Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have more than 200 bookmarks in my Chrome, I have tried different services to store them online,but every time I changed back to Chrome.
What do you use to store bookmarks? <comment><USER2> Pinboard. 25441 bookmarks and counting, carried over from the 15000 or so I imported from delicious a few years ago. <http://pinboard.in/u:deusx>

The thing is, though, how do you use bookmarks? I hoard everything and rely on search. I feel like once you're over a dozen or so, that's what you need to do. I long, long ago gave up trying to organize them by hand

I use my pinboard to collect links from my tweets and status updates posts, and I use IFTTT and a to:fb tag to post from pinboard to facebook.

I also use a bookmarklet to post to pinboard with tags.

Later, I use pinboard as a personal search engine between tags and search terms. Basically, everything I used to do with Delicious for years

</comment><comment><USER3> Short story, my own system with over 16k links.

Back in 2004 there a competing service to delicious called Furl (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl>) it would save a snapshot of page you were saving.

The only downside was it was slow so I modified the bookmarklet to point to my own domain. I called my system Lruf (furl backwards) built with PHP and MySQL.

It worked well enough for a very long time, I would occasionally work on it. It was built in a very 2004 way (logic and display intertwined)

I had added other features through out the years (tagging, rating, 404 checking, etc).

Last year I finally rewrote the entire system using a framework, I used diffbot to extract the text from the page and opencalais to help with auto tagging bookmarks. I switched search to use Solr.

It has been a nice little side project for the last 9 years.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://historio.us> \-- indexes the contents of pages allowing for search based on page contents, not just domain or title. I have a small selection of bookmarks I use repeatedly in the chrome bar thingy and then use historious (with the chrome extension) for everything else. Saved me a lot of trouble many times when I could only remember a fragment of the page contents I was looking for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Kippt is really good for any type of bookmark.

I made my site <http://pineapple.io> specifically for all my development bookmarks. Since then it's grown to be quite a nice awesome database. I moderate it really heavily for quality, so if you skim all 100 pages I guarantee you will find tons of hidden gems.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for Pineapple, it's such a wonderful resource, plus the design is really great. Did you design and develop it yourself?

<comment><USER5> Yessir! Did the entire thing myself :)

By the way... This may seem crazy but I knew I recognized your name. Someone registered with your same username 6 months ago. Heh. Sometimes my memory is awesome, and other days I can't remember what I did the day before.

<http://pineapple.io/profiles/citricsquid>

<comment><USER4> Very impressive, it would be very easy to pass the site off as something that had an entire team of people behind it, everything is so well polished. Do you have any long term plans for it?

That's me! Found it when you posted on reddit (<http://redd.it/yh6w3>) :D

<comment><USER5> I have put my blood sweat and tears into it. Ever since being a kid I've always wanted a site that lots and lots of people use.

My dream is coming true. It's extremely 'dear' to me, and as such I'm continually developing it and trying to make the best possible experience for users. There's a lot of content out there and I wanted a place to only show the GOOD stuff, not the 1000's of pages of crap.

Long term goals are still in the air as far as my plans, but it definitely will be with me for the long term, that's for sure :)

<comment><USER6> "While Pineapple doesn't intend to be the next Facebook (whew!),"

What about the new Yahoo!? didn't know it but I'll give it a try :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always save my bookmarks in Firefox. To make sure I don't lose them next time I reinstall Windows I use an add-on called FEBE that backs-up all my bookmarks(among other things) into a directory. Next time I have a vanilla Firefox I reinstall FEBE and import all my bookmarks. I really don't need to spend the extra time to go see another website. Another trick I use is to delete the bookmark name and only leave the favicon to showup. It saves space and I'm only one click away from my favorite website.

If you tried other services and returned to Chrome then it seems you're looking for a specific feature and you're not finding it, but you also didn't tell us what it is.

Just use Chrome and try to categorize your bookmarks as best you can.

Here is a simple(and a bit ugly) website that lets you bookmark sites. I don't use it but I recommended it before and some people seemed to like it: <http://fav20.ro/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Big fan of Pinboard.in

<comment><USER9> Same here, since Pinboard is protocol compatible to Del.icio.us its well integrated almost everywhere (also an option in lots of mobile apps). Everywhere else I use just the great boomarklet.

Especially great is their page archiving ... goodbye link rot and you can even download the archives of your bookmarks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a Wordpress install with a couple plugins: <http://aaron.pk/bookmarks/>

More info: <http://aaron.pk/bookmarks/about/>

<comment><USER11> Very nice! I've been using Chrome and Xmarks and getting very frustrated with sync conflicts between the two, across multiple machines. I pipe all my social media activity out to a Wordpress installation and have been wanting to do the same for bookmarks. Your implementation looks essentially like what I had in mind.

I notice it only displays bookmarks for this year. Is there an out-of-the-box way to configure this to paginate or display by year (like post archives)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They exist somewhere in the Opera cloud ether, and locally on my computer. Sync doesn't work, so it is a pretty crappy solution.

I thought briefly of writing some Pinboard.in extension, but I probably wouldn't be able to extend the built-in bookmarks system anyway.

Chrome sync doesn't work either. :/

I do prefer Opera to Chrome, because it manages bookmarks better, when I need to access them and search for something particular, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hijacking: I'm looking exclusively for a service that allows for images to be applied to the link the way Snip.it was. I've found [related] visuals (even if it's just a cropped screengrab of the site/blog post) are much quicker to remember/navigate through later than text. Been trying to use Kippt, but it just doesn't do it for me.

<comment><USER14> Kippt's creator here. I send you an email about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Same problem, I use chrome bookmarks mainly (due to the sync with my mobile and every other chrome I have) and Pocket. And sometimes also Kippt.

I wonder if there is a service that syncs your Chrome bookmarks (one way, read only) to some nice web UI that allows better searching (e.g. search by folder name, not just bookmark title)

<comment><USER16> 1\. Export bookmarks to HTML

2\. Bookmark the resulting HTML file or upload to someplace online.

3\. Use browser find function.

<comment><USER15> Nice hack if you didn't have to repeat this each time you update you bookmarks. Just wondering if it was done already so I don't reinvent the wheel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to use Del.icio.us and _loved_ they version 2.0 look. It was beautiful service I would happily pay for using if I had to. I was so dissapointed at the time they were killing it, I never switched to pinboard or anything like this.

Now I defaulted to bookmarks in Chrome, synced and encrypted + Session Buddy extension [0].

I sort heavily using folders:

'by Topic'(abbr. to 'bT') with subfolders for current research projects (eg. Juicer,...);

'People' with subfolders 'Friend A's name',... where I put links received from / sent to folks;

'Track' with 'Year.Month' subfolders;

I rearrange folders so placement of a folder is also a queue - both left-right on the toolbar and up/down in a dropdown (Chrome does not force 'byTime' or 'A-Z' sorting and allows dragging). I also keep folder names as short as possible: S would stand for 'Services' - web apps I use on daily basis, 'R' would be 'Research'. Most frequently used services get bookmark without text - just an icon on the bar.

'I defaulted to bookmarks in Chrome' means its the simplest thing, bare minimum, but it kind of works. Saving pages on mobile? - I get lost here (Opera Mobile on the phone has 40+ open tabs - 'bookmarked', so to speak).

Session Buddy is a beast of its own. You can name sessions there, merge them, edit them, search them and so on.

Tools we use shape us in more subtle ways than we usually realise. I certainly miss 'social' part of using Del.icio.us and I would definitely reach out more if using social bookmarking service instead of bookmarks in a browser. Maybe I should come back.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session- buddy/edac...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session- buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko)

Edit: For me 'How do you manage your bookmarks?' is a sub-problem of a topic of 'How you take/manage notes' (including lists, todos and all that stuff). I don't even wanna start it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I pretty much put everything I want to keep for future reference or reading in Pinboard.in.

</comment><comment><USER19> I keep a strict minimum. I use folders as much as I can. I sync them through chrome & firefox (I have different bookmark for each browser). I use multi row toolbar. ( <http://i.imgur.com/1UQ915E.png> )

Also, so as not to flood my toolbar I "star" some of them in Firefox. It doesn't appear in the list but I can still give them some "tags". For example I've tagged all the hipmunk, matrix, skyscanner, easyjet, adioso... to the words "plane, tickets, travel" etc...

</comment><comment><USER20> I use Firefox Sync to keep my bookmarks and history synced between my personal and work laptops and my phone. I like that Sync keeps my bookmarks encrypted on the server, and I have no interest in a web UI; I just want my browser to have the same resources available no matter which system I use it on.

I do wish Sync supported different bookmarks toolbar folders for different systems, though. At the moment I just only display the toolbar on one system.

</comment><comment><USER21> I can't believe no one has mentioned XMarks.com I've used them for years. Can't imagine using anything else.

I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks, only ones I visit daily.

For archiving, I use Kippt.

<comment><USER22> I've been using XMarks for a few months now, after having tried different options (Firefox sync, evernote, instapaper) and haven't felt the need to use anything else as well. It can synchronize painlessly between my various computers and has different profiles (subsets of folders) so that you can differentiate, for example, work bookmarks from personal ones. There are plugins for all major browsers (I'm mostly a Firefox user but sometimes use Chrome) and a handy web interface.

It also has a nifty backup service allowing you to restore previous versions of the bookmarks, should you have erased something important or something else. There are also other services (password sync and open tabs sync) which I don't use.

