my laptop to finish off the email, likely involving the task of referencing other documents/web pages, to compose the intelligent reply. Better multi-tasking and quick access to a keyboard on a device improves this common use case scenario.

Also, when I travel, I have to take both a laptop and a tablet. As tablets become a little richer in functionality, I could see less of the need to take both with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about doing actual work? This revolution of touch, which has come to desktop with Windows 8 and Ubuntu, scares me a bit. First because I feel that professionnals that use computers daily are not really considered and second because with touch devices, the emphasis is on consumption rather than creation.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure how to feel about tablets.

Even as a life-long Mac guy, I bought a TabletPC in 2005 because I wanted a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet that was embedded into the display. The most striking thing for me was how nice it was to be able to sit on the couch and read a webpage in portrait mode, but having to unfold the keyboard to be able to go to a new URL (or hunt/peck on the onscreen keyboard) was a disaster. When Nokia announced its pocket-sized tablet in 2006, I was very tempted to buy one until I realized it wasn't pressure sensitive.

Drawing on a digital device with an infinite color space is awesome, but being able to tangibly interact with information is a phenomenal achievement. Hell, I even built a homebrew version of the Microsoft Surface (table) to explore the possibilities.

In spite of my enthusiasm over the last decade, the tablets I've seen all feel like they slow me down. Not only are they computationally underpowered, but they're just slower to interact with. Moreover, I worry about the ergonomics of it all. My fingers tend to feel a bit chaffed if I spend too much time with a tablet. I wonder if others have this issue.

I love the idea of the tablet. I want to love the execution, but nothing I've seen has made me want to integrate an iPad/Surface RT into my life. My MacBook just works better for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone here also feel like an outsider because you - no matter how other people love it - just won't get used to touch (or for some reason you don't want to) ?

I wouldn't mind my current notebook [1] having a touch display (additionally), but i still wouldn't use it that often i guess (and i wouldn't pay extra for it).

I really have to try the Keyboard of the Surface though, but knowing me - <USER2> picky about keyboards - i don't think i could work with it.

[1]: Thinkpad T 520

<comment><USER3> Case in point: I have very dry skin. The tip of my fingers will crack and bleed unless I use a copious amount of hand cream. As a result, every touchscreen I use becomes a greasy mess of smudged fingerprints. I also hate scrolling and zooming, because rubbing a finger across several inches of plastic irritates my skin much more than simply moving a mouse around and clicking from time to time.

So, regular screen + keyboard + mouse for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The thing that frustrates me most about these devices with keyboard covers with or without kickstands is that I can't sit on the couch and use it on my lap. It isn't a LAPtop replacement, it is a portable computing replacement.

<comment><USER20> You can use it in your lap: you just have to use the on-screen keyboard rather than the keyboard cover.

That would probably not crimp _my_ style because when I am too tired to get off the couch and move to a table or desk, I am also probably too tired to do a satisfactory job at writing anything longer than a tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> While I personally love touchscreens and want to see them everywhere, I think we can't ignore the limitations of this type interface. For instance, it would seem that Bret Victor doesn't like Jeff's touch future, and has some interesting things to say about it:

[http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...](http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/)

</comment><comment><USER22> >This is a version one device from a company that has never built a computer before

Why do people keep saying this? Microsoft has been making the Xbox and tons of other hardware for years. They know how to make things.

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently got the ultraslim logitech ipad keyboard cover and it is pretty awesome. I could really see a future for tablet+keyboard devices for a lot of people. Apple doesn't really need to promote this as their core feature because it's just an optional setup, but MSFT could propel the tablet keyboard market forward in very interesting ways. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER24> Disclosure: recently accepted a position at MSFT.

I think I'm starting to "get it", in that Windows 8 (perhaps moreso than Surface) may have a big effect on how we use computers.

After using a Surface for a day or two, I've caught myself a few times trying to tap on my other LCD screens. For some reason, this didn't happen even after using Android tablets, even with docking keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER25> I spend boatloads of money (this is Brazil) in an ipad telling me it was a productivity device, but its really a consuming device. The more I use touch devices, the more I realize the superiority of mice: I really hate how my finger gets in the way on the ipad. Meh.

