What's so special about being a designer? - <AUTHOR> It's a simple question for which I am trying to get a clear answer to: can everyone be a designer?
It's a fact that everyone has opinions when it comes to design - clients, partners, mothers, grandmothers, uncles, cousins, etc. However, I don't think that design is based on opinions.
So, apart from some technical knowledge, why is the designer the authority on design? What makes a designer different from the common mortal? <comment><USER2> designing != having opinions

My mom can't figure out google maps. If I asked her to design a better UI, her head would explode.</comment>


Maps of cities coloured by street/road/ave/etc. - <AUTHOR> https://erdavis.com/2019/07/27/the-beautiful-hidden-logic-of-cities/ <comment><USER2> DUPE _ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21094715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21094715)</comment>


Show HN: Swatchy palette editor for indie game devs - <AUTHOR> http://rm2kdev.net/2013/02/08/swatchy-the-ultimate-palette-editor/

<comment><USER2> This is neat! I wouldn't buy this for $2, though; I think free full-featured pixel art editors like GraphicsGale can do the same thing.

On the subject of pixel art palettes, this guy put a lot of work into making an ideal generic palette. <http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795>

</comment><comment><USER3> RPG Maker 2000? Boy, that takes me back. Anyway, it's always good to see more pixel art software. The medium is alive and well. You should post a news item on PixelJoint[1] and a thread on Pixelation[2].

[1]: <http://www.pixeljoint.com/>

[2]: <http://www.wayofthepixel.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had my online alias as rm2kdev since i was 13 back in the y2k. Its just stuck with me all these years :)</comment></comment>


How to Forecast Weather (without gadgets) - <AUTHOR> http://www.marisys.com/how-to-forecast-weather_2010-05-26/

<comment><USER2> Okay, with my free-time hobby being the study of weather and atmospheric activity, I'm left unsatisfied and felt I should say something. In particular, the section about clouds stands to be corrected. "Clouds moving in different directions=bad weather coming, probably hail"? What you're probably seeing, when you see two huge collections of clouds moving in opposite directions is the Coriolis effect, something _very_ common in atmospheric activity.

Take this poster at face value, the abundance of the word "probably" indicates to me the creator is going off of second hand information.</comment>


CIRCLean – USB key sanitizer - <AUTHOR> https://www.circl.lu/projects/CIRCLean/ <comment><USER2> This seems a bit misleading to me. From README.md:

      This project aims to be useful when you get/find a USB key
      that you can't trust, and you want to look at its contents
      without taking the risk of plugging it into your computer
      directly.

Its method of operation is given as:

      The content of the untrusted key will be copied or/and
      converted to the second (blank) key following these rules
      (based on the mime type as determined by libmagic)

This process does _not_ make the key trustworthy. From the BadUSB intro:

      Once reprogrammed, benign devices can turn malicious in
      many ways, including:

        1. A device can emulate a keyboard and issue commands on
           behalf of the logged-in user [...]

        2. A modified thumb drive or external hard disk
           can [...] boot a small virus, which infects the
           computer's operating system prior to boot.

Assuming that the first USB stick can infect the second USB stick, CIRClean will not protect you against these attacks.

<comment><USER3> They can mitigate against badUSB by only whitelisting the generic USB mass storage class driver. No keyboard, no mouse, etc... I am not confident they do this though.

<comment><USER4> Looks like they don't, but they turn off usbhid on that particular port: [https://github.com/CIRCL/Circlean/blob/master/circlean_fs/ro...](https://github.com/CIRCL/Circlean/blob/master/circlean_fs/root_partition/etc/udev/rules.d/50-blockhid.rules)

However, that could be bypassed if the USB key acted like a USB hub with a keyboard attached.

If you do get a keyboard working, it looks like you can just log in with raspberry / raspberry and then full privileged access since sudo from the raspberry user, and /dev/kmem from root is enabled. That would allow arbitrary content to be copied on to the user supplied USB, and depending on the device, possibly firmware reprogramming.

<comment><USER3> Huh, at least it seems that they care about this attach vector. Blacklisting seems to be the wrong approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keep in mind that it is completely feasible for the µC to activate malicious payloads only after the n-th usage. Kind of like a PS3 exploit worked, albeit not on the descriptor layer, but the MSC layer.

</comment><comment><USER6> > In the worst case, only the CIRCLean would be compromised, but not the > computer reading the target (trusted) USB key/stick.

If the CIRClean device is compromised, I don't see how the trusted USB stick, which is connected to the now compromised CIRClean, can be guaranteed to not be infected.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about sharing the output via WiFi / Bluetooth?

That seems quite risky tho, once the device is infected, that would be like washing all your dishes with the toilet sponge.

What is the goal of having to reboot at each cycle?

<comment><USER8> To guarantee, in theory, that there isn't any contamination between two different flash drives.

But in practice, I'm pretty sure that with the right privileges you could just write to the SD card...

<comment><USER9> Isn't there also a physical switch on the SD card to mark it as write- protected? I'm sure that could be bypassed, but it would make it more difficult to hide the contamination.

<comment><USER10> The physical switch is entirely software implemented.

<comment><USER11> Also for Raspberry Pis the connection pin the switch relies on is un-wired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The code runs on a Raspberry Pi (a small hardware device), which also means > it is not required to plug the original USB key into a computer.

This may be splitting hairs, but a Raspberry Pi is a computer. From [https://www.raspberrypi.org/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/)

> The Raspberry Pi is a tiny and affordable computer that you can use to learn > programming through fun, practical projects.

The actual project page - [https://github.com/CIRCL/Circlean](https://github.com/CIRCL/Circlean)

</comment><comment><USER13> Not all USB keys can be sanitized. e.g: USB Killer

<comment><USER14> Though it's probably cheaper/better to destroy a CIRCLean than to destroy something else

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What even is the use case for USB sticks these days? Compared to just putting the files in Dropbox.

If I found a USB stick, I would just bin it.

<comment><USER16> I can buy a USB stick with 32 gigs of memory for a couple of Euros and fill it in minutes. My friends can read the stick in minutes, without having to install software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >plug a headset and listen to the music that is played during the conversion. When the music stops, the conversion is finished.

Bad UX but I guess it works,

I would have preferred an LED, on the Raspberry Pi GPIO ports to indicate ready, processing and finished.

<comment><USER18> > _If you have a Raspberry Pi with a diode, wait until the blinking stops_</comment></comment>


True 8-bit Color Cycling with HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ <comment><USER2> It's a nit, but this demo is "true" color cycling only in the sense of "faked" color cycling. The original hack used a series of color cells in the pallet to represent the object that was "moving", then updated the pallet (and _only_ the palette) per-frame to effect the animation.

An HTML canvas has no palette. And in fact, for didactic emphasis, I just tried this on my phone -- where it works -- that has no color palette hardware at all. This code can only do what it does by doing what the original did not: modifying all the changed pixels every frame. It's emulating the original hack, not duplicating it.

<comment><USER3> Would you say that if I write a colour cycling program and run it in dosbox, it isn't real colour cycling because it is being emulated?

<comment><USER2> Given that dosbox is an "emulator" (says so right there in the man page!), yes. You expected a different answer? Dosbox doesn't support "true" palette animation either (well, unless you give it access to the real VGA registers of real hardware, which can be done in some emulators).

The point was that the programming technique required to make this work is _not_ the same as the one used on palette hardware, so calling it the "true" effect is going to be confusing to people who don't know exactly how this works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think pixel art looks awesome even in 2012. What do modern developers/artists think about its future, given that high-DPI displays may become the norm? Will there be 264 DPI pixel art?

<comment><USER5> I think it would be an interesting and awesome project to make a 3D renderer that generates 256-colour(per scene? per frame) graphics in this style. Perhaps it could be done with shaders? Imagine playing through Skyrim and it looking as pretty as this?

<comment><USER6> It already exists, it's called toon shading <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel- shaded_animation> and it was used also in a commercial game called XIII <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XIII_(video_game)>

<comment><USER5> That's not quite it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5) is the article describing this amazing hack of the limited graphics hardware of the early 90ies.

<comment><USER8> The author mentions it does not work on IE6/7/8, and I suppose the lack of canvas is the cause, but would using excanvas do the trick?

