ArangoDB Closes 2.2M Euro Investment Led by Target Partners - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2016/11/arangodb-closes-2-2-million-euro-investment-led-target-partners/ <comment> Simran-B Awesome news! Did not know know about this new investment as a remote-working member of the team until now. Looking forward to the future, what we can achieve in the coming months.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why will ArangoDB succeed where RethinkDB failed commercially? Can't see any mention of changefeeds on the Arango website, which is the killer Rethink feature for me.

<comment><USER3> ArangoDB is a multi model store, which is to say it lets you store key value pairs, json documents, and graphs. (Edges are just another document with two special fields: "_from" and "_to".

My team just spent 3 weeks investigating document stores and ultimately settled on arangoDB because: 1. Graph functionality, 2. Read after write consistency, 3. Partial updates, 4. Efficient joins across shards, 5. The (limited) text search features, 6. AQL is just pretty sweet. There was a whole spreadsheet matrix but that's what I can remember without pulling it up.

We really liked RethinkDB for its change feeds. We are probably going to use Elastic for search, because we want to expose Lucene to our users, so we'll probably have to write some foxx endpoints to manage the data replication. I like the idea of foxx but really hate that it's JavaScript based. I'm planning on looking into using ScalaJS if possible.

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm Alan from the ArangoDB JavaScript team.

It should be possible to use ScalaJS with Foxx as long as it is transpiled in advance and produces node-compatible modules (i.e. something that can be consumed by and can consume other node modules using `require`). I've heard of other people successfully using Babel, TypeScript and even ClojureScript with Foxx.

<comment><USER3> Aw yeah! While I have you - has any progress been made on a correct write ahead log APIacross shards? I saw a post from mid 2015 about it, but didn't see anything after. Would really like to be able to write an elastic river- type tool for search.

<comment><USER4> I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you can point me in the direction of the article you mentioned, maybe one of the developers who are more intimately familiar with the cluster internals can take a stab at it?

<comment><USER3> Haha that's fair. I was being a little lazy because I'm writing this from a kayak on Rainbow River. This is the thread where I got my rather limited info. :) [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/arangodb/ModsM74K1...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/arangodb/ModsM74K1zA)

If it makes sense to take off thread, my email is email@example.com. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge!

<comment><USER4> The question makes more sense in context, but I'm not familiar enough with the WAL to be able to answer myself. When you're back on dry land, maybe you can join us in the Community Slack: [https://slack.arangodb.com](https://slack.arangodb.com)

We have a dedicated #cluster channel were you will probably have better luck getting detailed answers to technical questions. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations to the team! Happy to hear that you guys are going further. Looking forward to see what the future brings.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great news ! ArangoDB is awesome ... Foxx is a very powerful tool for building micro services.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like they were planning to Jepsen test later this year [0]. But it looks like they're preparing to run it themselves [1]?

[0]: [https://www.arangodb.com/2016/05/getting-closer- arangodb-3-0...](https://www.arangodb.com/2016/05/getting-closer- arangodb-3-0-alpha-release/)

[1]: [https://github.com/arangodb/jepsen/commit/2b79809df73ca6c755...](https://github.com/arangodb/jepsen/commit/2b79809df73ca6c755ebe41a92f2b436860532b0)

<comment><USER8> I'm an ArangoDB team member. We are starting with our own Jepsen tests. But we will ask Aphyr as soon as possible to do an official test. In the meantime can the community check our implementation.

<comment><USER9> It most certainly makes sense to jepsen Arango before asking the public to do so. But I won't take your tests without a grain of salt till Aphyr does so. ;) Best of luck

<comment><USER8> As far as I know is Aphyer booked for months. We will do our best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious on the graph database claims - how is this different to MongoDB using _from/_to attributes to represent edges? It certainly looks better than MongoDB in all other aspects (though to improve on MongoDB would not be difficult!).

How will it get the performance of a Neo4J,Titan et al. with this model? Does it index them specially?

Seems odd to ignore Gremlin and OpenCypher just to have a proprietary / "yet another standard" graph query language.

<comment><USER4> There's a general comparison on our website: [https://www.arangodb.com/why- arangodb/arangodb-vs-mongodb/](https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/arangodb- vs-mongodb/)

One major difference is that ArangoDB has full support of transactions across collections. Also while MongoDB now has limited graph functionality, ArangoDB is actually optimized for graph queries and can do arbitrary traversals and joins very efficiently.

The problem with Gremlin/OpenCypher is that they are primarily designed as graph query languages. ArangoDB takes a multi-model approach and many ArangoDB users focus on documents first and add in graph queries as an optimization step as their products mature. AQL is designed to be very easy to learn and mixes the document and graph paradigms seamlessly, embracing the multi-model nature of the database.

Personally I think that starting with a blank slate was the right choice compared to other multi-model databases that have found it necessary to extend a subset of a standard query language with their own proprietary additions to achieve the same goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a lot of faith in multi-model datastores but I'm a little worried about the Jepsen test post below. Is that true?

<comment><USER12> What is it that worried you? That the team is going to check things over to make sure that they have things done right?

The only alternative to that is to just kind of pretend that it all works without doing the hard work to verify. You saw how that ended up for a lot of other systems that Kyle has tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm interested in knowing how similar ArangoDB is to Google Cloud Datastore in functionality and scalability.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations! ArangoDB is a great database.

</comment><comment><USER15> Until it goes under like RethinkDB and we are screwed. One should not use a non-established, open-source DB.

<comment><USER16> It takes time and money for an open-source DB to become established. I think Arango is taking the right steps and this investment will help a lot in getting there.

PS: I only started using ArangoDB recently for the first time on a client project and it was refreshing to say the least. Being able to do complex joins, coming from a Mongo environment feels so much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER18> Do you support any type of debugging in foxx, can I somehow set breakpoints and inspect the state?

We're currently using Arango and it gets tedious to call foxx-manager replace every time I'm doing a change on the db

<comment><USER19> You can active the dev mode for a Foxx app. This way any change will be directly visible without the need of replace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> congratulations.

Is there plan to support gremlin query natively ?

<comment><USER19> We are closely monitoring the development. Not being a Java database, we cannot run Java queries natively. Tinkerpop3 has added some hooks for non- Java, but it would still very hard to get the speed of AQL. But I hope that Tinkerpop will open up to non-Java even more.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. I understand the Tinkerpop JVM stack issue. They should have a native port as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I give it a year before it collapses like a flan in a cupboard. No way it has 3,000 companies using it as per the press release.

</comment><comment><USER21> why do we need this? Mongo (3.4) is now doing graph and will also (obviously) do document and key-value. Is there something special about the storage engine, for example, that will make this awesome for range queries (contiguous location ala RIAK TS or Cassandra rows)? Does it optimize for the new SSD controllers that have order of magnitude higher random read throughputs? Does it leverage GPU RAM? Does it occupy some barren area of the CAP triangle?

Does it do something new, or is it just another neat query language on top of the same old storage algos? The "3-in-one" pitch doesn't fly for me unless the underlying storage tech does something special.

<comment><USER8> I'm an ArangoDB team member. The new graphLookup is far away to be a graph functionality. It's only a recursive lookup. Yes, the storage is special. The three data models are combined in one database core.</comment></comment>


Beaker: a peer-to-peer browser with tools to create and host websites - <AUTHOR> https://beakerbrowser.com/ <comment><USER2> This project has been on my list of things to explore for a year now.</comment>


Show HN: BasisPoints – Hacker News for payments - <AUTHOR> http://basispoints.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

With all the news about payments, I wanted one place to see the best articles. Hence, BasisPoints.

The site is run on telesc.pe, an open source Meteor project, much appreciation to the contributors.

clickable: [http://basispoints.co](http://basispoints.co)</comment>


New Outlook.com confirmation dialog is well-designed - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/vUTEQ <comment><USER2> It's been a design philosophy of Apple's to label the buttons to correspond with the action, instead of just OK/Cancel or Yes/No/Cancel. I think it's even been there since the 1990's...

To quote their design guideline ([https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/WindowAlerts.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000957-CH44-SW1)):

Ensure that the default button name corresponds to the action you describe. In particular, it's a good idea to avoid using OK for the default button. The meaning of OK can be unclear even in alerts that ask if users are sure they want to do something. For example, does OK mean "OK, I want to complete the action" or "OK, I now understand the negative results my action would have caused"?

Using a more focused button name, such as Erase, Convert, Clear, or Delete, helps make sure that users understand the action they're taking.

<comment><USER3> Dialogs on OS X are really great. They always follow a pattern:

        Do you want to do something?
        Here's what will happen if you do something.
                                [Cancel] [Do Something]

For example:

        Are you sure you want to permanently
        erase the items in the Trash?
        You can't undo this action
                                [Cancel] [Empty Trash]

It's also pretty easy to write clear copy when you stick to this system!

It's also nice that the non-destructive button is always labelled "Cancel". If unsure what to do; if your cat ran over the keyboard, just click "Cancel" and nothing bad will happen.

I only had an issue once when I was working on a kind of activity monitor that displayed running operations and allowed you to cancel them.

        Do you want to cancel the operation?
                            [Cancel] [Cancel Operation]

Yeah, that doesn't work.</comment></comment>


Kovarex's (creator of Factorio) struggle with burnout - <AUTHOR> https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356 <comment><USER2> I actually think what is described there is more of 80:20, than a burnout. The first 80% of a new product are usually quite interesting to work on, but the last 20% of necessary touches are tedious work, that still needs to be done though.

