IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/news/3550760-ibm-sues-airbnb-for-patent-infringement <comment><USER2> I remember when I worked at IBM Hursley research labs 20 years ago. The lab director told us all "patents are very important to IBM". I expected him to tell us that IBM made billions from licensing them. He didn't say that though. I don't think he even _mentioned_ that. Instead he stated: "It raises the entry barrier for the competition".

Patents were (narrowly) created to _encourage_ the spread of knowledge. Instead of risky "trade secrets" a company would make the knowledge public for a short monopoly. Most patents these days are not worthy of protection (certainly not as long as they are granted for). We need different lengths for different patents - we shouldn't treat how rectangular a phone is the same way as a life saving drug.

<comment><USER3> To be fair to IBM, what your director may have been saying is that their use was primarily defensive, which it is and was for IBM. It's not wrong for them to patent as much as they are able to, it serves an important disclosure function. When I worked at the USPTO, we used several patent databases. The US, of course, Japan, Europe, and IBM. IBM had their own database because of how significant their IP was. So while it's unfortunate that they've taken the offensive in this case, historically IBM has been an important and relatively benign player in the IP landscape.

<comment><USER4> This is informative. What is a good way to keep track of 1) parents filed by IBM, 2) lawsuits and parties involved IBM? Is there a service you like that provide weekly or monthly updates?

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer, I've contributed a couple of patents to IBM's hoard of patents, but I no longer work there.

#1 is fairly straight forward, a simple script that uses the USPTO search function and searches for the Assignee field being IBM and the date range being the last 30 days gives you the patents issued that month to IBM. You can do that with a simple cron script, curl, and some script code.

#2 is somewhat more difficult, IBM gets sued a lot because they are big and a juicy target. If you have access to one of the legal databases (Lexis, Etc) you can search for cases where IBM is the plaintiff and the complaint contains phaseology around patents (like "patent", "infringement", Etc.) While expensive to access, if you live near a College or University with a Law program _and_ you can get library privileges you use their access. In Santa Clara county you can join the Santa Clara Law Library ([http://sccll.org/](http://sccll.org/)) which will give you access. Unfortunately, you need to be there to access the databases so that would involve a monthly trip to the library (not a bad thing in my opinion :-))

<comment><USER6> Tangential question for everyone. I recently had to file a small claims case by myself (i.e., no attorney). It's still in the pipeline, but the process made me realise that the legal world is a different universe altogether. From the tech perspective, everything is stuck in the dark ages. I had to create a pdf, print it, then go to the court, only to scan it again on a windows 8 computer with silverlight that would keep timing out. Similar experience with the website (run by a company called tyler technologies). I was not successful in doing much research on my own about the laws and precedents regarding such cases. The instructions on the court's website are not precise. Why is everything so siloed and inefficient that only lawyers can navigate this? Are any startups working in this space ?

<comment><USER7> There are startups in this space, but there are also people who value the friction (and not all for selfish reasons).

<comment><USER6> > (and not all for selfish reasons)

Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER7> Having physical interaction and time needed makes it harder to file nuisance suits, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The whole US patent system needs to either be scrapped or rebuilt. The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate. Getting a software patent is mostly a matter of sneaking past the people at the USPTO, and making sure you're the first to file. These patent factories could just write code to generate patents all day (maybe start using PyTorch?).

<comment><USER9> > The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in > a world where most new technology is just software, and software is > incredibly easy to copy and duplicate.

The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.

I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have _never_ in their history been ostensibly for good.

<comment><USER10> The Constitution requires that Congress setup laws for both copyright and patent, for the good of the nation. Patents were always intended for the overall wellbeing of the nation. That's not to say that is what has always been achieved by the patent system, but it's not some sort of conspiracy. If anything, in history, they were always OSTENSIBLY for good, but perhaps ACTUALLY bad. So I find your statement to be A) historically and factually inaccurate B) literally incorrect given your usage of ostensibly.

<comment><USER11> The Framers were skeptical of enabling government to give out patent and copyright monopoly grants. Jefferson wrote:

 _Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it._

It is notable that patent and copyright are not natural rights. At no time was it assumed that people have such rights, nor that government, without explicit authorization could grant such limited term monopolies. Calling these monopolies "good" is definitely not uncontested, nor was it ever.

<comment><USER10> It's true some of the founders were skeptical, I never said otherwise and I never said it was "uncontested. What I said was that it's inclusion in the Constitution is for a clear reason, whether or not the reasoning is valid is a different debate.

As I pointed out, the constitution grants congress the EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION you refer to, for the very purpose of promoting the PROGRESS of the arts and sciences.

I guess you think that the promotion of the progress of arts and sciences is not inherently a GOOD thing, but I'd disagree and I think the implied reasoning behind it's inclusion is entirely self-evident.

<comment><USER12> That seems like an unsubstantiated claim.

Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago?

From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.

Thus it is very reasonable to ask: Is the behavior we see from IBM in this news story promoting the progress of "science" and/or "useful arts"? Is the behavior of industry overall with respect to these tools doing more good or more harm?

<comment><USER13> _That seems like an unsubstantiated claim._

It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself.

 _From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don 't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids._

They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent for this particular clause should be given more weight, not less.

<comment><USER12> You cut out the very next sentence which describes the element that I am claiming is unsubstantiated.

Though you do understand the further elaboration of why I too feel it is __extremely__ important that there is a clause about why this power is reserved to Congress and a described intent / limit within which that power is to be used.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately this clause was specifically litigated and we lost.

More specifically, can Congress achieve unlimited terms with regular copyright extensions to existing copyright? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft) ruled that they can. However their next attempt to extend has so far failed.

We will find out in 2024 whether they get it together, or whether Mickey Mouse enters the public domain after all...like it should have done in 1984. (That was the maximum that could have been expected when _Steamboat Willie_ was released.)

<comment><USER12> I still believe that's wrong, but a re-do now would be pointless. I doubt anyone within the next few decades will put someone for the people, rather than for the rich people and corporations, on the supreme court. There's a lot of corruption (money/influence) everywhere that needs to be cleaned up first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recall an article a while back about how IBM is so innovative because it had the most patents filed per year on tech or something. I think we can see now that their patenting is less about innovation and more about patent trolling. Quote from the FT article on this below does not seem to show to me that this is the sort of patent that promotes real innovation - "improved navigation using bookmarks" does not seem like a breakthrough patent-worthy innovation, and I wonder how defensible these will be in court.

Quote from ([https://www.ft.com/content/6f02ce76-e1d6-45d8-b27a-0491281c2...](https://www.ft.com/content/6f02ce76-e1d6-45d8-b27a-0491281c2507?ftcamp=traffic/partner/feed_headline/us_yahoo/auddev&yptr=yahoo))

The computing giant has accused Airbnb of "building its business" by using patents relating to functions such as "presenting advertising in an interactive service" and "improved navigation using bookmarks".

<comment><USER15> IBM files a lot of patent because (at least when I was there many years ago), employees and their management chain have strong economic incentives to file anything. Even interns were encouraged to file patents, and as a student it's a great way to beef up your resume. Ironically, even between technology professionals, the patents one files at IBM are great marketing material on the resume.

IBM marketing itself as 'the most innovative' does work on the vast majority of the world that isn't in technology.

<comment><USER16> > as a student it's a great way to beef up your resume

Really? I wouldn't view that as a positive unless we're talking about law students I guess.

<comment><USER17> That's just a cynical response meant to devalue the OP. When people see a few patent #'s on a resume from a kid coming out of college, of course it's a positive.

<comment><USER18> If I see patent #'s on a resume from a college kid, I'm going to actually look up those patents.

And I'm only going to view them positively if they are genuinely novel. If I can trivially find prior art or its another of those "with a computer" software patents, it's going to be a very big red flag.

Of course, this is just my own anecdote, and you may very well be right in the broader scale.

<comment><USER19> You described putting in more than 100x as much work going through someone's resume as the typical company.

Also, why would it be a big red flag if you can find prior art? Whether or not there is prior art probably has very little to do with how capable of a developer the individual is.

<comment><USER18> Certainly. It is far more time than what our recruiter would put into it; but I don't see resumes until they've at least been filtered that way, so I don't really have to deal with a deluge, just a slow trickle. We're also a relatively small company, so the number of applicants is a bit reduced by that.

If I can find prior art that is effectively their patent, it shows to me that they were engaged in patenting something that shouldn't be patented. I have strong personal feelings about that, and I do not much want to work with someone that believes that every idea that _can_ be patented _should_ be patented.

With that said, there are many other reasons I would reject a candidate before I would reject them over this. If anything, with the relatively small number of resumes that I get on a weekly basis, anyone having any patents on their resume is going to raise a red flag that I am going to poke at more. It also gives me another topic to engage the candidate on, and on one occasion that lead to a conversation that made me vote to hire the candidate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The patents involved in the case are United States Patent Nos. 7,072,849 (the '849 patent), 6,778,193 (the '193 patent), 7,631,346 (the '346 patent), and 6,966,038 (the '038 patent). The '849 patent was used in IBM's development of Prodigy, a precursor to the World Wide Web, and involved taking advantage of the computing power of a user's PC to increase response speed. The '193 patent involved a method to improve search results based on user context. The '346 patent involved improvements to single-sign-on technology for first-time users. The '038 patent improved navigation by using bookmarks.