<comment><USER9> Don't think so, I don't think it supports ImageData.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The 8-bit dithered look brings back some great video game memories of my childhood. I really enjoy this type of artwork...

</comment><comment><USER11> Ian Gilman worked on the original and has a writeup about it here: <http://iangilman.com/software/seizetheday.php>

Hopefully he'll jump in and comment.

<comment><USER12> I don't know that I really have much to add about the color cycling; seems like everyone's covered the topic pretty well! Delightful to see so many people interested in these old techniques.

The thing that unfortunately gets a little lost in the demo is the way in which the color cycling (along with clever color palette fading and some sprite animation) was used as a means to create a world that looked like it was really alive for the whole month long… When you started the app up in the morning, you saw the sunrise. If you tuned in at night, you could see the fireflies. Each day the moon progressed in its cycle. Some days it was sunny, others it rained. Clouds slowly marched across the sky. The whole effect was quite enchanting. Regardless of if we use color cycling or not, I'd love to do something like that again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Blog post:

[http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

FAQ with artist (quite fascinating):

[http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Q_A_w...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Q_A_with_Mark_J_Ferrari)

</comment><comment><USER13> Please, Mark Ferrarri, find a coder and start a project on kickstarter.

I would love to play a game with these artworks!

<comment><USER11> Try Heaven & Earth: <http://iangilman.com/software/heavenearth.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you think this is a clever hack, you also might be interested about the way programmers of 8-bit '80s machines used to increase the number of colours they could display at a time. My first computer, the ZX spectrum, had video memory that was laid out in such a way that you could only assign two colours to any 8x8 pixel block. However by changing the colours of that square in sync with the TV raster signal, you could get it to display 8 miraculous stripy colours in the same block. You could use a similar technique to get stripes in the theoretically one-colour border. I think some people even managed to do these things and still have time for some semblance of a game, which is fairly impressive on a 3.5MHz machine.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article[1] linked from the demo mentions an optimization that the image is preprocessed so that the javascript code only updates the pixels that are cycling. I wonder how another method would compare - modify the palette table in the PNG or GIF in Javascript, then redecode the image for each animation frame using the browser's decoder (native code).

1\. [http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome.

I turned it into an OS X screensaver using <https://github.com/tlrobinson/WebSaver>

</comment><comment><USER17> The guys at Effect Games were actually making a pretty kickass javascript game engine in basic non-HTML5 HTML, using all kinds of Flash hacks to get sound and other advanced stuff working... until libraries like impact.js came out and browsers made a jump forward to support canvas and HTML5 better.

So they shut it down and started a game development company: <http://www.goldcartridge.com/>

I wonder what they're up to?

<comment><USER18> Hi there, I won't speak for Joe nor Mark (the color cycling demo was their baby, but I'll pass along the sentiments), but thanks for the kind comments about Effect Games.

As far as Gold Cart is concerned, we're working mainly on some short "experiments". By way of a preview, <http://itsmin.com/portfolio/goldcart/gbasp/> Again, thanks for remembering us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Okay now I need to see if my Deluxe Paint II floppies still work

<comment><USER20> Hands up who else spent way too many half-hours drawing "rainbow snakes" and psychedelic cycling dots with the spray can.

Well, ok. Maybe it was just me.

<comment><USER21> I did that a lot in Autodesk Animator on my 3/486. And it did palette cycling!

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

<comment><USER22> I have been trying to revive that program. I have the original source code on github if you want to help. <http://animatorpro.org>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would give anything to be able to draw this well...

Pretty cool demos

<comment><USER24> >I would give anything to be able to draw this well...

Not to be a smartass but if you'd give _anything_ , why not buy some art books and put in a few hundred hours of practice?

<comment><USER23> Not to be a smart ass, but what makes you think I haven't tried, and found that I lack a certain artistic eye for shapes, shadows, and colors that prevents me from even having the slightest chance at reproducing things from my imagination, or even physical source material, in any recognizable way?

Although I pretty much gave up on trying to improve years ago. I switched focus to creating things with code, and have been faaaar more successful. So your comment is fair, in that I certainly could put time in to learn to draw and animate well, but I have a lot of other focuses for my life right now that can't spare that kind of time.

But, it doesn't stop me from dreaming :)

<comment><USER24> > Not to be a smart ass, but what makes you think I haven't tried, and found > that I lack a certain artistic eye for shapes, shadows, and colors

Well, mostly the fact that most people lack "a certain artistic eye" until they develop it, including people who later become competent artists.

>So your comment is fair, in that I certainly could put time in to learn to draw and animate well, but I have a lot of other focuses for my life right now that can't spare that kind of time.

A valid choice. So when you said you'd "give anything" what you really meant was not that you would actually give anything, but rather that you just wish that you could draw well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Every time I see a color-cycling example, it's this pretty waterfall picture. Does anyone know what game it was originally from?

<comment><USER26> I don't think it's from a game. I think the pics are all stand-alone paintings from Mark Ferrari <http://www.markferrari.com/> He worked on several classic PC games [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,60...](http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,6000/)

<comment><USER11> It's the monthly art from a calendar app.

<comment><USER26> And here it is: <http://www.iangilman.com/software/seizetheday.php>

Link from the bottom of a technical interview about the pics: [http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Q_A_w...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Q_A_with_Mark_J_Ferrari)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's pretty to look at, using Ubuntu 64 bit and nVidia 6800 here. It used about 60% to 80% CPU time. It reminds me of palette animations in games like King's Quest series from the 1980's.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know how you go about creating the images? Do you create a static image and then figure out how to animate it? Is it software assisted?

<comment><USER19> I used a program caled Deluxe Paint to do it back in the late 80s/early 90s. Back then pretty much all pictures used a pallete anyway; it was a matter of creating a static image and just making sure you use a specific range for the parts you want animated. A lot of times it's just highlights you want to sparkle, lights you want to blink, or water you want to shimmer, and you'll create a range (with e.g. a gradient) for those specifically anyway). More complex effects are possible, but can be a bit time-consuming.

[edit] To clarify I did not do the drawings on this page. Also if you want to see a good example of slightly fancier effects than just shimmering, look at the "swamp cathedral - Day" sample there and hit options. See how there is one range that is just for the rippling water, but then a different more complicated range for making the reflection shimmer appropriately; in that one they had to cycle very specific regions from purple to green for the boundary between the reflection of the hill and the reflection of the building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These are beautiful! Are they from an actual game?

(Also for me the Standard cycle mode is very jerky, but Blend is smooth).

<comment><USER30> Yes, that's kind of the point of Blend mode. AFAIK from looking at it, Blend mode makes the colors smoothly animate from one color to the next, which basically bumps the frame rate. Standard makes it change instantly, and since the frame rate is actually pretty low, it appears jerky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very cool, now could anyone recommend a good read about this technique and how it is/was used?

</comment><comment><USER32> What ever become of "Doug's Math Aquarium"?

</comment><comment><USER33> Back to the 80ies</comment>


Taboola and Outbrain call off their $850M merger - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/08/taboola-and-outbrain-call-off-their-850m-merger/ <comment><USER2> Taboola and Outbrain ads, when you want your site to look spammy as f __ _</comment>


Virus in iOS5? - <AUTHOR> https://p.twimg.com/AR74gtQCAAIqOm2.jpg This dialog popped up with the phone in a standby/locked state. Both the lock and the home button would not dismiss it. The dismiss button pictured did remove it, however.
iOS5 was installed from the official developer build, downloaded from a valid iPhone developer account.
Apps running: phone, safari, photos, contacts, messages, mail, settings. <comment><AUTHOR> This dialog appeared from the phone being locked. It could not be dismissed by either the home or lock button. The dismiss button shown, removed it, however.

The only apps running at the time were built in iPhone apps, such as safari, photos and mail.

</comment><comment><USER2> I believe that's just a Class 0 SMS.</comment>


Managing your dotfiles with GNU Stow - <AUTHOR> http://juanda.me/managing-your-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow <comment><USER2> There are a ton of similar resources available here: [http://dotfiles.github.io/](http://dotfiles.github.io/) (reference dotfiles, frameworks, dotfile management utilities, and tutorials).

