HP Apologizes for Bricking Third-Party Cartridges, Will Restore Functionality - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/news/hp-apologizes-for-sabotaging-third-party-ink-cartridges <comment><USER2> This article promised a "sincere apology", but what followed instead was

> We updated a cartridge authentication procedure in select models of HP > office inkjet printers to ensure the best consumer experience and protect > them from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges [...]

That's insincere as hell. It all paraphrases to "We did this for your own good and we're sorry you got upset".

<comment><USER3> Even worse, as the article points out: This is a one-time thing. They'll do it again in the future, only that time with a warning in the EULA or something like that.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's how I read their "apology", too:

> _We should have done a better job of communicating about the authentication > procedure to customers, and we apologize._

Note that the apology was for not properly disclosing what they were doing, rather than for what they were doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was recently in the market for a label printer. Dymo is the leader on this kind of products and as I was about to buy one I read this review

[https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VG8JOAJDWJ0E/ref=cm_cr_dp_ti...](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VG8JOAJDWJ0E/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0027JIIKQ&channel=detail- glance&nodeID=1064954&store=office-products)

as well as many like it, that explain how the printer will only accept original, overpriced Dymo labels.

I bought a Brother QL-700 instead, with ordinary labels that cost 1/5 of the price of the Dymo ones, and couldn't be happier.

Let's hope those practices hurt the businesses instead of helping their bottom line, that's the only way we will get rid of them.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, good to know.

We've bought a handheld Dymo LabelManager 280 for our Hackerspace. We've tried third-party labels, but we'll be back to official ones. Not because the third- party ones aren't supported - they very much are! It's because they turned out to be shitty; the quality of print is quite bad. Not a showstopper, but you don't spend money on a label printer to have shitty-looking labels everywhere.

<comment><USER7> To my paranoid side that raises an interesting question. They have the ability to know when approved labels are used in the device. They could just reject them, creating all kinds of bad publicity. Or they could degrade output quality on "unapproved" mediums then say earnestly, "This lack of quality is why we recommend using only Genuine Dynamo Labels®. Buy some today!"

<comment><USER8> You know, I'd be fine with the printer detecting the use of 3rd party ink cartridges and signalling this fact to the computer, so that a warning C n be displayed, as long as the printer and driver don't use that information to deliberately degrade the output.

And I'm not necessarily against using that information to void the warranty too.

<comment><USER9> > And I'm not necessarily against using that information to void the warranty > too.

In the US a manufacturer can't use a simple indicator like "you broke the seal" or "that's not an Original Manufacturer cartridge" to void a warranty. A warranty may only be voided if the specific act involved was the actual proximal cause of the failure of the product.

Anyone who tries to use "that voids the warranty" is usually just trying to invoke FUD with no legal standing.

<comment><USER10> I've never heard this, could you provide some sort of evidence of this? I was always under the impression that warranties were purely manufacturer defined and could be voided for any reason the manufacturer stated up front.

<comment><USER9> The Magnussen-Moss Warranty Act [1] lays out many requirements and terms of reference for warranties in the US. One specific requirement:

"Warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.[7] This is commonly referred to as the "tie-in sales" provisions,[8] and is frequently mentioned in the context of third- party computer parts, such as memory and hard drives." [Wikipedia]

Edit: Additionally, the onus is on the manufacturer to prove that a non-OEM part or service was the proximal cause of a warrantied failure. They don't get to put it back on you without proving their case.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I squint my eyes (or brain) really hard I can just about believe that zero day exploits _could_ exist for a printer cartridge.

But then I just arrive at the conclusion that if you didn't add DRM and try to make cartridges "smart" there wouldn't even be a security vector...

<comment><USER6> That can be said about a lot of things now. Coffee makers, anyone?

DRM is mostly a tool to support shitty business models, and _above that_ , it tends to introduce new attack vectors.

</comment></comment><comment> amiga-workbench Spend a bit more and get yourself a Brother monochrome laser printer, you won't have to deal with it squirting half of its ink down the drain every time it needs to unclog.

<comment><USER12> I've got a Samsung monochrome laser printer, best purchase ever.

<comment><USER13> Good you have one now, HP just agreed to purchase Samsung's printer division. [1]

I can't see this ending in a better customer experience for future Samsung printer models.

It's a shame. I've had several Samsung CLP series laser printers and they've all worked amazingly well for many years.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478699)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "When ink cartridges are cloned or counterfeited, the customer is exposed to quality and potential security risks, compromising the printing experience." [1]

I know there's security risks in the printer and in any other thing plugged into a network, but what's the security risk in a cartridge? A cartridge can be hacked and then...? Can a cartridge really be owned? What can possibly be done then?

[1] [http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/blog/Small-Business- Printin...](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/blog/Small-Business- Printing/best-possible-printing-experience.html)

<comment><USER15> If you can hack an HP printer by installing a cartridge from a third party, then HP has even more embarrassing security problems to apologize for.

<comment><USER16> I would love to meet the person who owns a printer using a hacked ink cartridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why bother, just go with the new Epson Eco-Tank printer ET-3600 and you get the ink tanks on the side, basically a continuous ink system. You can buy a gallon off non-epson ink (like Nano Digital brand ink) and literally print color for fractions of a penny per page. Cartridges seem so outdated.

<comment><USER18> Just looked this up as I have not heard of it before.

"Cartridge-free printing — comes with up to 2 years of ink in the box" \- I really like this bit.

Any idea how this works from a dollars & cents perspective?

<comment><USER19> They're filling radio adverts here in the UK about them, claiming "new tanks cost as little as £6".

If replacements won't be needed for 2 years I figure most people will expect it to have broken and been taken off the market by then...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't care. HP is on my no-buy list until they promise to not do this again. Ever. I don't own an HP printer today and I probably now won't for a while. DRM stunts like this, the surprise bricking of working hardware, are not forgiven overnight.

<comment><USER21> Apologies and promises are worthless. If they move to free software and firmware, I might consider them again. No trust required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My first inkjet printer was a HP Deskjet 500. It was fantastic (for its day and my requirements), robust and seemingly lasted forever. I eventually upgraded to something that did colour, but no printer I've had since, HP or otherwise has ever been as reliable as that old printer.

It is sad that I'm now in a position where I won't buy another HP printer while the cloud of them restricting my ink choices lingers.

<comment><USER3> Just give up on ink. Laser printers are much better in every regard, and are only bought less because they can't be pushed out the door for less than a restaurant bill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This headline lacks the words "getting" and "caught".

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought I'd had the inkjet game beat when I saw Epson color printers at Walmart for < $50.

Since it cost $50+ for new color and black cartridges I figured I'd just buy a new printer every time the old one ran out.

Sadly new printers come with super small cartridges.

</comment><comment><USER25> So now will they stop bricking "Genuine HP" cartridges every time I look away from the printer for a few days?

</comment><comment><USER26> This is normal. I'd expect the sales of ink cartridges to be a bigger business than the sale of printers itself.

<comment><USER27> _> I'd expect ..._

Yes, that has been the case for many years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yes, I want a better user experience. That's why I'm not buying any more HP Inkjets

</comment><comment><USER29> Good luck the customers will be very happy with your apology. /s</comment>


Ask HN: Is Facebook worth $15 Billion? - <AUTHOR>

Rough comparison: Yahoo's market capitalization is now about $35 billion. With about 506 million unique visitors in March, that translates to about $71 per visitor. Apply that same metric to Facebook's 109 million unique visitors and the company would be worth $7.7 billion, about half the value implied in the Microsoft deal of $240 million for 1.6% Facebook stake.<p>Source: New York times. <comment><USER2> [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/facebook-back- of...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/facebook-back-of-the- envelope-calculations.html) (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=161583>)

[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/facebook-back- of...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/facebook-back-of-the- envelope-calculation-ii.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> IMHO - No.</comment>


How do you manage/track your health and fitness today? - <AUTHOR> I want to be able to see easy to understand analytics combining my lab results, checkup information, sleep & exercise data, and genetic information into actionable, preventative and predictive results. If someone works to connect all the EHR systems, this seems like a purely UX + Data/ML issue. What do you think? <comment><USER2> I have a small log in my emacs org mode. I note when I feel bad, pain, whatever. This allows me to see quite a lot about me and put my evolution in perspective. Since I do it by hand, it forces me to distillate information and it goes at the speed of what I note (you don't need realtime information about your sleep patterns, a once per week check up is more than enough)

Bonus point : I'm the only one to read it, no GDPR issue, no privacy issues. Simple, effective.</comment>


Jawbone Raises $49 Million from Andreessen Horowitz - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/16/jawbone-raises-49-million-from-andreessen-horowitz-to-dominate-your-mobile-accessory-world/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> I had a Jawbone Hero for approximately 8 days (I bought it so I could communicate with my team while I drove home). In any case the device was great, less the fact that it has only 3-4 hours of talk time... but that is standard for bluetooth. I loved it and would continue to use it but it was stolen from my office desk.....</comment>


Why Lego Design Principles Don't Work On Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3017409/why-lego-design-principles-dont-work-on-smartphones

<comment><USER2> Let's doubt technology that doesn't exist for the simple reason that it doesn't exist!