These sound so generic and ubiquitous to how the internet works. The once great IBM is becoming a patent troll :(

<comment><USER21> > _The once great IBM is becoming a patent troll :(_

IBM has _always_ been a huge patent troll.

 _" OK,"_ [IBM] _said,_ [to Sun in the 1980s] _" maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk_ [IBM headquarters in New York] _and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million? "_

 _After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list._

— Patently Absurd, Forbes, 2002: [https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html](https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> famous fat line patent !

[https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html](https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html)

>>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !

<comment><USER23> Here is the 'fat lines' patent you mentioned: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US6930686](https://patents.google.com/patent/US6930686). It's more about efficiency of drawing a line than connecting four dots.

<comment><USER24> What the patent says it's about and what your lawyers say it's about are two different things

<comment><USER7> That's not true. If a patent doesn't say what it's about in a fairly prescribed way, it is easily defeated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> AirBNB is already facing a severe shock from pandemic and economic disruptions to travel. I can't say I'm going to be sad if the short-term rental market collapses after what they've done to the housing situation in so many cities.

</comment><comment><USER26> Apparently, it includes patent 7,072,849, which they also sued Groupon for.

 _" Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service"_

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US7072849B1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US7072849B1/en)

</comment><comment><USER27> IBM has so many generic patents. I wonder why they don't sue more companies? I guess maybe they settle under the radar.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, they would rather license. 2018 was $1.2B+ in revenue just for the patents they already have. Our patent system really needs fixed.

<comment><USER29> If someone invests resources inventing something, why shouldn't that entity be entitled to participate in the on-going monetization of that invention? If we presume the prior statement is simply a straw man, do you agree partially with this statement and it simply needs reform or would you propose to throw it out altogether? If the former, how would you propose to reform it?

<comment><USER30> The problem is so many software patents just cover "do a thing on a computer," which becomes so broad nobody else can ever do that thing without infringing on the patent. Even if I have an objectively different, even better, way of doing it, software patents are used far too broadly because they tend to protect the act of doing a thing as opposed to specifically how to do the thing.

This is in contrast to something like a hardware patent, where if you patent a tool, and I build a better tool that does the same thing, the mere fact it does the same thing is not infringing unless I copy specific aspects of your patented physical design.

The reform is that an ideal implementation of software patents is largely the same as an ideal implementation of software copyright. I can't just copy what you did, but if I figure out a different way to do it, that's perfectly fine. That's why so many people say scrap software patents altogether and work on improving software copyright instead.

<comment><USER10> The software patents you described are consistently knocked-out on §101 eligibility grounds for being an "abstract concept".

IMO people who advocate scrapping software patents are disingenuous - look at what Google is trying to do software copyright at the same time. Essentially, if you take Google up on software patents and copyright, there will be no protection left for software.

<comment><USER31> Patents are granted, then if challenged, can be invalidated in court. It should be the other way around, they shouldn't be granted in the first case.

Not all can handle being taken to court for a claimed patent infringement of a crappy patent. It's expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Did I mention wasteful?

<comment><USER29> I'm not trying to be argumentative and someone who is a lawyer can correct me here but generally speaking a company like ibm is only going to seek licensing from a party where the commercial impact is sufficient to merit the use of their resources to secure a licensing deal. Even in the case of Airbnb, it's clear in the article ibm is suing only after attempting to exhaust other remedies. Again, I don't think it's necessarily bullet proof legal policy to advise companies to fly under the radar but de facto I don't think ibm is spending a lot of time chasing companies who can't afford a legal defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It seems like patent laws are a barrier to grow your business up to a certain size in the US. Would it be more sensible to incorporate in a jurisdiction - say, Canada - which does not allow such broad patents?

<comment><USER33> I'm not 100% sure but they should be able to sue you for sales gained at USA.

Unfortunately entire system is built around protecting monopolies / giant corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As a host I've always hated Airbnb,a guest overstayed and they didn't allow me to charge the guest extra even though the guest admitted to overstaying in the chat with me. Can't say I feel much pity for them, they've always had the grow at all costs mentality and have been pretty ruthless about it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can someone with patent law domain expertise please describe the "novel" patent criteria to laypeople here for software patents?

To my simple lay mind, I apply a "not-novel" test criteria to patents. If I can describe a software patent in non-software terms, and apply a "...then a light-speed fast homunculus does this all...", then I'm already skeptical of the novelty of the software patent. In this specific instance, change "interactive service" to "newspaper, fetched from a vast library...by a very, very fast homunculus", and "advertisement" to "advertisement cut out and replaced by another advertisement fetched from a vast library...by a very, very fast homunculus".

So obviously my lay understanding is way off, and I'm seeking to rectify that flawed understanding.

<comment><USER10> You might be surprised that it is fairly complicated and there is not a clear standard on what "novel" means for every single instance of possible novelty

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> AirBNB is like the Michael Jordan of getting sued

</comment><comment><USER36> I was a fact witness for Groupon in the IBM/groupon suit (which IBM won).

Airbnb is going to need a lot of luck with a jury to win this. Morally they ought to win it, but ...

<comment><USER37> > Airbnb is going to need a lot of luck with a jury to win this.

As an aside, the fact that these things are decided by juries is nuts to me. Why should the average Joe who needs help installing a printer be compelled to miss work to decide multibillion dollar lawsuits that are deeply technical? I understand the right to a jury if you are accused of murder, but for patent cases it just seems asinine.

<comment><USER38> because justice must not depend on any preexisting hierarchy

<comment><USER37> This makes sense to me in the context of humans committing natural crimes, but not in the context of multinational corporations squabbling over IP. The very concept of ideas as defensible property depends on a pre-existing hierarchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can someone find the relevant suit and allegations? What eCommerce patents does IBM own?

<comment><USER40> This is from 2007, but it sounds right, and it includes some patent numbers:

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2545023/ibm--amazon- co...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2545023/ibm--amazon-com-settle- patent-fight.html)

<comment><USER41> > IBM sued Amazon in October last year, alleging that the company was > infringing on a number of its U.S. patents, including those relating to > storing data in an interactive network (Patent No. 5,442,771), adjusting > hypertext links with weighted user goals and activities (5,446,891) and > ordering items using an electronic catalogue (5,319,542)

Hahahahahaha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> One would think after years of getting trolled by SCO IBM would be over this.

<comment><USER43> I seem to recall that there was a patent claim in SCO v IBM, but it got knocked out very early. The suit was actually about copyrights and contracts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If IBM is patent trolling now it means they're on death watch... this is a top indicator of a failing company.

</comment><comment><USER45> The US industrial revolution started from ignoring British patents.

Much as I admire the engineering prowess of the Wrights, their attempts to extract value via patents crippled the US aviation industry for a decade, ceding aviation dominance to Europe who ignored those patents.

Similarly, Hollywood grew out of people evading Edison's patents on motion pictures.

The notion that patents encourage innovation and progress doesn't seem to have much historical supporting evidence.

<comment><USER45> Edison also spent much of his career in court being sued, suing, and being hired as an expert witness in patent suits. Much of his contracts were from companies trying to get around patents.

To be fair, much of his income came from exploiting patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just skimmed some patents being mentioned. I'm surprised that such a engineering company is trying to make money using such a non-technical patents. Very disappointed on IBM.

</comment><comment><USER47> Oracle copied IBMs SQL amd its mostly built from IBMs white paper. IBM allowed it. Oracle bought JAVA to sue Google and get some billions out of it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Url changed from [https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/ibm-sues-airbnb-for- pat...](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/ibm-sues-airbnb-for-patent- royalties-on-e-commerce-technologies) to one that isn't hardwalled, even though all it does is summarize this one. Is there a URL to another, fuller article?

<comment><USER49> [https://www.ft.com/content/6f02ce76-e1d6-45d8-b27a-0491281c2...](https://www.ft.com/content/6f02ce76-e1d6-45d8-b27a-0491281c2507)

<comment><USER50> That's paywalled.

Does anyone have a non paywalled URL?

<comment><USER51> You can get past the FT paywall by having a google referer. Usually as simple as googling for the headline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It would be great if more companies handled patents like Tesla. They obtain patents and then let others use them royalty free

<comment><USER53> Does their royalty free license have any guarantees that the license stays royalty free? If not, it could be an potential trap..

<comment><USER54> Not a lawyer but I'd imagine depends on the way they wrote the license. Like with software if someone open sourced something and then wanted to make it closed source, if they own the copyright 100% and you didn't violate the license you could keep using the current version but their new private changes you wouldn't get.

So I'd imagine something similar unless the license expires after X time but that doesn't make sense in open source as haven't seen that other than in commercial closed source programs, and even then some programs still work but you won't get updates unless you pay to upgrade or a yearly maintenance fee.