</comment><comment><USER3> Recently started using [https://github.com/dotphiles/dotsync](https://github.com/dotphiles/dotsync) for managing dotfiles, very easy to remotely deploy them this way.</comment>


RT Editor-In-Chief Explains "Why We Don't Respect the West Anymore" - <AUTHOR> http://thesaker.is/why-we-dont-respect-the-west-anymore-must-read/ <comment><USER2> This is not a technology related article. It's propaganda bullshit written by a special snowflake. Grow up.</comment>


Show HN: Invest Your Money In What Matters to You - <AUTHOR> http://www.valuedinvesting.com <comment><USER2> There is a basic problem with socially conscious investing. Let us take the Kantian/golden rule perspective and imagine that every "good" person invested with a social conscious and avoided evil companies. The stock prices of "good" companies would go up, and the dividend yield/return on investment would go down. Then bad people could invest in the evil companies and earn a much higher rate of return, because they would be under-bought, under-valued assets. In other words, socially conscious investing is a way for good people to allow bad people to earn more money.

If you want to be socially aware with your money you can either a) own a normal stock index, but donate a share of the profits from bad companies to charity and/or b) boycott the evil companies as a consumer. Boycotting is the only way to actually hurt the evil company and prevent people from profiting from evil.

<comment><USER3> Few investors would give up diversification for potentially good profits on stocks that have been dropping like a stone.

Also look at this from the company's perspective: companies, wanting high evaluations so they can sell off their own stock at a profit, might try to actively push themselves up the "moral index"/"popularity index" \- that's a win for the common folk.

<comment><USER4> You're incorrect with regard to diversification.

You can go short the good company and long equivalent bad company (or a basket of securities containing a bad company) and be more or less hedged until the premium for being a "good" company dissipates (and it very likely would.)

You don't really lose diversification in this scenario, since you'd be able to construct a long/short basket that can have you market neutral with respect to systemic inputs to the valuations of both companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I paged through the "Get Started" flow, and it took me to [http://www.valuedinvesting.com/signup/account- creation.php](http://www.valuedinvesting.com/signup/account-creation.php) \--- do you expect people to give their Social Security Numbers to a form not using SSL?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have linked through: [https://valuedinvesting.com/signup/get- started.php](https://valuedinvesting.com/signup/get-started.php)

<comment><USER6> The whole site should be https and never load assets that are not -- from the start. Especially since it's an investing site with access to sensitive information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Frustrated that I wasted 10 minutes of my time filling out the form and never got my stock mix recommendations. I provided my data and you (the website) never upheld its promise of giving me a stock mix based on my preferences.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea, but the site design looks kinda fishy, so I probably wouldn't use it. Plus, I have some brand-name trust in places like Motif and Vanguard, which I don't have with Valued Investing. But I like the idea and where you're going with it.

Hire a designer, get an SSL certificate, and let me invest, say, $500, and I'll sign up. ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone read about shareholder activism.

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596518-america- shoul...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596518-america-should-make- life-easier-not-harder-activist-investors-corporate-upgraders)

I feel like a cooler impact statement would to start an investment fund where by the fund based on its size targets owning large swaths of shares in companies it deems as evil. Then leverages its position in those companies to shift the direction away from said evil things.

Companies that are public and already not evil are going to be fine. But making evil companies be not evil would be a cool premise.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am Canadian and do not have a social security number, therefore I am not in your target audience. So, I encourage you to be extra skeptical about my critique.

However, when it comes to investing with someone, my biggest concern is trust. I am a long term investor, so I am not terribly concerned with management fees. Rather, I am looking for trust. Not only trust that you won't steal from me, but trust that you will do a relatively good job of managing my investments.

Unfortunately, this website and the signup process both severely eroded my trust. First, other people have mentioned this, but it has not been fixed so I will reiterate. This entire website needs to be https! Since it isn't https (and you still haven't fixed the link to the signup page), I have concerns over how you store and secure the data that you collect.

Second, I notice that you use Google Analytics and you collect some very personal information that you will no doubt use for marketing purposes. For example, in your risk assessment, you ask what I would do if my portfolio lost ~ 30% of its value over three months. Are you using this information to determine how much risk I can stomach, or are you using it to know when to market to me? Despite this level of information and the questions it creates, I cannot find a privacy policy. Your site has a terms of service, but it is a .pdf and, call me paranoid, but I am extra careful with .pdf documents.

Technically, since your site doesn't have a privacy policy, you're violating Google Analytics' terms of service. Your privacy policy may be included in your terms of service, so I could be completely wrong.

Third, call me paranoid, but in light of these issues, I have some concerns investing with a company that is seemingly run by an MBA student, especially one with an interest in starting 'disruptive companies'. My current advisor and I have been friends for 14 years, he has been in the business for 10 years, and he has no plans to retire until around the time that I will (hopefully) retire myself. I am a long term investor, so I am looking for an advisor who is just as interested in a long term relationship. You might be, but nothing on your website makes me feel confident that you will be doing this in ten years.

Finally, when I read your FAQ page, I noticed that if I want to see my portfolio, I have to log into Motif. Since I could use Motif myself, control my own portfolio, and not have to worry that I'll stop managing my own portfolio, it seems like I might be better served by signing up with Motif.

You have an excellent idea and I like how much work you have already done to execute on it. I think that if you added some more polish, you would have a force to be reckoned with. I especially like your FAQ page and, with the exception of the last sentence (Cerberus is a hell-hound), I found your blog worth a read.

<comment><USER11> > I am a long term investor, so I am not terribly concerned with management > fees.

This is what you should be _most_ concerned with as a long-term investor. Investment fees can easily chew away at a significant portion of your gains over the long-term. The difference between a mutual fund with an expense ratio of 1% and a fund that costs 0.05% is $6661 over 20 years on a $10,000 investment (assuming both return 7% annually). In the end, it's the difference between $31,650 and $38,311.

Obviously the difference grows with the size of your investment.

<comment><USER12> "(assuming both return 7% annually)"

LOL the median never gets returns above the median, which sounds like a tautology and nobody gets the same return every year except for long term .gov bonds and those aren't indexed for (real) inflation anyway.

The point is you can't get blood from a stone and the median of active mgmt will always return somewhat less than the median of passive mgmt (aka the permanent portfolio theory or related funds). After all that active manager needs to adsorb income to eat whereas the passive manager might merely be a line of source code. However, what active management can provide is a smaller std deviation of returns, at least on average.

So in the real world you won't get 7% every year unless you somehow obtained a .gov bond at that yield (good luck) or something like that. But it'll average 7%. And the std deviation of that will more or less decrease with increasing activity of mgmt aka increasing costs. There are guys who just waste money or go in parasite mode and there are cheap guys who do a great job, I'm talking about on average.

So you're right for the wrong reasons, in that when you're young you want the highest return for compounding reasons so you get the most passive guy possible (possibly just a permanent portfolio psuedoindex fund) and don't sweat fluctuations, but half a decade outta retirement you want the most expensive guy out there so maybe you only get around 6% but its almost certain it'll be between 5.5 and 6.5 not all over the map. There's more to think about like diversification and selecting less risky (aka lower yield) as you get older etc, but this is a good gross summary.

<comment><USER11> Rather than moving towards active management as you become more conservative, why not just rebalance towards safer investments like bonds, reducing your equity holdings without increasing costs?

<comment><USER12> Rebalancing your portfolio is active management of the portfolio. Aside from that...

With bonds at this time you can either get a return on capital below the real inflation rate (aka you're better off with metals which track inflation better than bonds or just spending it now to get more than you'll be able to get later) or you get to worry about return of capital with super risky investments. From a harm minimization standpoint you'll fall behind slower with bonds than just putting it in a savings account, so from that point of view its a valid strategy.

Right now we're near a peak, nobodys buying equities but the retail guys who you can always count on to buy high and sell low, so I'm not talking about today but over a longer term. It probably wouldn't be wise to buy in near a market peak.

An interesting observational definition of the start of a recession is there's no really good place to park your money. That's now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really dislike going through a survey about my investing and ending up on a sign up page asking for all kinds of information about me before I get results.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea, but I have to wonder if the 0.6% fee would be enough to make their form of socially responsible investing underperform the benchmarks.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a great question. The management fee is slightly higher than online advisors that use broad-index ETFs (Wealthfront, Betterment charge ~.25% to .35%). However to get to an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to include the ETFs expense ratio (which can range from .15% to .45%). When you look at other socially responsible investing options (mostly mutual funds), the 0.6% fee is rather low.