If the first computer would have been Macs where you couldn't change the pieces at all, everyone would be doubting the person that would come up with the idea of a PC that you can change the hard drive, ram, graphic card. "But, it would be slower! And bulkier!"... Yep, pretty much describes what everyone feel about the whole PC vs Mac war... and a lot of people use the argument that PC are easier to customize, which makes them superior even if they are not as pretty or user friendly as Macs.</comment>


Can Facebook Be Fixed? Should It Be? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/facebook-chris-hughes.html <comment><USER2> Social media with an ad-based business model inherently incentivises maximizing engagement in both time and intensity. The time incentive leads to addiction. The intensity incentive leads to promoting hyperbolic content. (The latter almost always leads to divisive, angry content.)

Breaking that incentive structure is tough. It would mean substantially re- building the company, perhaps down to its business model, corporate organization and management. (It almost certainly requires breaking WhatsApp and Instagram off as separate companies.)

<comment><USER3> Media with an ad-based business model inherently incentives maximizing engagement in both time and intensity. The time incentive leads to addiction. The intensity incentive leads to promoting hyperbolic content. (The latter almost always leads to divisive, angry content.) Breaking that incentive structure is tough. It would mean substantially re-building the company(ies), perhaps down to its business model, corporate organization and management.

Fixed a couple typos.

To be literal though, I agree with your point but I find a massive irony in News having the same inherent flaws as social media while also leading the charge against Facebook etc. It's all rotten.

<comment><USER2> > _I find a massive irony in News having the same inherent flaws as social > media_

News is broadcast, _i.e._ few to many. If the _New York Times_ or _Wall Street Journal_ or _RT_ say something insidious, everyone has a chance to call them out on it.

Social media is closer to P2P. Content is selectively targeted over the social graph. Platforms' ad models further microtarget along ideological lines. This makes it difficult or even impossible to know what someone in another domain is seeing, which makes responding in a timely manner practically impossible.

(Also, mass media is nowhere close to social media when it comes to the prevalence and intensity of addiction.)

TL; DR The problems mass media has with addictiveness and hyperbole are amplified on ad-driven social media platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Facebook is a "Public Square"? Please. Call a spade a spade... it is a "Walled Garden". If you don't like how the roses are starting to smell, well, step outside the gates, no one is keeping you in:

[https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674](https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674)

<comment><USER5> Facebook is tracking you online, even if you don't have an account

[https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if- you-d...](https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if-you-dont- have-account-888699)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Between the title and the first paragraph, there is a prominent 'like on Facebook' button, so the subtext is pro-Facebook no matter what is written in the article.

<comment><USER7> Or maybe it underscores the point that using Facebook is an uncomfortable requirement for many people and businesses, no matter how much they might hate it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMO there is very little need for the friends mechanism on Facebook. I think you should just add people you are interested in, and they add you if they are interested in you, and there should be no confirmation whether you were added or not. That way there is less of the toxic clique behavior possible where you unfriend or refuse to friend someone, no popularity contest or friend counts, and the current behavior of seeing friend-only posts would still function if you mutually added each other. The way it is designed seems to me to invite drama and is a big problem. Please change it, Mark!

<comment><USER9> Seems pretty similar to the Twitter model, which still produces plenty of toxic behavior

<comment><USER8> Yes, minus follower counts and the ability to see followers/follows. There is no practical reason I can see to have those features. I consider Facebook to be a useful public utility like a modern white pages and I wish the design was just a little different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone needs to create a new social network that will import the data blob that Facebook creates when users request all their data.

In fact, this new social network will automatically request all your data, download it, and import it for you if you enter your Facebook credentials.

Double fact, this new social network runs on top of a blockchain and you keep the keys and from this point forward, you control access to your data and all future data added to the site.

If you control the keys, its your data. If you don't control the keys, its not your data.

<comment><USER11> Why do you want a 'new social network'? As in a place where you're primarily signaling to strangers or acquaintances, as opposed to, say, just a way to have actual relationships with people who you actually want to have a relationship (plus events, of course)? It feels like what's missing from Facebook isn't simply data privacy, it's a fundamental premise about relationships and discourse, but I'm curious if I'm missing something.

<comment><USER12> What would you call that "way to have actual relationships, etc."? It's a social network. Just one of a different kind.

I think Facebook understands that very well, or at least Zuckerberg does, and that's why they're taking that turn towards community, reflected in their new mission statement and new initiatives.

People don't give Facebook enough credit sometimes, and I'm saying that as someone who almost never uses their services. They know what an ideal social network would be. Now it remains to be seen if they can pivot the current behemoth into that ideal in a viable, profitable way. Short of that, they'll probably get "disrupted" sooner than later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite comment:

 _> Zuckerberg's power seems quintessentially American to me and reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our economic model: compete until you succeed, but if you succeed too much you're being anti-competitive. Free- market fundamentalists should be rejoicing at the success of Facebook, Amazon and Google. They represent the holy grail at the end of the Darwinian quest. Isn't this perfection? What could go wrong? There's no better time to wake up and realize we're in bed with the Devil. — Mark Holmes, Twain Harte, Calif._

This is what happens when deregulation is taken to the extreme. Facebook is a company that breaks laws, flagrantly violates our privacy, buys or clones all its competition, and offers mere tokens of recompense when people use it to influence elections or coordinate genocide — but also experiences virtually no repercussions for its actions, because it's making investors money.

<comment><USER13> Free markets and democracies are good at a lot of things, but self preservation is NOT one of them -- in fact, if practiced at the extreme, it is basically guaranteed that a sufficiently large winner-takes-it-all will take over {free-market,democracy} and dismantle it.

That's why you need all kinds of checks and balances and regulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/11/big- te...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/11/big-tech- progressive-vision-silicon-valley)</comment>


Why Is iTunes So Bad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/why-is-itunes-so-bad/399833/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> If iTunes is bad you should check out Apple Music...

[https://www.useronboard.com/how-applemusic-onboards-new- user...](https://www.useronboard.com/how-applemusic-onboards-new-users/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeesh! That's terrible. It makes iTunes look simple by comparison.</comment></comment>


Further Reflections on Amanita Muscaria as an Edible Species (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://bayareamushrooms.org/education/further_reflections_amanita_muscaria.html <comment><USER2> Back when I studied biology, I found it fascinating that two of the major categories of neurotransmitter receptors are muscarinic and nicotinic receptors, named after: muscarine, from the Amanita muscaria mushroom; and nicotine, from tobacco and other plants from the nightshade family.

<comment><USER3> Nit, Amanita muscaria does not really contain muscarin but muscimol and ibotenic acid. Latter causes stomach upset.

<comment><USER2> I see, you're right - according to Wikipedia:

"Muscarine is only a trace compound in the fly agaric Amanita muscaria; the pharmacologically more relevant compounds from this mushroom are ibotenic acid and muscimol. A. muscaria fruitbodies contain a variable dose of muscarine, usually around 0.0003% fresh weight."