</comment><comment><USER26> My mother still cannot use the iPad I bought for her. She still uses a laptop, but her typing is atrocious. It's not her fault, she wasn't trained to use a QWERTY keyboard like the rest of us and she's an immigrant.

She can however, speak somewhat understandable English. As we move toward devices that fit into how human beings naturally interact, I think a necessary evolution is going to be voice recognition, but not as we think of it. I don't think it'll be as clunky as it is now, but much more like giving commands and discussion to another human being.

I could be wrong. More kids text message now than ever use their cell phones, so perhaps a keyboard is necessary as the article says.

</comment><comment><USER27> I welcome this new type of device - a small touchscreen with an optional keyboard (and a mouse?) - warmly. But I would like the future to happen with open systems, not some US corp acting as a gatekeeper for all my content.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've had an 11" laptop/tablet with a touchscreen for a couple of years now... (Gigabyte T1125N; I didn't even realise it was a tablet when I bought it)

The novelty of the touchscreen wore off after the first month.

<comment><USER29> For almost 4 years I've had and still do as my primary computer a Tablet PC (HP 2730p), no touch, but with stylus. I still use it and will probably use it in every aspect of it until it dies on me.

Touch is maybe cool and natural and whatnot, but stylus is useful. I can actually account for how much money stylus option had brought to my wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone have a good description of the keyboard he describes? I haven't seen any details so I don't know how the Surface works, I didn't very much understand the post.

<comment><USER31> The TouchCover, a very thin pressure sensitive keyboard cover:

[http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/accessories/touch- cov...](http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/accessories/touch-cover)

There is also a TypeCover, slightly thicker and has physical keys:

[http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/accessories/type- cove...](http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/accessories/type-cover)

<comment><USER30> Oh wow, that's a good idea! Damn. Very nice.

Thanks for the clarification!

<comment><USER31> Also bear in mind the Surface has a kickstand so it stands up on its own

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't get it. The Surface is cool becasue of the keyboard? Logitech made the iPad keyboard some time ago. That's all there is to it to help you type like on a laptop. Review: [http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/29/review-logitech-ultrathin- ipad...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/29/review-logitech-ultrathin-ipad- keyboard-cover-will-kickstart-your-transition-from-consumption-to-creation/)

<comment><USER33> Likewise, Asus' eee Transformer Prime has been around for a while now. While somewhat pricey for an Android tablet it's still a lot better value than the Surface.

<comment><USER14> I have an external blue tooth keyboard for both my iPad and droid phone. Not having it integrated into the device is clunky, at best. Especially considering my keyboard and stand take up more space than the tablet itself. It's not elegant. Would love to see Apple come out with a sexier, more integrated, slim keyboard cover. Also, multi-tasking on the iPad blows, hard. It's better on my Android phone.

My neighbor got an Asus Transformer (the T300 model or what ever it was called). It's definitely slick and I could type quite well on it. Can't wait to see how the Win 8 RT app ecosystem plays out, because I like a lot of things MSFT is doing with their multi-tasking and side-by-side apps. Having good multi-tasking hot-keys on the keyboard is a big boost in productivity. Get me a good RDP client on it and I could find it very useful for a lot of work scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Couple of thoughts:

\- not everybody can buy like Jeff all the new devices and get rid of the ones that don't stick, that's rather a special way to choose devices.

\- I like Jeff's reasoning with the upsides and downsides of a lack of keyboard: the keyboard sort of gets in the way to do spontaneous things but for now the non-physical keyboards are not good for writing and editing long chunks of text. So it makes me wonder: wouldn't a tablet with a stylus and some good hand writing recognition software beat? After all, you can see a touchscreen as a better mouse - an evolution of the mouse, if you want. And if you want to write some text, like an email, doing it with your hand writing doesn't look too bad. Maybe it will really beat the keyboard for writing in Chinese or Japanese (disclaimer: I can't write yet in those languages). Of course if you want to use those devices to write code, it will be damn hard to implement the equivalent of the keyboard shortcuts for an hand-writing system.