I wrote a post about historic performance of socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. Academic studies show that SRI funds meet or beat the benchmark in 89% of studies. [http://blog.valuedinvesting.com/performance-and- responsible-...](http://blog.valuedinvesting.com/performance-and-responsible- investing/)

<comment><USER14> Ahh, I see. So you're investing in stocks therefore there's no added expenses beyond the 0.6%. I definitely agree that 0.6% is lower than a typical managed mutual fund management fee.

Thanks for the clarification!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A serious flaw of this site is the pre-selection of what's "good" and what isn't. People's beliefs aren't that uniform. It's very possible that a value that's positive to the author would be negative to a user or visa-versa.

Every filter should have both "exclude" and "prefer".

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://www.valuedinvesting.com/how-we- invest.php](http://www.valuedinvesting.com/how-we-invest.php)

Under Long-Term Growth:

'As an investor it take discipline to hold stocks during a downturn, but we will be there to give you confidence.'

Not giving my money to anyone who misses typos.

</comment><comment><USER17> I looked at the site and liked the design though I agree with the rest of the comments here about SSL etc. One basic question I have is why did you choose Motif as against others such as TradeKing or AmeriTrade or E-Trade. Any particular reason for that?

</comment><comment><USER18> If you invest in something sentimentally and not in what will give you the best return, then you're not really investing per se.

</comment><comment><USER19> this reminds a lot of investing in real-life ideas at Motif ([https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs#catalog=our](https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs#catalog=our))

<comment><USER14> According to the Valued Investing page footer, Motif Investing is the broker used for their service.

<comment><USER19> nice catch.

so is this site just piggybacking and creating custom portfolio's through motif?

<comment><USER20> Motif Investing allows users to create and share motifs. I don't understand why this site was made?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> this just looks like another 'I make $xx,xxx everyday, you can to if you use our service'. Also the whole name, valued investing, which seems close to 'Value Investing' is awfully misleading. Value investing is buying a stock that the market, irrationally prices it far below it's actual intrinsic worth (requires accounting knowledge to sift through Q's and K's, and understanding of the business niche). The value that this site talks about seems like something based off socially conscious ethics which at most is subjective.

99.9% would rather see a green than losing money on a portfolio, regardless of whether I've made a right choice (subjective) by investing in the 'morally right' company. If you want to argue morally bad company, let's start with capitalism and inequality it naturally creates and that by investing you are furthering it.

Also, contributing a measly amount of capital that would barely make an impact at a company where you'd have to amass a vast amount of money to be able to control it.</comment>


The problem with calling technologies dead too soon. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webicity.info/2010/05/01/the-problem-with-tech-is-dead-hysteria/

<comment><USER2> I know people that still use really old computers. If you're trying to sell something to them, they aren't your market. If you think they care that your website looks like absolute crap on their computer, they don't really care. These aren't people that generally look at computing as anything more than something they grudgingly were forced to do. They know their computer is old and expect things not to work on them. It fits into their perception of computers being useless anyway.

<comment><USER3> Yeah my parents were like that. The only things they did on the internet were pay bills and check their email (using Outlook web access, which not only works in IE6, it works a lot better than in Firefox).

<comment><USER4> I think that says more about OWA than it does about Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What proportion of computers sold in the last year ran Windows 98?

Ok, the market for selling Win98 computers is dead, then, we agree?

So what remains is the leftovers of the people who already bought those computers. But no one will buy a new one.

So, going back to the iPad... people who are saying something like the iPad will kill, say, the personal computer industry (like Charles Stross) aren't arguing that everyone's PCs will suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke. No one would be stupid enough to argue that.

What they're arguing is that the iPad and devices like it will transform the landscape of devices sold. Right now, probably 0.01% of computer-like devices are "tablet computers" and 99.99% are "PCs" (i.e. netbooks, desktops, macbooks, etc). What people who predict the "death" of those computers are predicting is a reversal of that _sales_ situation - i.e. a not-so-distant future where 99+% of "computers" sold are tablets, and only a negligible percentage are traditional computers.

Sure, there'll still be people using Win98 even then, but who cares? Anyone who spends any money on computer-like equipment will have moved on to spending their money on something else (both hardware and software).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to use my current computer for 20 years: <http://mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com/> Only 17.5 years to go!

</comment><comment><USER7> It depends on what you mean by "dead". [1]

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I like to urge on the death of IE6. For my paid work I often don't have the luxury of ignoring IE6. But for my side projects, I often specifically check for IE6 users and offer them some kind of "go away" page. My thinking is that I want to make the IE6 Internet the "boring" Internet. If everyone's interesting side projects didn't support IE6, then after a while the general public will catch on that their IE6 browser is crippling them. Meanwhile, the enterprise IE6 users aren't affected because they are at work and wouldn't (shouldn't?) be visiting silly side project websites anyway. ;)

Here's what alphabetclock.com looks like when you view it in IE6:

<http://imgur.com/J7809.png>

I helped my wife launch a dessert baking blog at chocochichi.com. Here's what that looks like in IE6:

<http://imgur.com/py8rn.png>

<comment><USER9> If you are going to do this please add a link to something to educate a user on how to upgrade and why as just pictures like yours come off confrontational and would probably leave casual computer users (who are the ones that can actually upgrade their browser) confused and probably irritated.

<comment><USER8> Good point. Can you suggest a web site that properly explains the issues with IE6 and how to upgrade in language that's appropriate for users who may not even know what a browser is? I bet there are some pages out there already like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> This one is quite helpful: <http://browsehappy.com/>

<comment><USER8> Thanks. I'm using that at the moment, but I'm going to keep looking. The site doesn't get to the point fast enough and it doesn't suggest Google Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A little side note. The author says:

 _The best online image editor I could find, still doesn't achieve feature parity with Paint.NET, which it is obviously inspired by._

I think that the aviary.com suite is well past that point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to look into that one. I never heard of it before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If your job is to build new technology products, is there a difference between a technology being dead and the users of those technologies not adopting any new technology? I don't think so. Saying Windows 98 is dead is just short hand for saying users of Windows 98 are never going to be my customers so I don't need to build a Win98 compliant desktop version of my product.

</comment><comment><USER12> Its not just about IE6. I've users who would have used DOS 6.22 and an old POS software happily. However they were forced to upgrade since they needed to use Thumb drives, DVD Writers (for Backup) and USB printers. If it were not for these hardware requirements, they would have happily used DOS. [updating the app through net? A lot of users have very simple requirements that once done are done for a long time.]

The average Joe upgrades their software only when they miss out very essential things. If they are still able to Facebook, check mails and watch movies, they're probably okay with whatever old OS they've. They really don't care about 64 bit computing or the latest Service Packs unless it has something very directly related with daily use.</comment>


How to set up a VPN in 10 minutes for free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-to-set-up-a-vpn-in-5-minutes-for-free-and-why-you-urgently-need-one-d5cdba361907#.dmfa744uf <comment><USER2> The title is "How to set up a VPN in 10 minutes for free" although it doesn't tell you how to "set up" a VPN, just how to configure your browser to use one, or to buy a service or device (router) to connect to a VPN.

If you actually are looking to set up your own VPN, I recommend this guide on Digital Ocean[1] If privacy is your main concern for using a VPN, and you are technically inclined, then it would make sense to be in control of the server acting as your VPN.

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- set-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an- openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04)

<comment><USER3> I actually advise against digital ocean if your privacy is your main concern, as they mention in their terms[0] they will pretty much hand over anything requested.

[0][https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/](https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/)

plus, remember when they took out 38,000 websites because the Yes Man made a parody site?[1]

[1][https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160629/23462634866/nra-t...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160629/23462634866/nra- trademark-complaint-over-yes-men-parody-takes-down-38000-websites.shtml)

regardless, DO is known for shooting first and asking questions later, does this seem like the type of provider you want to use for a VPN?

<comment><USER4> >they will pretty much hand over anything requested //

It sounds from [https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/enforcement/](https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/enforcement/) like they don't really have much to hand over though. If you bring up an instance use it for a VPN, delete the instance. They claim to not have connecting IP addresses, nor the contents of deleted instances (which can be encrypted), nor indeed much beyond your payment & contact details.

But then they could just be claiming that.