However you might want to document these things, heard once some copyright troll put images out under a free license and then changed their mind so went after websites using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Related:

(This is with respect to IBM vs. Groupon, an earlier case)

 _" What patents are IBM claiming Groupon infringed upon?":_

[https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/19726/what- paten...](https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/19726/what-patents-are- ibm-claiming-groupon-infringed-upon)

</comment><comment><USER56> IBM is a patent troll. They'll come in and threaten to sue on a patent, and then indicate they have a zillion patents, that they'll 'find some infringement' and then exhort. They have a cadre of lawyers incented to do this.

It's fair that people can defend their IP, but it goes too far in many cases.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how the Red Hat people, committed to open source and now IBM employees, feel about this.

<comment><USER58> Thanks to the Red Hat acquisition, IBM became a member of the anti-patent troll group, LOT Network : [https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-14-IBM-Joins-LOT- Network-in...](https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-14-IBM-Joins-LOT-Network-in- Major-Step-to-Promote-and-Protect-Open-Innovation)

The fox is in the henhouse

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> According to the article, IBM did this same thing to Twitter (suing for ridiculous patent claims immediately prior to an IPO, in order to pressure some sort of settlement).

I don't know much about the stock market, but this doesn't make a ton of sense to me. If the claim really is meritless (which, it certainly seems to be), it shouldn't effect the fundamental value of Airbnb's business. If the underlying business is unaffected, won't whatever PR-related impact the lawsuit has on stock prices be erased rather quickly? Or would investors still price in some risk as long as the lawsuit was pending, even if they felt confident it would be thrown out?

</comment><comment><USER60> Is there some sort of group-defense, where several sue-ees group together to contest a ridiculous patent ?

I guess the main difficulty is not the legal framework, but the business framing

<comment><USER10> Yup, you can seek a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, or institute an IPR at the PTAB to get a patent knocked-out. As a patent litigator, I believe most people don't understand patents, the patent system, nor what it tries to achieve.

<comment><USER61> What else do you think people don't know? I'd love to hear from someone knowledgeable.

<comment><USER10> I think people misunderstand the patent system. It's not perfect, but to expect it to be so is entirely absurd. People do not realize it is a set of laws that is supposed to categorize and provide structure... to the unknown. If people realized this is the starting point from which all patent laws must be developed, it would create the context to understand why everything else happens. It's kind of absurd, even amongst the quite intelligent folks here, that this goes without notice. To say software patents shouldn't exist outright is to say that no one could invent anything in software that is novel and beneficial to society. I'm not sure how people come to that conclusion!

I think people also fundamentally misunderstand that the "patent troll" is kinda like the "jaywalker" a term made up by an industry attacking the very concept. The car companies made up jaywalking once they got cities to switch off streetcars and to free the roads up for individual's motor vehicles. Similarly, patent troll is something used by large corporations owning vast troves of IP that get attacked by a smaller company that owns less IP. Is every patent litigation great? No! But our legal system already prefers to let a guilty man free rather than put an innocent man in jail... yet there is some absurd belief that the patent system should be more perfect than this. And lets be fair, it's a lot easier to say "killing people is wrong and deserves XYZ punishment" than it is to determine every unknown thing in the world. Patent trolls aren't really trolls, they are the inventors. Most of the time, if you invent a patent, you still can't find the funds to take on a big corporation infringing your patent. At least if "trolls" exist, the founder can sell his patent right to an entity that specializes in enforcing it. This is the market working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> FT article: [http://archive.md/ESune](http://archive.md/ESune)

</comment><comment><USER63> Does anyone have details of how much IBM is trying to extract from Airbnb? I see the settlement with Groupon but surely they cannot be aiming that high? (of course I could be too optimistic here)

</comment><comment><USER64> IBM made a large investment in Prodigy the bbs/internet service of the 90's and came out of it with a lot of patents.

<comment><USER65> Wouldn't those patents have expired? The 90s is now more than 20 years ago.

<comment><USER43> There's this ugly thing called a continuation. You file a patent in the 90s, the patent office says "I don't think so", you modify the patent, the PTO still says no, you modify it again, and so on. If I understand correctly, you can wind up with a patent with a priority date of when you first filed, but an expiration date of 20 years from when it was finally granted. (The "priority date" means that you need prior art from before that date to invalidate the patent.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is not a good year for AirBnB. First the virus, then this, all while they were planning to IPO.

<comment><USER67> This should be noise. COVID-19 will be a big hit, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's pretty uncommon these days to see a major tech company (read: one that has a reputation to maintain) actually litigate over a software patent in court, especially over something as established and basic as "ecommerce". I'm curious what the exact patent is for.

</comment><comment><USER68> Does anyone know what specific patents IBM is defending?

</comment><comment><USER69> Why doesnt this link to the actual story on Bloomberg?

</comment><comment><USER70> Ag nee jislaaik ouens !

</comment><comment><USER71> What are the patents?

</comment><comment><USER72> Shocking: some people believe they should rule the world forever.

What a novel play by entitled aristocrats.

<comment><USER10> Forever? Patents typically last 13 years

<comment><USER72> Software patents are a joke that the tech industry has relied upon to give it relevance.

Why should "using commonly known syntax patterns to enable mechanized organization and display of text and images in any number arbitrary configurations", which is a reasonable enough description of what we're doing from a user perspective, be protected?

That's ALL software work is. "Feeling" ephemeral things are real is not a good enough justification for shackling us all with such laws.

That's ripe for abuse. No less than being told we have to make laws this way because people "felt" God was telling them that's ok.

But money makes laws change so they can collect on our innate agency and curiosity for these things.

They own the land and the ideas.

Sorry, mate, read a bit more than contemporary politics & economics books.

A philosophy that undoes all this captured emotional energy to prop up correctness of winning favor with stern old people who don't literally contribute except via condescending approval is right there.

Society will instead kowtow to daddy despite all the now dead philosophers writing that we should avoid just that, lest they reign over us with their feelings of what is appropriate and emotional wanky tales of grandiose pipe dreams they want to achieve for themselves via our effort. More real gains for them, inequality gains for those of us that prop up their emotional castles.

Adam Smith was right: the extreme division of labor has created a society of ignorant humans whose agency has been boxed in by the state apparatus.

I'm not talking about anti-science and well argued positions. Politically the people are not existing in one. They're existing as scared children too afraid of the ruler their fifth grade teacher who died years ago, keeps in her drawer.

Childish paranoias literally etched in these brains forever. Thanks neuroscience for showing us the long life of our childhood anxieties and paranoias.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you are resorting to ad-hominem attacks and I'm not sure where you get your facts from as software patents have routinely and generally been knocked out for ineligibility since the Supreme Court's Alice decision years ago.

It's clear you have no idea what is involved in getting a patent, it's also clear that you have no idea what a patent gets you. Without litigation, generally nothing. Software companies are well aware of how flimsy most software patents that have passed actually are, and routinely knock them out in IPR proceedings or §101 claims.

And your quote is silly as it describes something that should not be patented. In fact, patent law specifically prohibits the patenting of anything "commonly known" or simply a computer-operated process that is something a human otherwise previously did. This is a very difficult area of the law, to prescribe what-yet-unthought-of-things are patentable and which aren't. That's why having a patent doesn't mean that a court will find it valid once you attempt to litigate over it. You seem to not understand this! The patent system isn't perfect, and it doesn't purport itself to be. We struggle to get criminal law right and that involves people's actual lives. So I'm not sure where you get the gall to call other people emotional when it's clearly just a projection of your own situation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gopls: Language server protocol implementation for Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/gopls <comment><USER2> I use this fork: [https://github.com/saibing/tools](https://github.com/saibing/tools) which has a bunch of features ported over from bingo (which is another LSP backend for Go). References support is the important one for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gopls is great, but it's still alpha quality, in my opinion.

I've tried using it with VSCode this week, and it frequently stopped working in different ways, requiring a restart.

The peskiest problem is that it just refuses to automatically add some imports. No errors in the log, just messages about "undefined: someimportedname".

Really looking forward to Gopls stabilizing, because it's bound to be better than what came before.

<comment><USER4> gopls does support automatically organizing imports (it uses the same library as goimports). If you're having problems with this feature, please file a bug on the Go issue tracker ([https://github.com/golang/go/issues](https://github.com/golang/go/issues)). Thanks!

<comment><USER3> I'll try, but the code I've been working on is not open source, and the problem only happened with _some_ imports within my own project. I don't expect a bug report is very useful without my code given the relative sparseness of Gopls's debug log.

<comment><USER4> No worries, but if you are able to encounter a scenario where goimports works, but gopls fails, it would be very helpful. Totally understand if you aren't able to share, but even redacted logs will be useful for debugging.

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/31977](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/31977)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recetly switched to using this on VsCode. Works great. A lot faster than the older implementation and this server model makes a lot of sense. Good job having gopls ready in a short time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Finally! Still in the early days but Go has been lacking in good tooling (at least, not as great as JS) and hopefully this is the mark of things changing.

<comment><USER7> Gomft and goimports have been great for as long as I've been using Go. GoLand had a rocky start but has been excellent for ~2 years. Pprof is awesome.

The only weak tooling I saw was dependency management; Dep is great and modules are part of the toolchain now.