I use it to store ~2000 bookmarks in a loosely disorganized set of folders. My biggest grief is that Firefox's bookmark user interface is terrible (and Chrome's only slightly better), and it becomes painful to use when you want to classify hundred's of bookmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've built <http://lstack.com> to satisfy my need to store custom parameters with bookmarks, rather than tags only (eg. <http://www.clojure.org/> programming language, licence:epl, lisp, clojure, platform:jvm, language:clojure, paradigm:functional). It's private and under development. You can give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER24> Chrome. I don't bookmark a ton of stuff, just things that might be difficult to find again in the future. Otherwise a minute on Google will usually help me find whatever. I used to be a fan of Delicious but the browser extensions and stuff never worked in a manner I was fond of.

Pretty sure I'll end up building my own mini-app eventually for quickly archiving links, so I tailor it however I want.

</comment><comment><USER25> I had a lot of bookmarks too. But how many times I used it? Once, twice a year? And I never got to really organize my bookmarks. It's always bothered me.

Now I rarely use bookmaks. I just keep a few that I visit daily.

So, everytime I need something I go to google. And I use pocket for things that I really wanna read later. If I don't read it in some time, I just delete the link.

It had worked fine for me. It's simple and focused.

</comment><comment><USER26> <http://bookmarked.in> \-- It's private, does one thing and does it really well - saves a link to a list of other links! Sometimes I just want to save a link and continue browsing without being hassled for extraneous details like tags or descriptions. Features=1 -> save a URL.

</comment><comment><USER27> Still use delicious-- 3,600 links. I rarely need to go far back in time (and I'm sure many links are dead), but it's a nice "journal" of what I've thought was noteworthy over the past 7-8+ years. It would be nice to know what my very first bookmark was, but, sadly, due to their infinite scroll interface I'm not sure how.

</comment><comment><USER28> There is probably a service that could take care of this for me, but generally skip bookmarks altogether and just email myself the URL and a few Keywords that are meaningful to me. Then I can just use Gmail's search to find what I'm looking for at a later date. So it's essentially browser/OS/device/location agnostic.

</comment><comment><USER29> Here is my method, with just Chrome and a combination of 2–3 organization methods.

I'm tired and not english native so this is poorly written, but it enables me to keep 434 favorites (and growing, I could scale to at least 1500 I'm sure) and not feel overwhelmed by them.

\-----

Simple filing from zenhabits' article: [http://zenhabits.net/how-to-create-a- minimalist-computer-exp...](http://zenhabits.net/how-to-create-a-minimalist- computer-experience/) I have four folders on my chrome bar, inbox – projects – reading – archives.

\--

Inbox is for things that I must take action on, like reading it (but that doesn't go into Reading because I __must __read it, unlike things in Reading that are good to read but not mandatory for me).

\--

Projects contains links related to the projects I'm currently working on, each project got its own folder.

\--

Reading categories from Mark Hurst's book Bit Literacy: Inside my reading folder, I have:

Stars for blogs (and the like) from which I usually read every article/news.

Scans for blogs/etc. that I enjoy much but have to scan to then decide what I'm reading (HN for example, the other one I have is Quora).

Targets for blogs from my competitor that I want to keep an eye on.

Tryouts for blogs that are good but not good enough that they are on my routine for reading.

For specific articles, they go at the root of Reading.

This is poorly written and I'm sorry, you should check Bit Literacy anyway as it has a lot of info for not feeling overflowed by bits in general (applies whether you're a newbie or an advanced user).

\--

Archives contains links I've already read. With inside a folder structure that mimicks the categories on <http://personalmba.com/best-business-books> (Business Creation, Value-creation/Testing, Marketing, etc…), with two additional folders for Health and Programming.

If it doesn't have a category, I just put them into Archives.

\--

For searching, I use the search bar from the bookmarks manager (Ctrl + Shift + O), it searches inside the title but that's often enough, if I know the title doesn't match what I'm looking after I rename the title when I'm adding the favorite.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have about 1300 and Chrome's bookmark interface is slow at this quantity so I use and recommend this extension:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neater- bookmarks/o...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neater- bookmarks/ofgjggbjanlhbgaemjbkiegeebmccifi)

<comment><USER30> also, it has a great search feature/filter built in

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I use zootool, pretty easy and simple.

I'm going to have to try kippt that @eduadordm recommended, it looks sweet.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use Chrome for all bookmarks I want to share publicly at work, home and etc. For private bookmarks, I use my desktop. (And this is the main reason I moved away from Ubuntu + Unity. Someone had the bright idea of disallowing URL dragging to the desktop.)

</comment><comment><USER33> Evernote. Although a lot more than a bookmarking tool, once you fit it into your workflow, it is a pretty amazing tool for curating all kinds of things, and you can easily share it across all your devices. I couldn't live without it now.

<comment><USER34> I find my Evernote has turned into a valuable asset. I used to create browser bookmarks, but without searchable content from the page, or something visual, no matter how much organization, it was often easier to just go back to Google to find the link.

If it's a good tutorial, etc, I copy the relevant part of the page, and paste into a new note. It keeps the formatting well enough, and on Desktop it picks up the Heading and Link on it's own.

A lot of times it will be a web design, or some other smaller UI feature that I like, and will screen clip the design and us Evernote as kind of a visual bookmarks.

<comment><USER34> I figured I'd share a screenshot of why I find the visual critical and a feature missing from all of the great sounding tools mentioned in this thread. Historious sounds great, but so much of what I remember is what it looked like.

<http://imgur.com/S74Ef2u>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use kippt, it is really nice.

<comment><USER36> kippt is awesome!!! thanks for the recommendation

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've got a strip of favicons in the bookmark bar in Chrome for stuff I regularly visit. For sites/pages/content I want to keep longer-term, I use Evernote. Useful in case the site changes, or goes offline too.

</comment><comment><USER38> I gave up on bookmarks. They just pile up and I never go back to read anything. Search is so powerful that within a few keywords and filters I can find exactly what I'm looking for without the need to store it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I want a plugin in syncs somewhere private and not anything akin to del.icio.us. I've had trouble getting Xmarks with private servers working though this may no longer be the case. Any recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER40> I use ClipBoard.com almost exclusively although I recently started to use Evernote and it's working out well so far. Both have easy-to-use Chrome extensions that make bookmarking and tagging a breeze.

</comment><comment><USER41> Right now I just dump them into Firefox. I'd like to keep archive copies of the pages, but I don't want to use a third-party service for that, and I haven't found anything to my liking.

</comment><comment><USER42> <http://zootool.com/> looks interesting, haven't used it though, still just using Chrome for bookmarking..

</comment><comment><USER43> I'll throw another recommendation in for pinboard.in.

</comment><comment><USER44> I use tumblr's bookmarklet to grab the links. It is crazy fast to post links/quotes/videos etc on tumblr and I don't care about the tags.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've being using <http://delicious.com/> ever since, works fine for me.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wrote a small Sinatra app that I have on my vps. No authentication whatsoever but it hasn't been spammed yet.

</comment><comment><USER47> I post them to my tumblr site <http://links.amyunus.com/>

</comment><comment><USER48> For porn bookmarks I built <http://xstashed.com/>

</comment><comment><USER49> diigo.com -- I can share bookmarks to groups so my coworkers get access to them and best of all, with the chrome extension, every search I do on Google also searches my diigo library.

</comment><comment><USER50> pinboard

<comment><USER51> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> pinboard.in is my new favorite.

</comment><comment><USER53> Notational Velocity + Dropbox

</comment><comment><USER54> Pocket

</comment><comment><USER55> bookmarks.google.com

</comment><comment><USER56> I know HN follows the "less is more" philosophy, but one thing I'd really like is the ability to "save" a submission like you can on reddit.

As it is, the only way I can do that is to comment, which probably isn't very good for anybody.

<comment><USER57> Just upvote, then:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=largesse>

<comment><USER56> Fair enough. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I use Evernote for important stuff, Readablity for articles and pocket for interesting stuff.</comment>


How LinkedIn Has Turned Your Resume Into A Cash Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/06/27/how-linkedin-strategy/1

<comment><USER2> How do you find all the good articles?

In all seriousness though, I think recruiting is going to be one of the biggest growth industries over the next 20 years. We're starting to see more and more online education programs offering credentials designed to be easily shared and searchable online. All this data should lead to a boom in the recruiting industry, which will hopefully lead to a positive feedback cycle with more and more people continually upskilling for free on their own time so that they can be found by these recruiters. Hopefully this will tip the balance of power away from US News & World Report, which will in turn free up colleges (and then high schools) to innovate and modernize, at least to the extent the law currently allows.

I don't think we're going to see any massive systemic changes any time soon, but I am reasonably optimistic that we will at least start seeing pockets of high quality stuff going on in the not-too-distant future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Articles? mostly from RSS feeds I've accumulated and skim in the mornings like one used to read the paper.

This article is right up HN's alley so too bad it mostly hasn't been noticed. Someone should try reposting it (maybe via the print url) in a day or two.

The more talent and creativity matter, the important recruiting gets, so I agree with you there. On the other hand, corporate recruiting feels so generally horrid that that industry needs disrupting as well. But maybe moving more to in-house recruiters will help. After all, they say "don't outsource your core" and they also say "it's all about the people", and those add up to "don't outsource recruiting".

<comment><USER2> "On the other hand, corporate recruiting feels so generally horrid that that industry needs disrupting as well."

I feel like this is largely because right now recruiting is insanely hard. Not only are there not a lot of highly skilled programmers without jobs, but there aren't even good tools to figure out who the most highly skilled programmers are. In fact, recruiting is so hard that it's difficult to even figure out who the good recruiters are, because the success rates are so low even for the talented ones.