Aside, their terms include this gem - after the para noting that "content" covers all "data" and "information":

>You represent that all User Content provided by you is accurate, complete, up-to-date, and in compliance with all applicable laws, rules and regulations.

So, if you give them any data or information you have to give them all the information, and it has to be accurate and up to date! Cue data dump of all facts in the known universe!! Hang on, that fact was only up to date when you sent it, now it's out of date ... can ... not ... comply ... must ... send ... more ... data ...

<comment><USER3> Ive actually heard a horror story with DO where someones deleted instance was recovered[0]

the link is dead though :/

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498861)

EDIT: Webarchive has it: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140331054458/https://gist.gith...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140331054458/https://gist.github.com/agh/d0e2b115de77b1bcb902)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is incredibly bad advice. Opera has the worst security track record of every other major browser, and clicking that ad blocker button routes all your traffic through a single endpoint at a Chinese-owned company. Hello surveillance! Even the routers... haven't there been enough remotely exploitable flaws in those archaic router vendors to recommend against using them at this point? You might get a VPN in name but you'll get none of the security that comes with them that way.

You should setup your own personal VPN server if you can. We wrote Algo VPN, a set of ansible scripts that automates the process as much as possible. It contains the most secure defaults available, works with common cloud providers, and does not require client software on most devices.

[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

<comment><USER6> >Does not install Tor, OpenVPN, or other risky servers

Can you explain how ipsec differs from openvpn ? All the major vpn providers seem to use openvpn right now.

<comment><USER5> Yes! We cover that in the FAQ in detail:

[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#...](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#5-why- arent-you-using-openvpn)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This is where the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere extension comes in handy. It will > make sure traffic to non-HTTPS websites is also encrypted.

Is it just me, or this paragraph is completely wrong? HTTPS Everywhere's job is to HTTPS when available but not explicitely used.

<comment><USER8> It's wrong, and wrong beyond a simple mistake in phrasing. The author has no idea how HTTPS operates or what this extension does, despite plugging Let's Encrypt in the preceding paragraph.

<comment><USER8> the author must be watching; already changed the content to more closely match what HTTPS Everywhere actually does

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "How to cut-and-paste your way into a VPN setup for free without having any idea WTF you're doing, let alone how to adapt these instructions when the underlying technologies inevitably roll over in the next 24-48 months" would have been a more descriptive title.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Hijack your searches and share them with third parties

What does it mean to "hijack" a search? If the ISP is modifying your data in flight then that'd qualify though I don't think this bill gives them that power.

Also, most (all?) searches go over SSL which would not be susceptible to MITM fiddling.

At most it gives them access to log the number of bytes sent per customer to each destination and the DNS lookups you've performed. I'd be concerned if they are selling that information but there's no need to make up fake lingo to sell this. It's crap enough as it stands.

<comment><AUTHOR> The EFF explains how this was done here:

Back in 2011, several ISPs were caught red-handed working with a company called Paxfire to hijack their customers' search queries to Bing, Yahoo!, and Google. Here's how it worked.

When you entered a search term in your browser's search box or URL bar, your ISP directed that query to Paxfire instead of to an actual search engine. Paxfire then checked what you were searching for to see if it matched a list of companies that had paid them for more traffic. If your query matched one of these brands (e.g. you had typed in "apple", "dell", or "wsj", to name a few) then Paxfire would send you directly to that company's website instead of sending you to a search engine and showing you all the search results (which is what you'd normally expect). The company would then presumably give Paxfire some money, and Paxfire would presumably give your ISP some money.

In other words, ISPs were hijacking their customers' search queries and redirecting them to a place customers hadn't asked for, all while pocketing a little cash on the side. Oh, and the ISPs in question hadn't bothered to tell their customers they'd be sending their search traffic to a third party that might record some of it.

Source: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/five-creepy-things- you...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/five-creepy-things-your-isp- could-do-if-congress-repeals-fccs-privacy-protections)

<comment><USER10> Okay that sounds completely illegal and the exact definition of digital hijacking. Any type of modification of the packets themselves outside of dropping them for network control is a clear violation in my book.

I don't see that working for connections over SSL. I wonder how the companies that operate these questionable "services" deal with the rapid rise of SSL the past few years.

<comment><USER11> I think this type of attack being described was (is) actually done by hijacking requests that should have returned DNS NXDOMAIN. You tried to visit a URL that did not exist, but your DNS server failed to make that clear in the standard way to your browser, and now your traffic is sent somewhere else, instead of sending you to the familiar (or ugly, they might argue) NXDOMAIN browser error page.

So there aren't really any packets being modified, since you already get your DNS from your ISP. They're just returning bad information to requests that your browser naturally had directed at them.

<comment><USER10> The NXDOMAIN hijack isn't as bad as this. It involves replacing the response from the resource you requested with the ISPs preferred response.

It can happen either through DNS hijacking (nslookup for google.com goes to isp-fake-google.com) or they can just sniff all the traffic and MITM HTTP traffic for "GET /q=?" with a "Host: google.com". In either case they send you to whatever they'd like rather than the original request (and of course sell the data that User X searched for Y).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't opera owned by chinese (nothing against them just that they are the same level as US)? The traffic is only as secure as where the VPN terminates and there is no mention of what servers opera uses.

<comment><USER13> That is mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't mean to hijack the thread; but speaking of Tor...If some entity ran enough nodes wouldn't they be able to get a pretty good idea of the traffic sources and destinations?

<comment><USER10> The "O" in TOR stands for "Onion". The name comes from having many layers with traffic routing between them. Each node only knows enough to go to the next node. You'd have to control the entire chain to track a packet from source (TOR client on end user's machine) to target (i.e. TOR-exit).

It's definitely possible but with an increased number of hops it becomes harder and harder.

<comment><USER15> It's Tor* not TOR.

[https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've used [https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn/new](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn/new) several times to quickly set up a new VPN on a DigitalOcean droplet. Takes ~5 minutes.

Lately I had it set one up for me and have just let it run constantly since then. I effectively have my own personal VPN for $5 month.

</comment><comment><USER17> So 50 Republican senators, and not a single Democratic senator, voted for CRA, but also won't permit the FTC to regulate ISPs when it comes to preserving user privacy. Is this coincidence or is it a "market opportunity" for ISP's to bring back privacy as a product? Disallow VPN at the standard pricing level; and only permit it if you upgrade?

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know much about VPNs, so please forgive my ignorance. But doesn't using a VPN basically throttle you to whatever internet speed the VPN server has? I pay for 100mb at home, I don't really want to artificially throttle that down to 10mb or pay some exorbitant price for giving the endpoint 100mb.

</comment><comment><USER19> > If you want to take things next level, you can try Tor, which is extremely > private, and extremely hard to de-anonymize

I don't think Tor would eliminate the need for a VPN; wouldn't your ISP still be able to see the requested URL?

Edit: I was thinking of DNS leaks, but that's really not an issue if you use Tor Browser.

<comment><USER20> The entire HTTP request, including the destination, is bundled into the TOR packet, AFAIK. Only the exit node on the tor network can know where the destination is. But even then, when using HTTPS, the exit node only knows the host of the HTTP request, not the entire URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A friend recently setup openvpn to run in his router (I'm going to guess it was MIPS based), and his download bandwidth went from ~100Mbps to about 10Mbps; so a 10x drop. Why? Is a MIPS CPU in a consumer off the shelf router ($200) itself just too underpowered for this task?

</comment><comment><USER21> Opera doesn't provide a true VPN in its browser, it's just a proxy.

Learn more about VPNs and all privacy related things here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Here is a link to setup VPN Server on AWS.

[https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2015/how-to-setup-your-own- pr...](https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2015/how-to-setup-your-own-private- secure-free-vpn-on-the-amazon-aws-cloud-in-10-minutes/)

</comment><comment><USER23> There is no privacy without open source software. This article with the recommandations to buy Netgear stuff or commercials VPN services is just a farce.

The author don't know shit, writing this type of false articles will lead to another privacy disaster.

<comment><USER24> Whether the server is free / open source software is irrelevant to the matter of privacy with a VPN. It's running on someone else's computer, so you have no way of proving what is running, or more importantly, what _isn 't_ running - the service provider can run OpenVPN and also tcpdump, both of which are free software. You need to trust the provider not to monitor your traffic, and perhaps not to be easily compelled to monitor your traffic on someone else's behalf.