<comment><AUTHOR> What makes you say this is 80:20? The thing that got him out of the funk was fixing a minor UI issue:

 _> Once he asked me "Father, what is this thing in the list of things I can order?" ... "This is atomic bomb" .. "Oh, I want to order it" .. "No, we don't even have it researched" .. "But, why is it in the list then, it doesn't make sense" ... "Hmm, you are right, it doesn't, I might actually fix that." So I opened Factorio source code after a long time, and made the change, that the filter and logistic request selections didn't contain things yet to be researched (unless you force-unlock it in the settings). I made a change to Factorio, and it felt good, and I started to want more, this is how I got from the lowest point._

He didn't get back into it because the problem was particularly meaty or interesting to work on. It was a small piece of work that nonetheless allowed him to feel like he had impact. Because he was connecting with someone who was actually engaging with and getting joy from what he was building (and it might have helped that the person was his son).

I guess it's possible that what initially put him into the burnout was working on tedious things that felt like they had no substantial impact (though nothing in the post really indicates that IMO). But, that doesn't mean that this isn't burnout. Burnout is exactly caused by a felt loss of control and/or impact.</comment></comment>


Xamarin Forms: it works - <AUTHOR> https://www.sharpnado.com/xamarin-forms-works/ <comment><USER2> This post actually highlights more of XF's downfalls than positives. I've been a big XF developer for years, and XF has many positives but this example just shows that they needed SkiaSharp, Lottie, and native platform code just to get their app out.

Not to mention the need for additional components such as horizontal scroll, carousel view etc.

If you look at Flutter, most of this app could be done with just the Flutter SDK. Haven't really played much with RN, so not sure how that compares.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand this app would work across desktop OSes as well, whereas Flutter not, as it isn't their focus.

Given past experiences, I am sceptical of using languages not part of platform SDKs for production code.

When I do use such third party languages then the eco-system plays a major role in the decision, and for .NET vs a language clinging for survival, the decision is obvious if I care about having the same code in production in the next couple of years.

<comment><USER2> I understand the need for some apps to work on desktops, but I haven't personally done any of these before. Just iOS and Android, is all clients ever seem to ask me. So of course Flutter wouldn't work well for desktop atm. But FYI: it is being looked at - [https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop- embedding](https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding) Even seen an MS employee contributing to it as well.

As for Dart, its similar to C# in a lot of ways and certainly is gaining traction. I didn't have any difficulty writing Dart code.

<comment><USER3> Dart might be similar to C# in syntax, it just has like 1% of libraries available to C#, no IDE support at the same level as C# and no commercial value to put on the CV.

When comparing programming languages one always must look beyond grammar and language semantics.

Flutter is trying to be Dart's Rails, it remains to be seen if it will actually accomplish it.

How are pure Ruby projects doing in the market outside plain Rails apps?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used xamarin a few years ago for a moderately sized iOS app. It got me about 95% there. That last few percent was brutal, the app kept crashing after coming back from the contact chooser. Couldn't find a way around it, even with latest xamarin version, hot fixes. Was very unfortunate. I'm pretty skeptical of frameworks that abstract away a whole system. Hopefully, xamarin is a lot more stable and powerful these days.

<comment><USER5> It has improved a lot in the last year, I started working with it just as Microsoft acquired Xamarin, it was buggy as hell, now it is really solid.

<comment><USER6> People have been saying that since Xamarin came out though, myself included a few years back.

I often get the feeling that what has happened in "the last year" is that the developer saying it has gotten to know Xamarin well enough to avoid the warts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Xamarin Forms and Mature are two things I've never seen in the same sentence before. Microsoft must have really worked its magic on Xamarin then. The last time I tried XF it was so extremely buggy I got bald from pulling my hairs out. Most errors are extremely vague with no way to debug them and they occur at random times for seemingly no reason.

<comment><USER8> I used it around 3-4 years back ago for a banking client. I had worst experience (worse than android 2.2 ant + eclipse). However, they put a lot of effort into it. And it could be a lot better now. Microsoft has some great tech, you can't deny it. But how many other solutions need there to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Xamarin is very tempting but all projects I have seen that tried to use it went native after a while because of insurmountable problem. I am not sure if I'd bet my project on it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just today I was really contemplating how miserable life with Xamarin is.

In the morning, visual studio crashed first thing with a 'non-fatal' error.

Then I was making a bug fix in a Xamarin.Forms app - changing a string in the UI. I deploy the app, but the change isn't there. So I clean and rebuild. Then I redeploy. Change isn't there. I uninstall the app from the simulator. I delete the output directory. I redeploy - still the change isn't there. Xamarin was deploying cached packages and I had no idea. Imagine verifying a bug fix or change, which causes a crash, and not knowing because the updated package never gets deployed.

Every once in a while I accidentally double-click a xaml file - big mistake. I get to watch visual studio turn white and not respond for about 35 seconds - time to check email and try not to break something.

In the afternoon, I wanted to connect to my mac while doing work in the background - connecting to the Mac takes ages. Unfortunately that's not an option - connecting to a server is a modal operation. I have no idea why and it frustrates the heck out of me. Even worse, they have flow problems. If you fail to connect to a Mac, you have to close and re-open the dialog before you can add a new one. You have to do this every single time Visual Studio crashes. Visual Studio crashes at least 5 times a day with even moderate use. Xamarin is a big culprit for the instability, but Visual Studio has its share of fuckups, including mainstream releases that will just stop you from running unit tests until they ship a patch. Or just break your build altogether.

Xamarin Forms is uniquely frustrating because it, for the last ~12 months of my active use, always had a bug in the latest version that affects my product. Every time I upgrade, one bug gets fixed, but another one is added. Their QA is nonexistent and it really shows. And it's not little things- think controls just don't render on some platforms, or toolbars are busted on iOS. The newest version has some long-awaited features, but I'm afraid to upgrade. Visual Studio is also really bad nowadays - I really, really, really avoid upgrading; it is usually painful and more than once I've had to totally uninstall and reinstall.

The build system is a nightmare. There's a lot of complexity in Forms and a lot of room for things to go wrong. People come to me with build errors all the time, and the first thing I say is, did you hit the green button again? Because failing once doesn't mean there's a problem with your app. There's all sorts of nonsense that happens with caching, msbuild instances interfere with each other - I've had to painfully run builds in serial because yes, running msbuild on two projects simultaneously will break both.

I've got a lot more complaints but I'm tired and want to keep it brief.

Xamarin.Forms is (and I recognize that much of the pain I described is really problems with other supporting tools) painful enough that I wonder if it's worth the benefit of writing C#, and this is coming from a militant C# fanboy.

I was really hoping the Microsoft acquisition would lead to more robust QA efforts, but clearly not.

<comment><USER9> That's in line with what I have heard. Xamarin is a source of never ending obscure problems. All projects I know have switched to native from Xamarin by now b

<comment><USER11> Not Xamarin but Xamarin.Forms. Xamarin just works because it's basically C# bindings to native.

<comment><USER9> True. I should have been more specific about Forms. But in my company the mobile guys have even given up on Xamarin because it caused more headaches than solved things. First they tried Forms which didn't go well, then native UI with Xamarin backed, didn't go well either, and now they are fully native.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not really my cup of tea, but always interesting to hear what cross-platform solutions are being used outside of React Native and Flutter. Xamarin is probably number two after RN, and gets a fraction of the buzz.

<comment><USER3> Buzz depends on which circles one moves on, on the enterprise shops I work with, RN is not even relevant.

If JavaScript is involved it is either a mobile web site or Ionic.

Otherwise Xamarin is the usual option when not going native or betting on JS.

<comment><USER12> It's interesting- in the Silicon Valley, hip consumer-centric startup scene, native is king. React Native is touted in a pinch; Flutter is the new flavor of favored cross-platform solution that is getting the hype that RN had. Yet I wonder how many firms in the larger world aren't just writing Xamarin apps, but apps using derided old hybrid solutions like Cordova/PhoneGap or Appcelerator.

<comment><USER13> The world moves too quickly for the non-startup folks to have any hope of staying on the bleeding edge. Even if one does resolve to use the new hotness, by the time the project is completed, the world has moved on. Not even beginning to get into the realities of having to actually support the product for years, on a fractional budget, where major updates and the probable event of breaking changes in updated dependencies introduce unacceptable risk. You really want a set of steady, stable building blocks under those constraints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure if the OP will see this but [http://sharpnado.com/](http://sharpnado.com/) points to a "parked" page so you probably want a redirect.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't able to reproduce this, I wonder if the author fixed it already?

<comment><USER16> Still showing as parked for me.

<comment><USER17> Showing parked here still, with Gandi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This app looks beautiful. I agree, Forms is very solid these days. The docs really underplay the capabilities. The library that they built in this article looks awesome! I'm pretty surprised that horizontal scrolling is not natively bundled. A lot of things are still in "alpha" for years, good to call out. I want to see more new components shipped with Forms. Webview is another oldie that hasn't gotten any updates.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was surprised to learn about SkiaSharp. Isn't Skia what Flutter is built on? I couldn't help imagine how great Flutter would be written in C# rather than Dart.

<comment><USER2> I actually half built a solution where the Flutter engine was running on Xamarin (hence coded in C#), and got a basic hello world app running. It does have the downfall of slower boot times and larger file sizes though.