Looks like there's a historical reason why muscarine is associated with Amanita muscaria: it was first isolated from the mushroom by a German chemist in 1869.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the difference between a mushroom that is poisonous unless boiled, and, say, a potato? If we consider potatoes "edible"—do we?—then it'd make sense to me to classify these mushrooms the same way.

<comment><USER5> With many edible fungi species - Boletes for instance - boiling can be the difference between getting sick (2-3 days of GI distress) and a good meal.

When it comes to other species like Amanita phalloides (death cap) or Galerina sp. - which contain Amatoxins and resemble edibles - boiling will have no effect: You will need a liver transplant [1].

Amanita muscaria does not contain amatoxins - but it does contain muscimol and ibotenic acid, which are interesting in their own right [2].

1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amatoxin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amatoxin)

2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscimol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscimol)

<comment><USER6> > With many edible fungi species - Boletes for instance

What are examples of bolete species that are only edible if boiled? I know of a lot that are only edible if well cooked, but haven't heard of any that are only edible if specifically boiled. (I'm from New England / mid-Atlantic though, so I only know the ones around here.)

<comment><USER7> Boletus erythropus, but eating Boletus with red pores is a bad idea. The venomous species share this feature.

In theory, Is said that venomous boletus boiled are less toxic, but they still have unpleasant effects.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Yeah I've never used the regional bolete rules-of-thumb (not red/orange pored, not fast blueing, not B. huronensis) to decide whether or not to eat something.

I think I need to just go take the Eagle Hill bolete class with the Bessettes one year if they keep offering it, otherwise I feel like they're just too hard to really ID beyond the handful of really easy ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Foodie here. I love a good Chantarelle or Maitake as well as the next guy, but I don't understand what could be left of the flavor (not to mention nutrition) in anything that you boiled long enough to detoxify it.

What's the point in all of this tempting of the Fates who are in charge of poisons?

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting (scary?) to note that the Wikipedia article for _Amanita muscaria_ briefly mentions de-toxification in the above-the-fold section.

</comment><comment><USER10> As with many things that may or may not be too poisonous to count as food, it's worth looking at these compared to ethanol. The lethal dose of ethanol is fairly low multiple of the dose that will provide a buzzed or pleasantly drunk state. Seems like these Muscaria follow that same pattern.

In a sense, they are less toxic than ethanol because they can in principle be detoxified by cooking. Compared to ethanol, the main worry seems to be the inconsistent concentration of intoxicants between mushrooms, and the delayed psychotropic effect making it hard to tell if you've consumed too much.

<comment><USER11> You pointed out one aspect: the in inconsistent concentration of intoxicants.

You are missing another crucial point: time until onset of the effects.

It is much easier to consume a lethal dose of mushrooms than ethanol before your body violently rejects the poison (colloquially known as "vomiting")</comment></comment>


New AWS SDKs for Mobile Development (Android and iOS) - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/12/new-aws-sdks-for-mobile-development.html

<comment><USER2> These are two great SDK's and I'm looking forward to using them in future projects. Also kudos to Amazon for tackling the problem with AWS credential storage in apps for mobile devices.

It should be noted that this SDK is only for testing and not for deployment, since the two proposed solutions for secure credential management (IAM and session tokens) are not yet released ("Credential Management in Mobile Applications": <http://aws.amazon.com/articles/SDKs/Android/4611615499399490>)

" _Embedding credentials in source code is problematic for software, including mobile applications, because malicious users can de-compile the software or view the source code to retrieve the Secret Access Key._ "</comment>


One Gene Lost = One Limb Regained? - <AUTHOR> http://www.labspaces.net/102541/__gene_lost_____limb_regained_ <comment><USER2> I, B.S., think that the overuse of academic titles in this article makes it very hard to read.

Really, how medieval! It's not like the titles confer any extra knowledge to me, the uninitiated, yet interested reader. Does it matter that one of them has an MD and a PhD? It seems like those British military leaders of the first World War, General Sir Douglas Haig, Jethro Lord Walrustitty, or some such.</comment>


How to go about getting a credit card processor - <AUTHOR> http://stakeventures.com/articles/2009/03/24/how-do-go-about-getting-a-credit-card-processor

<comment><USER2> What's CVV?

<comment><USER3> It's the numeric code on the back of the card near your signature.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Security_Code></comment></comment>


EditorConfig - <AUTHOR> http://editorconfig.org/? <comment><USER2> The idea seems very cool, but I wonder if there is anything like this that could have more language specific stuff like "in JS (or Ruby, or ...) format your hashes/object literals/arrays/constants/... like so."

I like this, but the list of supported properties seems pretty short. I can see there might be some difficulties making it language-aware since the file formats are simple globs, but maybe you could say something like:

      [*.js]
      language_style = javascript

and somewhere describe that language_style in more detail.

<comment><USER3> .editorconfig supports domain specific properties: [https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/EditorConf...](https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/EditorConf..). Its encouraged that other extensions/tooling take a dependency on .editorconfig to introduce their own configuration.

<comment><USER4> Fixed link: [https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/EditorConf...](https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/EditorConfig- Properties#ideas-for-domain-specific-properties)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> EditorConfig is excellent. Straightforward to write a configuration file and pretty great editor support. I've only ever used the Vim plugin, but it works seamlessly such that I don't even notice.

</comment><comment><USER6> Might it make more sense to rather compile the editorconfig file into the respective editor's config file? That way you need not depend on a plugin being written for the editor. This would mean that you could support more editors and enhance editor configurations without having to wait for the plugin to update to support your own new features. This would be at the cost of the ease of simply editing a single file, though it could be set up that, when compiled, the system will back the old config file up and insert the new one in its place.

<comment><USER7> EditorConfig support built-in to your text editor is the pipe dream. JetBrains 9 will have EditorConfig support, but no other editors yet support it natively so all of the plugins are necessary currently.

Unfortunately many editors do not support project-level configuration files by default. A conversion tool could be a good way to make global configurations even more accessible for editors that do support project configuration files and don't have native EditorConfig support yet.

Until native support becomes more common, EditorConfig acts as an unopinionated universal editor-level linter of sorts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your favorite editor does not yet have an EditorConfig plugin, feel free to tweet @EditorConfig or open an issue.

The Eclipse plugin has a small bounty on it right now. Maybe someone will create one if some more money is pitched in: [https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/271/support- eclipse](https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/271/support-eclipse)

</comment><comment><USER8> The logo is so cute. Did you notice the mouse has blue eyes and pink ears ?

<comment><USER9> Hmm, I can see the pink ears, the blue eyes not so much. I may need to calibrate my monitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using this for at least a couple of years and was expecting it to develop further (offer more common settings for editors) and to gain native support as, for example, the Sublime Text plugin loads the file using default tab size, then EditorConfig plugin kicks in and changes tab size to 4, let's say, which causes a full redraw and that always annoys me.

<comment><USER7> Native support is the ultimate goal. WebStorm 9 will have EditorConfig support built-in (as noted here: [https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/nextversion/](https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/nextversion/)).

<comment><USER10> Great! Let's keep spreading awareness so that this becomes a high-demand item for each editors! I personally commit to make a PR to each major project I use as I found out about EditorConfig just by being curious about the config file in a project, so, this will definitely boost adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved EditorConfig until tools like clang-format[1] and gofmt[2] showed up. Combine those with Git's hooks and you really got something.

[1]: [http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html](http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html)

[2]: [https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/](https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/)

<comment><USER12> Scalariform is pretty awesome too: [https://github.com/mdr/scalariform](https://github.com/mdr/scalariform)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Combine with something like [https://github.com/schorfES/grunt- lintspaces](https://github.com/schorfES/grunt-lintspaces) to check that all code complies + some tests before or after you push your code upstream to eg. Git and you'll get a much more consistent code base when it comes to whitespaces.

<comment><USER14> If your project doesn't use Grunt, but you do use Vim, you can put the following in your .vimrc

        " Remove trailing whitespace for everything but markdown.
        let whitespace_blacklist = ['markdown']
        autocmd BufWritePre * if index(whitespace_blacklist, &ft) < 0 | :%s/\s\+$//e

There's also several ways to use Git for removing trailing whitespace, if you prefer that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was surprised this only appeared here today.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to see an editor that let me see the code in the way I preferred (perhaps even as far as rendering Java as Lisp), but wrote the code to disk according to the EditorConfig.