That's why I think these free online education initiatives are going to be the game changer, because they are going to provide lots of highly skilled people and also the tools to find them. Suddenly this makes recruiting a lot easier, and it also makes it obvious who the good recruiters and who the bad recruiters are. This in turn makes it easier for companies to justify paying top dollar for the best recruiters in their industry, it makes it easier for programmers to justify teaching themselves new skills, and just creates a whole lot of virtuous cycles all around.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's also why I thought Hacker School was such a great idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My Weekend Project, Random Last Statements by Executed Offenders - <AUTHOR> http://anmonteiro.github.io/deathrow/

<comment><USER2> You know what I would love? A link to the crime and a link to the question of their guilt bellow the quote. I know some say they deserve this and others are executed with a horror story of justice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love and asking for forgiveness is pretty much the universal theme in almost all of the statements.

A very interesting project. What made you want to make this?

<comment><AUTHOR> The link[1] was on HN frontpage on Friday, I just felt that:

1\. I wanted to read the majority of the statements and the interface in [1] was not very appealing;

2\. Some content there is really inspirational and wanted to share it with the community.

[1] [http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_row/dr_executed_offenders....](http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_row/dr_executed_offenders.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about putting an image on it - make a motivational style page.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice. A restful API would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like it

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It doesn't do a lot as I was in a rush to ship it on the weekend; I might add some more features if people actually like it. Suggestions?</comment></comment>


2011: The Year You Weren't Expecting - <AUTHOR> http://arbesman.net/blog/2011/01/02/2011-the-year-you-werent-expecting/

<comment><USER2> The full sentence is necessary here; headline is somewhat baffling, since Neptune obviously has orbited at SOME point before:

The planet Neptune completes its first full orbit since its discovery on Sept. 23, 1846.

<comment><USER3> before that date it wasn't neptune, so I guess it's correct.

<comment><USER4> A planet by any other name...

would still smell of methane and ammonia.

<comment><USER5> But does it smell if there is no living thing there to do the smelling?

<comment><USER6> Does it smell if any living thing cannot survive smelling it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Corduroy Appreciation Club exists and has an annual holiday? Weird.

I can't believe that they were tactless enough to choose November 11. Which in much of the world is a very solemn day, dedicated to remembering various wars. In the US it is a much smaller deal than in other countries, but we still have veterans day. Not exactly a day for celebration.

(The reason for choosing November 11 is that the treaty ending WW I specified that the shooting would stop on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.)

<comment><USER7> Remembrance Day has become something of a misnomer, since almost no one alive actually remembers WW1. Also, there are more people alive today with a Nov. 11 birthday than died in that war. So I think it's OK to celebrate again.

<comment><USER5> Nobody may remember WW I, but there are lots of other wars that people remember. And in lots of countries, Nov 11 is the day set aside to remember it.

Personally I cannot think of Nov 11 without remembering school assemblies where a WW II vet had put together a program to impress upon us the seriousness of the occasion. In particular I can't forget a picture of a man whose throat had just been cut by a bayonet. The wall of blood coming out had not yet hit the ground.

YMMV. But for me, personally, November 11 will never be a day of celebration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The youngest countries in the world currently are Curacao and the Republic > of Kosovo.

It's actually Southern Ossetia and Abkhasia. The recognition is spotty of course, but Kosovo ain't perfect either.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought they were moving towards basing all units of measure on the speed of light?</comment>


Rust docs team is no more - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2020/03/27/goodbye-docs-team.html <comment><USER2> That feeling when you're done with writing documentation but you just can't shake the impulse to document that fact.

<comment><USER3> More so when we are in a time when people have the time to document things.

<comment><USER4> Not everyone has a bunch of free time right now. People working on software tend to be able to work from home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To get good documentation, you can either take a documentation expert (they exist and they're worth their weight in gold) and teach them the relevant part of the code base, or take the code author and teach them to write good docs. In my opinion, the second approach is best because the code author has the nuanced familiarity necessary to provide high-level context to an end-user.

This switch by Rust seems in line with that thinking. The Rust community, through no accidents, has incredible standards when it comes to documentation. Now that the feature teams have learned to write docs that live up to that standard (a skill as valuable as writing tests IMO) it makes sense for them to do so.

<comment><USER6> I think you need both. You're not going to get a documentation team to successfully write API docs for every nook and cranny of the codebase if those nook and crannies' respective coders are uninterested. But you're also not going to get a bunch of coders whose main job is extending the language to write the Rust Book on the side. To me good documentation means that both those things exist.

<comment><USER7> You absolutely need both for quality, public-facing docs. The process of explaining the logic to your docs expert is just invaluable. Without the docs expert, the engineer(s) is too in-the-weeds to meet the audience's needs thoroughly. Without the engineer(s), the docs expert has too steep a hill to climb to understand the intent and edge cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The headline sounds scary, but the actual change sounds like it's merely an organizational reshuffling formality.

<comment><USER9> Sort of! We'll see if the teams actually keep up the standards of the docs, or if they slide. They've been doing a good job for a while, but it's also pretty varied across the teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Begs the question: Why isn't Mozilla funding this?

> At this point, the only person really writing docs is me, and I haven't had > a ton of time lately either. So we haven't had a docs team meeting since > August of 2018. There also aren't really docs RFCs these days. As such, this > blog post isn't really announcing the end of the docs team as much as it is > describing what is already true today.

<comment><USER11> They used to, but it looks like that came with its own set of problems: [https://words.steveklabnik.com/thank-u- next](https://words.steveklabnik.com/thank-u-next)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rust is an amazing language, and I'm glad to see they are transparent too.

</comment><comment><USER13> An example of a project that is "done?"

<comment><USER10> "done" in what sense? I don't think documentation of a living project is ever finished.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but it sounds like docs are now updated by the relevant developers. The "docs team" sounds more like a project team to overhaul the state of docs at the time, which is now complete.

<comment><USER15> We can hope that the language itself is similarly declared "done" at some point. That would be in contrast to C++ for example, where it's the job of a bunch of people to keep making changes ad nausium until it starts to crumble.

<comment><USER16> Would a Rust spec that actually allows multiple compatible implementations actually be simpler than the C++ spec? There has only ever been one real Rust implementation, and a lot of Rust behaviors are just arbitrary implementation decisions, especially with subtyping in the type system and the borrow checker.

<comment><USER9> mrustc has implemented a significant portion of the language, without a formal spec. It's at least advanced enough to compile the compiler. The biggest feature missing is borrowcheck.

<comment><USER16> I don't mean a formal spec. Rust is much too complicated and asymmetric to have a formal spec of the kind that exists for other languages (e.g. Standard ML), at least using current specification methodology. It doesn't even have an informal spec, which would be required to have a real attempt at multiple compatible implementations.

<comment><USER9> I hear what you're saying, but at the same time, mrustc is _almost_ a counterexample of that. And we have real counterexamples in other languages too; Ruby and Python, for example.

(My understanding of mrustc and borrowck is that it's not implemented because the primary initial goal is bootstrapping rustc, not being a general rust compiler.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good work, docs team.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like a situation I've found myself in before. The majority of the work is done, and it's become more work to organize and maintain a team than to simply do it on your own.

</comment><comment><USER19> The Rust documentation was not the reason I started with Rust but it was an important reason why I stuck with it and it was what helped me over the initial bump. The chapter about ownership and borrowing in the Rust Book was particularly helpful and it was nice to see it evolve and improve over time.

</comment><comment><USER20> Respect to the Rust docs team.

Unfortunately, the rust std docs are not my favourite. I think i'm much more comfortable in other's languages docs. I really like the examples, like in c++.

Maybe I just don't know hot to use them.

</comment><comment><USER21> &tldr; The docs team created filled in the gaps where they were needed when it was created. Now, the teams making the code changes handle their own docs and doc changes. There is no longer a need for a docs only team.

So, instead of having a dedicated team for docs the load has shifted to the teams responsible for the code. Sounds like a reorg more than anything.

<comment><USER22> Out of curiosity, how many people are working on Rust as permanent employees or otherwise paid by Mozilla? I thought Rust is mainly developed by individual contributors but "load has shifted to the teams responsible for the code" and "reorgs" sure sounds like there's some kind of hierarchical leverage and long- term planning in place.

<comment><USER9> Mozilla employs something like .... five? people to work on Rust these days. We usually have a few hundred contribute to any given release [https://thanks.rust-lang.org/](https://thanks.rust-lang.org/)

I left Mozilla over a year ago, this change isn't really super relevant to it other than I was a full time docs person and now there are no full time docs people. One person isn't a team, though, and the team had these issues even when I was employed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good strategy. By ensuring good documentation in the early stages, the community will likely follow.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not deeply familiar with how Rust is organized, but have found their documentation to be useful when dabbling with it. Will they continue updating docs at the same fidelity after this change?

<comment><USER9> This has been the state of the world for the last ~year, so it should remain roughly the same as that, at least.</comment></comment>


A Single Web Development Tool to Replace Many - <AUTHOR> https://scotch.io/tutorials/cloudapp-screen-recording-software-on-steroids-with-a-simple-ui?utm_source=hackernew_scotchio1&utm_content=hackernews_scotchio_article1 <comment><USER2> Amen.</comment>


The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection - <AUTHOR> http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html <comment><USER2> This is a fine article. Unfortunately, it describes very specifically how _not_ to verify an PKCS RSA signature, perpetuating a mistake that screwed over browser vendors a couple years back:

[http://www.matasano.com/log/558/public-key-signature- forgery...](http://www.matasano.com/log/558/public-key-signature-forgery- collected/)

To wit: you verify specifically cannot look at the SHA-1 hash at the end of an RSA block and compare it to your own hash, because there are hundreds of zillions of other RSA blocks that can result from the RSA algorithm that could contain a SHA-1 block of an attacker's choosing.