(The same is true of Tor exit nodes, incidentally, and it's very easy for an intelligence agency to run Tor and tcpdump.)

If you actually want a VPN, one of your best options is to use a commercial service that has a reputation to uphold. Some fly-by-night "non-profit" is probably a front for a miscreant running tcpdump. (And there is no conflict with a commercial service running open source code, as I'm sure you know!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I could have sworn the link changed from its original submission.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about the link, but the content has clearly changed to address concerns brought up in this HN thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any commercial vpn recommendations from this crowd?

<comment><USER22> Setup your own in 10 mins. Here is a link to setup VPN Server on AWS. Free tiers also apply for new accounts in 1st year.

[https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2015/how-to-setup-your-own- pr...](https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2015/how-to-setup-your-own-private- secure-free-vpn-on-the-amazon-aws-cloud-in-10-minutes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> how is this "free" when you have to pay for the cloud instance?</comment>


Asciinema – Record and share your terminal sessions - <AUTHOR> https://asciinema.org <comment><USER3> I think I was pushing the limits of what the service could handle with my fluid simulations. They're pretty choppy on first playback, but run smoothly the second time.

Block - [https://asciinema.org/a/125371](https://asciinema.org/a/125371)

Waterfall - [https://asciinema.org/a/125380](https://asciinema.org/a/125380)

<comment><USER4> Those are worth an HN thread of their own imo. Maybe a blog post or github page explaining how you did this

<comment><USER3> I built it to be a reference implementation for "Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics" (1st Ed.) by Robert Bridson. The book is a cleaned up version of his free course notes. If I had the time, I'd clean up the code a little because the book already has a great explanation of how it works.

[https://github.com/cgmb/euler](https://github.com/cgmb/euler)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My co-founder wrote a bit about Asciinema as part of a comprehensive comparison of terminal recorders [1]. There's a lot to love about it (wide availability, very nice JavaScript playback -- check out the Game of Life playback at [1]), but it's a bit of a chore to self host, if that's important for you.

[1]: [https://intoli.com/blog/terminal- recorders/](https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/)

<comment><USER6> The difficulty in self-hosting was what prevented us from using this at my job. Proprietary source code, and whatnot.

<comment><USER7> asciinema dev here. Where did you get impression it's proprietary? I'm really curious because it's fully open-source, with all components open-source and usable independently, and there's no company or business model behind it. Just me and my spare hobby time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really cool, and if I wanted to host a demo on a public website or something like that (attempting to keep bandwidth use down), I would use it in a heartbeat.

My use case for terminal demos is very different from that. Usually I'm just recording something short and emailing it to one person. Bandwidth savings do not accumulate across many website visitors, and simple is perfect.

The nice thing about video is I can just email it. I don't need to host a web server instance for playback. Even at very high quality settings ("ffmpeg -qscale:v 1", nothing blurry about it) the resulting video is only about 1MB/minute (80x24 term, h264 or h265).

Here's my demo workflow, in case folks are curious:

1\. simplescreenrecorder to record terminal window + voice.

2\. ffmpeg -i recorded.mkv -vcodec libx264 -qscale:v 1 -acodec aac encoded.mp4 # or s/264/265/ for slightly better compression, if the receiver has new enough codecs

3\. Email the video or whatever.

That's it.

<comment><USER9> The main killer feature, in my opinion, is that you can pause and copy and paste the text from any given point. Not that you can record and share terminal session, which you could do with basically any video recording software.

For example, at 00:11 of [https://asciinema.org/a/139514](https://asciinema.org/a/139514)

        Puzzle: 54-14343245-14134544-48EW.53NE
            1 4 1 3 4 5 4 4            1 4 1 3 4 5 4 4
           ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐          ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐
         8 │ │ │ │━│ │ │ │ │ 5      8 │ │┏│━│━│┓│ │ │ │ 5
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         7 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4      7 │ │┃│ │ │┗│━│┓│ │ 4
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         6 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 2      6 │ │┃│ │ │ │ │┃│ │ 2
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         A │━│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 3      A │━│┛│ │ │ │ │┃│ │ 3
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         4 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4      4 │ │ │ │ │┏│━│┛│ │ 4
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         3 │ │ │ │ │┗│ │ │ │ 3      3 │ │ │ │ │┗│ │ │ │ 3
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         2 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4      2 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4
           ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤          ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
         1 │ │ │ │┃│ │ │ │ │ 1      1 │ │ │ │┃│ │ │ │ │ 1
           └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘          └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘
            1 2 3 B 5 6 7 8            1 2 3 B 5 6 7 8

<comment><USER8> That is cool, but not usually something I need from a demo video.

<comment><USER10> It depends what you demo and what hay you wear: if you're on the receiving end of a tutorial, being able to copy the text you just saw on the screen is nice. If you're just giving the demo (and/or the that thing you're demoing doesn't have anything useful to copy, e.g. it's not a tutorial) then you probably don't care about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes you wonder how something that is so widely known and has been posted so many times [1] can reach No. 1... but yeah, its cool.

[1]: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=asciinema&sort=byPopularity&pr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=asciinema&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER12> Perhaps because it has lots of fans who like to spread the word?

I use it only _very_ occasionally, like once a year, but love the way it works. My first experience was perfect, I really couldn't think of a single thing to improve (and that's very rare), so that left a very good impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't forget you can take the recording and turn it into an animated GIF: [https://github.com/asciinema/asciicast2gif](https://github.com/asciinema/asciicast2gif)

Super useful for sharing because then the other parties don't need this software installed.

</comment><comment><USER14> Visual Studio Code LiveShare extension also has terminal sharing, but not with recording, simply being able to work with the remote's terminal.

</comment><comment><USER15> Tried out asciinema earlier this year, and it is super duper cool.

TLDR: Wish it included some functionality to get finished usable media artifacts out.

In the end I gave up after failing to find a way to convert the resulting asciinema data files to a GIF or any other HTML-compatible media file. The open-source projects ended up not working for various reasons- broken shell scripts, abandoned projects, node.js programs that require a fully working phantomjs installation and then it still doesn't work, requiring docker (come on, really? Spin up containers just to convert to a GIF?), and these are only the problems I remember offhand.

Some breadcrumbs:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=asciinema+convert+to+gif](https://www.google.com/search?q=asciinema+convert+to+gif)

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/314235/converting-a...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/314235/converting- asciinema-output-to-gif)

"asciinema doesn't provide this natively, there are tools out there that can facilitate that for you"

Right.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't animated svgs be a better output format for something like that?

<comment><USER7> Yup. There's project called svg-term-cli which generates animated SVG from asciicast file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I swear I can't be the only one who's bugged by the fact that the link to the recording[0] doesn't actually play out the same way as the session you just watched in the front page![1]

[0] [https://asciinema.org/a/17648](https://asciinema.org/a/17648)

[1] [https://asciinema.org/](https://asciinema.org/)

<comment><USER18> how on earth does copy/paste work from inside a video?

i'm way more confused than disappointed and wonder how easy it would be to rip this for use in a non-public environment?

<comment><USER19> This is a JSON-based container format for timestamped terminal sequences, including the terminal dimensions, the shell and the terminal used. (i.e., values of SHELL and TERM). See this minimal example [0]:

      {"timestamp": 1526123655, "version": 2, "height": 55, "env": {"SHELL": "/bin/bash", "TERM": "screen"}, "width": 179}
      [0.046457, "o", "namibj@nb:~/git/namibj/ind3xlite$ "]
      [3.021128, "o", "l"]
      [3.116894, "o", "s"]
      [3.468747, "o", "\r\n"]
      [3.472283, "o", "\u001b[0m\u001b[01;32mind3xlite\u001b[0m  LICENSE  main.c  main.h  Makefile  README.md  sqlite3.c  sqlite3.h  sqlite3.o\r\n"]
      [3.472869, "o", "namibj@nb:~/git/namibj/ind3xlite$ "]
      [4.092707, "o", "e"]
      [4.340945, "o", "x"]
      [4.548934, "o", "i"]
      [4.653126, "o", "t"]
      [4.859118, "o", "\r\n"]
      [4.859605, "o", "exit\r\n"]

As you can see, it was easy for me to redact the user and hostname from the prompt, without you even seeing it. The canonical implementation is in python (3 iirc), but you should be able to hook a non-x11 terminal emulator up and make that spew out frames for each individual timestamp, and just create a variable framerate mkv from that. With uncompressed video. This is then trivial to feed into ffmpeg for transcoding into your favourite codec, possibly even including a different stream for audio into the resulting mux. I might, if I'd get a reason to do this before other projects, take an existing terminal emulator and teach that to do this (or possibly directly to lossless VC1, removing the need to search for matching glyphs later in the process, which should yield reasonably small files directly from the conversion, without quality loss). So, if someone want's me to do this, email's in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I discovered that my dockers demonstration isn't updating the background colour correctly through asciinema. It looks good on my terminal, but maybe I have old man eyes.