<comment><USER17> From what I've seen, people sometimes accomplish this with git hooks. Well, not exactly what you want, but the basic: you see something different as is eventually saved to repository (and vice versa).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's been a while since I found something immediately useful for me a this thing. Thank you so much.

I use Emacs but I hate with passion configuring it. Not anymore :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Have used this in a handful of projects. Works as advertised. Easy to setup.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder when Netbeans will support this

<comment><USER7> There is a community-contributed EditorConfig NetBeans plugin but it doesn't have a license or installation instructions: [https://github.com/geertjanw/editorconfig- netbeans](https://github.com/geertjanw/editorconfig-netbeans)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pleased to see RubyMine support!

</comment><comment><USER22> If the IDE would just let me plug in whatever editor I like the most, that would be great.

I guess there could be conflicts with things like hotkeys, but some tweaking should get rid of such incompatibilities.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why would you launch without Eclipse?

<comment><USER24> If you do go ahead and build support for it there is a small bounty already up for grabs.

[https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/271/support- eclipse](https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/271/support-eclipse)</comment></comment>


SD lawmakers declare state of 'emergency' to force repeal of ethics law - <AUTHOR> https://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/south-dakota-lawmakers-declare-state-of-emergency-to-force-repeal-of-voter-imposed-ethics-law/ <comment><USER2> If you want to "bribe" someone, you don't hand them cash. You fly them to that industry conference in Hawaii in February. You give their spouse a non-job. You give them great interest rates on loans. You help their kid get into college. You buy the house next to theirs, tear it down, and make it a beautiful, lush lawn.

* Those are all real situations.

Protip: This is not a Republican vs Democrat issue.. just people getting massive kickbacks for using their power in specific ways.

<comment><USER3> The article clearly identifies this as a Republican issue in both SD and ND?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Lawmakers who are found guilty of violating the act face $1,000 in fines > and up to one year in prison._

This seems to be a bizarrely asymmetric pair of punishments. Someone on higher than the average wage can pay $1k without blinking, but a year in prison is career-crippling.

<comment><USER5> I once went on a blind date with a prosecutor from a large city, who worked in a department that investigated corrupt cops, lawyers, politicians and city employees. She said some of them were straight up psycholopaths that needed the book thrown at them. Others who had a singular lapse in judgment and found themselves on the wrong side of the law received some leniency. So penalties like this are to give the judge or jury a tool to remove someone permanently from the position they abuse, or to give them an opportunity to make amends. Or re-offend but second offenses often carry stiffer penalties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not a lawyer but it seems kind of like these politicians might be setting themselves up to become targets of a RICO investigation.

</comment><comment><USER6> They really don't even try, do they?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious as to what emergency the state is going through right now. At face value it only seems to be an emergency of abuse of power and breach of ethics...</comment>


Ask HN: What SaaS do you pay for you don't think I've heard about? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Storyblok.com could be one you may never heard before. ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Evaluate my startup idea: Q&A website for solving health problems - <AUTHOR>

The idea of this website is to help people solve their personal health problems through the form of question and answer to a community of people.
People will ask questions about a disease or symptom they have; someone who has the same health problem can share their experience on how they mitigated or cured it.
I want to know if you think this offers enough value for people, or is a bad idea that will result in fail. Please explain your reasoning. <comment><USER2> I thought about doing this, but had some other projects. I disagree with the comments below. This is an excellent idea, if you can execute it well.

Existing websites that are open to the public (as opposed to answered by a medical practitioner) are full of spam. So you would need to monitor it carefully.

But I don't think that there is some added danger that people will not seek real medical assistance. To the contrary, they may find that something that they would normally wait to go away actually requires early medical assistance. Plus, most people already do ask around when it is something they can talk about. All you would do is to put that discussion online.

</comment><comment><USER3> Things to consider:

1.) Creating a filter system that finely discriminates between similar conditions (i.e. many ailments have very similar external symptoms, how will you distinguish between them?), but don't make it overly complex with a million options because people will get confused

2.) A novel rating system that can eliminate bad suggestions and bring to the top the most effective solutions (perhaps individuals who contribute some of the most effective treatments gain special status??)

3.) Personal picture and video submissions may be helpful, but always hold peoples' privacy with utmost regard; also, should you choose to incorporate multimedia into your site, do so with caution as I personally would not be so inclined to visit your site if I were greeted with throbbing pustules every which way!

This is an idea I (along with thousands of people I'm sure) have thought about. WebMD isn't bad but it can definitely be better.

If you want someone to bounce additional ideas off of let me know!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is particularly dangerous, and I really worry about health sites in general, because if people trust the advice too much, they may not choose to go to doctor (rising health care costs, no insurance, ...) in lieu of listening to advice from the site. Then, when a severe case breaks out, people will spend weeks trying others' recommendations rather than getting a real diagnosis

Not to be a Debbie downer, but Im curious as to how you could indicate when a symptom is serious enough to warrant real help. Unless you try a Quora style system (only allowing doctor rs to respond)

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't really offer an opinion of success/failure, but the idea makes me highly uncomfortable. As is, self-misdiagnosis is high, with untrained people flocking towards "popular"/well-known diseases that "kind of fits" their symptoms, or finding out about a disease they hadn't previously known about that sounds "just like" what they have, or just chasing zebras. With a community encouraging and amplifying this effect... I'm slightly terrified.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I can imagine this website breeding communities of hypochondriacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Try doing a search for health forum. Here is one example

<http://www.healthboards.com/boards/forumdisplay.php?f=58>

It doesnt mean it cant be a startup, but things like it do exist. If you make something you will need to create a spin.

I thought webmd did this but the discussions are buried many layers deep.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's called WebMD.com.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good idea, very high value, but VERY difficult to make sure you get high quality answers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't forget that IBM's Watson is bound to enter this exact market.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bad idea. Trust me.</comment>


Richard Rorty: Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/richard-rorty-life-pragmatism-and-conversational-philosophy/ <comment><USER2> I have read a number of Rorty's books, and he is strangely contradictory. On the one hand, he strongly supports democracy and the whole modern project. On the other hand, his essay The Contingency of the Self in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity presents a very Nietzschean view of the self as a nothing that can be made into something only by creating by telling myths that fool others into thinking you know something important.

As for the claim that democracy is based on the idea there is no objective truth, and instead we create it through conversation, that is certainly not what the American founding fathers thought.

<comment><USER3> In "Philosophy and Social Hope" I think he addresses what you and probably a lot of people see as a contradiction.

He supports the Western views of democracy, the rights of individualism, etc and points to the success of the western world as having to do with the result of these ideas being whiled embraced. Yet, you're right, his views are also very Nietzschean. So he can't say that the success of these ideas is because of something "innate" or "universally metaphysical" behind them. They simply were tools that were used to yield certain historical results.

It's been a while since I've read any Rorty, but I'm nearly certain that when he is talking about this he uses some language about "fate" vs "luck". Where we like to think that it was the fate of these western values to produce great societies, when really it could be, from an epistemic viewpoint, just luck.

<comment><USER2> Let me say a bit about where I am coming from. I see Rorty as an example of what I call a "pseudo-anti-foundationalist" Authentic anti-foundationalism holds there is a real independent reality, and we can say a great deal definite about it, we just can never describe it entirely or with a single set of concepts.

Rorty's Nietzschean pseudo-anti-foundationalism holds there is nothing definite out there and so we are free to make our descriptions as we wish. Many people like this idea because of the common claim that different cultures think of reality entirely differently, but that is not true. In fact there are enormous commonalities, and this is because there are real, independent realities that we all have to deal with to survive, like the necessity to eat, and what counts as food.

As for liberal democracy, I see it as based on a more authentic practical anti-foundationalism that was developed before academic philosophy got there. So for instance, if you can't capture all of reality with a single set of precise concepts, then you need to have lots of different people working on understanding it and contributing to making decisions, which is why you need free speech and various other characteristics of liberal democracy. Which is what Dewey, a much more sincere anti-foundationalist, said.