Vendors learned the hard way that to verify an RSA signature, you have to reconstruct the entire m block you'd expect to see, and byte compare it to the entire "decrypted" m block from the certificate.

Crypto sucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! If I update the post to indicate that the length is also checked in secvfy.c: [http://www.koders.com/c/fid7EBD6C04C1D001D6410ED86171294E237...](http://www.koders.com/c/fid7EBD6C04C1D001D6410ED86171294E237E35273E.aspx#L74)

and link to the matasano series, would that better address your concern?

<comment><USER2> Don't link to that source code. Mozilla's RSA implementation is really hard to follow. The most important security check there is nowhere near the function you've linked to. The "length" of the block isn't the issue (the "length" is the key size); verifying that every bit of the expected m block matches, bit for bit, with the received m block is.

Don't get me wrong. Great article. It has to be possible for general practitioners to write about encryption without inciting people to write their own, the same way it has to be possible for general practitioners to write about brain surgery without inciting people to cut other people's heads open. You didn't intend this as an implementation guide. =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! It's humbling to have a security pro like you even read it :). I dabble with this stuff because I find it interesting (especially the number theory). The Wireshark'ing was to see how things really worked.

Hopefully the links I made to the Netscape and Debian OpenSSL RNG fiascos along with at least some coverage of how many subtle checks the handshake performs terrifies people enough to follow the exhortation I put at the end: "It's certainly better to use TLS than inventing your own solution."

<comment><USER2> Most developers would probably find Crypt++'s implementation of RSA verification --- or even, gag, LibTomcrypt --- a better rundown of how to do this safely. Too much of Mozilla NSS's functionality is scattered across multiple modules and indirected through function pointers.

<comment><USER3> Forgive my naïvety, but what's wrong with LibTomCrypt?

And did you mean Crypto++?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent write up.

I frequently wish descriptions like this existed in a fractal form with ever increasing complexity that could be "zoomed in" (or out) for more or less detail. Many times the problem is the inverse, some overly generalized news blurb lacking details or even reference links.

This seems like the well crafted super magnified version. I loved all of the in-line reference links!

<comment><USER5> This is actually exactly the project I've been planning for a while and am starting in a week or so!

If you (or anyone really) are interested in hearing me out or helping, email me.

<comment><USER6> No way. I've also been thinking about that project for a while now.

<comment><USER7> Uhhh... tree structured documentation?

<comment><USER4> Yeah...

But rather than just section headings, perhaps complete sentences that you could "zoom-in" to more detailed wording. Or if things seem to be too detailed, you could zoom-out.

Seems hard to automate. Better writing could probably solve a lot of my frustration (not for this article though).

An ideal application would be for educational material (such as this post). Where it's worth the significant human effort to craft the multiple variants of the subject.

<comment><USER8> I'm a really noob coder, and not a web developer, so I don't know what functions etc are responsible for this, but couldn't you use the code governing the common "More..." link often used to truncate reviews?

(e.g. Sesame Street is... (More...) - > Sesame Street is a children's show.)

Also, each sentence could be an object of sorts with one value for the simplified version and references to other objects that constitute the detail of the simple sentence. The referenced objects could be of the same class, and, in turn, resolve to even further detail by reference.

The pitfall is, of course, that it would require some extra thought while writing to keep everything cohesive and sensible with varying levels of complexity on the page at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love the play by play. Was aware of the handshake after that I thought there would be some matrix like kung-fu fight scene... Seriously, thanks for the share and kudos to the author.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really well written! One thing I was curious about was the use of TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 instead of TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA: what's the difference between these setups in terms of mem/cpu usage? Obviously it varies between servers, but is it roughly 2x, 10x slower?

<comment><USER11> The relative cost of the symmetric bulk encryption algorithms (RC4 vs AES here) is irrelevant compared to the expense of the key exchange/agreement and authentication.

The first ciphersuite uses the most common option where the server sends a certificate containing an RSA public key and the client chooses a random number, encrypts it with this key, and sends the encrypted value to the server. The server then decrypts this value with the private half of the key and derives the session keys from it. The expense of this decryption increases with the length of the RSA modulus.

The second ciphersuite uses ephemeral diffie-hellman where both sides choose a random number, and then exchange them. In order to accomplish this securely, the server must at least provide a certificate with an RSA key that supports signing (and signature verification) so that the client can verify that the diffie-hellman parameter received from the server has not been tampered with.

The DH parameter sent from the client to the server needs to be checked out too, and there are two ways this can be accomplished. If the server certificate contains a second RSA key which is marked as suitable for encryption, then the client can simply encrypt with this key as in the simple RSA key exchange described above. If this encryption key does not exist, then TLS provides a crazy way that the handshake can still succeed:

1) The server generates a temporary RSA key pair (very expensive)

2) The server signs the public half of the key pair with the RSA signing key in the certificate, and sends it to the client.

3) The client uses this key to encrypt the diffie-hellman value to send to the server.

When the diffie-hellman parameters have been exchanged the server must perform an RSA private-key operation to either decrypt the client value or verify the signature on it. This has the same cost as in the first type of key exchange and depends again on the length of the RSA key. After verifying the client value, the server must complete the DH protocol which requires an expensive modular exponentiation which is roughly as expensive as an RSA operation.

So no matter what, the second option is going to perform worse than the first option. The real reason though that the server probably rejected the second ciphersuite is because no certificate was available with an RSA signing key needed to complete the protocol.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, RC4 and AES are not comparably secure, and by conflating the cipher with the protocol variants, that issue is somewhat muddied by the article. Nobody should be using RC4. It's also a bit misleading to say that AES encrypts "16 bytes at a time" where RC4 encrypts 1 at a time: AES can easily be turned into a byte-at-a-time stream cipher using CTR mode; there's just not much value to doing so in TLS.

There's another reason why DHE isn't super popular: inside enterprises, security groups will have reasons to want to monitor connections to their servers. DHE makes that pretty much impossible, by decoupling the server's private key from the actual session key. This sounds like a good thing until you realize that such monitoring has no privacy implications at all (they own the server, they can just sniff the sockets), only (negative) operational implications.

<comment><USER11> > Nobody should be using RC4.

I don't think this opinion gets enough play. A collision attack on SHA-1 is published which is still 'academic' enough that nobody has actually produced a single collision and Debian thinks it's worth re-keying their entire infrastructure over ("Attacks will only get better!").

Meanwhile, Fluhrer, Mantin, Shamir tore RC4 a new one almost a decade ago and everybody just applied a kludge and forgot about it. Then 5 years later, improved attacks are published and still no talk about permanently retiring RC4.

<comment><USER2> I could be wrong but I think what's happening is this:

RC4 is the only stream cipher anybody really knows.

People don't really understand how OFB and CTR mode work, and don't get that AES is already a serviceable stream cipher.

Therefore, people don't really have a "go-to" stream cipher besides RC4.

You'd hope eSTREAM would change that --- Trivium would make a great replacement for RC4 --- but it may be that NIST simply has to bless something to make RC4 go away.

<comment><USER12> RC4 is also just plain beautiful; it's a permutation of all unique bytes with just two pointers into the array. It's implementable in what, 4 lines of code?

Trivium is comparably simple, I guess, but the LFSR-like structure makes for significantly longer (and uglier, IMHO) code. Trivium is also brand new and has had _vastly_ less attention paid to it. RC4 isn't "unbroken" exactly, but even after all these years RC4-based protocols _are_ working securely in the real world right now, and that has to count for something.

I'm not arguing for using RC4 either. The sentiment is more: "Don't diss RC4, it's still a really great piece of work."

<comment><USER2> The fact that the most elegant solutions are rarely secure is yet another reason why otherwise sane developers shouldn't be going anywhere near cryptography.

<comment><USER12> RSA is elegant and secure. MD5 is ugly and broken. RC4 is _really_ elegant and not-quite-unbroken. I've extended the data set now to three points, and the graph looks like a pretty good correlation between elegance and security, actually. Your text implies the opposite, and I think that's wrong.

Crypto stuff is just hard. But I think that elegance is as good a guide to correctness there as it is anywhere else. Elegance never gets you correctness automatically anywhere. But it's not a bad place to start your analysis.

<comment><USER11> RSA quickly becomes a lot less elegant once you start patching in all the cracks.

What I mean is that if you give an otherwise competent developer who is not a cryptographer a description of the elegant version of the RSA algorithm and ask them to implement it and design a secure protocol what they come up with will be completely broken.

<comment><USER12> Sure. But to be honest, that point is kinda trivial, no? If you give _any_ competent developer a hard problem in an area where they are not a domain expert and ask them to deliver a correct solution based on nothing but an elegant description of an algorithm, they're likely to fail.

My point was this: it's easy from your perspective to complain about subtle practical details with stuff like RC4. But that obscures the fact that RC4 is an important algorithm, and worth studying. It's prudent to put on your expert hat and warn amateurs away from crypto stuff, but if they're _going_ to study it, they should know about RC4.

<comment><USER2> If, like you, they're going for a PhD in the subject, then yes.