<comment><USER35> > _Maybe it will really beat the keyboard for writing in Chinese or Japanese_

It seems very unlikely, at least with Japanese. In my experience, a typical Japanese native speaker (who is accustomed to the computer) can enter text with a keyboard an order of magnitude faster than they can write it. The difference becomes a bit less stark with tiny keyboards on phones or whatever, but even there, most people these days are a bit shaky when it comes to writing complicated kanji anyway... ><

Writing has other benefits of course, e.g. that you can easily enter a character which that you don't know the pronunciation of (which is why it's commonly supported for dictionaries), so it's a useful feature to have even if it's not the primary input method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> No physical keyboard doesn't always mean immediate large-scale writing failure for all people. I think some people either just get used to it for extensive prose, or don't.

In Japan, the keitai-novel - novels written by young authors often entirely using featurephone numpads - has gotten past its initial craze and appears here to stay as an established genre. Even for other genres, there has been a recent example of a self-published science fiction novella scoring high in the just-started Japanese Kindle/Kobo sales rankings, having its majority written on an iPhone.

I imagine the general populace will gradually get accustomed to using a non- physical-keyboard device for extensive text input, especially as more kids emerge experiencing the touchscreen as their first and only input device. (And the aforementioned author wasn't even that young - IIRC he's around 40!)

</comment><comment><USER37> I find the same thing with writing anything longer than a couple of sentences, and that's the major reason I've stuck to a laptop.

I love my phone - and I could see me wanting a tablet as well as my laptop, but I definitely want the laptop, so the tablet becomes an "If I have the spare money" item.

<comment><USER38> In the six months since I got a tablet, it's my laptop which has become superfluous. I also have a nice desktop setup, and there is now no reason for me to use the laptop. When I'm out and about, I can count on one hand the number of times I thought it would be a good idea to bring the laptop since I got the tablet, and I never actually used it. A good ergonomic desktop setup for productivity and a tablet and smartphone for mobile use is all I really need. If I regularly had to be productive in multiple locations without a desktop handy I might feel differently, but I don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If the world moves to touch computing, what's going to happen to PC gaming? Traditionally, PC gaming has been popular because PCs get used for many other things besides gaming. If most people switch to touch devices for their primary computers, will there still be enough people building gaming rigs for developers to care about that market? I'm sure the big console manufacturers would love nothing more than to move everyone over to consoles, but this would signal the downfall of indie games, certain kinds of first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, simulators, and many other genres. I would be devastated to see this happen.

</comment><comment><USER40> One thing I never see mentioned regarding tablets is what happens if you suffer from RSI symptoms. Moving your hand around the screen all the time or typing on hard surfaces sounds like a ticket to more pain.

</comment><comment><USER41> It seems like with a keyboard "dock" the Nexus 10 might be the lightest "retina" laptop available at 25% of the price as the new 13" Retina Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER42> I believe this is what you are looking for:

<http://eee.asus.com/en/transformer-infinity/features>

I've never used one but a lot of people on HN seem to swear by them.

<comment><USER41> Except it's _more_ expensive, and the screen and CPU are not as good.

<comment><USER42> I know, I'm waiting for the refresh. All told it's $200 extra counting the keyboard dock but I consider that totally worth it, especially since there's an extra battery pack in the keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I played with the MS Surface RT yesterday at an MS kiosk in a mall. I really liked the keyboard option. It was the first touch device I've seen that made me consider buying a tablet. I didn't like it enough to buy it, but it is an idea that is definitely headed I'm the right direction. I can't wait for technology to mature a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER44> I will always cringe when I see people use 'laptops' and touching the screen. It's become instinctually painful.

</comment><comment><USER45> The thing I appreciate the most about this write up is that he blatantly calls out other reviews/reviewers.

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone make a multi-touch keyboard? This seems like it would be a great input device for performance users (e.g. programmers). And by "multi-touch keyboard" I mean a keyboard with physically pressable keys that, when not pressed, lay flat and can detect finger locations.