But I abandoned it because its too big of a project for a one person side project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Didn't you experience any (big) performance issue with XF on Android compared to iOS?

<comment><USER21> Just enable AOT by hacking the proj file and suddenly you have amazing performance in release mode (but bigger APK). Normal builds have been getting steadily better for Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well Microsoft is not using Xamarin for any of their cross platform apps. Why should we?

<comment><USER9> That's actually a weird thing with a lot of MS tech, especially .NET desktop development. They barely used Winforms themselves, WPF got only used in Visual Studio 2010 (and made it slow and buggy for the first releases). They put out stuff for developers but don't use it themselves.

<comment><USER23> Yes, same goes for MFC.

<comment><USER9> Very true. Does anyone know how the situation is with Apple? Do they use the libraries they have developers work with?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Okay hold on, Xamarin forms doesn't just work. That is a bold faced lie. Xamarin, like many other languages and frameworks has its share of zealots. Coming from a basically agnostic position on mobile development technologies I have found Xamarin to be pretty difficult to work with.

Doing UI work in Xamarin is incredibly verbose while at the same time being underpowered. It certainly does not just work. To give you a better idea of the real state of Xamarin we are JUST NOW getting the ability to underline text [https://xamarinhelp.com/hyperlink-in-xamarin-forms- label/](https://xamarinhelp.com/hyperlink-in-xamarin-forms-label/).

But Xamarin is chock full of other gotchas. A few off the top of my head:

\- there is no real file picker (even third party) let alone a great file picker that can pick files locally and remotely (like from google drive).

\- there are a surprisingly limited number of controls available and native or not they often look terrible.

\- build times average one to two minutes and the debugger doesn't work about 50% of the time.

\- a lot of APIs that you think are supported are not. for example, they say System.Drawing is supported but it's not. So what you end up doing is writing custom implementations for each platform.

I could go on but suffice it to say developing in Xamarin is not something that just works. It ONLY works because developers spend a great deal of time making sure that it works.

As an aside, for my next Xamarin project I am considering doing the UI in a WebView while using C# as the back end. It would be more like a web application than a Xamarin application which would hopefully mean a nicer UI while still being able to leverage C#.

<comment><USER25> > doing the UI in a WebView while using C# as the back end.

I have to ask, why not just do a mobile web app?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, good question. I agree, lol.

In my particular case I do need some C#/Backend functionality that I don't want to have to call a server for.

<comment><USER25> Let me guess... Some kind of legacy business logic library that nobody in their right mind would want to port to JavaScript? I don't blame you.

<comment><USER24> That sounds like a use case but in reality it wouldn't work anyhow because it probably relies on Windows functionality that hasn't been ported to or doesn't have a one to one mapping with iOS and Android.

No, It's a steganography application so I don't want to do any of it in a browser which I imagine could be an attack vector.

<comment><USER25> Yours is a good use case.

Doing everything in JS is so common now that I didn't even think about hiding the source code. I haven't considered it as a factor in a long time, but I do remember it being considered somewhat of a disadvantage for Javascript around 2010.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wkhtmltopdf - Shell utility to convert html to PDF using webkit. - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ <comment><USER2> I tried porting it to OpenBSD and found building it from source to be surprisingly complicated. IIRC, it wanted me to install their own fork of qt, just to render PDFs. Pass.

I went with htmldoc (<http://www.htmldoc.org/>) instead. Perhaps the rendered PDFs aren't as pretty, but for my purposes, it works quite well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use wkhtmltoimage to create images of book-quality syntax-highlighted source code:

<http://superuser.com/questions/213217/convert-html-to-image>

Use gvim to pick from 100 different ready-made colour schemes:

<http://www.vi-improved.org/color_sampler_pack/>

Shameless plug: I describe this technique in an appendix of my technical manual.

<http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/books/indispensable/>

For example:

        #!/bin/bash

        echo Converting $1 to $1.html...

        # Schemes: pyte
        vim $1 -c "set nobackup" ${2:+"-c set number"} \
          -c ":colorscheme tango-morning" \
          -c ":TOhtml" \
          -c "wq"  -c ":q"

        echo Converting $1.html to $1.png...

        wkhtmltoimage --transparent --minimum-font-size 80 \
          --format png --quality 100 --width 4000 \
          $1.html $1.png

        mv $1.png $1.orig.png

        # For scripts that are under 80 characters, make the generated image always
        # the same size (4000 pixels = width + (border x 2) = 3950 + 25 x 2).
        LENGTH=$(awk 'BEGIN {x=0} {if( length($0)>x ) x=length()} END {print x;}' $1)

        if [ $LENGTH -le 80 ]; then
          EXTENT=true
        fi

        echo Trimming $1.png...
        convert -format png $1.orig.png -background none -antialias -trim +repage \
          -density 150x150 ${EXTENT:+-extent 3950x} \
          -bordercolor none -border 25 \
          $1.png

        echo Removing temporary files...
        rm -f $1.orig.png
        rm -f $1.html

</comment><comment><USER4> We are using this. Seems to do fine. My only complaint is that trying to pronounce the name makes me choke on my own uuvula.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic, thank you so much for posting this. I felt like pointing out another headless Webkit project, PhantomJS (<http://www.phantomjs.org/>), which can also perform HTML to PDF conversion.

edit: I've just run a comparison between wkhtmltopdf and PhantomJS and wkhtmltopdf is far superior. wkhtmltopdf produces correct output and bookmarks but has a slightly lower quality, where PhantomJS's output was not correct and without bookmarks but at a slightly higher quality. From my perspective correctness beats quality.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very useful tool. Beware a tough time getting various fonts to work, though — and some characters (thin space anyone?) will just completely crash it.

<comment><USER7> I am using this for two different projects. The font issue can lead to a lot of head banging. Try messing around with your css to get it close to what you expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use the excellent Pandoc for my conversion needs: <http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

</comment><comment><USER9> On a related note: I'm looking for a command line utility (*nix) to go the other way. Any recommendations for a tool which extracts text from a PDF?

<comment><USER10> pdftotext and pdftohtml are shipped with poppler, the de-facto PDF implementation on Linux systems today.

<comment><USER11> pdftotext can produce garbled output, especially from two-column PDFs.* Depending on what you need, scripting Adobe Reader may be an option as it does a better job.

* I did a sizeable data mining project a while ago which required converting a lot of scientific papers to plain text. pdftotext didn't work well on a lot of them, so I had a script sending click events to Adobe Reader running overnight.

<comment><USER2> While still a very new project, pdfsplit (<http://dmwit.com/pdfsplit/>) may be worth a try.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for all the links, I'll check those out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a great tool, I've been using it for a long time. Only downside is that on Ubuntu Server certain graphics libraries aren't in the PPA so you have to download a static binary instead of using apt-get. But it's a minor quibble for a great program.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was briefly looking for exactly this, after our lawyer suggested manually printing out thousands of emails and scanning to PDF. Luckily my encouragement to use a PST file finally won out. Not a confidence inspiring moment.

</comment><comment><USER14> We're using this on <http://interstateapp.com> to allow users to download a PDF version of their roadmap. The script works very well!

</comment><comment><USER15> This tool works impressively well. I use it to convert my CV to PDF, as I don't trust my CSS to work everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool. Can you get an image out of it ?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a utility on the same project page called: wkhtmltoimage</comment></comment>


Investing in a Coding-School Graduate Could Get You 13% a Year - T-A https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-25/investing-in-a-coding-school-graduate-could-get-you-13-a-year <comment><AUTHOR> I've upvoted this because it's slightly dystopian to me.

<comment><USER2> "Lambda School once wrote an investment memo titled "Human Capital: The Last Unoptimized Asset Class," and people love last unoptimized asset classes"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ISA sounds intriguing, but in practice (e.g, Purdue) it is only used _after_ the typical student loan options have been exhausted. I don't know why articles about ISA don't mention this.

</comment><comment><USER4> The meta-business of evaluating human-capital investment seems like a wood&shovels/gold-rush equivalent.</comment>


What I hate about "beginner" programming books   - <AUTHOR> http://allfuzzy.tumblr.com/post/19464639511/3-things-i-hate-about-beginner-programming-books <comment><USER2> Point #2 is the Little Coder's problem _Why spoke of: a beginning programmer is likely to be discouraged by the vast difference between the toy programs displayed in introductory books, and the real code that inspired them.

I think any purported attempt to teach programming which does not end with the student creating a non-trivial, cool app, is a shame. What went wrong between SICP and current (non-Hartl/Shaw) beginning texts?

</comment><comment><USER3> The "worthless example to explain features" in my pet peeve...

This is something like "we're going to have a class named Vehicle" and "class Car inherits Vehicle" in an OO language.

You would almost never use something like this in a real program, and it takes what's a minor and problem fraught feature (inheritance) and quickly has new programmers creating bizzaro hierarchies that never should be.

<comment><USER4> Forgive me, but I'm really new to programming, and I don't really understand why your example is something that shouldn't be used in real programming. Should a Car be a Vehicle object instead of a sub-class?

<comment><USER5> The problem lies in that you never have a "Car" which should inherit "Vehicle". It's a question that never comes up in programming. The bad part of it, is that it sometimes makes new programmers look for these kind of concepts in their code, and write class-based code around them. Exactly the problem <http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes> discusses.

Basicly it teaches people to think in taxonomies, which is not good for object-oriented programming since it usually results in highly complicated code, with way to many classes and inheritance.