If, like me, they're faced with it in practice, then what they need to know is, "bad".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, thanks for taking the time to do this in-depth writeup. Really cool to see what all goes on in milliseconds of time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very nice writeup there; good job :)

</comment><comment><USER15> That is amazingly insightful.</comment>


I deleted Julian Assange's account.  - <AUTHOR> http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/i-deleted-julian-assanges-account/ <comment><USER2> I wonder why Markus made a blog post out of this? If he just wanted to make the point that POF deletes inactive profiles, why use Assange's as an example considering that it is an example clouded with political controversy?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't like what I read but it's still better than 99% of the other nonsense profiles. Most people describe themselves as if they are a different species altogether. The traits he describes are at least patently human.

</comment><comment><USER4> Forget hacking Gawker Media, POF stores your plaintext password as it sends out regular emails with your password included. Something like "In case you forgot, your password is 'fred1234'".

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, aren't you the cheeky one.</comment>


Judge rules Seattle media companies must hand over protest images to police - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/judge-rules-seattle-media-companies-must-hand-over-protest-images-to-police/ <comment><USER4> I've been very vocal against mass surveillance, mostly with the argument that the court warrant system is entirely sufficient for police to do their jobs.

One important thing about warrants and subpoenas is that they are often limited to strictly collecting data related to a specific investigation - <USER2> a fishing expedition.

> The judge placed some limits on the subpoena. He said police could use the > images to identify suspects only in the arson and gun theft investigations. > Detectives could not use the photos or video to pursue suspects in vandalism > or other lesser crimes — even if police found such evidence.

> The subpoena would also be limited to professional camera equipment and > would exclude reporters' cell phone photos and videos.

This seems to fit the criteria - especially since police firearms were stolen.

The only red flag is that they are asking 5x different news organization to hand over journalist's raw recordings. I'd be highly skeptical of this subpoena if I was a judge - unless they could prove the journalists were likely the only ones at the time recording the incident, that they know were present, and it didn't apply to material involved in any specific reporting. Broad footage taken at a public event is always less concerning and less protected.

But at the same time tons of people are recording protests besides journalists and it might just be laziness on the police's part. Although that said, sometimes rioters intimidate people trying to film crimes being committed (as seen here: [https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/hu9l...](https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/hu9lz0/protesters_in_seattle_peacefully_looting_an/)). And the police claim "the department was at a dead end in its investigations." So I'm not sure much outrage is warranted here, but I'd still probably lean on the safe side.

<comment><USER5> Well that and what kind of visibility and process and oversight do we have into this process that the police will truly stay within the judges confinements.

I mean let's be honest. They are going to feed it into facial recognition, identify their targets and then gather whatever additional evidence. They could then potentially present a new case with evidence external to the data collection and construct a narrative around that.

I think it's slippery.

<comment><USER6> A case against someone peacefully demonstrating? How so?

<comment><USER7> Exactly. If you are not committing a crime, what do you have to worry about?

<comment><USER8> Apparently a whole lot when it comes to a corrupt federal police force - <USER3> made up charges to family being targeted. The list goes on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the data exists within US jurisdiction, the US government feels (and, in practice, is) entitled to it. Plan accordingly.

<comment><USER10> This is true in virtually every country with a system of warrants for evidence collection when investigating a crime. The problem here for many people is the underlying police violence that in part instigated these crimes against the police.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, this order will prevent the police from using any video evidence of crimes perpetrated by a police officer found in the evidence siezed.

<comment><USER5> It wouldn't happen either way as that requires somebody to prosecute the police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The SPD subpoena seeks media images taken during a 90-minute span in a four- > block area between Fourth and Sixth Avenue and Olive Way to Pike Street that > day.

For reference, that's a 2 by 2 block centered around Westlake Station.

[https://goo.gl/maps/kcJnTW9yw82VE1PLA](https://goo.gl/maps/kcJnTW9yw82VE1PLA)

</comment><comment><USER12> SPD wants video?, shoulda thought of taking it themselves then. Don't slicken a slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a great example of why a "warrant" is nothing other than an abusive fishing expedition.

A "warrant" can be rubber stamped to exfil all of your internet data, phone records, credit card statements, to raid your home or business...

All gestapo techniques. I'm very glad we have encryption and other related technologies that can prevent this type of tyranny.

With all of the tech I design, privacy is the number one priority. That includes being warrant-proof.

<comment><USER14> Warrants aren't even needed these days with the Patriot Act

<comment><USER13> You are right, thanks. I don't live there anymore so that atrocity slipped my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why are we still calling riots "protests?"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8)

<comment><USER16> You'd be absolutely livid if you found out how your ancestors earned the right to a weekend and a 40 hour work week.

<comment><USER17> The only reason we have days off is because of productivity gains due to investment in capital goods. If we can wean ourselves off of a debt-based economy, then we might be able to whittle that workweek down even further. We seem to have stalled right around 1971 when dollar convertibility was suspended.

<comment><USER16> The reason you have days off is due to decades of labor agitation. Productivity has continued to climb even after the 70s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is why everyone should be raising hell over things like RealID and the requirement for you to allow the Federal government to get a hold of biometrics for you in order to fly.

This is also why Third Party Doctrine is screaming for reassessment in the wake of expanded capabilities for meta information collection, storage and reproduction.

In the past, your recordings/pictures/artifacts of reporting were physical things that cost time, money, and effort to reproduce. No one would want to ask for anymore than is absolutely necessary due to the inconvenience. Nowadays, with terabytes of data being able to be stored in the palm of one's hand, and copied, moved in minutes, there is a much greater risk for old precedents to turn into dangerous overreach based upon the sheer exaggeration of the capability to get blood from the stone of a photograph.

Get a picture with a partial match in a database of a subject? Spin by their residence with a a Stingray and sniff some IMEI's. Take that to a telco, Google, or a data broker, and geofence. Or look at the latest data dump acquired and see if you can match them with some data point in the area.

In this age, the things we can do with data scare the ever loving bajeezus out of me, and it's not that I don't want LE to be unable to do their jobs, but we really need to get a societal handle on how we treat digital footprint. Otherwise, it's not that far to a world nobody wants to see or live.</comment>


What We Know About How Air Conditioners Spread Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/15/897147164/can-air-conditioners-spread-covid-19 <comment><AUTHOR> Can releasing an un-tied balloon spread Covid-19?</comment>


Show HN: K8s Gatekeeper Policy Manager, Easily Visualize Policies and Violations - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sighup.io/announcing-gatekeeper-policy-manager/ <comment><USER2> looks nice, I don't want to hijack this post, but does anyone know a software that shows a GUI to manage OPA policies that are not OPA Gatekeeper ones?

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries, this is a simple web-based UI - maybe you want to check out a more complete solution like Styra?

<comment><USER2> hmm, might be what I'm looking for, I'm just turned off by the "Give us a call and request a demo website"

<comment><AUTHOR> don't! I happen to know them in person: they are super nice and super knowledgable!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/blob/master/src/modules/fancyzones/README.md <comment><USER2> This seems like a good time to plug my tiling window manager for Windows, workspacer. [https://www.workspacer.org/](https://www.workspacer.org/)

I use xmonad on my linux machines, and wanted something similar for Window, so workspacer trys to replicate that style of window manager (configurable via writing C#, dynamic layouts, etc).

I've been using it every day for about a year, but its still pretty early, there are some applications for which it freaks out, but for the most part it works! What it really needs is a good set of docs and a bunch of examples, but I haven't had any time to flesh it out.

I was hoping to see some unique tricks in the source for Fancy Zones, but it looks like it more or less does the same thing as workspacer, managing the set of open windows and occasionally calling SetWindowPos.

<comment><USER3> Oh! This is the closest I've seen to what I want when on Windows. I run linux at home but Windows at work, so I miss i3 a lot. I've tried some other tiling WM attempts for Windows before but none of them have worked very well...

I'll definitely give this a try!

<comment><USER2> Please do! I haven't had time to work on it lately, but if there is interest in it I wouldn't mind picking it back up!

<comment><USER3> Just downloaded it and I have some pretty specific/opinionated requests already :P

I like it when the config file is explicit - as in that there are no defaults outside of what is specified in the config file. This way it's very easy for a new user (like me) to edit things like keybinds, colors, etc. without having to basically recreate the default config to then edit it.

Also, since I'm an i3 user, I'd like if there was the possibility of navigating windows using directions instead of in a sequence, and to create layouts on the fly by doing splits and resizing. Maybe this is already possible by writing some code in the code though?

Nothing too important, but thought I'd voice my initial thoughts. Thanks for your work!

I'll go ahead and plug my dmenu equivalent[0], since that's also something I use when on Windows and which someone might find useful.

[0]: [https://github.com/jerwuqu/wlines](https://github.com/jerwuqu/wlines)

<comment><USER2> on default config: yeah, I'm not sure what the best story is here. I would like the out of the box experience to be nice, and I want to be able to configure anything, but I also want to be able to ship nice improvements to the defaults without making all users update their own config. For example, I just pushed a commit that adds a default ignore for a new start menu process in 1903. If I place that ignore in the "template" for the config file, then all users with a custom config will need to somehow diff their config with the default. I am 10000% open to suggestions on how to make this better.

On direction changes, I've gotten this request a few times. It should be pretty easy, but I haven't gotten around to it: [https://github.com/rickbutton/workspacer/issues/43](https://github.com/rickbutton/workspacer/issues/43)

On the fly layouts would be neat. Since layouts are just an instance of ILayoutEngine, you could probably just write a bunch of custom code to allow you to make splits however you want. I would be super interested in seeing what this looks like!

wlines is awesome! There is a feature in workspacer similar to dmenu called "menus", but there are a few bugs, mostly around it sometimes not showing up in focus, which is a pain. I have some config on my work machine that lets me press alt-shift-p and navigate to a bunch of work projects I maintain, only typing the first few characters of the project I'm looking for.