[https://asciinema.org/a/tlpahVHp6cAUsdznznBCExGDo](https://asciinema.org/a/tlpahVHp6cAUsdznznBCExGDo)

</comment><comment><USER21> I just wish they added a "live" presentation feature like the unmaintained "play it again sam" ([https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam](https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam)) had.

<comment><USER19> Support for the necessary recording is available since version 2.0.0.

This can be done via jq [0]. See the simple script [1] I made. It relies on things like tab-expansion yielding the same results, so beware.

[0]: [https://github.com/stedolan/jq](https://github.com/stedolan/jq) [1]: [https://0x0.st/sj0G.txt](https://0x0.st/sj0G.txt) (License: AGPLv3, credit to my handle)

<comment><USER21> Wow - happens rare but I really can't understand your answer. I never would have guessed jq to have any use for presentation. Can you give a short example how to apply your script.

<comment><USER19> Uh, just feed it the resulting file from

      asciinema rec --stdin

and it will execute whatever was in there. If some programs were reading more than they actually wanted, it would have trouble, because they would likely get fed further commands/input, which would no longer go to the shell/later program.

Regarding the script, it's just using jq because asciinema uses a JSON-based format, of which some data needs to be extracted. It should be self-evident from looking at what jq is doing and what an interactive shell does different from a non-interactive one (hint: it's related to autocompletion), as well as a sample file created by the above command. If you still don't understand, tell, and I'll try to explain better.

And sorry for the delay, I wasn't expecting a timely response that asks me for something.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the reply. Doesn't happen every day someone answers your sorrows with a two liner. I don't really see at what points it is checking for my pressed keys. I just was able to try your snippet. Unfortunately I do not get it to work - I just end up with lines like `ls: no such file or directory`.

<comment><USER19> You might want to check what your shell does, as this relies on auto- completion doing the same thing if you replay the same keystrokes, even if that happens faster. Specifically, try to intercept the output of the last pipe into a

less -U and look if that seems to be what you were typing. If you want, you can replay the special chars by pressing Ctrl+<whatever symbol is followed by the caret>. Try to _not_ use a fancy auto-completion like fish or fzf provides you with, as they tend to not be the same when doing a replay.

This should not be hard, I used bash succesfully. I hope you did not forget to run it on the same filesystem state, as far as auto-complete behavior during the asciicast is concerned.

Also, this could be improved by delaying the replay as long as specified by the asciicast. But I couldn't quickly figure out how to get that done without further dependencies, so I won't provide that (now).

This script filters for input keys from the asciicast with the

      select("i" == .[1]?)

and then extracts only the string itself with

      .[2]

. I'd like to understand what is going wrong, but this style of debugging isn't working. I won't debug it on your system unless you find a way to make that sufficiently productive for me. And I really hope you created the file with --stdin, but judging from ls barfing on a non-existent file/directory, I assume the shell it spawned just did not result in ls being called with the same name, due to auto-complete changing it's behavior.

<comment><USER21> I appreciate your guidance. I don't expect you to debug it.

But it seems to me we were using the term "live" differently. I think I understand now that the code you provide runs the recording on the current machine - similar to a macro. The live mode I was referring from pias takes the recording - but times the keystrokes to what you type during the presentation - so one doesn't need to check. Makes also a nice trick for showing off as one can do fun stuff like type with your feet. Ah I see - <USER2> call this "manual typing", and have a "Live Replay" \- just as you suggested. So it was me being inprecise - sorry.

You were right the errors I was experiencing had to do with the shell. I use fish - forcing everything to use bash made previous errors disappear. However in my test recording the it got stuck in vim - suppose escape didn't work.

<comment><USER19> Escape should work, you'd wanna check the keys around that tho. It might be a timing issue. The requirement to not use fish in that mode is just due to fish exhibiting hidden non-constant state. I did think about how to do that timing, but I could not figure out how to do it. It should be a very short python script or so tho, just replace the 'jq ksjdfkasjdfk |' with a script that reads the newline-delimited JSON and waits until the next timestamp, sends that data to the shell, and parses the next JSON. You'd just have to get a system time at the beginning, and not just sleep for the offset between the timestamps in the JSON, as you'd be slower by as much as the inaccuracy from the system sleep call and the processing you have to do to extract the data from the JSON. But otherwise this should yield a timing predictable enough for such a live replay. The escape char seems to be kinda weird indeed. I'm not sure where that issue is tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> With all the terminal recordings I have seen, the content eventually ends up at the bottom. It would be awesome to have the cursor always stay in the middle... any idea if thats possible with Asciinema?

<comment><USER12> Why do you want to have it in the middle? Then you waste half the screen space right?

If you want it to push from the top, I could understand... but in the middle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Also see ttyrec, for a standalone terminal recording/playback utility:

[http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/](http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I last used Asciinema when presenting my thesis. It certainly gave the presentation a nice vibe, but I still had to fire up a real terminal window when answering questions.

</comment><comment><USER25> This fixes my main grievance with ttyrec: no seeking!

<comment><USER26> tty-player [1] gives you seekability, scrolling, and copy/paste with standard ttyrec files. Much easier for self-hosting than Asciinema and permits the use of other existing tools that work with ttyrec output.

[1] [http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info](http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Super cool!

IMO, the killer feature is how easy it is to embed recordings into your project readme or issues/comments in markdown/html.

</comment><comment><USER28> Still doesn't support Windows =(

<comment><USER29> There's a "Contributing" link at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER12> People who contribute to FOSS usually don't use Windows anyway, though.

<comment><USER29> Do you have stats at hand about people who whine software isn't available for their platform?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I read this as "Ascii enema". Yikes

<comment><USER31> Me too. What's the correct pronunciation? "Ass-cinema"?

<comment><USER32> From the website: "asciinema _[as-kee-nuh-muh_ "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Or just the `script` command?

[http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man1/script.1.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html)

Still, that's pretty sick that you can pause the "video" and highlight/copy/paste in-browser

<comment><USER32> The script command doesn't record timing data, so it's not very useful for playback. It's designed for transcripts, not for videos.

<comment><USER33> Per the man page, `script -t` captures timing data which you can playback easily with `scriptreplay -t`

[http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html)

<comment><USER7> Yes but script command on *BSD and macOS doesn't support this. Long long time ago asciinema was wrapping script then doing upload. But it work only on Linux and I wanted it to work for users of other Unix-like systems so here we are.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flash will be EOL by 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848786), which has the original source and was submitted a bit earlier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we link to the actual announcement instead of Techcrunch's regurgitation?

[https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash- up...](https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html)

<comment><USER2> OK, we changed to that from [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/get-ready-to- say-goodbye-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/get-ready-to-say-goodbye- to-flash-in-2020). Thanks, all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the real announcement, not this regarbled blog spam with no technical details: [https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash- up...](https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Announcement on Adobes blog: [https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash- up...](https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html)</comment>


Ask HN: how do you deal with legal stuff when you are bootstraping? - rush-tea

When you are bootstraping, how do you deal with the legal stuff such as term of use statement, privacy statement, NDA, etc?  Do you hire someone to draft them for you? Or is there a site with a generic format that you can use?<p>Thank you. :) <comment><USER3> Unless you have a legal issue unique to your startup, you can always get general legal advice from mentors and advisors and the HN community - <AUTHOR> just asked about terms of service, for example. You're probably too small for anyone to care to sue you.