I can't agree that Go lacks tooling. Maybe it's just a disparity in what my company configures out of the box, but I feel better supported by tools in Go than in Python or Java.

<comment><USER6> I don't use GoLand, but one thing that's definitely lacking is good autocomplete support.

The language server by sourcegraph isn't too bad, but it often takes more than 10GB RAM for a big project and is not forgiving to errors (i.e. autocomplete, peeking, jumping, referencing will all fail when there are syntax/build errors).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't there an "official" LSP in the works?

<comment><USER9> this is the official one

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't sourcegraph already have an LSP server for go?

<comment><USER11> Sourcegraph agreed to join the effort around gopls, to have one really robust implementation supported by the whole Go community.

<comment><USER12> Sourcegraph CEO here. Yes, we are very happy that the Go core team is taking over. I posted about this 7 months ago at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18042930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18042930). Language servers should be owned by the same core team that owns the compiler for each language because tooling is so important to language users.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Rome – date picker component with no dependencies - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bevacqua/rome

<comment><USER2> After using a dozen date picker components in past 10 years, this one is great. Could be great if you could show how to use it without npm. For example, in my WordPress site I'd like to use it within my landing page form.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can get it from bower or just take the stuff in the dist folder. It doesn't depend on npm at all. If you don't use commonjs it'll be published to the "rome" global variable.</comment></comment>


It's time to do something about dirty clouds - <AUTHOR> https://www.greenedge.cloud/blog/its-time-to-do-something-about-dirty-clouds/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Thatcher here, the author. Would love to hear what you think about it.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I buy a quiet fridge? - <AUTHOR> I recently bought a used fridge and was disappointed about how loud it was once I took it home. In stores you can't really test the quietness either because of ambient noise. Most manufacturer's values are not accurate either. The one I bought has a great official value but is still loud as hell. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Clean the fans. If they are dirty they are out of balance, inefficient about moving air, and hard on their bearings. There is one fan under the machine and there might be another one inside, between the freezer and the frig. Really quiet machines use solid-state Peltier devices. They are slow to cool, cheap to run, but very expensive. You might have someone check the coolant; if it is low on coolant it is going to run longer to reach proper temperature. Note: In the interest of keeping your fingers unplug the machine before you fool with the fans.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your suggestions! I'd love to spend more, how would one find such a fridge with Peltier devices?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried cleaning the fridge coils/vents. Sometimes fridges can run louder when they are dirty.

Some independent review sites will also report on the decibel level of appliances. My suggestion would be to pick a few models in your price range and do some independent research on the search engine of your choice.

</comment><comment><USER4> This anti-vibration pad reduced my refrigerator's noise by 1.5dB, though [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B7ZH2LG](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B7ZH2LG)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some low level jobs where you can work on side projects? - <AUTHOR> What are some low level jobs (high school or above) that give you a chance to work on side projects? I have heard that bridge operators and security guards can have long stretches of free time at work with no repercussions for working on other things as long as you get your work done. What are some other examples? <comment><USER2> I used to work in a library at my college (while in undergrad). I believe there were also some high-school graduate workers employed there too. It was a very easy job that mostly composed of gathering book requests and preparing them for patrons. I say it was a 80% free time and 20% work split. Another good job in my experience was lifeguarding, some cities even pay as high as $11/hr for an entry level position, most of the time it's 50/50 with work and break time or 70/30 work / break time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was considering trying to get a job in one of the computer labs on campus in the spring semester at my University, kind of fits along the same lines. I was somewhat concerned that they might have some rights to your product because you developed it on their time, any experience with that?

<comment><USER2> That could be a great option for you I think. As far as I know, unless otherwise noted in some type of legal document any code you write regardless on whose time is your code legally. Unless you sign some type of agreement which you wouldn't have to sign to work at the University lab, more so for a software internship / job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Go work in France and enjoy a 35 hour workweek and you will have enough time for your side project after work.

Bonus point if you find a job in the public sector you can probably code on your side project at work and after work ;-)

Forget Silicon Valley pay though.

Or if you're really frugal you could live on social benefits and be totally free of work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already don't live in Silicon Valley so the pay difference wouldn't be an issue. Whats the process of finding jobs in the EU if I'm only fluent in English? Is it even possible?

<comment><USER3> Forget a job in France if you don't speak the language. I can't say for other countries.</comment></comment></comment>


Can We Change the Web's Culture of Nastiness? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/can-we-change-the-webs-culture-of-nastiness/

<comment><USER2> If we can sort this one out we can also figure out what to do about road rage and offensive driver behavior.

In both cases there's something that makes people forget they are not the only thinking, feeling, I-make-the-occasional-fuck-up person on the planet.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice on Git hosting: self-hosting vs. Github - <AUTHOR>

We're a small team, roughly 10 people, of which 3 would be active developers using Git. The rest are analysts, managers, etc who likely would not use Git regularly.
Also, we're a mostly Microsoft/ESRI(GIS)/Flex/Javascript group within a heavily MS-based company. Before you ask, TFS is out, based on my experiences with Source Safe.
I've installed WebGitNet for basic Git repositories, but I'm wondering if a private Github corporate account would be better.
I'm sure others have faced this issue. What were your pain points, deciding factors, etc. when choosing a self-hosted git solution vs. Github for your company? Does Github provide enough storage for you? Are you concerned with locating all of your source with a third party, etc?
I'll also add that we're new to Git (coming from the horrid abomination of Source Safe, then nothing, now "something is needed").
I'm not worried about learning Git in general, rather my question is related to self-hosted vs. Github. I've already made the decision to go with Git as an SCM solution. I've installed the new GitHub Windows client but haven't tested it yet with a self-hosted solution. What are your experiences? Please include concerns about client code security, etc. Any advice is welcomed! <comment><USER2> I would split it up like this.

Pros:

\- You don't have to manage your own git server setup, certs, securing the server etc. (probably better uptime than your own server would have)

\- Github's issue tracking and the wiki are usable

\- You can use their pull request stuff, which might or might not be a good match for your workflow.

\- You can also maintain public repos if you want to contribute at all to OS (though it's trivial to use github only for the public facing ones, just by adding a remote + auth)

\- If you have a few repos it's very nice to browse them using github.

Cons:

\- Limited number of repos, unless you are willing to fork out more $$

That's kind of it, the way I see it

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points--thanks. I'm not sure how much we'd use Github's advanced features in the near-term. Basically, they would just serve as the master repo.

Yes, the number of repos is an issue for me. We have 20-30+ active projects, which may not result in large files, but when Github places limits on projects vs. space that becomes an issue.

We're a consulting company, so we have lots of projects, many with repeat customers (hopefully). I'm stuck deciding on banking our SCM with a third party vs. self-hosting with no limits. Projects are usually short-lived (1-2 months) but we want to maintain a good archive of what we've done for future projects.

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, you can check out Atlassian's Bitbucket services. May be less pricey than Github's premium offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with self-hosting is one of managing the servers. When you are a small team the effort is just not worth it. Yes, there are risks when you give your code to someone else, but hopefully a company whose job is to host source repositories will take enough precautions.

Note, you can host GitHub within your company, but again - it is usually not worth it unless you are a larger company.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've deployed Git on a server in our DMZ for testing. So, it's possibly accessible from external IPs, but in reality we're using it via a VPN connection, so it's _mostly_ internal. I haven't locked down the security yet. My idea is to create an internal git server that is freely accessible when connected via VPN or secure HTTPS (when not on VPN).

From what I've read, the self-hosted GitHub is far beyond our budget. We already have VM servers available. It's just a matter of choosing an appropriate self-hosted solution (e.g. WebGitNet, etc) vs. a more established and polished GitHub solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can try Bitbucket (<https://bitbucket.org/>). For 10 users they have pretty good pricing of $10/per month.

edit : I missed that only 3 team members will be using git. In that case you can have unlimited private repository for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll take a look at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you host your own Git repo(s), make sure you have someone on your team that can stop what they're doing at the drop of a dime and fix/tweak the server hosting the repo(s). Hosting it yourself, it will be 100% someone on your teams responsibility.

With Github (which is what we use). It's just there. It works perfectly. We get all the tools that come along with working on GH. We haven't seen one uptime issue since we started with them. They have an entire team to make sure everything is working properly, you do not.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stick with the private git hosting until you see a need to do otherwise. Maintaining your own repo with gitolite or something similar is drop-dead simple. Why mess with GitHub when you don't even know why you need it?</comment>


Web company built slowly amidst hype in our polymorphous Web industry - <AUTHOR> http://tcrn.ch/m2kO04

<comment><AUTHOR> A TechCrunch article. I renamed the article because I felt the original was a bit of hype. Nonetheless, I found it interesting because the guy kept believing and built the company and survived business terrain change over the years. Hope it spur some people on.</comment>


The Rise of a Visual Internet: Welcome to the Post-Text Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/09/technology/the-rise-of-a-visual-internet.html#Visual <comment><USER2> Whatever it is, it hangs trying to load in my browser.

A post text world would certainly be distopian for me, but I can't really conceive of it. Perhaps I could find out if only this page would load in my chrome browser.