<comment><USER4> The way most software I've seen resolve this is to have a defaults config file and a user config file. defaults is defined by the application maintainers and the user config overrides any settings in the defaults.

So you can do updates to the defaults but if users wanted to specify specific customisations those would be preserved. Also users can browser the defaults config and copy/paste chunks of that config into the user config file.

Those files are often named differently and/or located in different parts of the file system hierarchy; but the concept is the same.

<comment><USER2> thats an interesting idea.

right now, configuring workspacer is a very imperative, mutable process, because you just setup instances of objects, and call functions that setup some state. some care would need to be taken to design an API that could be "layered" in that it could be easily overridden by the user. this is a good idea!

<comment><USER5> Might be just as easy as making sure that all of your defaults are documented in the doc-comments of relevant properties and encouraging people to use CSX editors that have good documentation tooltips for API exploration (like VS Code with OmniSharp)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried using a custom "window manager" for Windows a while ago (back in the Vista days IIRC) and it didn't really work well.

The main problem was that, as far as I could tell, the window manager couldn't really preempt the windows and force them to show up in a certain way. Instead it basically asked them "pretty please, could you show up at this location with these dimensions?". As a result frozen apps (such as graphical apps that triggered a breakpoint in code or are simply misbehaving) or apps running as admin would refuse to obey and stay stuck. IIRC one workaround was to run the window manager with admin privilege but even that didn't help with frozen apps I think. Besides I wasn't really comfortable running such an application with administrator privileges.

Of course that was a long time ago and it was a non-MS project, hopefully this one works better. I really can't see myself working without a tiling WM anymore, "conventional" desktops feel terribly clunky and inefficient to me.

<comment><USER7> I've encountered similar issues with macOS tiling window managers. At the end of the day, you're bolting on behaviors that the original designers of the system didn't intend you to, and there's always going to be tension there.

When I'm on Linux I love using xmonad/i3, but on other platforms I've learned to accept the defaults; otherwise you just end up using things that work most of the time, but not really, and it's really infuriating when you expect your workflows to be snappy and consistent.

<comment><USER8> Have you tried chunkwm[1] on Mac? It has it's issues but it has served me fine for the last few years.

[1] [https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm](https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm)

<comment><USER9> There's also AppGrid[2] for Mac, which I've been using for years and still use to this day. It's simple but flexible.

[2] [https://github.com/mjolnirapp/appgrid](https://github.com/mjolnirapp/appgrid)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recently been forced to work on Windows, been looking for a tiling windows manager for Windows. I'm used to i3/Sway.

Played with it a bit. It has some good ideas, but hopefully they keep adding features. Some things it's missing (that most or all tiling WMs have):

\- Custom keyboard shortcuts

\- ability to switch focus quickly with keyboard shortcuts (move to window to right/left, instead of alt-tabbing through all open windows for example)

\- virtual desktop keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch to a numbered Virtual Desktop and move windows to them (I have a autohotkey script for this), but would be nice for it to be built-in to this.

\- an option to auto-tile when new windows are opened. As it is, it floats new windows, and you have to manually move them into position. This is fairly cumbersome.

<comment><USER11> Also coming to Windows from an i3 background, I've set up a custom autohotkey script that handles a lot of window management stuff for me on windows 10.

F1 - Run or switch to Outlook

F2 - Run or switch to Firefox

F3 - Run or switch to Emacs

...

F9 - Cycle windows in app

F10 - previous window (alt+tab)

F11 - maximize / restore

F12 - Kill window

It's not tiling, but it's a potent workflow.

<comment><USER12> For the launch, open of applications I use Win+Position on super bar.

Win+1 Explorer

Win+2 Firefox

Win+...

<comment><USER13> Man, that saves me from so much alt-tabbing. I was using a custom AutoHotKey script to move between all sorts of Visual Studio solutions and manually opening email/chat/chrome/whatever else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know that several of my Windows-based co-workers will like this. Looking at the screenshots it does look cumbersome though. The real power of i3 is it's simplicity. You are not overwhelmed by complicated constructs. This appears to be a more static approach to tiling 'I want Layout #3' vs 'Open a new window here'.

I really hope this catches on. It's a fantastic productivity booster that I feel is on-par with having a second monitor.

<comment><USER15> In my opinion, the major disadvantage of current tiling WMs like i3 is that they don't make effective use of the mouse, which can be a very efficient input device for some usages.

If this product is able to change that, then that could outweigh the pain of the awkward configuration for me.

<comment><USER16> Regarding the mouse... thats the entire point of i3, i.e. to make it all keyboard-driven.

It's sort of like saying "the problem with cars is that they don't make effective use of the horse".

i3 doesn't do anything to prevent you using the mouse for whatever application you like.

<comment><USER17> The point is to use the mouse for window management not just on the applications. Now, i haven't used i3, but from a tiling window manager i'd expect _at minimum_ that i can drag-drop windows with the mouse between "zones" and resize the zone boundaries interactively with the mouse.

For extra stuff i'd like using the wheel up/down on a title bar to minimize/restore a zone, drag-dropping a window over another window to create a zone made out of tab-like title bars, ctrl+clicking multiple titlebars to select multiple windows (so that, e.g, drag-dropping them to another zone would put all of them as tabbed windows in there or being able to close all of them either via a shortcut or via a popup menu command, and/or commands to merge them in one tabbed zone, or split tabbed zone(s) to individual zones), right clicking on a zone separator to offer a popup with commands to split/merge the zone, move the splitter at some specific percentage, etc, drag-dropping one or more windows at the edge of the screen to create a new zone (or set of zones for multiple windows).

There are so many things you can add with a mouse, especially if instead of thinking of it as a car vs horse you think of it as what it actually is: an additional input device that is right next to your keyboard and unlike the keyboard it provides precise analog input for 2D motion.

As a starting point you can check what pretty much every IDE with support for tiling does (e.g. the recent versions of Visual Studio - not VSCore, the real one).

<comment><USER18> i3 isn't really a Windows click-click-click style UI; you do most everything with the keyboard, including % based resizing, converting tiles to tabs or stacks, moving tiles from one section or virtual desktop to another, etc.

It's really quite a powerful and easily configurable tool, so much so that I consider it to be an absolutely indispensable part of my day-to-day computing experience (working on a Mac, for example, is just depressing in comparison).

<comment><USER15> But why? I think it would be hard to argue that the mouse isn't significantly more efficient for, e.g. resize operations than the keyboard. And you have one right there on your desk, don't you? Don't you find it to be a waste that it can't make effective use of all your input devices even in situations where they could provide advantages?

<comment><USER19> Decade-long user of i3 here, I have three different keyboards (netbook to server) and three different trackpads\mouses -- the keyboard is more efficient for resize operations. I use focus-follows-mouse (agreed, why not use all devices) and fling the cursor all over the place all the time, but don't have to click and don't even have to use my fingers if I can drag my lower palm across the trackpad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > ... also to restore these layouts quickly.

This is the most frustrating problem I have with Microsoft Windows, which frequently needs a reboot (to satisfy update obligations, or just to try to fix degraded performance).

After more than twenty years having my preferred desktop environment (KDE) bring back all my application windows, laid out as they were prior to reboot, across multiple virtual desktops, it's profoundly frustrating to have to spend several minutes each time trying to recreate my layout on Microsoft Windows 10.

Yes, tiling WMs etc may solve (for small values) this in different ways, but the fact remains that after a reboot on Microsoft Windows I'm back to a pristine desktop each and every time.

<comment><USER21> Sorry to tell you that KDE on Wayland will not make you happy any more.

<comment><USER22> I think this still could change though given Wayland is still very much a work in progress. Maybe they just haven't implemented this feature yet. AFAIK it isn't technically impossible with Wayland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Im a huge fan of window management, so I'll definitely check this out.

Incumbents are pretty strong, though. Windows 10 introduced Snap, which easily breaks your screen into halves or quadrants

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4027324/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4027324/windows-10-snap-your-windows)

Sysinternals, well known for simple powerfull tools, makes a program called Desktops. It creates a total of 4 sets of desktops you can hotkey between.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/downloads/desk...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/downloads/desktops)

sysinternals desktops multiplies my 3 monitors and gives me 12, and a few are quartered or halved. 16 "sections" in use pretty commonly with no extra software or hardware cost.

It should be noted that my work computer has 8gb ram and an i5, so if i can do it you can too : )

<comment><USER24> For Windows 10, you probably don't need Desktops anymore. If you click on the task view button on the toolbar, one of the options at the top is to add virtual desktops. You cycle between them with ctrl-win-left and ctrl-win- right.

<comment><USER25> Win+Tab opens up an overlay that allows you add a desktop as well.

<comment><USER24> That's another way of getting to the task view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This sounds like a feature for sysadmins and programmers. It's something you need to "configure".

There are three thing I'd like regarding window layout:

1) the WM remembers the last placement of each app (and child window, and second or 3rd instance), and put them there when relaunched.

2) since I use a huge 4k monitor, I almost never want a window to drag beyond any edge of the screen. I dont need snapping, just a large hysteresis (in one direction) at the edge of the screen.

3) an easy way to set which thing launch at login. This may want to be in one of the common menus, not off in a config tool or .login file.