Inheritance is mostly good for factoring out common code between different sub-classes. Or extending library classes in a way that wasn't thought of when they were written.

<comment><USER6> I don't think I have ever read a programming book that teaches OO in the same way that most developers use it - that is implement top level first and then when you have commonalities between objects abstract them out into parent objects.

Thinking about and mapping out class hierarchies is something that Java enterprise analysts do.

A good example to teach OO would be a config parser. Write a config parsing object, then sub-class for parsing Yaml, INI, XML, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to add a 4th one:

Those arbitrary and excessively long introductory chapters that teach you the history of the language. Granted, that might have some merit in a classroom setting where an instructor is going to ask you a pointless question about who designed the first interpreter, but this is the sort of thing that should be kept to a minimum, or kept out.

Zed Shaw's "Learn to code the hard way" are brilliant for this. They get _right_ to it, nothing you don't need to learn and get your hands dirty.

</comment><comment><USER8> I started learning programming in January using K & R. It is a wonderful book which avoids all of these problems.

It's short. You write challenging programs in the tutorial introduction. And the accompanying "C answer book" has good solutions for all the exercises.

I also like the fact that each example is a working program. You learn the concepts by applying them. And the exercises really make you think.

People say its "not for beginners". I actually think it's an ideal way to start. The "beginner" books are just confusing.

</comment><comment><USER9> My pet peeve is books that show the wrong way to do something followed by the right way. If I'm new to a language, I haven't committed these sins yet, so please just skip to the preferred method. All this does is add mental overhead.

<comment><USER10> It seems to be not only programming language books' fault. And not only books' fault. Even teachers at schools and universities sometimes show wrong way of doing something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 3: If there are multiple valid solutions to an exercise, list them. If some solutions are better than others, explain why. If there are solutions which are technically invalid but commonly thought up by new programmers, explain what they did wrong.

I would also add a forth point: "Overdoing the 'lol im not like those nerdy others programmers, im a regular normal person like you' rhetoric. Instead of mentioning an old cliche (and then trying to distance themselves from it), why not just not mention it at all?

</comment><comment><USER12> #1 is a great point and a great recommend. There is certainly a place for long, ponderous reference book-like tomes, but they are a poor substitute for concise beginner books. Eloquent JavaScript is amazing in that respect.

<comment><USER13> I think the right approach would be to print the concise beginner book and bind it with 1000 blank pages. That way it won't be too daunting for the learner, but can still perform well in a secondary role as a monitor stand once they're done with it.

More seriously, I think that the discipline of making a shorter book usually produces better writing. If you're going to write something longer than say 300 pages (about 1 K&R-length) you'd better have a lot of interesting things to say.

<comment><USER14> I agree ('the internet' thinks this idea is from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle- ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.")

Problem is that that short book, having taken more effort to write, would have to be more expensive (paper, printing, distribution, etc. cost 'nothing' for any book worth anything at all). Selling a shorter book for more money is possible, but customers typically prefer the longer book ("more is better, and even if it is not, I just don't read the extra stuff")

<comment><USER15> Which is why you have to find the cracks in the inefficient market. Thank god for passionate individuals not driven primarily by money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I believe there is a start-up that is gaining traction that is looking to remedy all of those issues. I can't remember what it's called right now, but the concept is you learn to program online in an environment that shows you where the mistakes are and also what the outcomes are to keep you motivated. Seems like an ideal situation; and frankly it's a little surprising something like this hasn't come out sooner considering most programmers go through this sort of pain... Maybe it's seen as a right of passage, if you can put up with the BS, you deserve to be a programmer?

<comment><USER16> Found it; Codeacademy, <http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm no expert, but I think it's possible that the fact that's a book at all may be a failing. The goal is to get them writing code and seeing results, as well as mimicking their later real world experience of experimenting to find the right answer. That's why I think things like code academy better reflect the way we'll be teaching this in the future.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I agree. Sure, programming is a craft, and the only way to learn it is to _do_ it. But I see no reason why a book can't serve as an introduction, giving the reader projects to complete and guidance toward completing them. Being that they lack interactivity and mentorship, sure, books are difficult to make into what beginners need. But just because they're not the _best_ medium doesn't mean they should be completely discounted.

<comment><USER17> Let me begin by saying that I don't think books aren't the right approach for every programmer - simply true beginners.

In my experience beginner programmers get stuck very quickly on very small and frustrating bugs, such as not understanding how to put together the syntax. If they can't overcome this quickly, you may completely lose them. This is where the book completely fails as it can provide no further assistance. Even if the answer is provided in the printed text, the individual may not "see" the difference between what they've typed and what the book has printed (it may take a while to get used to the computer-level of exactness you need when comparing code, and to overcome some punctuation blindness they may have developed from normal reading, etc.).

Similarly, I believe it is bad to read too much before doing anything, because as you read you believe you are following along: "uh huh, that makes sense, sure, got it...", then a whole chapter in you may actually start coding and notice you don't really know what's going on (or again, simply think you don't due to some simple syntax mistake). Now the individual will feel overwhelmed as they have an entire chapter's worth of material that they may or may not understand. Even if there are exercises in the middle, people often say "oh thats easy and makes sense" and skip it since its a "waste of time" (which is bad, because its very easy to think you understand something when they don't).

Having seen a few people use codeacademy, I now believe that it may need to be taken a step further: I think for the first few exercises the code should actually be ghosted so that the user is literally "tracing" over it (as opposed to the current technique of saying "now type this in the console"). For example, as I described in a previous comment, one person got completely stuck because it said "Now type variable.length.". The user didn't notice that the last period wasn't part of the code and unfortunately the error isn't very beginner-friendly: "Expected an identifier but found '}' instead" -- "what, I didn't type a }? And what's an identifier?". I believe ghosting the text and beeping when you type a character that doesn't match can give you a feel for the code -- its kind of how rewriting notes really helps it sink in vs. just reading them. Then, slowly take the training wheels off.

<comment><USER19> You are basically describing the LXTHW model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about another one.. "Takes too long to get to the interesting parts."

i.e. learning Obj-C and taking until the very last chapter to give even a cursory intro to apps. By the time they get there a ton of people will be burnt out / disinterested.

</comment><comment><USER21> My pet peeve are books/tutorials that spend most of their time in the interpreter. I appreciate interpreters for what they are, but I don't thing the ability to type 2+3 and get 5 is relevant to any programming language skills.

</comment><comment><USER22> Also:

\- Please stop including math in every example. I just can't stand see another fibonacci example. Ok we get it, it's awesome for showing recursion, but use other things. Also, don't put math problem on exercises. I'm learning a language, I don't want to recap all my scholl math at the same time. I'll die if I see another "get all the prime numbers from 1 to 100" yada yada yada...

\- Don't use the concept of "throughout the chapters we will be building an app...", most of the times these apps suck and are plain boring, and it's demotivating for the beginner. Instead create different small apps in every chapter.

\- Bonus: It would be awesome if books started including a cheat sheet.

<comment><USER23> OMG !are you working as a programer ?

<comment><USER22> OMG yes !!! And do you know how to interpret what you read ? I never said this was for experienced programmers, only to newbies !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was thinking about how I never "look at the language's documentation" when a book or tutorial tells me to.

As a beginner/intermediate coder myself, I can't just "look at online documentation" because I don't truly understand how to use it and understand properly. Does anyone have a good resource for learning how to use documentation?

I know that may sound trivial to experienced hackers, and possibly paradoxical, but I'm actually quite sincere about this request.

</comment><comment><USER24> Random idea: tailor programming books somewhat to personality types? Eg an ENTP and ISTJ are not going to enjoy creating the same kinds of programs.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm also pretty tired of "foo" and "bar". At the very least they teach nothing about the thought process that should go into naming things.

<comment><USER26> This is a huge annoyance for me, as is providing an example in the terms of 'A', 'B', 'C', and 'D'.

PHP's manual is terrible for this. It's not just a naming problem, but a total failure to explain the purpose of that concept or function with a proper use- case.

        class A {
            public function a($a) {
                $this->a = $a;
            }
        }

        class _A extends A {
        }

        class B {
            public function b($b) {
                $this->b = $b;
            }
        }

        $foo = new A;
        $bar = new _A;
        $baz = new B;

        ....

Another thing is stuff like this:

        Array.sort(function(a, b) {
            return a - b;
        });

Firstly, if you're a beginner, that means absolutely nothing other than an array is being sorted. Secondly, if you do know what it is, it fails to explain what else you might be able to do other than sorting from lowest to highest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Although point #3 has also annoyed me no end, I believe I learned a lot from being forced to solve problems myself. Peeking at the solution is just too easy and severely diminishes what you can learn by being forced to think more about the problem. I believe Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Sipser gets it right: answers to about half the exercises.

</comment><comment><USER28> Totally agree, except for his point three - beginners typically don't care about exercises, they want to get something working. As long as it works and does what they want, they're happy.

</comment><comment><USER29> ...not to mention 'From Beginner to Professional in 28 days!'

</comment><comment><USER30> "Teach yourself blah in _21 days_ ", anyone?</comment>


Food Stamps (EBT Cards) For Buying Beer? Why 25 year olds beat system... again. - <AUTHOR> http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2010/03/26/food-stamp-beer-reviews/

<comment><USER2> Government spending Pie chart in the article is a oft repeated lie. They don't include "trust fund" payments like Social Security and Medicare in it. Why? It's $1.89 trillion. But that doesn't count for some reason.