<comment><USER3> This comment is the exact reason a text internet is still needed, because otherwise it will turn into a lag fest full of strange Javascript frameworks just to show a single article.</comment></comment>


Why doesn't OWASP recommend to hash passwords both on the client and the server? - <AUTHOR> Since the recent problems with GitHub and Twitter:
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/github-accidentally-recorded-some-plaintext-passwords-in-its-internal-logs/
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/twitter-admits-recording-plaintext-passwords-in-internal-logs-just-like-github/
I was wondering, why isn't the best practice to bcrypt the password both on the client and the server? Since I won't change anything that already are the best practices for the server side (salt, strong hash, HTTPS), it can only be safer. The server would consider the already hashed password as the password, and would hash it again before store it.
- In case I log the entire request when an exception is thrown, if an exception happens in the login/signup request, I would never get access to the user plaintext password
- I know that if somebody have access to these only-client-side-hashed passwords, either by MITM (which a lot of companies do in their private networks replacing the SSL certificates) or by logs or a malicious server administrator, they would be able to use it to authenticate in my site, but wouldn't have access to the plaintext password, so it would never compromise the user's account in other sites and services (even for those users that reuse their passwords)
Cross-posted from my stackoverflow's question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50701933/why-doesnt-owasp-recommend-to-bcrypt-the-password-both-on-the-client-and-the-se <comment><USER2> Because then you'd have to expose how you did the hashing.

<comment><AUTHOR> But I'll expose just how I hashed on client side, not how I hash on the server side. The only purpose of this is to protect the plaintext password of the user. I won't stop doing anything that I already do on the server site to protect these passwords.</comment></comment>


Craigslist posts shown on a map while viewing Craigslist housing - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/omonmigaleaafgpkgoammpclbcdepjpi

<comment><USER3> In the end, client side scraping of the data actually increases the traffic on CL's servers, because multiple people have to scrape the same posts, rather than a central server. If padmapper remained small, then they probably scrape more posts than they have unique views. Of the 100 they scrape, maybe only 10 are seen. As padmapper et al grow, it may reduce the bandwidth on cl.

In 10 years, if all clients looking for apartments use a plug-in however, now you have cl paying for a lot more bandwidth than outsourcing this functionality to a centralized service, because for every 100 posts they scrape, they may only really look at one and they want the ability to show thousands on a single map.

I really don't understand why cl doesn't just do it themselves. It's not hard. I've built these maps countless times on top of all the popular mapping services and using different geocoders.

The hardest part is figuring out what the poster means in their location: where is "forth and main" [sic] or do you mean "East 4th St at Main St?", but I can see a simple address validator that updates a map with their location until they get something that will geocode correctly. That's the best solution and everyone wins here, except padmapper and the like, but there are other sources of data to map that aren't from craigslist too.

It's really trivial. The only other issue is cost, but those can be covered easily with all the money CL leaves on the table.

<comment> olog-hai > client side scraping of the data actually increases the traffic on CL's > servers

Of course, but not in PadMapper's case.

"Padmapper gets its data from 3Taps, a site that collects and republishes Craigslist's content. 3Taps, in turn, says it gets its data from cached copies supplied by Google and Bing, rather than Craigslist directly."

Source: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/craigslist- tighte...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/craigslist-tightens- grip-demanding-exclusive-ownership-of-ads/)

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, but you should really ask yourself if this is true. Bing maybe, as they can do what ddg does and pull a feed from Yahoo/Bing BOSS (maybe?) but to scrape Google would be a very bad and unreliable (and counter to the Google TOS) way of getting this information.

This whole situation is very sketchy, honestly.

<comment><USER5> Padmapper used to scrape Craigslist, but stopped after a cease and desist letter. While buying the data from a service that scrapes search engine caches may be unreliable, my understanding is that it's legally much more defensible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've just pushed the full source code to github: <https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper>

If you find issues or have feature suggestions, please add them and I will push fixes: <https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/issues>

<comment><USER6> This is not working for New York for me, didn't show up at all, but it was definitely working in Gainesville, FL (where I'm at now), popped up right away. Are there certain cities it will not function in, for whatever reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> It works for: <http://newyork.craigslist.org/hhh/> but newyork.craigslist.org has housing categories different from sfbay.craigslist.org and a Chrome extension's client script only runs on the pages which match the manifest.json: [https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/blob/master/src/mani...](https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/blob/master/src/manifest.json)

I'll add the newyork urls to the manifest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool idea. Will be interesting to see what companies like Craigslist can/will do about this stuff. It's not like Craigslist is ideologically opposed to maps, they just didn't want them to be hosted on a competing site.

So I imagine they might not mind this at all..

<comment><USER8> I use a Chrome extension that automatically displays the embedded photos as thumbnails next to each listing. Per request, it probably increases the resource burden on CL's servers by one or two orders of magnitude. I can't imagine they are happy about that and keep waiting for the day when they implement some sort of rate limiting.

Or maybe it really is as they say, and they just don't want 3rd parties doing this sort of thing, even though it's far more efficient. Personally I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER9> What extension? I was just looking for something like this.

<comment><USER8> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgnfe...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgnfeecolmmcgocefnf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like this. It's interesting that a viable solution to the Craigslist third party problem is to just make everybody scrape Craigslist. From a purely technical standpoint, that seems rather unfortunate, but I'd rather have a local scraper + Padmapper UI than have no Padmapper at all.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://housingmaps.com> \- the mothership - how do they still exist?

<comment><USER12> They aren't trying to use Craigslist to jumpstart their own business - <USER2> are simply offering a service to users, so CL is fine with them.

CL isn't opposed to these services existing on top of CL, it's opposed to them using CL to jumpstart their own business that is supposed to _replace_ CL.

Padmapper's eventual goal is to destroy CL - which, of course, CL is not going to go out of its way to enable.

<comment><USER13> _Padmapper's eventual goal is to destroy CL_

What? I don't think that's ever been Padmapper's goal.

<comment><USER14> It is the unavoidable end-game if padmapper is successful.

<comment><USER15> I think I have some say in the end-game for PadMapper, no?

<comment><USER14> <http://www.padlister.com/> \- "PadLister is a full suite of tools for renting"

Are you _seriously_ telling me that you're not trying to compete with Craigslist in the Apartment Listings space?

 _All_ incentives, evidence, and your actions point in this direction. The only dissonance is with what you're saying, not with what you're doing.

Even if you mean it now (in context, this seems unlikely), incentives have a way of wearing down your resistance. If PadMapper actually succeeded in supplanting Craigslist as the primary destination for apartment ads, you'd be outright foolish to not start accepting ads directly yourself ... ___ _which you already do, through PadLister._ ___

So how are you not aiming to surplant Craigslist, exactly? There's nothing wrong with competing with them, but it's insanely disingenuous to claim that you aren't.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that might be the issue, and I'd strongly consider shutting it down if that would make working with CL possible. I disagree that competition is inevitable, though.

<comment><USER14> > _Yeah, that might be the issue, and I'd strongly consider shutting it down > if that would make working with CL possible._

Carrot and stick. That's not a highly principled stand.

> _I disagree that competition is inevitable, though._

You're doing this out of the pure altruistic goodness of your heart?

All the incentives point in a single direction. There's nothing _wrong_ with competing with Craigslist. You'd be foolish to not take a piece of the pie -- if you can. Likewise, Craigslist would be idiotic to give away the valuable data that you need to take a piece of their pie.

<comment><USER15> I'd need to be able to talk with them to see if it's actually the thing they have an issue with before I would nuke that project. And yes, I started and continue this project because I wanted to solve a problem, and I find it fulfilling. Money isn't a strong motivator for me.

<comment><USER12> " Money isn't a strong motivator for me."

Please don't say that - it is disingenuous. Money is a strong motivator for 99.99999% of the world. Money lets you do things you otherwise could not do without that money. It's reasonable to say things like, "Money isn't the only motivator for me."

<comment><USER15> Sorry, that wasn't specific enough, money past my current point isn't a strong motivator for me, since I have relatively cheap tastes and low expenses. Even below market salary for an engineer, being childless, I have such low expenses that I can afford to go on trips and do the other things I want without needing to make more. Obviously, if I couldn't afford good food, I would care a lot more about money and less about doing stuff I enjoy doing. And of course, that might change over time if I ever wanted to buy a house or car or had kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Local client-side scraping of CG to bring about similar results to Padmapper - I like it.

Noting that CG has recently gone on the offensive, I wonder where they would draw the line. At the moment, everything is done locally and it doesn't look like the extension is communicating with any central source. What if there was a central server that aggregated the results of all the distributed scraping to cache results and a) display them more quickly to users, and b) reduce the number of hits to CG?

Would CG rebuke the extension b/c its communicating with a central server and sharing CG's data in a manner not controlled by CG?

<comment><USER17> I had the idea that browser clients could scrape content as they browse then send that anonymously to a central system that could be used by all, but with the copyright issue now in play it seems that it would give CL due process to shut down such a service.

<comment><USER18> That's essentially what NotifyWire.com did and got a C&D.