BTW I use gnome (on wayland), so if you know how I can get any of these behaviors I'd like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> For 1, Fancy Zones has "Move newly created windows to their last known zone"

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Gonna drop a PSA, if anyone is moving from i3wm to OSX, check out yabai. [https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai)

<comment><USER28> Another option is Amethyst: [https://ianyh.com/amethyst/](https://ianyh.com/amethyst/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will definitely check this out. I use a 43" 4K and the default corner/side snapping behavior is just not sufficient for managing windows. Having visual studio snapped to the right/left 50% of your screen all day is terrible for your neck, especially considering the default location of solution explorer in VS. I really just need a 'priority' zone or column right in the middle of the display that I can quickly snap other things around. A 3x3 grid or simply 3 columns might work out well for me.

<comment><USER30> If you're on an X11 based desktop system I would highly recommend Quicktile[1]. I have a 43 inch 4k too and the 3x1 layout is one of the most common I use. Centering a single window in the middle is also very useful. On my mac I use Spectactle[2] instead and I have the keyboard shortcuts mapped the same on both systems. If I would use Windows this looks like a good option.

[1] [https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile](https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile) [2] [https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/)

<comment><USER31> Another option is Amethyst [1]. It does the tiling for you.

[1] [https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst](https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> so, i've tried this out. it seems like, unless i'm missing something, the zones can only be used on your primary display right now. that makes it useless for me.

another commenter mentioned maxto so i tried it out as well. it looks like maxto is exactly what fancy zones will be once it's finished.

<comment><USER33> Currently the new zone editor only supports tbe primary monitor. You can switch to the old zone editor in settings in the interim, though

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think it's not updated anymore but I used WindowGrind on 10.

[https://bitbucket.org/joshua_wilding/windowgrid- binaries/src...](https://bitbucket.org/joshua_wilding/windowgrid- binaries/src/master/)

<comment><USER35> Came here to mention WindowGrid and WinNumpad Position.

WindowGrid: Drag window with left+right mouse buttons brings up a customizable grid. Release RMB to set first corner, and LMB to set opposite corner.

WinNumpad Position: Win key+Numpad key to snap window into corresponding position (eg- 7 for top left corner). Hit number multiple times to cycle through sizes. [https://pbrs.weebly.com/win-numpad- positioner.html](https://pbrs.weebly.com/win-numpad-positioner.html)

Both are basically abandoned, but they work well along side the built in Aero Snap features.

Other old alternatives that have various levels of functionality (and clearly inspired many of the tools posted in this thread):

GridMove (free): Used to be my go to, but hdpi scaling and the Modern UI window elements borked it. Based on AutoHotKey, but surprisingly responsive, extremely customizable (though not very user friendly). Would love to see this make a comeback. [http://www.dcmembers.com/jgpaiva/](http://www.dcmembers.com/jgpaiva/) [https://github.com/jgpaiva/GridMove](https://github.com/jgpaiva/GridMove)

MaxTo (paid): User friendly and pretty, but less useful since Aero Snap. Rarely updated, but alive. Nice if all you want is a slightly more control over the built in Aero Snap. [https://maxto.net/](https://maxto.net/)

AquaSnap (paid): Very similar to MaxTo, but more refined. Free personal version is limited to single display functions. Updated rarely, but alive. [https://www.nurgo-software.com/products/aquasnap](https://www.nurgo- software.com/products/aquasnap)

Windock (free): Crashes for me but works for some. [https://www.ivanyu.ca/#/windock/](https://www.ivanyu.ca/#/windock/)

Freesnap (free): Not maintained, but used to be great. Haven't tried it in a while, but thought it deserved mentioning. [https://mike- ward.net/freesnap/](https://mike-ward.net/freesnap/)

<comment><USER36> Author of MaxTo here. It is very much alive, but there is just me working on it so progress is sometimes slow.

There are some very cool things coming in the next release: \- support for different triggers, that lets you run specific commands in response to windows events. Basically our recipes feature extended quite a bit. \- WinSplit-like hotkeys for those who liked those. Configurable. \- lots of these small quality of life improvements

We are getting closer to a public preview of this, but shoot me an e-mail for a private preview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is part of the new PowerToys utilities. There's already a post on Hacker News front page about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20890828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20890828)

</comment><comment><USER38> I got REALLY excited when I read this title until I read the documentation and now I probably won't even bother testing it.

If anyone is looking for an i3-like tiling window manager (a Linux tiling wm) Fanzy Zones isn't it. This one requires pre-setting a bunch of layouts up front, unlike i3 where you can just seamlessly open and move windows that auto-split as you go with zero window configuration up front.

IMO the mods should change the title of this post to define what type of tiling window manager it is, such as "Fancy Zones, a pre-defined layout based tiling window manager from Microsoft". In the title's current form it's borderline clickbait.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an Open Source project. Send a PR or a feature request: [https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/new?assignees=...](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/new?assignees=&labels=&template=feature_request.md&title=)

<comment><USER38> > > [https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/new?assignees=...](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/new?assignees=&labels=&template=feature_request.md&title=)

This isn't something that's really a feature request. It would require changing how the whole entire application works at a fundamental level, or really building 2 applications in 1.

That's why you have 2 different sets of tiling window managers on Linux. You either have fixed layout ones where it's automatic after configuration or manual tiling window managers instead of 1 tool trying to do both.

<comment><USER39> > You either have fixed layout ones or dynamic tiling window managers instead > of 1 tool trying to do both.

I must be missing something, because the 'dynamic' tiling window managers are 1 tool doing both fixed and floating (or stacking) layouts.

<comment><USER38> Sorry, I should have been more clear in my words. I edit what you quoted for clarity.

i3 acts much differently because if you open 1 window it takes up your whole screen and if you open another window it will be split 50/50 (the direction depends on what hotkey you hit). And it keeps going like this. You can just naturally use your system and let the tiling window manager worry about resizing things and you can fine tune the sizes with hotkeys on the spot if you desire to have non-symmetrical splits.

This is why i3 is classified as a manual tiling window manager. You get to control how the splits happen on the spot, rather than it being automatic as long as you pre-configure the layouts beforehand.

i3 also lets you optionally choose to make windows floating on demand with hotkeys or even pre-configure certain apps or window titles to be floating by default. There's stacking as well.

This video does a good job showing how i3 works and feels: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKviflL9XeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKviflL9XeI) (and how it's drastically different than Fancy Zones).

<comment><USER39> Ah I realize how I misunderstood/how that was poorly worded, but I'm well aware of how i3 works, thanks.

This may come as a shock to you, but some of us prefer our highly-tailored pre-configured tiling setups to the ad-hoc interaction that is i3.

<comment><USER38> > This may come as a shock to you, but some of us prefer our highly-tailored > pre-configured tiling setups to the ad-hoc interaction that is i3.

Yes, that's why i3 and other wms exist on Linux and everyone is happy using the tool they prefer.

I'm more upset about the title of the post being clickbait because like you said, some people prefer different styles of tiled window managers.

Having it defined as "tiling window manager" is going to make the 50% of the people who prefer i3 feel they got baited into clicking the link. I know I went from "omg best software day ever" to "..." between reading the title and clicking the link.

<comment><USER39> Probably closer to 80% :).

I get the baited feeling. But you know as well as me that any sort of tiling interaction with Windows beyond snap left/snap right is progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> On Win 10 I'm using the combo of Virtuawin (for multi-desktops and window assignments) and AquaSnap for tiling / positioning.

NB: Virtuawin seems like OSS abandon-ware (last build ~2017, iirc) but it works great (so far), while AquaSnap is trialware (I bought it after two days of use) and is still shipping releases.

I also hack the registry to enable focus-follows-mouse without autoraise. (Powertoys could enable the first capability but not the latter, hence the registry mod.)

I'm primarily a Windows SE, but I fell in love with these capabilities in X when I was learning my way around Linux and just _had to have_ the same experience on Windows <grin>.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wrote (and use) Mosaico.

Download it at [http://www.soulidstudio.com](http://www.soulidstudio.com)

Any feedback welcome!

<comment><USER42> This looks great. Something I have been looking for since upgrading to a 49-inch Ultra-wide, where I now prefer to keep my application windows floating around the center on this giant monitor.

Do you still actively develop it? The digital signature in your .exe says 2017 and your website footer says 2015.

<comment><USER41> Thank you! Yes, I'm currently working on a 2.0 version, which is a big refactoring code-wise and takes a lot of time. That's why regular updates are missing unfortunately :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Speaking of tiling window managers in new environments, I've had a really positive experience with Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor. Almost everything you need can be done, someone has even written an OBS plugin capable of capturing from it (and any other wl_roots-based compositor.) I think when Chrome, Firefox and Electron all ship a WebRTC build capable of capturing from wl_roots based compositors, there will be no practical downsides to Sway over X11/i3. (There's already plenty of cool things about it today.) That could take a while, though, since upstream WebRTC does not have support for this today.

</comment><comment><USER44> This looks neat. This is a kind of window manager I have wanted for quite a while on OSX

<comment><USER45> I've been using spectacle[0] for a while and happy with it

[0]: [https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle](https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle)

<comment><USER46> Seconded - this is the first thing I install on any new Mac I get my hands on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> NVIDIA's nView Desktop Manager has Gridline Editor that is very similar. It's an indispensable tool for a ultra-wide monitor. If you happen to have NVIDIA GPU and Windows most likely you already have it one right click from desktop.

</comment><comment><USER48> for those unfamiliar with it, there's also 'divvy', which has a mac and windows client.

[https://mizage.com/divvy/](https://mizage.com/divvy/)

I use it on my 34" monitor.

<comment><USER49> User on OSX before, and on windows since the start! They gonna have to pry WinDivvy from my dead cold hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Funnily enough, I recently purchased MaxTo[0], which appears now to have a decent and free competitor.