Anyways, better source is: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget)</comment>


Technology's complicated role in our sex lives - <AUTHOR> http://modelviewculture.com/issues/sex-and-sexuality

<comment><USER2> Fascinating articles, and judging especially by the "SexTech Startups in a Hostile Business World," it seems like sextech would do well to be added to YC's 'New Requests for Startups' list...</comment>


Check if one string is a rotation of another string - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2553522/interview-question-check-if-one-string-is-a-rotation-of-other-string <comment><USER2> Why is this kind of thing on HN? I don't mean that it isn't of interest to Hackers... I find it extremely interesting! But StackOverflow has a community and a discussion feature. So if I want to comment on the question or its answers I can do that right there. And any comment on here is not visible to people who answer the question there.

Having a separate conversation is useful if the HN community is strongly disjoint from the source community, that way you get a completely different flavour to the commentary. For example, I'm glad when I see one of my own posts on HN and on proggit, I get two completely different kinds of feedback from the comments, and that's a benefit to me as an author and I suspect to the communities.

But is HN completely disjoint from StackOverflow where a simple programming question is concerned? Is it a net benefit to have two separate comment streams?

<comment><USER3> Some people (like you, it seems) see HN primarily as a place to discuss things. Others see it primarily as a place to discover things. For the latter group, this belongs on HN because they would not have seen it otherwise.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend Project, Hulu Profanity Filtering - <AUTHOR> http://jacobwg.com/projects/clean-hulu/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a Google Chrome extension I wrote that automatically mutes Hulu videos if profanity is detected in the closed captioning...

The source code is at <https://github.com/jacobwg/clean-hulu> (mostly written in Coffeescript).

A bookmarklet version can be found at at <http://tmfdb.org/>.

I'd love to hear any feedback you might have - thanks.

</comment><comment><USER2> While I've got absolutely no problem with profanity, and have on the rare occasion been accused of using it a bit much, and probably will never use this... This is a great idea! Bonus points to you!

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea. Profanity bothers me particularly when I'm watching something with my daughter. This will come in handy.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do startups crawl off to die? - <AUTHOR>

After a careful analysis of opportunities in fast-growing business areas, a few months ago I spotted a promising market gap. I developed a B2B SaaS, including a single-page app and a web API. The code works like a charm, it is easy to deploy, easy to scale, the user interface is fast and slick and it satisfies a real business need. I have some very experienced and successful businesspeople in the team helping me out for equity only and I keep on getting encouragements and compliments for the good idea and the great implementation. Unfortunately, I'm paying the toll of the long days and nights spent working. I'm tired, stressed, demoralized and depressed. On top of that, the B2B sale cycle is much longer than expected: I have the first clients in test phase, but still no revenues. My only wish is to get a 8-to-5 job and forget about starting up companies. Now, how should I proceed? Should I sell my code? How can I do that in the best way? I'd like at least to recoup some of the time and money I spent in the development. Any suggestion? <comment><USER2> You might consider complementing revenues by selling services until the long slow SAAS Ramp[1] will get better.

* One of the best usage of your business partners might be taking over navigation of the sales cycle -if they're sold on the valueprop, they probably know where it can be sold successfully. If they can't sell it, that's a strong datapoint you need to consider re: viability.

* If the market gap is real, you might want to consider selling consulting solutions to that gap specifically to gain additional understanding to the market.

* As a fallback, you might be able to sell consulting/contracting on other fields until sales gets significantly better

[1] [http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman- constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant- contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless it's either a huge complex app, a very CS heavy app or has some fundamental innovation you'll have huge trouble selling that code. Can you hit up some people that are interested in this space? Unless you can make that kind of an ad-hoc sale you'll be really lucky to get anything over 5-10k. Open-sourcing is always one way to go about it. If you're determined going the 8-5 job route then maybe you're just better off trying to leverage this project/experience to get a great job? And also if you already made up your mind about quitting then why not post it on HN here? That's one of the few potential places where someone might be interested in buying that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The code contains proprietary algorithms that perform critical operations in a much shorter time than the competition. Before starting coding I did my homework and focused on those features that would have given me the best edge against competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Typically larger startups are sold as an acquire for peanuts and their failure is spun as a success. Often the employees get better jobs than they had, so they're not out on the street. If you have any contacts at larger companies, use them now.

</comment><comment><USER5> What are those successful business ppl doing to help? Giving you money? Ask them to help even more by giving you enough money to hire an extra person that can run the startup for a month or 2 until you destress.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're contributing in work, mainly sales and business development. Unfortunately I'm the only one who knows the whole codebase and it's not trivial to find someone to whom I can hand it over. I know other well-funded startups having the same kind of problems with finding skilled personnel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If what you say about the product is true, I'd strongly suggest you hold out just a bit longer than you want to. You may put yourself in a situation where other people get rich off of your labor, and you get nothing because you bailed (again, assuming the product is that good).

It sounds like you have a sales problem. Find someone really good at sales and try to get them to join the effort. Sales cures all, and it'll give you the 9 to 5 income, and slightly more regular hours, that I'm guessing you'd like to see coming in. With sales you can delegate some more of the labor that's crushing you.

Also, if your product is stellar, you can probably raise serious venture capital and accomplish the same thing until you get sales up.

It's often said that people tend to give up right before they get to the finish line. I happen to agree with that. Being a successful entrepreneur usually involves being able to endure pain that other people can't or won't, making it possible to stay in the fight long enough to succeed.

The task is to balance this equation: hang on longer than you feel like you can, but not so long that you do permanent damage (monetary, mental, physical, relationship, whatever type) you can't recover from. Getting that right gives you the best shot at success and limits the risk of regret.

If you're really, really, really certain your heart isn't in it, then bail in a way that perhaps enables you to retain a stake in the venture long term, and try to leave it in good hands.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think sales are being approached in a good way, especially by my partners. I started contacting prospective clients by myself and got about 15% to 20% fast and positive responses to cold-emailing, which I'm told is a very good figure. But having those "hot" leads test my SaaS and finally go live is taking ages. Considering my pricing and according to some statistics I found online, my clients should make a decision within 2-3 weeks, whereas the times are now in the range of 3-4 months and getting longer.

As PG suggests in one of his essays, I'm "digging a hole that's narrow and deep". I'm targeting a few thousands companies worldwide. The business area they're in is fast-growing and fast-changing and I suspect that they might be wary of adopting innovative solutions because they don't have clear ideas about where their own business is heading. Some don't even seem to have clear ideas about the prices of their own services and products (I tested this hypothesis by offering a simple, free tool to help them model their costs, and the feedback has been clear and positive).

I wouldn't say there's a risk of regret: I'll certainly regret it. Presently, apart from my mental exhaustion, I'm in pretty good shape, both physically and financially, but I need to set limits and draw lines. One of my main worries is that I cannot figure out what's not working, why I cannot get more clients on board and why it's taking so much time for them to go live. I developed the app at blazing speed and now the sales are going so slowly that it looks like nothing is moving and I find that unbearable. Maybe I'm just missing some entrepreneurial skills? I wish I knew which ones. Right now, I would just like to get rid of the whole thing, as irrational as it may seem.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Mail turns 16, gets a makeover - <AUTHOR> http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/63462971435/yahoo-mails-sweet-16-is-sweet-a-brand-new-view

<comment><USER2> One thing that bothers me about their android app is that they trick users into clicking ads. What I mean is that when you open the inbox, you'll see an unread message at the top of the list but when you go to tap on it, an ad has already slid into place shifting the entire list of emails down leading people to tap on the ad instead. What's even more scummy about this is that the behavior isn't consistent so sometimes an ad will be in the top of the list, sometimes it won't so the user doesn't know if to wait for the ad to load or not.

I don't mind seeing ads in my free products, I just don't like being tricked into clicking an ad.

<comment><USER3> I've noticed this issue with quite a few mobile games as well.

After the loading screen has ended and the "Tap anywhere to play" screen appears, right as you get ready to tap the screen, an ad will slide in covering the screen and handle the tap. Scummy indeed.

<comment><USER4> People improve what they measure. If the measure is "revenue derived from PPC ads," then they'll evolve interfaces to make clicking ads unavoidable.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but some companies measure building long term brand and trust against trying to squeeze a few extra points out of PPC by making people feel tricked.

<comment><USER6> Apparently not the companies making games like Turbo Turd Launcher 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I switched over to outlook.com recently. The UI is far superior to Google's in a lot of ways, the ads are less in your face, and with the recent NSA revelations I'm not really too concerned if the NSA is getting my data from Microsoft rather than from Google.

The new Yahoo UI looks nice, and I'm really interested in seeing more competition among the big three. Google has been navel-gazing with the gmail UI for too long, really.

<comment><USER8> I recently moved my personal domain email to be handled by Outlook (since Google no longer has Apps for your Domain) and have been really happy so far. I don't know why I'm bothered by the ad bar in either Yahoo Mail or Outlook since Gmail has it too. Likely because Gmail's blends in much better to the interface?

The multiple smart inboxes in Gmail is a killer feature for me thoug

<comment><USER9> > since Google no longer has Apps for your Domain

should probably read as "since Google no longer has free Apps for your Domain"

<comment><USER10> Uh? I'm still using the free plan... Did I miss something?

<comment><USER11> You're grandfathered in.

<comment><USER10> As in this?