<comment><USER17> Oh well, good to know the idea was put into practice at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It'll be interesting to see how CL views this in light of section 5 of their TOU:

        Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or
        derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist
        whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not
        limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing,
        iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.

<http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use>

Would CL really want to sue its users though?

<comment><USER20> Isn't a user's browser technically an intermediary? The browser reads html from an initial request and makes automated additional requests for images, javascript and css files, etc and then renders the page using its own rendering engine. The only difference here is that the browser is making multiple requests and using a different rendering engine (the extension) to display it using a map.

There's an obvious market for people who want the amount of data that craigslist has, but wanted it displayed in a smarter way that allows better filtering and searching. They could make a killing licensing their data to 3rd party sites (or launching a new site with an improved interface). Instead they are giving users more and more reasons to switch to other services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neat. I have heard of CL C&Ding some extensions as well, but it may have just been a subset of extensions that were doing something they didn't like.

<comment><USER21> You mean like overloading their servers with needless scraping?

<comment><USER22> There's no reason to assume this will overload CL servers or CDN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> FYI, <http://www.housingmaps.com/> is still a decent CL housing + Map mashup

<comment><USER24> As are <http://mapliv.com> and <https://www.padmapper.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Would be great if it worked for cities outside of the US.. the ones I tested (even in English) did not. Map stayed centered on California.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I made this in 24 hrs. That's one of the things that will be fixed soon.

<comment><USER25> No need for apologies. Craigslist should've put out a plugin like this, that way they can keep their site simple, but also give it some boost for people that want it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was very close to making a bookmarklet / extension like this, but I'd rather see padmapper succeed.</comment>


Why I discuss my future projects - <AUTHOR>

I am writing this because a friend of mine literally said to me at the bar the other day "I have this great idea I will tell you about, but you'll have to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement before I do". I almost coughed in my beer.
I just let a friend out my door who I willfully discussed a future project of mine with and he was able to give me some interesting feedback which I appreciated very much. Seeing as I have been spending my last few months on the project and all...
I just find it so strange that so many people are secretive of their goings on and future plans in the start-up community.
The reason I am willing to talk to others about it is because it's a really hard problem which I have been working on for some time now which persists without a perfect solution.
If you are so naive to believe that your idea which is so easily copied simply by overhearing about it in a bar is the golden egg laying goose, then you are misinformed about the world we live in. <comment><USER2> Agree to some extent. This applies to those ideas where execution is the most important part. That's the vast majority of ideas. However, occasionally you get an idea where the concept is almost more important than the execution.

For example, Twitter. They've obviously executed it well and grown over time, but the initial concept is simple, and you'd want to be first to market. 140 character messages, and you can follow people. It's a good idea, you can create a working beta in a weekend, and grow quickly from there. You don't want to tell people about those ideas.

On the other hand, you have something like the Microsoft post on the homepage, about real-time voice translations for Skype. You can share things like that with the world. Everyone knows this technology is going to exist one day, and everyone knows it's going to be widely used. There's no big secret there. It just boils down to a lot of work, and who executes the most accurate translations. It's not a race, it's a marathon that's open to anyone.

<comment><USER3> Twitter is a bad example; some ideas with simple initial concepts won't get stolen because it takes awhile for anyone to see the point to it.</comment></comment>


.NINJA domains are coming as an alternative to .COM - <AUTHOR> http://name.com/domains/ninja

<comment><USER2> This is bonkers... in a good way!</comment>


Ask HN: Why srcset and not just progressive JPGs? - <AUTHOR>

These days I often use devices with high DPIs. Some auto-scale websites up, on other devices I use tools like NoSquint that sets a default zoom. So more and more often I wish the images on my sites had a higher resolution.<p>Looking into the documentation of srcset, I wonder why all the complexity. Couldn't we just use progressive JPGs and the browser loads until it has all the pixels it needs for the image in the current situation (screen dpi, zoom level, css scaling etc). <comment><USER2> The roundtrip latency means the server will send more packets than you really need, and it'll have read more data off disk than it actually sends. The client has all the information about dpi up front, so it has the ability to make a precisely described request up front. Also, you'd have to make your images be JPEGs, and use tools that generate the kind you need.

I also don't see what complexity you see. Instead of specifying one URL, you specify a small family of them. That's not architecturally more complicated -- it's a change of datatype. The behavior's straightforward and the presence of multiple versions of images is highly visible, instead of being a detail of some binary file.</comment>


87-year-old Occupy protester can't get arrested - <AUTHOR> http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45353723/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts

<comment><AUTHOR> I would like to hear stories about what goes through the head of some of the law enforcement officers who are ordered to disband a protest, when at the same time they agree with some of the protesters' viewpoints.

That must be a tough job, emotionally... I would not like to have it.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a story about a hateful woman whose primary intention is to be arrested. Her ideals are irrelevant because her intention isn't to be arrested for her protest, but to just be arrested _while protesting_. The difference is profound, and shouldn't be ignored by the reader.</comment>


Hacker News Will Not Load - <AUTHOR> http://crowdsupport.telstra.com.au/t5/Home-Broadband/Hacker-News-Will-Not-Load/td-p/199801

<comment><USER2> I would bet it's stale DNS from their (HN) migration to cloudflare. The home broadband must cache records ignoring their TTL/expiry.</comment>


Habits of a Happy Node Hacker - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/3/11/node-habits

<comment><USER2> Good article. I think one area where it could be improved slightly is to specify which type of use case the recommendation is appropriate for:

1\. Node as a scripting language

2\. Node + Express or Hapi or whatever as a web development framework

The recommendations in this article work well if you're targeting Node as a scripting language.

However, if you are developing using a web framework, then some of the recommendations are too lean (IMO).

1\. npm init

When I'm developing for the web, I use a more robust application skeleton. There are a ton to choose from. However, I do use npm init when developing scripts. My guess is the author's point is something like, "good Node devs include a package.json".

2\. Declare all dependencies

Absolutely. Works for both web and scripts.

3\. Specify a start script

Yes, for scripts.

However for the web task runners such as Grunt / Gulp / etc. work better. For web dev starting the server is just one task of many. For example, if you need to start the server after checking the environment, watch for file changes, run jslint/jshint, and so on then a task runner makes web development easier.

4\. Specify a test script

Yes!

5\. Keep dependencies out of source control

Yes, but use npm-shrinkwrap because the code you deploy (your code + deps) should be the __exact same code __that you ran during testing.

6\. Use environment variables to configure npm

Absolutely. Config files are another option, but this is a matter of personal preference. The authors point is totally valid.

7\. Bring your own npm registry

This is an interesting one and one where there is no clear "best choice" yet. It'll be interesting to see how npm (public and private) evolve.

8\. Keep track of outdated dependencies

Yup

9\. Use npm scripts to run custom build steps

This is now being debated. There are some in the community who specifically prevent pre/post scripts from running automatically when installing via npm.

10\. Try new things

Debatable (at this time). These new features can also go onto the todo list in the near future. If someone is new to node, they __may __be better served by focusing on what node / JS does now.

11\. Browserify

Depends. If you're using Angular, then it has its own module system. I think Ember has its own module system as well.

require.js is another option. But the author's point about having client-side modules is totally valid.

Again, nice article.

</comment><comment><USER3> _nodemon_ (restart the server automatically when your backend scripts change) + _node-inspector_ (debug Node apps from Chrome Dev Tools)(yes, it's as awesome as it sounds) + _concurrent_ (start multiple servers from a single Grunt task) is also a slice of heaven for Node developers, but I don't seem them mentioned often.

[1]: [https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt- nodemon](https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-nodemon)

[2]: [https://www.npmjs.org/package/node- inspector](https://www.npmjs.org/package/node-inspector)

[3]: [https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt- concurrent](https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-concurrent)

Edit: here is an example configuration: [https://github.com/ChrisWren/grunt- nodemon#advanced-usage](https://github.com/ChrisWren/grunt-nodemon#advanced- usage)

<comment><USER4> node supervisor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I learned recently was that dependencies can be locked with npm shrinkwrap [1]. In the event that you don't want a deployment to be impacted by a newer version of a dependency.

[1]: [https://www.npmjs.org/doc/cli/npm- shrinkwrap.html](https://www.npmjs.org/doc/cli/npm-shrinkwrap.html)

<comment><USER6> Isn't this why you should check-in dependencies to your source control?

<comment><USER7> npm-shrinkwrap covers one of the main strengths of checking code into source control, without actually needing to check in to version control. It locks versions down for your direct dependencies AND their dependencies, same as checking into your own repo would.

<comment><USER8> Does it protect against the hosting site going down and the project disappearing from the web? That's the main concern people have when they check library dependencies into source control.

<comment><USER7> Nope, but hosting an NPM mirror does do that, or mirroring the packages that you use in your projects if you want to skip the full mirror. So you can combine that + shrinkwrapping to get the same benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Using grunt watch for things like automatically linting my files, and running unit tests based on what source / test files are changing was a revolutionary jump for me and my development with Node. Having a near-0 feedback loop to indicate your impact to code quality and tests is priceless!

Grunt also makes it super simple to do add tasks which are wrappers for things like Vagrant etc. For example, you can bootstrap a vagrant vm with a mongo service provisioned inside the VM and have that auto-deploy before you start you development workflow.