0: [https://maxto.net/](https://maxto.net/)

<comment><USER36> Thank you for you purchase. I'm the author of MaxTo.

I'm not too worried about the competition here; MaxTo's feature set is expanding and will remain quite a bit more powerful than FancyZones for the overseeable future. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Interesting. The recent 1903 update has a significant flaw where any disconnection from an RDP session (I work remote) completely resets all window positions. I was saved by this wonderful tool:

[https://github.com/adamsmith/WindowsLayoutSnapshot](https://github.com/adamsmith/WindowsLayoutSnapshot)

Wonder if this tool would perform the same general function.

BTW: For any MS folks listening, please fix this bug, it's dreadful! :(

</comment><comment><USER52> This doesn't look like what a Linux or BSD user would call a window manager. It looks more like a way to configure the MS-Windows window manager (that is, the graphical shell) to behave a bit more like i3 or xmonad in how it arranges windows on the screen. There's no real way to pry off MS-Windows and run anything else on top of the NT kernel, is there?

<comment><USER5> Microsoft themselves tried in Windows 8, when they thought they might actually have a chance to reinvent most of the graphical shell. The original UWP "world" (app composition model) involved a separate tiling window manager that a lot of people hated (I loved it, sigh). In Windows 8.1 that tiling window manager got rather capable allowing for any number of vertical splits and the Win32 desktop taking up what remains after the splits. In Windows 10 the last vestiges of that tiling window manager remain only in Tablet Mode and devolved back to only supporting one vertical split at a time, just managing two semi- maximized apps running more traditionally like the Win32 desktop mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'd love to give this a try. The improvements to edge/corner snapping in Windows 10 already feel like they give me about 60% of a tiling window manager, and if this was 80%, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately, it requires a newer release of Windows 10 than my workplace is running, so it's out of the question for me for now.

</comment><comment><USER54> DWM port windows is what I use daily. [https://github.com/prabirshrestha/dwm- win32-6](https://github.com/prabirshrestha/dwm-win32-6)

</comment><comment><USER55> Does windows have virtual desktops? I don't see any hotkeys for moving between vdesks. Never thought I'd see the day MS makes a tiling wm with hotkeys inspired by i3 & friends.

I'll stick with i3 though.

<comment><USER56> Use Win+Tab then in the upper left corner there is a button for 'New desktop'. On my work Dell laptop I can use three-finger swipe to switch desktops. Not sure about moving windows between virtual desktops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Looks really nice, but not a big fan of the name "Power Toys" \- It makes me think it's some extension to powershell or a collection of powershell scripts that does something fancy.

<comment><USER58> Well it inherits the name from the Win95 days, some years before powershell became a thing. And "power" is a word borrowed from biz like power lunches and power walking, etc. just a happy play on words.

I think it also borrows a bit from "Kai's Power Tools"

<comment><USER5> "Power user" has been a computing term for decades, for someone that uses advanced features. (In this case you have toys for power users.)

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/power_user](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/power_user)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Does it allow for scaling windows or just resizing. I would be thrilled by a possibility to have 1 main area and 3 smallers on a side, where windows wouldn't resize but just scale down.

</comment><comment><USER60> not directly related but whats the closest to i3 on osx? I have tried Amethyst - it works but has quite a few rough edges and rouge app interaction problems.

<comment><USER61> Check out Hammerspoon [https://www.hammerspoon.org/](https://www.hammerspoon.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is great. As a primarily keyboard person, I've always wished for this.

Great productivity booster!

<comment><USER63> Try the Vimium chrome extension as well. I avoid the mouse as best I can woth vimium and i3 and when it's flowing it's really fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is great.

I had some difficulty using it on multiple monitors though.

<comment><USER65> i cant seem to get it to work with additional monitors, what did you do to get it working?

<comment><USER66> Same here, I'm having difficulties getting it to work on both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> What is equivalent of something like this for Linux?

<comment><USER67> Looks like:

* [https://i3wm.org/](https://i3wm.org/) (i3)

* [https://xmonad.org/](https://xmonad.org/) (xmonad)

* [https://awesomewm.org/](https://awesomewm.org/) (Awesome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> To see the day ...

</comment><comment><USER69> > PowerToys

What a project name :P

<comment><USER70> Surely one that weeds out the millennials from the old guard ;-)

<comment><USER71> Millenials are older than you think. :)

<comment><USER72> do they know the powertoys heritage though?

also: i'm not sure i agree with <19 yrs old people being ... "old"

<comment><USER73> Am millennial. Fully aware of the PowerToys heritage. I used to run the win95 explorer.exe on Windows 98 back in the day along with a bunch of PowerToys tweaks.

Millennial were born 1981-1996 ;) There's no <19 year old millennial's left, I'm afraid.

<comment><USER72> I confused millennia with generation x... You're right if course! I can never keep these terms straight

<comment><USER72> No, it's not. Too late to delete however...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Listen, I have an extremely locked down work PC. I need this app to be able to install in a public folder ASAP.

/Edit

I'm going to assume all these downvoters work for my IT department.</comment>


Show HN: A unit test library for shell scripts, that is one file - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rafritts/BashScriptTestingLibrary <comment><AUTHOR> I built a unit test library for shell scripts that provides a unit test api that functions very similarly to JUnit. The library is only a single file in size; the idea being that you shouldnt need any permissions whatsoever to use the library.

The goal behind this library is that I wanted to make sure that my shell scripts were actually doing what I wanted them to, and if I made changes to the scripts, that at least something would be watching my back to make sure I didnt royal screw anything up.

Tell me what you think!</comment>


US Department of Justice Subpoena to Twitter for Account Data [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/07/twitter/subpoena.pdf <comment><USER2> This is an interesting and important next step in the WL story.

From a political standpoint, somebody is going to have to pay somewhere. It will be interesting to see if they apply current law, create new laws, or work extra-judicially. My guess, and the way this article indicates the story is heading, is that they find some existing law to apply. After all, with a legal system as complex as the United States has, if they want you they'll find something you're guilty of. Remember that they got the gangster Al Capone not for breaking prohibition, gambling, or murder: they got him for tax evasion.

If they keep heading this way we all need to pay careful attention to what WL gets charged with, mainly because it will set a precedent for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER3> _1\. subscriber names, user names, screen names, or other identities;_

Wait, does this mean they are requesting information of people who follow WikiLeaks on Twitter?

<comment><USER4> That's the first thing I said when I looked at it. Are all the people who've merely subscribed to them on Twitter considered part of the investigation? That's quite scary to me.

<comment><USER5> I think that 'subscriber' refers to the account owner as they are 'subscribing' to Twitter's service (in the same way that your ISP considers you a subscriber).

      > The following customer or subscriber account information
      > for each account registered to...

That sounds to me like customer and subscriber are being used as synonyms. Maybe someone else more legal-headed can clarify.

<comment><USER3> Having re-read it a few more times, I think you're right. That's at least a _little_ less concerning than I had originally thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i wouldn't be surprised if Twitter wasn't the only one who got that letter. I'd bet Facebook and Google(Gmail) got it too.

<comment><USER7> What is interesting is that according to the Salon article, Twitter responded by requesting permission to disclose the existence of the subpoena to their customers, leading to the unsealing order that allowed for this document to be published.

I think they should be applauded for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> more info is in Greenwalds blog from which the pdf links:

<http://salon.com/a/s3yIfAA>

Also (German) <http://goo.gl/Wnuup>

see chat with @WLLegal on Twitter for more updates

</comment><comment><USER9> There's something inherently hinky about lifting private communication from a member of the national parliament of a NATO member democratic state, then not telling anyone until a month later.</comment>


Samsung launches 5g smartphone with 12gb RAM - <AUTHOR> https://samsung.com.ng/samsung-w20-5g/ <comment><AUTHOR> The phone is foldable</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a publicly available database of org charts? - <AUTHOR> Looking for org charts per year for companies as they grow — interested in seeing what roles and functions are added when, etc. I've found some old Apple charts via Computer History Museum and Internet Archive, but it seems like there <i>should</i> be an open source project to collect these, if there's not already. <comment><USER2> You can get data on corporate officers from SEC filings and similar documents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Hoping to drill into even the operator level, but those will be harder to source / vet. Will dig into SEC and related resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Try using AgensGraph to manage your database</comment>


The Excel formula that initiated austerity policies after the crisis - Power-user http://www.powerusersoftwares.com/#!The-Excel-formula-error-that-initiated-austerity-policies-after-the-crisis/biauv/57ac71d90cf2b496d76b6758 <comment><AUTHOR> "For Excel users, this should be a good story to keep in mind before sharing results of an Excel model."

Shouldn't this be an argument for sharing your model before drawing conclusions and sharing those?

Also, maybe using Excel isn't a great idea for building models that will affect economic policy. Complex Excel sheets can be difficult to debug and version when compared to a more traditional programming language.

<comment><USER2> Scientists are notoriously bad at sharing their source code, so I wouldn't be surprised if economists are bad at sharing their Excel spreadsheets.

As for Excel versus a programming language: I doubt most economists know any programming languages. Excel is almost universally known in finance and economics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty blog spammy. The story played out very publicly at the time it happened. This Op-Ed by 2 of the UMass economists lays out roughly the same story:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/opinion/debt-and- growth-a-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/opinion/debt-and-growth-a- response-to-reinhart-and-rogoff.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> > In any case, the problem is that their research was cited a number of times > by militants of budget cuts and a strict reduction of government debt, even > US House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.

I feel like this should also mention the man is Speaker of the House; if anything it strengthens the point.</comment>