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

Does anyone know if they have plans to shut it down?

<comment><USER12> No, they're just not offering new ones. You should be fine.

<comment><USER10> Thanks.

This discussion prompted me to back up that account locally, just in case... It was long overdue, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I visited the article I immediately thought I was looking at a screenshot of Gmail, until I noticed the ugly Yahoo banner ad on the right.

I guess Gmail is succesful and popular enough that copying them makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER14> True, came in to say something similar. It looks _a lot_ like GMail[1]. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing.

[1] [http://media.tumblr.com/841e692e2c1bdf45eb0c3167146bd142/tum...](http://media.tumblr.com/841e692e2c1bdf45eb0c3167146bd142/tumblr_inline_mucp0t3Jq91qhxx5s.jpg)

<comment><USER15> It is a bad thing because consumers are so used to that interface and either designers just can't come up with a better one or they don't want to come up with a new one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "we're giving you a monstrous amount of storage, 1TB (that's 1,000 GBs), so you have ample space for all your emails and attachments."

<comment><USER17> I thought Yahoo Mail didn't limit storage - they advertised it as "unlimited storage" a few years ago.

\- terms and conditions apply, no abuse allowed

<comment><USER18> Everyone has "unlimited" storage. I guess "1TB" sounds better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised they still apparently have the big banner ad on the right-hand side. I know they have to make money somehow, but it really detracts from an otherwise pretty good-looking design.

Yesterday I saw someone using the previous version of Yahoo mail, and that banner ad had a strobe effect on the border that was constantly flashing. I'm amazed people put up with this -- I guess people have probably developed pretty strong ad blindness (hence the strobe ads).

If I ran a web mail company, I would not want to be part of the arms race of user ad blindness vs. more aggressive ads. As a user I'd take google's textual, potentially relevant ads over this any day. (No, I do not care if google "reads" my email. [http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/](http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/))

<comment><USER20> Yahoo + Adblock + customized ad opt-out and you never see any ads, and you don't have google reading your mail.

<comment><USER21> and you have Yahoo 'reading your mail'. So?

<comment><USER20> Yahoo doesn't scan your mail if you opt out of the customized advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, conversations! They're introducing threads almost a decade after Gmail. I remember when I first made the switch from FastMail and Yahoo to Gmail. Gmail conversations were jarring even though I was somewhat used to threads from newsgroups, but after a few days I never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's 2013 and still no IMAP access in Yahoo Mail. Heck, it's only been around for 27 years.

<comment><USER24> You can use IMAP from smartphones, and from Apple Mail. How to, per Wikipedia:

> _Mac OS X users can directly set up an IMAP account in Apple Mail 4.4. After > entering a full name, email address, and password, hold down the Option key. > The Create button will change to Continue, allowing one to manually > configure the account settings._

> _Apple Mail 5.0 included with Mac OS X Lion supports easy and direct IMAP > account setup._

<comment><USER25> Well gee, what about the other email clients? Not everyone uses Apple Mail.

<comment><USER24> The claim was Yahoo had "no" IMAP access. That's incorrect.

And, for the record, if you want it in Windows, just configure it. That it's not "supported" doesn't mean you can't use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yahoo! Mail; now with Gmail inside.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Looks like Gmail with a different background image.

</comment><comment><USER27> What used to be Y! Plus (19.99) is now Y! Ad-free (49.99). Nice increase for less since they've made all other features available to freeriders as well.

<comment><USER27> Addendum: Y! Plus subscribers will be grandfathered into the 19.99 plan.

<comment><USER28> I was shocked when I saw the ad free version priced at $49.99 for new subscribers!

And Yahoo still doesn't have IMAP access (while Gmail has had it for free).

<comment><USER24> You can use IMAP from smartphones, and from Apple Mail:

> _Mac OS X users can directly set up an IMAP account in Apple Mail 4.4. After > entering a full name, email address, and password, hold down the Option key. > The Create button will change to Continue, allowing one to manually > configure the account settings._

> _Apple Mail 5.0 included with Mac OS X Lion supports easy and direct IMAP > account setup._

<comment><USER28> As others have pointed out, it's not available on all platforms. It's not transparently published either.

<comment><USER24> The claim was it doesn't have IMAP access. It does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember when Yahoo was the goto email. Now that Gmail has the market share, will a fresh coat of paint relive the glory hey days of Yahoo Mail?

I'm using both and the best part about Gmail is the spam protection and the fact it's so easy to search. I have problems with Yahoo losing emails over the years and it's quite frustrating.

Just have to wait and see how this will affect it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Good to see the update.

But why hide my folders on page load now? And also not display how many unread in them on top of the little folder icon?

And why auto-reveal the next message when deleting the previous one (from the previous design change)?

At least give me an option to enable/disable these "features" please.

Frustrating. Two steps forward, one back.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. It is amazing how it is possible for a product development team to come to believe that making me click several times to see the same information I could before via one click (or without clicking at all) is a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> And still I get ~0 spam in my gmail account and lots of spam in my yahoo account that seems easy to trap (the "buy v1agr4" type)

<comment><USER33> My Yahoo account that is just for personal use and trusted vendors gets ~0 spam. Another Yahoo account for the remainder gets lots of spam. Part of the difference may be that I religiously use the Spam button for the first account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> These idiots keep screwing with their products. Thank god Yahoo is now only a secondary email for me. They removed tabs, the tabs were a great convenience. They fubared their fantasy sports site, recently added back the white theme, amidst a massive backlash.

I just don't get it, why mess with all this so damn often, and piss users off....

<comment><USER35> 1\. Yahoo doesn't change anything. Gets called unpopular and outdated. 2\. Yahoo changes. Gets criticized as screwing their products.

<comment><USER34> I am on year 13 of their fantasy sports site. I'm going to know what works and what doesn't. From applets to flash to mobile....Not to be a jerk, but do you? Otherwise don't have this conversation with me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> On the iOS app, they are still using the "old" keyboard, not the iOS 7 one. But the app seems to be getting better, which is good news for those using Yahoo mail.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is so, SO shamefully Gmail. :)

<comment><USER38> It definitely reminds me of the layout of Gmail, but I think it looks better.

Is it better to use? I had one spam message in my inbox, and when I tried to mark it spam I was unable to do so due to a layout glitch. I refreshed and tried again...and again...and eventually the message disappeared.

Definitely some bug fixes to be made. Even after the bug fixes -- could I use it to manage my email the same way I do with Gmail, with thousands of emails in and hundreds out per month? Not today, but I look forward to seeing Gmail get some competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ooh cosmetic changes. Sheesh, what about availability, security, and better/faster search?

<comment><USER33> An always-https connection would be great. I've had no significant availability or search issues, ever.

<comment><USER40> Yahoo! mail has an always-https connection, at least mine does. Go to Settings -> Security -> Use SSL: [http://imgur.com/q8DEnYs](http://imgur.com/q8DEnYs)

Just FYI - you had to enable HTTPS in Gmail at one point. Same thing with Yahoo! It does not presume you want SSL all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So can I read my yahoo mails on gmail without having to pay just to read them on my client or what ?</comment>


Study confirms that ending your texts with a period is terrible - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/12/08/study-confirms-that-ending-your-texts-with-a-period-is-terrible/?tid=ss_fb <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703303)</comment>


London councils pass rules to ban people from standing in pairs - <AUTHOR> http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/london-councils-pass-rules-to-ban-people-from-standing-in-pairs-a3191651.html <comment><USER2> The source report from the Manifesto Club is here: [http://manifestoclub.info/psposreport/](http://manifestoclub.info/psposreport/)</comment>


Pitfalls of Startup Team Building - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/pitfalls-of-startup-team-building?

<comment><USER2> Rule 5 is "there's no such thing as 10X engineers". Then to back it up, some faux data about Marketers is given? This was weak, IMO.

The reality is that there are 10x engineers. They likely won't come work for you though.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. However, there's a caveat: not every organization _needs_ 10x engineers. In fact, a lot wouldn't know what to do with them. So as far as they're concerned, they don't exist.

After all, a 10x engineer is still only 1x when it comes to adding new functionality to your CRUD app.

However, when you need a scalable recommendation system built in a weekend, that works on a sharded database, uses clever math to run with limited resources, and fits processing into an overnight cron job, and just _works_ (without breaking down every few days over the next couple months), that's when the "10x" guy or girl is your only choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Your culture is not: Ping pong tables & beer in the fridge

> Your culture is: Who you hire, keep & reward vs. who you don't promote (and > why)

I wish more people realized this. It seems so rare to hear, but it's so, so, so important.

</comment><comment><USER4> Slide #10: "How can I have influence" is naive. It's a great concept, and I hope everyone follows that link of thinking. It's the equivalent of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have." And I've found that most people gravitate to this mentality, too.

But the _key_ to this is that companies need to support this from the top down, and frankly most don't. Seniority-based hierarchies abound, and influence is nearly always associated with title. The people who have the most to gain from the notion of influence-in-spite-of-role tend to report to the people who have the most to lose from it.

</comment><comment><USER5> All this stuff is kind of MBA 101, but much of it has been very useful for me in practice.

Some companies in my region have the "inside joke, work hard play hard, let's party after work" "culture" the slides mentioned, and it has zero bearing on the trajectory of the company. I'm sure everyone's having fun, but god forbid you're 30-something with kids who wants to make a real impact.