But if you're raising money, having contracts signed, you really should work with a lawyer. Asking other startups in your area who they used is a good first step - you want to find a lawyer who specializes in working with early- stage companies, who can avoid some of the legal traps, many of which deal with tax issues associated with stock options and entity conversion. My personal opinion is that there's no good substitute for a good lawyer - <USER2> forms from LegalZoom just seems like a really bad idea.

I would also suggest getting a lawyer if your startup business model depends on a fine-tuned understanding of the law. For example, just the other day, a startup that was copying the structure and pagination of textbooks was sued by Pearson and other major textbook publishers. They're venture-backed, which probably means they consulted lawyers and understood the legal risks beforehand. Before spending tons of resources, I think you might want to know whether or not what you're doing is illegal, and whether you are prepared to deal with the legal risks.

Disclaimer: These statements are merely my personal opinions and do not constitute legal advice.

<comment> rush-tea Thank you for your opinion. No, I don't have legal issue, yet, with my startup, but I am within weeks to go beta launch and curious about term of use, privacy statement. I notice each startup has these on their products (whether it's website, mobile app, custom program, etc), but I wonder how do they get it. Do they have someone draft for them? Or is it a generic statement they can just use temporarily? I am bootstrapping now.

Of course, if my startup gains traction and grows, yes, I will definitely consult lawyer, but since it's still in its infancy, I wonder if it's really necessary to get lawyers just for term of service, privacy, NDA statement.

Thank you.

<comment><USER4> Legal terms cannot be copyrighted, so feel free to take a look around and cut and paste from some sites you like. Most of the terms can be figured out pretty easily, its the ones you leave out because you're not a lawyer that will come back to bite you :)

That being said, it doesn't matter much if you're not raising money, like others have said. Your chances of ever needing them are very low, they're mostly for show and do more to make you look like a real company than they do to protect you. Its like insurance, what start up buys insurance? Your chances of being sued are so low, it barely registers. Just copy the terms of a site that's like yours and go with it.

Once you raise money, change your tune and hire a good lawyer. Money needs to be protected :)

<comment> rush-tea Thank you. I was thinking of copy and paste from some sites that I have seen so far. But Mz post said otherwise. This is exactly my concern. Mz post states that his disclaimer is used by legal permission. Now to me, this seems to contradict what tstegart and me believe. If legal terms can not be copyrighted, then why would Mz require someone consent, the author in this case, to use the disclaimer? I want to avoid this situation if lets say I use facebook or google term of use word by word and then they sue me?

so now i m confused...

i understand that my project is nothing, and the chance of getting sued is almost 0 because i have no traction, but if it's legally not right, then i want to avoid the risk.

thank you for the advise.

<comment><USER3> I don't think tsegart is quite right on this one. Anytime you "express" words on a page, those words are copyrighted. Expressions are distinguished from more functional/factual considerations like labels, page numbers, math equations, etc.. So, my guess is that terms of service would likely be considered a copyrightable expression, just like software code, novels, and company manuals, because they are a manifestation of a lawyer's expression.

Assuming you copied Google or Facebook's terms of service without their permission, you would be in technical violation of their copyright. What they would sue for is less clear - unlike copying music, a textbook, or someone else's code, you're not really harming Google or Facebook's revenue through your copying like you would if you copied a competitor's design. In the extremely rare .00001% chance that Google's legal team decided to sue you, you're probably looking at a court-ordered takedown notice.

However, this discussion is largely academic. No one is probably going to sue you when you're bootstrapping and you can hire a real lawyer to change your ToS later. There's a good discussion of this on metafilter:

[http://ask.metafilter.com/74055/Can-one-copyright-a-legal- ag...](http://ask.metafilter.com/74055/Can-one-copyright-a-legal-agreement)

Disclaimer: This is not legal advice, just my personal opinion. If you want to rely on someone's advice, hire a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't generally self-promote but I've written a series of blog posts about handling privacy issues. Check them out. I'd love to hear your feedback on whether you found them helpful or not.

<http://jnorthrop.me/2012/04/15/privacy-best-practices/>

<http://jnorthrop.me/2012/04/7/preparing-data-breach/>

[http://jnorthrop.me/2012/04/3/getting-your-privacy-policy- gr...](http://jnorthrop.me/2012/04/3/getting-your-privacy-policy-ground/)

<http://jnorthrop.me/2012/04/22/privacy-and-our-humanity/>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a great question, which I'd love to know more about myself. You mentioned legal documents. I'd also love to know more about protecting your domain/product name from potential trademark issues. Even if your domain name doesn't infringe anyone's trademark today, how to prevent it from happening in the future? How to deal with that in a global market? I'm not much worried about people stealing my ideas, but rather worried about people preventing me from developing my own idea. Any book recommendation on the subject would be very welcome.

<comment><USER3> Again, not legal advice, but you can look at how ICANN resolves domain name disputes:

[http://www.wipo.int/about- ip/en/studies/publications/domain_...](http://www.wipo.int/about- ip/en/studies/publications/domain_names.htm)

What factors guide the panelists' decisions?

-Whether the domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights. -Whether the respondent has any rights or legitimate interests in the domain name (for example, the legitimate offering of goods and services under the same name). -Whether the domain name was registered and is being used in bad faith.

So don't try to use a famous trademark to boost recognition or traffic to your site and don't try and squat on other people's domains. If you prefer to be cautious, you can search whether or not the domain name you have (and anything similar) is already a registered trademark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FWIW: The legal disclaimer on my health site was adapted with permission from the legal disclaimer of a published author who has a PHD. He expressed concern about my legal exposure and had been hauled into court or something himself at one time for doing similar kinds of work. He advised me to put up a disclaimer and encouraged me to adapt his and sent me a copy. More recent language on the newer front page grows in part out of the fact that I worked for an insurance company for five years, where I received annual training in some of the federal laws that could potentially impact my health site. I state clearly that what I do is not medical. It is about eating right and making lifestyle changes.

I would also recommend being careful, considerate and sensitive. Politeness and manners help avoid situations that could require a lawyer.

Best of luck.</comment>


Ask HN: references for pros and cons of a business PayPal account - <AUTHOR>

Greetings,
I'm looking to organise an event in November and I'm looking for easy ways for people to pay.  One is direct deposit into the company bank account, another is by check.  Yet another is cash.
What are the pros and cons of setting up a business PayPal account?  I've found precious little that seems authoritative and unbiased, so I would appreciate any pointers.
Other advice and comments also welcome.
Thanks.
PS: The event will be announced here, but is likely to be of interest to only a small proportion of HNers. <comment><USER2> You try Eventbrite <http://www.eventbrite.com/t/how-to-sell-tickets-online></comment>


Which is easy to learn iOS development or android development - <AUTHOR>

I just wanted to know which is easy  since i will soon be learning IOS development. I think it will give me an basic idea of how its going to be. <comment><USER2> Neither is easy. Or conversely, both are about equally difficult.

Also, it's not so much the languages that are the steep learning curve, but the frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coming from web development (Rails), I started learning Swift this August with no previous background in Objective-C. I've found it to be fairly straightforward to pick up. I learned the basics in about a month and am approaching release of a production level app within the next month or so.

I have never tried Android dev though, so I can't compare to that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Things on iOS are either really really easy or extremely difficult for really arbitrary reasons (can you left align the text in that SearchBox please?). The pain in Android is a bit more constant. Fragmentation is still horrible but getting better.

iOS is slightly more easy overall though.

</comment><comment><USER5> similar learning curve with both -- with either one your learning will be split between learning language constructs (Obj-C/Swift or Java), app architecture (iOS and Android both have unique ways of doing common things), and the ecosystem library (Cocoa Touch or Android).

</comment><comment><USER6> In my experience: iOS is a bit easier, as long as you're using Objective-C, but not by much. Learning one doesn't necessarily help you learn the other.</comment>


Saleswhale (YC S16) Coaches and Manages Sales Reps - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/saleswhale/ <comment><USER2> hey there, co-founder of Saleswhale here -- will be happy to answer any questions! :D</comment>


Gynecologists may treat men for anal cancer, board says in switch - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/health/gynecologists-may-treat-men-board-says-in-switch.html

<comment><USER2> This is huge. This whole time the public was talking about women, HPV, and cervical cancer, men were also getting cancer from HPV. They had no resources and no we're to turn.

I have known of a few men who had cancer and were diagnosed very late because they had no one prompting them to have testing.</comment>