>It's been a while since I've read any Rorty, but I'm nearly certain that when he is talking about this he uses some language about "fate" vs "luck". Where we like to think that it was the fate of these western values to produce great societies, when really it could be, from an epistemic viewpoint, just luck.

Yes, that is an important point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Happy to see Rorty showing up on hn. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a must read. Even if you disagree with his views, the value comes in hearing out one strand in the lineage of Kuhn.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Although Rorty's polemical tone in his books and articles might suggest that he had a robust temperament, he was the opposite: gentle, shy, withdrawn, and sensitive."

His tone actually comes off as the latter to me. His work is intelligent but ultimately that of a weak pushover. I'm glad nobody is discussing this old- fashioned neoliberal. He was smart, but did not do what this writer seems to think he did.

<comment><USER6> _> neoliberal_

Rorty was not a neoliberal in any honest sense of the word. He was a liberal and a progressive, to be sure, but was decidedly not a neoliberal.

If you're confused about what "neoliberal" means, think "the intersection of things that Clinton and Reagan had in common", not "the things right-wing US commentators call liberal". Most true neoliberals in Congress are on the red team, for example.

Literally the only place I can find Rorty himself described as a neoliberal is in some Marxist critique of something or other. And those authors doesn't even make it through their criticism of Rorty without a blatant grammatical error, leading me to believe they don't take their characterization very seriously.</comment></comment>


The Internet makes magic disappear - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/11/the_internet_makes_magic_disappear/singleton/

<comment><USER2> If the article's premise is true, that there's a decline in the belief in magic due to having more information at your fingertips, that's good news to me. Sure, it'll mean a decline in the magic industry specifically (although it'll never die out entirely simply because watching someone perform a magic trick _well_ is amazing even though you know it's a trick). But it also means that people aren't taking what's fed to them on faith, and are looking behind the curtain. At a societal level, this is something we should definitely encourage.

</comment><comment><USER3> And yet Penn and Teller, who show you exactly how a trick is done after they do it, are still really entertaining.

There's a disconnect between "magic is an art that has to be practiced religiously to be good" and "we can't reveal the secret or it's ruined."

Even knowing how the trick works, it's very easy to appreciate the artistry of a good magician.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope magic did not depend on people actually believing the performance is magic? Even with youtube you can not become an instant magician, you still have to practice.

As for the shops, they just have the same problem all other shops have, online shopping is much more convenient.

</comment><comment><USER5> Article about decline of brick and mortar cites yellow pages. This is a joke right?</comment>


XnO - 3D Character Based Adventure Game for mobile devices. Launching soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaleclairs.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> X with his friends on a journey to rescue O!!</comment>


Online Bettors/Gamblers - <AUTHOR> Where do online gamblers/bettors hangout online? In terms of community group chats and reddit groups which are not obvious. <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to reach out to me! email@example.com ([https://yolorekt.com](https://yolorekt.com))</comment>


Operating a large distributed system in a reliable way: practices I learned - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/operating-a-high-scale-distributed-system/ <comment><USER2> I would add - you should start your monitoring with business metrics. Monitoring low level things is good to have but putting whole emphasis on it is missing the whole point. You should be able to answer at any point of time whether users are having a problem, what problem, how many users, what are they doing to workaround?

In other words, when person is in ER, doctors are looking for heartbeat, temperature, ... , not for some low level metric, like how many grams of oxygen is consumed by some specific cell.

<comment><USER3> Yes, in the ER, doctors look at things like heart rate, respiration rate, and temperature. But they also draw blood for electrolytes, glucose, creatine kinase, etc. since those can detect underlying problems which the body is compensating for.

A well designed distributed system is going to be able handle a certain failure rate in its components because requests will be retried automatically. If a component's failure rate increases from 0.01% to 0.1%, there will probably not be any user-visible impact... but if you can detect that increase, you might be able to correct the underlying issue before that component's failure rate increases to 1% or 10% or 100% -- at which point no amount of retrying will avoid problems.

<comment><USER4> You're missing the forest for the trees. The deeper metrics are important for diagnosis. The business metrics are what you care about.

I'd phrase your advice differently as well: monitor on contact points. Monitor where rubber meets road. Monitor where two components interesect, be it between teams working on frontend and backend components, your application and it's database, or low level metrics - the system API. I've found many interesting problems and averted several potential crises because I saw that the metrics things like requests looked different between the client and server, the system metrics and my applications, etc. Contact points are what's important, and it just happens that every (Figuratively) application has a contact point with the OS.

<comment><USER3> But that's my point: The deeper metrics aren't merely useful for diagnosis _after_ the business metrics go sideways; they can be useful as leading indicators, to warn you _before_ problems reach the point of affecting the business metrics which you care about.

<comment><USER5> The deep metrics, as you call them, get vanishingly irrelevant the larger the system gets, at least for the use case you mention.

To put it unscientifically, something always goes wrong, but that does not mean SLA is violated. As a corrollary, you will be alerted constantly about something that might go wrong because of some signal that someone thought might lead to some outage.

At face value it seems proactive, but it's really not. Better spend time actively making the system more reliable (e.g. look at your or someone else's postmortems, or do premortem exercises).

<comment><USER6> On the contrary, low level metrics become more important the larger a system gets, since the quantity of low probability events (e.g. cosmic ray bit flips) increases.

Without those "irrelevant" low level metrics for a large growing distributed system, you're not only flying blind but crashing increasingly more and more often.

<comment><USER5> You are just chasing your own tail by looking at those metrics. Your system needs to be resilient to these random events and you must account for those, that's for sure. But you would not put your focus on those, it's still the higher level alerts that are more relevant to the business.

Crashing more often is caught by an alert that looks at total capacity is s service. Doesn't matter if it's random bit flips or OOMing nodes at first. Longer term these metrics can be useful to increase efficiency again (should i first fix random bit flips or OOMing tasks). I would not base SLA relevant alerts on too low level alerts.

<comment><USER7> This is simply wrong. Quality starts in the basement, and works its way up. So if you monitor a system at the lowest level you will be able to build confidence about those layers and you will spot trends _long_ before they will become apparent at higher levels _because_ those higher levels will erase the fact that at lower levels things are already going wrong.

Systems that only monitor the highest levels appear to function fantastically well right up to the moment they crash spectacularly. Then the forensics will show you that at lower levels there were plenty of warning signs telling you that the system was headed for the cliffs and a large number of those signs will be apparent while there was still time to do something about them. Reliable systems engineering is not something you can do just at the highest levels because of the build in resilience in intermediary levels. This is counter-intuitive but born out in countless examples of systems that look robust but aren't versus those systems that really are robust.

<comment><USER8> After reading this thread, everyone convinced me there are good arguments for having different levels of metrics. I think we can better understand the problem if we introduce the word "priority".

Priority is always the customer. The focus can change given the circumstances and the context of each issue. Sometimes the focus must be high-level, sometime it requires a low-level focus, but the priority is always the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a good guide. One thing I'd add:

While you're monitoring for traffic/errors/latency throw in minimum success rate. Make a good estimate of how many successful operations monitored systems will do per minute on the slowest hour of the year and put in an alert if the throughput drops _below_ that. You'd be surprised how many 0 errors/0 successes faults happen in a complex system, and a minimum throughput alarm will catch them.

<comment><USER10> In some systems it's also nice to have a "canary" acting as the user to call your API every minute or so. Then even during low / no traffic hours you can still catch errors/outages/etc.

<comment><USER11> That's a prober, not a canary.

<comment><USER12> Sometimes things can be described in more than one way. Canary, readiness probe, health check, heartbeat, etc.

It makes communication more efficient and enjoyable when all parties are aware of this.

<comment><USER11> Yes, there are many words in the space. But there are also many classes of systems. It makes communication more efficient and enjoyable if all parties can think of the same thing when hearing a word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone recommend MOOCs and/or university courses (open syllabus) covering Distributed Systems?

<comment><USER14> Just go work as an SRE at Google for a couple years.