For those who are interested (in filing bugs, seeking inspiration, providing feedback), feel free to check out my NodeJS starter project here: [https://github.com/sabhiram/nodejs- scaffolding](https://github.com/sabhiram/nodejs-scaffolding)

</comment><comment><USER10> One thing I absolutely disagree with is keeping the dependencies out of source control. I have always argued that the best way to ensure that the code running in your dev environment is the same code that makes it to production is to check in node_modules to source control.

In addition this also eliminates the possibility of you being unable to deploy your application because npm decides to make a breaking change without bothering to inform anybody, or if npm goes down for any reason.

I find this over reliance on npm in the node community a bit discomfiting. npm is a package manager and an excellent one at that. But using it for everything from running tests to application deployment is not a very good idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> As someone new to Node I appreciated this list of tips. The article also led me to some great additional resources that I'll be looking at tonight including Browserify. Time for a serious upgrade to my front-end app development workflow. Thanks!

<comment><USER12> check out npm link, very usefull command during development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have question as someone that is still fairly new to node. The article recommends using npm for running tasks (for instance starting the application), but others recommend an external tool like grunt. Is it more idiomatic to use grunt or npm for these tasks?

<comment><USER14> Personally, I think using NPM is more idiomatic; Both Grunt and NPM are third- party tools, however NPM is FAR more pervasive with Node than grunt is. Essentially, if you write Node, you use NPM. Not so with grunt.

<comment><USER13> To be honest, I didn't realize that npm could be used as a task runner, but now that I do, I'm wondering what all the fuss about Grunt is. Why bring in yet another meta-tool into the chain if npm (which is basically a requirement) can handle task execution already?

<comment><USER15> I'm not entirely sure about this, but it seemed like Grunt was more for front- end developers that haven't quite jumped into Node.js yet (or had no intention to).

I've noticed some culture differences between front-end and back-end javascripters.

<comment><USER2> > it seemed like Grunt was more for front-end developers

Grunt is a task runner. It's a general purpose utility, that happens to work well with JavaScript (client and server).

Our team first started using Grunt to concat Scala templates prior to compilation (in an old version of Play with an old JVM). Back then, we noticed that concatenating the Scala files reduced the amount of heap used during compilation. Never did figure out why.

Later, we started to use Grunt to minify and concat our Backbone code.

Currently, we use Grunt for both our server-side Node and client-side Angular.

Server-side we use Grunt to: 1.) Restart Node on file change, 2.) Run JSHint against both server-side and client-side JavaScript, 3.) Set some environment vars prior to starting Node, plus a few other small tasks.

Client-side we use Grunt to: 1.) Create a production build by minifying and concatenating JS, 2.) Minifying and concatenating CSS, Minifying HTML, plus some other minor tasks.

We also use Grunt to run the client and server test suite.

Basically, it's common practice to use Grunt (or Gulp, or another task runner) to assist with both client and server-side JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 5\. Keep dependencies out of source control

Am I the only one who doesn't? I don't want to add another step for people checking out my branch. It should just work.

<comment><USER17> But as said in the article it might be a problem with some C libraries that need to be compiled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > 6\. Use environment variables to configure npm

Seems a very nice tip. I would love to hear more about this.</comment>


Yoshua Bengio, Revered Architect of AI, Has Some Ideas About What to Build Next - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/yoshua-bengio-revered-architect-of-ai-has-some-ideas-about-what-to-build-next <comment><AUTHOR> "I don't think we're anywhere close today to the level of intelligence of a two-year-old child. But maybe we have algorithms that are equivalent to lower animals, for perception. And we're gradually climbing this ladder in terms of tools that allow an entity to explore its environment."

His points on grounded language learning and meta learning are really interesting...

<comment><USER2> The thing is that the importance of grounding has been well known in the field of AGI for many years.

Where I think the big impact of these guys in the field of AGI besides mainstreaming ideas that have been around for awhile, is in finding ways to improve the models created by deep learning to be more abstract and accurate. Assuming that is possible. They are putting out papers about things like disentangled representations. That is how deep learning get grounded language understanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "What are the elements of higher-level cognition? Causality is one element of it, and there's also reasoning and planning, imagination, and credit assignment ..."

I don't think we have any clue about the answer to this question. Reasoning and planning, etc., it's just epiphenomena of consciousness.</comment>


After a lot more data, technical interview performance is still arbitrary - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interviewing.io/after-a-lot-more-data-technical-interview-performance-really-is-kind-of-arbitrary/ <comment><USER2> Very often the interview is a mechanism to complete a pre-defined checklist. Not only does it lead to false positives but, for the worse, false negatives.

There are platforms that claim to _filter_ candidates, but it's tough to vouch for the effectiveness. Interviewing is hard.</comment>


Eclipse color themes - <AUTHOR> http://www.eclipsecolorthemes.org/

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

I really wish IDEs and editors adapted a portable format for code highlighting themes. It would make things much easier. (For example, I have a very nice scheme for Eclipse, and would like to use it on my laptop in Kate as well, or in gEdit... Or use the same syntax scheme to highlight text on my blog... too bad they all have wildly different formats)

<comment><USER3> Man, my head is in the wrong place, I keep seeing "IED" when someone writes "IDE"....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using Visual Studio for 10 years and I just started using Eclipse for Android development about 6 months ago. I absolutely hated it and cringed every time I had to open it, until the day I found this color themes site. After I switched colors it suddenly felt more like home, I embraced the idea that Eclipse was actually a good IDE, and I've been pretty happy with it ever since. Funny how a little change like that can change my entire outlook. Now, the only thing I want is a plugin that would allow Eclipse to kick me in the nuts every time I try to compare strings using == in Java.</comment>


Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2019/04/iconic-consoles-of-ibm-system360.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> A dupe to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19598960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19598960)

</comment><comment><USER3> It is a cool looking console.

I wish I had one, just to wire it up to stuff around the house. :)

<comment><USER4> About 20 years ago I was married to someone whose father had a wrecking yard. I was out there and noticed some computer parts, so I dug around and found the major parts of a PDP-11, including one of those TTY printer/keyboard consoles. ([http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.jpg](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.jpg)) Unfortunately, years of sitting outside in Western Oregon weather had damaged it beyond any hope of repair.

<comment><USER5> can still hear an la36 decwriter in my head anytime. 100 boxes of greenbar later.</comment></comment></comment>


The Strange, Fading Call of the Narwhal - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/elements/lab-notes/the-strange-fading-call-of-the-narwhal <comment><USER2> Love these creatures, and I actually thought they were just fantasy for a long time! I like the Narwhal imperial stout and one time I noticed that the information about the animal on the bottle was written in such a way that you might think they're actually _real_ so I looked online and was stunned to find out that as fantastical as they seem, they actually exist!

<comment><USER3> The realization that narwhals are real was a Mandela Effect[0] moment for me.

[0] [https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/07/24/the-mandela- effect/](https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to the paper mentioned in the article: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198295)

</comment><comment><USER5> Even with a tag attached to a whale it is still impossible to be completely sure who made a sound. This is a big issue that has been haunting marine mammal communication research for decades. Hard to establish the function of the call when it is not clear who made it and who replied.

</comment><comment><USER6> These are beautiful creatures, I even named my startup after them.

[https://KloudTrader.com/Narwhal](https://KloudTrader.com/Narwhal)

</comment><comment><USER7> One of my favorite narwhal tidbits is that Viking settlers in Greenland would sell the tusks in continental European markets as unicorn horns: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/science/its- sensitive-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/science/its-sensitive- really.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ah, but when does it bacon?

 _ducks_

<comment><USER9> During the day</comment></comment>


Microsoft Office is killing Google Apps and anemic iWorks - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/desktop-apps/23055/game-over-microsoft-office-killing-google-apps-and-anemic-iworks <comment><USER2> Linkbait. This is a highly opinionated piece with an exaggerated title, short on data and long on unjustified hyperbole. Microsoft Office isn't "killing" anything. Both Office 365 and Google Apps are great products, and both are winning large enterprise contracts when pitted against the other -- for example, Google Apps just won a deal for 68,000 employees at Whirlpool, beating Microsoft Office.[1]

\--

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/google-lands-whirlpool-for- go...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-lands-whirlpool-for-google- apps-2013-10)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this. I got the weirdest feeling from some of the responses below that HN is being astroturfed.

I'm not a Microsoft hater, but it's being laid on a little thick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Office 365 is the fastest growing Microsoft product ever. Microsoft has earned ridicule in terms of Windows 8 and Windows Phone but to me they are doing all the right things in this space.

They should have launched Android and iOS support a year ago but I suspect that hole is going to be shut soon. I suspect Apple knows that too, and hence is offering their less valuable product for free.

Just think how amazing Skype is going to be when its the primary way you communicate in real time with the rest of the folks in your enterprise (I know most of you aren't enterprise folks but if you are you get just how valuable this is when 99% of the people you need to work with are in another building or another part of the world). I have no doubt that is coming.