Interestingly, cultures like the above tend to come from the employees themselves, despite the CEO's intentions. I'm a firm believer that your culture is what your employees say about your company, not what you, the founder, says.

The performance + values quadrant is probably the most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to building a team. That, and "hire slow, fire fast"

</comment><comment><USER6> I especially agree with the bottom left quadrant of slides 4 and 5.

low performance + high culture fit == hire/keep.

Over time I've found that high culture fit and a fun place to work help improve performance.

</comment><comment><USER7> The career progression slide is awesome but never implemented in practice. The director has waaaay more influence and salary compared to the architect.

</comment><comment><USER8> Before I clicked that link, I wondered why slides, of all things, should be the pitfall of startup team building. ;-)

<comment><USER9> slides are a pitfall in general since way overused, but these ones are good. I think they have some advice that's pretty right on based on the last 5 years running a startup, especially on the recruiting front.

<comment><USER10> For a second I thought the title was referring to the things you slide down at playgrounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title is misleading, it should be: Pitfalls of startup team building [slides]

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, my mistake.</comment></comment>


Focus On Your Science - <AUTHOR> http://startuplift.com/seqcentral-focus-on-your-science/

<comment><AUTHOR> Our goal at StartUpLift is to help startups get some exposure and solicit feedback. Often times, the startups featured cater to a niche and not everyone can provide a meaningful feedback. In this case, we have featured SeqCentral which is seeking feedback on its API page. I am asking HN community to participate and provide some feedback.</comment>


The Social Network Wins Golden Globe for Best Picture - <AUTHOR> http://www.goldenglobes.org/nominations/

<comment><USER2> Cool, it deserved it. It was an excellent movie. _The Social Network_ was my own personal pick for "best movie of 2010", although - to be fair - I didn't see every movie released in 2010. But I would rank it above _Inception_ , _Shutter Island_ , _Tron:Legacy_ , _True Grit_ , _Harry Potter_ , and _Red_ \- out of the other good movies that come to mind from last year.

Nice pacing, good acting, great score, inspirational, entertaining, thought- provoking, it really had everything. It was a great trip inside the world that a lot of us live in / aspire to live in. Maybe a non-hacker wouldn't see it in quite the same light, but I really thought it was just excellent.

<comment><USER3> I thought "The Social Network" was decent, but I was actually expecting more from Fincher and Sorkin. It could have been a student film, in some ways. I thought many of the characters were fairly two-dimensional and the "two lawsuit" structure was a little forced. It made me think of the examples in a screenwriting class I took in college. (Oh, and it's not a world I live in or aspire to live in.) My expectations must have been too high after all of the great press it received. It had so many raving critics and fans that I had a long period of people telling me I "had to see it" - but I didn't see it until it came out on DVD and then was fairly disappointed. If it is THE film of 'this generation', as some claim, then I think we're in trouble.

I think "Inception" should have won. It was much more creative and thought- provoking, and I thought the acting was also better. Of course, I had no preconceived notions about it - other than a general idea that it was apparently a goldmine of meme material for sites like Reddit. I've only seen snippets of "Black Swan," but the acting looks better than both "The Social Network" and "Inception."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Social network was good and all but Inception was a masterful, intelligent film that was original to boot. Far better IMHO.

<comment><USER5> As it happens, I saw both of these films for the first time in the last week or so.

I'd say that Inception was a hugely ambitious film which didn't _quite_ hit its mark, while The Social Network was a much simpler, much less ambitious film which just happened to be nearly flawless. Inception was a fifteen-course lobster meal where a couple of the courses were a little salty, while The Social Network was just a dish of masterfully-prepared spaghetti, far better than spaghetti has any right to be. Which of these you think is more worthy of recognition is a bit of a broader question.

<comment><USER4> I'd say the one pushing the envelope while achieving some mass market success... but that's just me, cuz i happen to want more ambitious films.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I finally saw this last night. It wasn't a BAD movie: Reznor's score was magnificent, they didn't mince hacker jargon and it was interesting enough to sit through. It boggles my mind that it took Best Picture. Was 2010 really that bad for movies?

I should mention I was actually blown away by not only the technical correctness of the programmer jargon, but the fairly accurate representation of hacker wordplay, i.e. referring to the Winklevoss brothers as "The Winklevi."

<comment><USER7> Rather than 2010 being a weak year in film, could your taste differ from that of movie buffs/critics because I don't think I saw anything but top-tier reviews for The Social Network. I thought it was superb.

IMO, 2009 was a weakish year.

<comment><USER6> It wasn't an overt knock on TSN -- I just don't watch many movies, so I really don't know what to expect. Aside from the geek jargon and a bit of drama, I suppose I was surprised that it was Best Picture material. I think the only movie I saw on the big screen in 2010 was TRON Legacy, which was technically part of the 2011 movie year anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also best director and best screenplay? That seems like a pretty big snub to Nolan for Inception. Social network was a pretty good movie, but it's hard to believe it would have done so well if everyone wasn't so gooey in the pants for facebook.

<comment><USER7> I don't use Facebook. I'm that friend everyone knows as the one that refuses to join. I like Reznor's work though so was familiar with that and perhaps somewhat predisposed to liking that aspect of the film.

I thought The Social Network was excellent and, though I really liked Inception too, would've picked Social Network as the better of the two. The introductory scenes were excellent. The characters were solid and believable, the tech side of things was handled very well and those involved collectively made a boardroom-and-laptops film into something impressive and enjoyable.

After the first time I saw Inception, I had a sneaking suspicion that my opinion of it might evolve a bit like that of The Matrix - huge at the time, but a bit cheesy down the track. I know the sequels amp the cheese, but they are mostly cringe-worthy now when repeats show up on TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The movie itself (I saw it twice) was excellent. Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross' score, in particular, blew me away - I saw it a second time just to enjoy the soundscape (note: You can buy the 19 tracks, in your preferred format, for $5 from <http://www.nullco.com/TSN/>) - the only other score I've ever enjoyed so much was Vangelis's Blade Runner. Reznor/Ross will win the Oscar hands down.

In terms of fairness, I thought that it was a little harsh towards Eduardo Saverin's contribution, and probably made Mark Zuckerberg out as a more sympathetic character than what really went down. Ironically, my "non-valley" friends saw the movie in a completely opposite light - which, too some degree, is a huge credit to the great direction, acting and screen play. So many people could see precisely the same movie, and come out with entirely different conclusions. The screenplay didn't pander, promote, or manipulate - it told an entertaining story in a way that allowed the audience to interpret based on their own background. I really think the Social Network deserved to win Best Picture, here's hoping the Academy thinks so as well.

<comment><USER5> This is the thing that bothers me about the film; I just don't _know_ how what happens in the film relates to what really happened, and even if I cared to find out I'd only hear a bunch of conflicting versions, and many of the key people have by now been paid serious money to never tell their versions again. Was Saverin's contribution underplayed? Overplayed? What about the Winklevi? Is Zuckerberg more of a jerk than he comes across or less of a jerk? I don't know, I'll never know, and I don't _especially_ care, except that I will forever have one unreliable version of the true story in my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> i think that's great news for the startup community. if startups weren't mainstream before, so many kids were inspired to get off their ass after seeing the movie.

as for the flick, i think is was very entertaining, but the most ironic thing about it (outside of the _love story_ ) was how close to reality it was. the way everything has played out over the last six years lent itself very well towards a screenplay.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did anyone else lol at The Social Network every time they said "He's wired in"?[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e1tss/did_anyon...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e1tss/did_anyone_else_lol_at_the_social_network_every/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Uh, it says that The King's Speech actually won.

<comment><USER13> Where does it say that? Because Social Network won.

<comment><USER12> Weird. The link definitely had it wrong an hour ago. Appears fixed now.</comment></comment></comment>


SEC Charges Wealthfront and Hedgeable With False Disclosures - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-300 <comment><USER2> It sounds like the false disclosures were that they promised to monitor their tax loss harvesting for wash sales which reduce the effectiveness, but didn't actually do this.</comment>


A Trip Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Sprawling, Embattled Compound in Hawaii - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/a-trip-inside-mark-zuckerberg-s-sprawling-embattled-co-1833142966 <comment><USER2> I've always found it deeply unsettling that Mark Zuckerberg simultaneously claims privacy is a thing of the past while going to extreme lengths to protect his own privacy.

I do not think he is a man that can be trusted, and I worry about how his power and influence will grow over the coming decades.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kinda very shallow report. No photos of actual property (houses) of Zuck.

<comment><USER4> The article is not about what the property looks like.

<comment><USER5> But that's what is interesting to me. Hawaii is a nightmare of rich people buying stuff. Larry Ellison bought all of Molokai, it some other island. It's not interesting that Zuck is like the hundredth millionaire to buy up land.

I love Hawaii, but I've been suckered too many times by people telling me how they really want the land for a connection going back 100 years just to develop it. Which is not that bad, but it's hard to filter out whose narrative is authentic. So it's all noise to me of rich people arguing with lucky people.

I'd be more interested in photos of the design decisions of a nerd.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Adds VP8 Support for WebRTC to Safari Technology Preview Release 68 - <AUTHOR> In today's Safari Technology Preview 68 Apple added VP8 support for WebRTC.
https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/release-notes/
WebRTC
Added VP8 support to WebRTC
Added support for IceCandidate stats
Added support for reporting "display composited video frames"
through the VideoPlaybackQuality object
Added support for RTCPeerConnection.generateCertificate
Added support for RTCConfiguration.certificates
Implemented error handler of MediaRecorder <comment><USER2> Also: support for dark mode via prefers-color-scheme CSS property, and <input type=color>.