<comment><USER15> Or better work at AVL for a few years. Their large distributed system is real- time, and on failures people might die. Esp. in the Formula 1 dptmt, where everything is 10x faster and larger with much more sensors.

On normal complicated control systems, such as in an airplane, you do have plenty of time to complete your task in the given timeframe, but in F1 there's not much time left, and you have to optimize everything, HW, protocols and SW. Much harder than in gaming or at scale at Google/Facebook/Amazon.

Eg you have to convert your database rows from write-optimized to read- optimized on demand. A simple fast database cannot do both fast enough. A normal firewire protocol is not fast enough, you have split it up into trees. A normal CAN protocol ditto, you have to multiplex it. You have to load logic into the sensors to compress the data and filter it out, to help transmitting the huge amount of data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice article. The amount of in-house procedures/tooling developed by the backend seems impressive (maybe some not invented here syndrome but can't judge really). What I am astonished at though, is that the backend part of Über seems so professional while the Uber Android app feels like it's build by 2 junior outsourced devs. Have rarely used an app which felt so buggy and awkward. (aside from regular crashes, e.g. when registering for Jump-bikes in Germany inside the app, I had to restart the app to have the corresponding menue item appear).

<comment><USER17> Really? That's a bit surprising to me as I've always thought their app was slick, easy to use, and responsive. Out of curiosity what device are you on?

<comment><USER16> Huawei P10 lite. If that should be the explanation I would actually be relieved - as said, it didn't fit my mental model they wouldn't have a super slick app with so many Dev resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You need to have a strategy for backward (and forward) compatibility for your components. If the environment is large enough, you don't exactly know which component is running what version of the code as they are constantly (holding back on) upgrading some part of your system. This includes extra (paramaters to) RPC calls, data type evolution, schema evolution. Without a decent strategy you'll be in over your head quickly. (Tip : a version number for your API as part of the API v0.0.1, ain't gonna be enough)

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting. Although it is on the lite side. For example, it doesn't talk about chaos testing, defining effective and comprehensive metrics (KPIs), alert noise or running services like databases in an active-active (hot-hot) mode.

</comment><comment><USER20> Good read. There are a few things that I'd throw on top as important;

\- Active monitoring

\- Chaos testing

\- Cold start testing

</comment><comment><USER21> > I like to think of the effort to operate a distributed system being similar > to operating a large organization, like a hospital.

Clearly never worked for a hospital. Hospitals need good engineers (and often don't have them). Our 'nines' are embarrassing...

<comment><USER22> Are you referring to medical operations, or IT operations, in hospitals? I think he is referring to medical operations, where I would expect the relevant professions to be doctors and nurses, not engineers.

<comment><USER23> Actually large hospital systems tend to hire one or two systems engineers to be part of the QI department. But yeah, most QI is front line staff.

<comment><USER24> QI department?

<comment><USER23> Quality improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Most of those advices apply to small non-distributed systems too.

</comment><comment><USER26> I find it problematic that this recommends the Five Whys to get to "the root cause". Haven't we collectively moved past that?

<comment><USER27> Would you care to explain why you find that problematic?

<comment><USER26> See this post by John Allspaw: [https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-infinite- hows](https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-infinite-hows)

> The Five Whys, as it's commonly presented, will lead us to believe that not > only is just one condition sufficient, but that condition is a canonical > one, to the exclusion of all others.

Five whys presents itself as a way to dig deep but promotes doing so linearly and getting to a singular thing you can fix, hiding a lot of potential learnings along the way. Thinking about contributing factors is a much more powerful framework.

<comment><USER11> I find it useful: you'll find at least one problem deep down. The more surface problems will get worked on anyways. In any case, the point is to make your system more robust over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did you do all these things by yourself?

Really great content, but was really taken back by "I" used everywhere. Maybe it's a new thing that I am not hip on that I ought to try - "I built and ran transaction processing software for Bloomberg! This is what I learned!"

But perhaps you really did all that by yourself, in that case sorry that i doubted you, looks like it's a lot.

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't really agree that this list could have come about through discussions with engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. The more computers you have the less important it becomes to monitor junk like CPU and memory utilization of individual machines. Host-level CPU usage alerting can't possibly be a "must- have" if there are extremely large distributed systems operating without it.

If you've designed software where the whole service can degrade based on the CPU consumption of a single machine, that right there is your problem and no amount of alerting can help you.

<comment><USER30> I work at a FAANG and host level cpu is most definitely an alert we page on. Though a single host hitting 100% CPU isn't really a problem in and of itself (our SOP is just to replace the host), its an important sign to watch for other hosts becoming unhealthy. It might be overkill but hey theres mission critical stuff at hand.

For example: if you have a fleet of hosts handling jobs with retries, a bad job could end up being passed host to host killing each host / locking up each one as it gets passed along. And that could happen in minutes while replacing and deploying and bootstrapping a new host takes longer. So by the time your automated system detects, removes, and spins up a new host everything is on fire.

<comment><USER29> Could you mention which FAANG so I can avoid applying or a job there? Large- scale software systems _must_ be designed to serve through local resource exhaustion. If you are paging on resource exhaustion of single host you are just paying the interest on your technical debt by drawing down your SREs' quality of life.

I stand by my beef with this article. The statement that "I've talked with engineers at Google [and concluded that a thing Google wouldn't tolerate is a must-have]" doesn't make sense. What I get from this article is you can talk with engineers at Google without learning anything.

<comment><USER31> A single host stuck at 100% CPU also has a nasty effect on your tail latency, in a system with wide fanout. If a request hits 100 backend systems, and 1 of them is slow, your 99th percentile latency is going to go in the toilet.

<comment><USER29> Which is a good reason to hedge and replicate but NOT a reason to alert on high CPU usage of single computers.

<comment><USER31> You definitely want to TRACK cpu usage on individual hosts, but, yeah, I would alert on service latency instead. Symptom, not cause.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone using a Desktop-as-a-Service product that can recommend? - <AUTHOR> Also, what are you using it for? <comment><USER2> I've used Workspaces [1] for simple browsing and admin because a jump server was needed for access due to latency. It is amazing that some websites actually do not work for a global audience! The cost is approx. $14 a month plus a per minute charge. Based on the specs, and shutting the server down when not working I consider it an ok expense. Some people have effectively used these for gaming [2]. If you use it for business purposes, the service charge is 100% deductible, whereas your hardware is usually deprecated based on fixed rates.

[1]: [https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/](https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/) [2]: [https://medium.com/tensoriot/cloud-gaming-on-amazon-web- serv...](https://medium.com/tensoriot/cloud-gaming-on-amazon-web- services-4be806c0051b)</comment>


Easily lazy-load, pre-cache and display blurred loading previews for images - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RevillWeb/img-2 <comment><USER2> Pre-Loading images in WebWorker is nice, but please support more preview image sizes as additional parameter (or based on media-query???) - loading the full size images for a gallery (with 400x300) is never performant.</comment>


Hey Engineers — Your Product Manager Needs a Hug - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-engineers-your-product-manager-needs-a-hug/#more-510

<comment><USER2> I'm an engineer-type (contributor/architect/lead/manager/director) who dabbles in product management from time to time, mainly to fill in the gaps and help cross the chasm between the two disciplines.

I've seen the breakdowns and failures on both sides. I love the "asking for the ROI model" person for engineering activities, but oh man if there isn't trust between them and the PM, progress and morale plummet.

IMO PMs need to embrace engineers as members of the team, bring them into the loop, motivate them and sell them the vision. Don't just handout a "roadmap", or worse yet simply assign tasks, then get all flustered when people don't understand.

On the other side, engineers need to realize their job is not to "write code" but rather to add value to the business - the PM is the resident expert in helping you figure out how to add that value inline with company goals.

</comment><comment><USER3> After spending 15 years as a product manager, reading this really resonated.</comment>


Ask HN:  PythonHackers.com Valid idea?  - <AUTHOR> http://pythonhackers.com

<comment><USER2> As it stands, the description is quite vague. It might be better to increase the focus on what you feel is the unique selling point of this community, and de-emphasise the stuff that you can do in lots of other places (e.g. share code).