<comment><USER5> Lync is the primary way to communicate in the large corporation I work for today. It replaced my desk phone. I would never want to go back to a traditional physical phone.

<comment><USER6> I'll pile on here. Lync's fantastic. Seamless integration, multi-device. Has phone support that's just plug-n-play (over USB). Proper presence info that just works. The tie-ins with Outlook/OWA/Exchange for voicemail and such is also really slick.

Slick and easy call management (forward, sent to group, VM), easy IM, group IM, easy escalation to screen sharing or voice and video conferencing. All of this is secured by your own TLS certs. IM history goes into Outlook, one simple place for all forms of communication from SMS to missed calls, voicemails, IMs and emails.

Edit: Oh, also, easy federated IM. We can now have customers federate via O365 and IM us directly. There are blocking tools in place to prevent abuse. But it's far better than having to list a Skype/GTalk/AIM/MSN ID.

I'd love to know of a non-enterprise competitor in this space (like why go to Cisco over MS?). Pretty much everything I've seen is not remotely on the same level. For example, they'll plaster a "Dial" toolbar by rendering on top of some other part of the Outlook UI, and then call that integrated dialing. Or you'll have to use a web UI somewhere and login to a phone just to change your call forwarding settings.

No particular pieces are terribly hard by themselves, but it's a massive amount of work to get it all really polished up and have it just work so wonderfully. Without the centerpoint of Exchange/Outlook, I think a Lync competitor has a pretty big uphill battle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Microsoft's biggest competitor for office suites is Google Apps,

Disagree. I'm a spreadsheet-fan and Numbers (mac version of Excel) is waaay better than Google Doc's spreadsheet. In fact, Numbers rivals Excel in many ways. For those who haven't used it, Numbers is more of a container that holds all kinds of objects, like media files, text fields, and including spreadsheets. This model, I've found, is way more effective at communicating concepts that require textual descriptions alongside small blocks of spreadsheets.

<comment><USER8> > Numbers rivals Excel in many ways

The only use case Numbers performs well is as spreadsheet presentation software with the ability to edit. If you need to work with a lot of data or crunch a lot of numbers, it's not even close. Excel wins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems to me that this is a situation similar to the one Dropbox found itself in when starting out - the key obstacle for getting a file hosting service to take off was universal device compatibility, and they spent a ton of time on it and nailed it.

For any startup or other competitors to Office, the one key feature they must get right is document compatibility. I know Microsoft doesn't play fair in that regard, but I'm sure a motivated enough team could crack it.

Office is actually decent for being MS software, but a simplified and streamlined web experience, reduced feature bloat, with online collaborative tools, and made available free or cheap could steal a lot of market share.

<comment><USER10> > a simplified and streamlined web experience, reduced feature bloat, with > online collaborative tools, and made available free or cheap could steal a > lot of market share.

Microsoft has this solution: [https://skydrive.live.com](https://skydrive.live.com)

SkyDrive and the associated Office "lite" apps are free and feature light versions of the Office suite products. For business there is the Office365 apps which are the logical progression.

Also, the desktop versions of the Office apps integrate with these cloud based services.

For larger companies, there are also options to run in a private cloud and/or behind the firewall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a lawyer, the only option is Office. I've tried Docs and it's terrible. Libreoffice had problems with ordered lists.

Office is far and away better than anything else out there in ease of use and professional look.

</comment><comment><USER12> This thread is thick with dubious possible-astroturfing. Please, people, when you're writing about commercialized products, try not to sound like their PR team - you lose credibility even if you are genuine users.

<comment><USER6> How do you suggest writing about a product that has turned out really fantastic for your org? A product that appears to be far ahead of the competition? I give my sincere opinion on Lync (although I didn't mention that it's a real pain to configure for on-premise deploy) - after 9 years in telecom, here's something that works like it should.

<comment><USER12> Phrases like "the competition" set off my buzzword detector.

I'm not ever thinking about 'the competition' of the products I'm using, I'm thinking of other ways to solve the same problem.

I dunno, just try to stick to more descriptive terms - "It's worked really well for us compared to the other telephony systems we've used", vs "it's far ahead of the competition"? I'm not a writer by trade.

<comment><USER13> Lol, I personally would have preferred he wrote it in Shakespearian "tith functioning supercedith thus of thyne competitors"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Out of curiosity, where does HN stand on Office suites? I use iWork for most of my work, but if I need to work on something quickly on any computer I use Google. What do the rest of you use? Does anyone prefer Office?

<comment><USER15> LibreOffice. I can download it and install it faster than Microsoft Office, even if the Office disc is in the drive. (I use Office stuff rarely enough where that actually matters.)

Plus, LibreOffice is kind of the only option on Linux.

I don't use my Mac for anything serious outside of XCode.

<comment><USER16> LibreOffice is goddamn awful. They should just scrap the whole thing and start over, because I have never _not_ been screwed by LibreOffice.

Make a presentation within L.O., save it to the native L.O. format, then when I open it again later, things have moved and fonts are different.

Any form the company sends me will be displayed incorrectly. Maybe fields won't be fillable, or only some of the checkboxes will check. Maybe the 2 page form will magically spread to 3 pages. Maybe it won't print at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also, google docs has been renamed to google drive, even if no one wants to call it google drive.

<comment><USER13> And the way to download these serious work apps is through Google Play

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just wrote my first proposal in Docs today, as an experiment to see if we can stop emailing Word documents back and forth. Google Docs is missing some very basic features, like page numbers in the table of contents, and the ability to hide the footer and header on the first page.

That said, creating a cover page and table of contents as separate documents and combining the pdfs later still seems like it'll better overall than dealing with Word.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's "iWork", not "iWorks". It doesn't care what bloggers say about it, as long as they spell its name right ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Spreadsheets are adequate for basic spreadsheet use and Docs is good enough for most document processing. Any time you start to lean in toward the complex functionality or dealing with large data sets you are going to wish you had a binary installed on your local machine.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love me some Word/Excel/PowerPoint (even the much maligned Ribbon), and Google Docs doesn't have anything close to Office's feature set. That said, the ability to edit a document simultaneously in Google Docs is its killer feature. The UX for this feature in Word/Excel (haven't tried PowerPoint yet) is nowhere near as good, in my humble opinion. I find myself doing collaborative composition in Docs and then, when necessary, moving to Word/Excel to finish editing. (Also, it would be nice if I could edit spreadsheets and presentations online in SharePoint.)

</comment><comment><USER21> My colleagues and I did numerous presentations in National (U.S.) conferences in 2012 and 2013. I'm sure that my team was the only one using Keynote instead of PowerPoint.

Taht being said, we get a lot of questions from the attendees and other presenters about our presentation. Other presenters wanted to know how to make theirs like ours in PowerPoint.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you believe it, maybe it will happen!

[isn't that called "delusional"?]</comment>


The Moment That I Decided I Would Not Finish Fallout 2 (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://thiscageisworms.com/2012/02/28/the-moment-that-i-decided-i-would-not-finish-fallout-2/

<comment><USER2> The Wanamingo mine is a huge pain, because there's basically no weapons that are very effective against them. Fallout's combat is fun when it's a brief, lethal shoot-out with human enemies, but any prolonged fight with non-human enemies can be a slog. Unfortunately, both of the original games start out in areas that feature prolonged fights with non-human enemies (rats and radscorpions in FO1, the temple trial and Trapper Town in FO2). FO2 also has the mission where you have to clear the aliens out of the tanker's hold, and the robots in the army depot can be a pain. None of those are mandatory, luckily, and the Wanamingo mine is almost entirely pointless because it only makes you a little bit of worthless money.

</comment><comment><USER3> If this frustrated anyone else out there, I recommend checking out the fallout2 restoration project: [http://killap.net/](http://killap.net/)

It makes it possible to reunite sulik with his sister, as well as roughly doubling the content in the rest of the game as well. It's a massive upgrade.

<comment><USER2> I found the quality of writing and level design in the new content F2RP offers to be pretty inconsistent with the rest of the game. The unofficial patch that fixes the various bugs in the game (including some which blocked off content that should have been accessible) is very worthwhile, though.</comment></comment>


WordPress, Joomla and Drupal Are Not the Best CMS - <AUTHOR> https://www.cmscritic.com/wordpress-joomla-and-drupal-are-not-the-best-cms/ <comment><USER2> Has anyone used keystone.js? I am looking for a developer(node/js) friendly CMS.

Ghost is a good idea, but its a blogging platform...and we all know you shouldn't turn a blog into an ecommerce site.

I want something that has users and authentication, but a non-technical person could maybe have an admin to edit content or drop widgets.

<comment><USER3> I was wondering the same thing. I stumbled upon Keystone this weekend and it's the one that looks the most promising. Only cons is mongodb, it's lacking per template custom fields, and is not very designer-friendly.

I have in mind a straightforward CMS in Node/Express and Postgres, that would combine some ideas of Wordpress's Page/Posts and Taxonomies, and the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.

The whole schema would be defined by the theme, and each template could provide its own custom fields, with no admin-side configuration. And the CSS classes would be scoped to the template in order to avoid conflicts.

I'm no strong developer, so would probably need collaborators to help me out.</comment></comment>