</comment><comment><USER3> I take that to mean that VP8 works only in WebRTC contexts, i.e. you can't click a VP8 video embedded as normal in an HTML document and have it play. But I haven't tested it myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> So far I've been unable to get a player to play Vp8 content but I'll keep on tinkering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> but still no fix for the sped up audio issue :(</comment>


Show HN: A Crowdsourced Online Dictionary for Haitian Creole - <AUTHOR> https://parollakay.com <comment><AUTHOR> Built with Reactjs.</comment>


Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Duplicate of the incumbent top ranked - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022963)</comment>


Techies use Fitbits and Apple Watches to monitor heart rates while doing drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/09/apple-watch-and-cocaine.html <comment><USER2> "or Burning Man, the annual drug-fueled shindig in Nevada's Black Rock Desert."

 _sigh_

I cannot roll my eyes at this hard enough.

anyway, I don't see this as a huge trend, more like "a few people did this, hey, let's write an article." Their "scores of users" on reddit links to an 3 year old entry with only a handful of posts.

This article is silly.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unfortunate when reading this that the realization is "they're gonna do the drugs whether or not the Fitbit is there, so I guess it might as well be there". :|

What happened to just not doing drugs?</comment>


Ask HN: I see discussion of Apple and FBI but little talk about non USA citizens - <AUTHOR> If Apple ever installs a backdoor I think nobody outside the USA would buy an Apple product again. <comment><USER2> A big part of the focus on the US here I believe is that non-citizens already have no protection from whatever the NSA/FBI might attempt.

For what it's worth I don't think many Americans would want to continue purchasing either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah downvote me fauckeradf'sjpoisgf</comment></comment></comment>


Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr: iPad 'will rule the world' - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/03/31/john-doerr-ipad/

<comment><USER2> Well, I don't know about ruling the world, but I really look forward to testing the iPad. Both Mossberg's and Pogue's review were interesting, and so far most people that have tried it seem to agree that it is something special about the iPad. Looking at the few apps shown so far, it's obvious that it's not just a larger iPhone. The larger screen enables a whole new set of possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like the Segway.

<comment><USER4> Exactly what I thought when I saw the title.

 _Kamen blithely forecast that by the end of 2002, his enterprise would be stamping out 10,000 machines a week. Meanwhile, his best-known backer, venture capitalist John Doerr, predicted Segway would rack up $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history._

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/segway.html>

<comment><USER5> You know... if they were pushing out 10k units a week, the damn things might actually be cheap enough that people would be willing to buy one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lucky we don't have to wait for EEStor ultracapacitors to power it eh John?</comment>


Why Spotify Will Kill iTunes - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/07/why_spotify_will_kill_itunes.html <comment><USER2> Hmmm... I seriously doubt spotify will have any major impact on iTunes there markets aren't the same, the uses cases aren't the same, its just the same products.

I buy tracks to listen on my ipod, say in my car, out fishing, at the gym... all places where there is no internet service ... places spotify has no service, spotify is not portable.

At my computer I use groove shark quite extensivly, but it hasn't altered my buying habits one bit. Because the use cases are not the same. I don't just buy music for that reason, and besides I already have piles of streaming sources at home (TV,radio,internet). Its nothign new, jsut maybe abit mroe adaptive.

So I doubt Spotify would have a real business impace unless they implement a music purchasing service, maybe thats there end game, I dunno. But currently I'd say that article is just speculative rubbish.

Also the instore as aspect of iTunes is nto to be frowned at either. I have seen alot of people getitng iTunes gift cards lately, they have adapted into the mainstream purchasing paradigm which I doubt spotify will be able to do anytime soon.</comment>


The sudo fraud - <AUTHOR> https://ilya-sher.org/2016/06/08/the-sudo-fraud/ <comment><USER2> Even with unlimited, no-password required sudo, it provides a valuable addition: audit logging.

every command you run with sudo is logged, along with the user than ran it. On GCP each end user is provisioned a separate login user, and logs can be shipped to Stackdriver Logging where they cannot be modified. This makes access really verifiable.

<comment><USER3> Seems silly. Why create a pain in the ass for every command, instead of enabling auditing? Of course you should log which ssh credential started the session.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with your thesis here, but "for every command" is substantially overstating the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's one very good reason to use sudo instead of being in a root shell: audit trails. sudo logs its invocations. While you could always see who is becoming root, you'd have to look through root's shell history to see what's happening (which isn't hard to purge - one of the many reasons a remote syslog server may be called for).

<comment><USER3> Why not enable auditing?

<comment><USER6> Why enable auditing when you already get the information you want with your current setup?

<comment><USER3> Because sudo only works when you sudo, it's just one more thing to type/mistype. Do you really want to pay your sysadmin to sometimes run sudo and sometimes have logging? Or would you rather automate it and get 100% logging?

<comment><USER6> Who's implementing it and why would it cost me less than paying a sysadmin to use sudo?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Is it really simpler for you to type sudo all the time rather than having > one terminal tab open with a root shell?

Yeesh. Privileged work I do is typically interleaved with commands that do not need to be privileged. Actual security considerations aside, I would rather have the guard rails afforded me by a normal user account for things that don't have some specific reason to be privileged.

</comment><comment><USER7> Technically, the main point for sudo is allowing non-root users access to a limited set of commands. That said, if you needed this, you should be using an actual MAC system.

<comment><USER8> sudo predates most (all?) Unix MAC solutions. Nowadays, PolKit can do most of its job in a more fine-grained way.

<comment><USER9> I still prefer sudo to PolKit. The syntax used in the sudo configuration file is quite error prone (which is why it is recommended to use visudo, as a way to not lock yourself out due to an invalid configuration), I still prefer that to PolKit's XML .policy files. Recent version can use JavaScript instead, but as far as I am concerned, it's equally bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The argument-via-AWS probably indicts _sudo_ , but it threatens in addition to indict any sort of command line access to production hosts. Why are you fixing your server with a typed command? Why not just kill it and spin up another?

</comment><comment> mh-cx On my severs I often use "sudo -s" in a separate tmux window. I've changed my PS1 to give me a red prompt for root. Over the years I never had a situation where I accidentally did something stupid as root.

<comment><USER11> It is so good to have visual clues. I do something similar, using..

        red = root
        yellow = others (or ssh)
        green = me

Plus when I'm SSH'ing to a remote box, it usually defaults to white prompt

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only thing I agreed was: "If you manage a server, use root". sudo is a good way to let unprivileged users to execute a restricted set of commands, it's easy to learn and setup.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ===8<== Update 2016-07-09 05:58 UTC

Just to be clear: Please note it's filed under the "Rant" category. The post has some valid points but don't take it too seriously. Use your best judgment to decide which parts of the above apply to your situation. ===8<===

</comment><comment><USER13> This seems relevant: [http://www.garyshood.com/root/](http://www.garyshood.com/root/)</comment>


Cash is dying, and the unbanked are being left behind - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/cash-is-dying-and-the-unbanked-are-being-left-behind-5a796f5e8055 <comment><USER2> Where is this a reality? I pay cash all the time. Most of the services I pay for have a local presence. Paying online is just a convenience for me, but entirely optional.

<comment><USER3> The article mentioned Mastercard paying transit fares on Fridays in New York, for those who are not unbanked. Thats pretty real.

I have a few more real world examples:

First, in northern Canada, food and other merchandise in brick and mortar(cash accepting) stores has a premium of typically 150%-200% applied to the products under the guise that it costs more to have it shipped into northern towns.

So people without bank accounts living in the north have no choice but to pay this premium if they only have cash, but if you have a bank account you can order the exact same stuff online at aleast half the price the stores are charging and get free two day shipping.

Secondly, people without bank accounts get to pay a premium to cheque cashing centers if they get paid by cheque, even trying to cash a cheque in the bank and branch location where a cheque is drawn from will result in a surcharge of five dollars or more if you dont have a bank account with them.

Finally most credit cards offer a cash back scheme where 2%-4% of purchases is given back to the purchaser. In a free market system based on supply and demand cash back schemes increase prices for all purchasers but people who pay cash do not get the rebate.</comment></comment>


Hitting Hacker News First Page: How Much Traffic Do You Get? - <AUTHOR> https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-first-page-how-much-traffic-do-you-get/ <comment><USER2> Awesome perspective! Thanks for the detail and the advice!</comment>


NixOS Release 15.09 - <AUTHOR> http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/release-notes.html#sec-release-15.09 <comment><AUTHOR> With the addition of Plex I think I'll switch my home media server over. I've been wanting to run gitlab and try out mailpile locally, but now that it's just an option away I'll do that.</comment>


Volumetric Rendering in HTML5 without WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://thomas-jansen.github.com/css_volviz/

<comment><AUTHOR> Already over a year old, but I haven't seen anyone else doing this, so I thought I share it here.</comment>


WxWidgets 3.1.4 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.wxwidgets.org/news/2020/07/wxwidgets-3.1.4-released/ <comment><AUTHOR> I really like wxWidgets. It is very convenient to add the wxWidgets repo as a git submodule and add it to your cmake build as a subdirectory. The licensing is also great. I highly recommend it! A fantastic project

</comment><comment><USER2> Already supporting the newly announced Apple ARM architecture! Definitely interesting to see that.</comment>