Also, you have a couple of typos and grammar errors on the front page. This isn't a big deal, but it detracts from the feel of a serious project. I'm at work, but if I find time later I'll send you a pull request with some corrections.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the pull request..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi Bahadir,

Why don't you start with a forum template (ready framworks) and if everything goes well, you might try to implement it from scratch and change the design and add more components??

Tuna

</comment><comment><USER4> While I appreciate the initiative, I dislike being asked for feedback for a closed product in an open forum. There is nothing to do on the site other than subscribe with twitter/email.

<comment><AUTHOR> why do you think the product is closed ? there is no product yet.. Rather than spending months of hard work, I am asking if people need this or not. Then I will build it.

<comment><USER4> I guess, I misinterpreted. Its a pretty good idea. I wonder if there are any existing forums/groups already out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback guys ?</comment>


Could Consciousness Come Down to the Way Things Vibrate? - <AUTHOR> https://interestingengineering.com/could-consciousness-come-down-to-the-way-things-vibrate <comment><USER2> Very sloppy article.

It starts with philosophy, jumps around to a few scientific facts, then gets to main point of "vibrations may make consciousness" (in new study posted last year!). But two links are to article research gate article from 2011 (not last year at all).

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263491208_Kicking_t...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263491208_Kicking_the_Psychophysical_Laws_into_Gear_A_New_Approach_to_the_Combination_Problem)

Does that article even suggest what they are saying? Beats me. Probably beats you too. Maybe they are banking on that?

And then, to top it all off, it ends up with "everything might be conscious because everything vibrates!".

Just... bad. Sorry to say and no hate intended but come on! The world, the internet does not need more trash. If you are going to take the time to write, make it solid.

<comment><USER3> Linked a school of life video the article was a red flag from the beginning

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very refreshing to read an article about consciousness; that does not say it is just an illusion.

</comment><comment><USER5> Leibniz would be pleased, it sounds like his monads might be making a comeback.</comment>


Python based Movie Organizer - <AUTHOR> http://www.getmoviemonkey.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Its really a great one, developed by one my friends (gotchance.com)</comment>


Richard Feynman can't tell you how magnets work - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM <comment><USER2> ...but he can properly explain why he can't.

<comment><USER3> he perfectly explained why he can't explain it in terms of other things which people are already familiar with.

It's because all of these things which people are familiar with are in turn macroscopic consequences of the electric and/or magnetic forces.

And what's very interesting in this video, is that Feymann recognized that the interviewer was expecting, and would be able to comprehend and accept, only those explanation involving some concepts he already masters intuitively.

And that's extremely important, it's the very nature of what "elementary" means and talks about the hard issues about understanding the deep structure of the world we are living in.

Feymann was a great teacher, and his way to make you reason are always insightful, and that's far more important than whatever simplistic explanation of the magnetic repulsion to a layman person you can find anywhere else.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage side projects? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to find the right balance between development efforts for work and my own personal side projects.I was also inspired by John Resig's blog about coding everyday. I feel if I had a more structured approach to going about side projects this would be easier to accomplish.
How do you go about planning and managing side projects and what tools do you use to maintain consistent development for side projects.
Any blogs or links to tools etc would be helpful. <comment><USER2> I am a consultant, and often have many projects or side projects going at all times, between client work, products I build and sell myself, and writing I do. I basically make private github repositories for myself. From there I make "issues" in github for the work I need to do. I ALWAYS make these tasks small. I have gotten to the point where I know about what I can get done in a half an hour chunk and I write these tasks as "issues" for myself whenever I get an idea. From there I simply "resolve the issue".

As a more concrete example. I have a repo for writing 2500-5000 word research articles. I will come up with a topic and break it down into sub topics and create github issues for each. Then I check in my writing to resolve the issue. In other words, I will write enough for the subtopic and check it in and make the issue complete. Same plan works for client code or personal products I code. It's easy, low overhead, and I always have things to do.

The only other thing I do is try to resolve as many issues as I can in a day. Sometimes personal projects take a back seat. But if you make your tasks about a half an hour each, you will find you get great momentum and you'll have time for each project you're working on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Block the days off to focus immersively. Which means the days you are working on a side project, try not to think about your main project unless there is an emergency. More importantly, the days you are working on your bread and butter main project, limit your urge to hack or get distracted by your side projects.

Going on a trip in a new place to really push and finish a project can be fun. Bands do that when they are finishing an albums. They go to a place where they won't be distracted by social pressures.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a great HN post on the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6107815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6107815)

For motivation to keep moving forward, check out the projects on r/SideProject: [http://reddit.com/r/sideproject](http://reddit.com/r/sideproject)</comment>


Show HN: Snorkel – a local, ready-in-30-seconds DataScience workbench - a-pagano https://github.com/Sqooba/snorkel <comment><AUTHOR> interesting.. wondering what it offers in contrast to using gryd ([https://gryd.us](https://gryd.us))

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks simple and convenient</comment>


Show HN: Side project for organized bookmarking: Saaave - <AUTHOR> http://saaave.com

<comment><USER3> "Your personal library for the web. A better way of bookmarking" - this isn't a value proposition. Give me a reason to take action (in this case, give you my email address) instead of clicking back.

Requesting a username and password immediately after the email address? Another obstacle to adoption. Get rid of this as quickly as you can.

Before you lose too much potential front page traffic, consider:

1\. Showing what Saaave does better than a browser's bookmark list or Safari's reading list - emphasis on show and not tell.

2\. Whether capturing the email address is really necessary as the first interaction with the site. You'll get much better retention if you let people start using Saaave with no obstacles, and then prompt for an email address as the last step.

<comment><USER4> Actually it is a value proposition. It just isn't an _Unique_ Value Proposition, which is obviously, the whole point. Good points though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you give me a bit of introduction about what it does? I personally would want to know this before I give my email address and start messing around.

<comment><USER6> exactly... any other surprises and mysteries in store for us? Did you create the logo?

"Your personal library for the web."

That tells me a lot. Are there 'virtual' bookshelves provided?

"A better way of bookmarking."

Are you sure about that? My way is pretty fast and works when I'm offline. Does yours do that too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks very promising. I think there is still no good tool to manage all your links correctly. However, I have some ideas for you: \- Sharing lists (so that they show up under your list) with teams \- Mobile integration if this is possible

Good work!

</comment><comment><USER8> I opened the site and the front page asks me to give my email w/o even telling me what it does. I came right back to HN to check on comments , so as mentioned by others , give us an intro , it will really help.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's what I experienced:

1\. Signed up using a dummy email address - just to test the service. Luckily(!), it logged me in without any email activation. Good that, there's a workaround to see the service without giving your actual email address.

2\. The landing page page after I logged in was little confusing at first. There was a button to create list - but I was wondering why should I create a list first in a bookmarking service. Later, only after creating a list, the option to add an URL popped up.

3\. Even before I create a list, I installed the bookmarklet. But when I tried to bookmark a page, the popup window was asking me to choose a list but I didn't have any. I thought from that popup I could create a new list, but I couldn't.

4\. After logging out, I wanted to login again. Went to home page - <USER2> couldn't find any 'login' link. It took sometime to realize I need to enter my email address in the same textbox which I used to signup. Little confusing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the design, nice and clean.

I managed to create two lists with the same name, should that be possible!? There was nothing to indicate the browser was saving the first time I clicked so I clicked again and ended up with two!

Also, when I add a new list, the input box overflows outside of the list div.

I really like the idea for this, some social features would be awesome, like sharing your lists publically and groups!

Groups could moderate a list of links for a particular topic, With contributors rating/commenting on whether they find them useful or not.

I remember a HN thread a while back saying there were no good lists of python tutorials around, this could certainly solve this problem!

<comment><USER10> Another thought, a welcome email would be nice, how am I supposed to remember how many a's are in saaaaaaave!? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could you explain how Saaave makes bookmarking more organized?