<comment><USER42> Apparently the TouchStream was beloved by its users before its designer, FingerWorks was bought by Apple along with all their patents and the device was chucked down the memory hole:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm still looking forward to Minority Report style interfaces for the desktop, like <https://leapmotion.com/>

Probably not the best model for mobile interaction, but there's plenty of seats free at the man-machine interface table.

</comment><comment><USER48> I want to buy this device, but it's not available in my country (Bolivia). :(</comment>


Introducing Electrode, an open source release from WalmartLabs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/walmartlabs/introducing-electrode-an-open-source-release-from-walmartlabs-14b836135319?source=email-cf545047efd2-1475735576046-digest.reader <comment><AUTHOR> Would like to see the performance uplift the switch to react/node.js gives Walmart.</comment>


Americans and Russians Drink Different Waters on the ISS (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/space-food/americans-russians-drink-waters-iss/ <comment><USER2> Even water can be a disagreement in politics</comment>


Try Helvetica: Handmade Signs In Brazil Updated Using Helvetica - <AUTHOR> http://laughingsquid.com/try-helvetica-handmade-signs-in-brazil-improved-using-helvetica/

<comment><USER2> The excerpts don't look that much better than the originals.

<comment><USER3> I think that's the point: Helvetica is the official font of Satan.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DuckDuckGo to Google Escape Hatch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rbren/greasemonkey-scripts <comment><USER2> Appending !g to your search does the same with less overhead and no install.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know! I might adjust this to do it with a keystroke rather than a click. Anything to make a tedious process faster :)

<comment><USER3> There's a variety of bang commands, !r for Reddit !so for stack overflow, etc

[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)</comment></comment></comment>


PythonRobotics: Python sample codes for robotics algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://atsushisakai.github.io/PythonRobotics/ <comment><USER2> Oh, neat! I'm currently taking the AI for Robotics class through Georgia Tech OMSCS, so this is a topic I am interested in, and in the language I currently use professionally. Thank you for sharing!

<comment><USER3> Oh great! Is Sebastian Thrun still teaching that class? I took it a few years ago in OMSCS and learnt a lot! One of my favorite classes in the program.

<comment><USER2> He does all the videos, but the instructor running this instance of the class is Jay Summet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is some really cool information! I implemented a map-parsing algorithm that used a data structure that enabled neighboring cell access in constant time. It's biggest weakness is that very high-resolution occupancy maps take quite some time to render. I'm very inexperienced when it comes to sharing my coding projects with the world, so any feedback on the readability/accessibility of my repository would be greatly appreciated! [https://github.com/dwrodri/LQTLD3](https://github.com/dwrodri/LQTLD3)

</comment><comment><USER5> The visualizations are lovely.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how easy it would be to integrate this to ROS for real robotic simulations. Anyone has experience in the matter?

<comment><USER4> I have not used real robotic simulations, but I have used RViz and ROS for testing my own path-finding algorithms. Performance on my Late 2015 MacBook Pro was stuttery (about 15-20 fps), but still good enough to be somewhat usable.

Overall, I had more issues with finding good resources on the rospy module than anything else. It seems almost all robotics development with ROS is done using C++ instead of Python (in my little experience), so there is little I could find in terms of code samples that would allow to get past a project like this ([https://github.com/gandalf15/CS3027--CS5059--Robotics- Univer...](https://github.com/gandalf15/CS3027--CS5059--Robotics-University- of-Aberdeen)).

<comment><USER6> I felt the same way during my lectures. I wanted to use Python because I had already implemented the fuzzy functions I needed for obstacle avoidance and it is overall simpler, but most people on class used C++ anyway.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, after realizing I never directly answered your question, I figured I should give you a full response.

Rospy aside, writing and implementing your own SLAM/path-planning tools in ROS is quite simple once you get familiar with the architecture of ROS. All the sensor data can be collected by subscribing to the right channel, and then you can return driving instructions back to a controller by publishing them on another channel. Since all this channel business operates on the network layer, you can even offload the computational workload of the algorithms to a remote system and have the robot get its moving instructions over Wi-Fi.</comment></comment></comment></comment>