Few weeks ago I've written on HN about my side project LStack (<http://lstack.com>), which essentially is also about better organization of bookmarks. It features bookmark parameters (like - price:100 USD, type:webapp, genre:jazz), powerful filtering and organizing bookmarks into groups and folders (I call them "streams").

How would you compare LStack to Saaave? What are the differences and / or similarities?

</comment><comment><USER12> This sounds interesting but I couldn't try it out. I got an "Invalid beta code" error. This happened after I typed in too short of a password. Also, the signup css was messed up in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have so many bookmarks that IE8 (don't ask) chokes for 10-20 seconds on startup (a bookmark is stored by IE8 as an individual file).

None of these bookmarks are organized well by me. I just bookmark something if it's good. Maybe, once in a while, I'll create a folder for a couple of related bookmarks that I add at the same time.

What can this do for me?

P.S., I have no idea what your website is or what it does, or how it can help me. But this is your failure, not mine.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love this! Iron out the bugs and add https support, and you've totally got me as a user. I've been looking for something like this for a long time now.

edit: being able to import and sort through my old bookmarks would be awesome too ;-).

</comment><comment><USER15> Does not accept my username, without pointing out the reason. And the registration flow is not standard and confusing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks like a similar approach like we have in <http://kippt.com>

</comment><comment><USER17> How is this any different from, or better than, all the other bookmarking apps out there?

</comment><comment><USER18> A form that lets me enter my email address? Aren't there are zillion of those already?</comment>


Hustler School: A bunch of stuff non-tech founders should be able to do - <AUTHOR> http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/ceo-training-school-feedback-request

<comment><AUTHOR> The basic idea is "the opposite of Starter League/Dev Bootcamp" -- Starter league gives people the skills to build a basic web app, but that's not the hard part in starting a business.

A lot of first time entrepreneurs thing that the thing that is holding them back is product (sometimes it is, usually it isn't). Once they have the ability to produce a basic product, now they're still faced with a lot of the non-programming founder tasks and there's no great path to learning a lot of this stuff.

Many first time bizdevs partner with developers and they think their job is to just shake hands at startup events. But being a great bizdev isn't a license to not use a computer -- there are tons of non-programming ways to contribute to a startup, and LOTS of great ideas can get off the ground without a CTO.</comment>


Why are we trying to supersize drones and not use helicopters? - <AUTHOR> http://datagenetics.com/blog/february62019/index.html <comment><USER2> You do have less unique moving parts. Just one per rotor, all the same.

I think that's a big plus. No jesus bolt, no variable angles of attack, no gearbox. I also don't know how well electronic motors scale, maybe a bit smaller is better?

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Because drones are really cool.

2\. Because throwing cpu power at them to solve the stabilization issue turns it from a mechanical project to an electronics project, which appeals to geeks everywhere who don't have much of any fabrication experience.

3\. Also, see #1 above :)</comment>


NYPD To Remove DNA Profiles of Non-Criminals from Database - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/nyregion/dna-nypd-database.html <comment><USER2> Nice. It's good to see New York take a pro-liberty stand as opposed to a pro- wokeness stand.</comment>


Ask HN: Why this sudden increase in G+ followers - <AUTHOR>

In past few days my followers have increased on G+ which is strange. In a normal week the count increased by 2/3 each week which is alright, and I understand that. But suddenly there is a surge, 52, 9, 10, 12...at a time, from last one week. I don't share alot on any site, don't even browse any profiles. How can I debug this? <comment><USER2> Consider yourself debugged: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3410859>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is so amazing :), it was on HN and I forget, I should have some more coffee.

Thanks for pointing out.</comment></comment>


Sex and Startups - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sexandstartups/sex-startups-53f2f63ded49#.2b05tst68 <comment><USER2> TL;DR: We can't build a successful business that would be worth funding, we blame it on men (as everything), and are hopping that someone is going to hand us money without hope for significant ROI because "we are visionaries and our cause matters".</comment>


Ford and Argo.ai acquire lidar company Princeton Lightwave - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2017/10/27/argo-ai-and-ford-double-down-on-lidar-acquire-princeton-lightwave/?s=trending#291dad081365 <comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, they're known primarily for their SPADs.</comment>


Endless URL Shortening Redirection Loop - <AUTHOR>

I wonder if its possible to use 10+ url shorteners in an endless loop of redirection. Can this be abused to cause increased latency to one of the shorteners across their network?  I wonder. <comment><USER2> <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.redirection-limit>

All other browsers, to the best of my knowledge, have similar systems built in. So your premise is flawed: you can't have an "infinite redirect."

<comment><USER3> "This preference affects only HTTP redirects, not redirects with HTML meta tags or JavaScript." So if the shorteners use (or can be configured to use) different redirect methods, it might be possible to get around this limit.

However, you'd have to create a chain composed of shorteners each of which either doesn't recognize the next one on the list, or doesn't do any "security" checking at all.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> All very good comments. It seems a LOT less likely to be able to do it than I originally thought.

</comment><comment><USER4> Many will notice if a shortened url goes to another shortener and give a 'security notice'.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think any modern browsers will redirect indefinitely.</comment>


Websites Vary Prices, Deals Based on Users' Information - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323777204578189391813881534-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwMzEyNDMyWj.html <comment><USER2> For a simple introduction to the economics of price discrimination from a tech startup's point of view, Joel on Software has a great article [1] which, although it's from 2004, is still quite relevant. That article notes:

"[Charging different people different prices for the same product] pisses the heck off of people. People want to feel they're paying a fair price. They don't want to think they're paying extra...it seems like customers would rather pay $100 when everyone else is paying $100 than pay $79 if they know there's someone out there who got it for $78."

[1] [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> There was an academic paper on this published in the fall by Telefonica in Spain: [http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2012/papers/hotnets12...](http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2012/papers/hotnets12-final94.pdf)

Abstract:

      Price discrimination, setting the price of a given product
      for each customer individually according to his valuation
      for it, can benefit from extensive information collected
      online on the customers and thus contribute to the
      profitability of e-commerce services. Another way to
      discriminate among customers with different willingness to
      pay is to steer them towards different sets of products
      when they search within a product category (i.e., search
      discrimination). Our main contribution in this paper is to
      empirically demonstrate the existence of signs of both
      price and search discrimination on the Internet, and to
      uncover the information vectors used to facilitate them.
      Supported by our findings, we outline the design of a
      large-scale, distributed watchdog system that allows users
      to detect discriminatory practices.

The paper only has preliminary results (hotnets targets fairly early ideas), but so far has only detected discrimination based on location and search terms.

<comment><USER4> This begs for a follow up paper from a psychological perspective, on psychological reaction by customers on finding out that somebody else paid a different price based on their shopping behavior.

If there is a very price sensitive shopping behavior this will lead to a strong increase of data noise by people trying to play the algorithms, e.g. fake accounts, deletion of accounts, groomed accounts towards specific deals, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once this becomes common place, I wonder if we will see proxy services that runs the same item through 100 different area codes to find the one with the cheapest results.

<comment><USER6> Oh absolutely. But there are lots of ways to figure out who you are. We had that discussion about Formalyzer and the 42floors article, a number of sites have it on their web pages. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4954972>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People will get mad at this but no one will ever reject a personal coupon in the basis that it is unfair for other customers.

I have had customers get annoyed when they find out we are charging more on Amazon (simply passing on the amazon fee). As a customer you will likely find on the amazon marketplace that an seller that also sells from a website will be doing a better price on the website. I guess in this case though the extra price is buying you some protection as the marketplace is very customer friendly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's the thing- if it's based on location, social data, influence, hair color, none of that is illegal. Two things are illegal: 1) discrimination in the -ism sense of the word, and 2) price discrimination based on proximity to competitors in the markets wherein the company doing the price fixing holds a monopoly. #2 is what Staples could be running afoul of here. In the US, it's not illegal to have a monopoly (ie be the only Staples in a small town without an Office Depot/OfficeMax etc). It's also not illegal to engage in anti- competitive (ie under-cutting your competition in price, signing exclusivity contracts etc.) or anti-consumer (ie price discrimination, restriction of choice, etc.) practices. What _IS_ illegal is engaging in anti-competitive practices in situations where you hold a monopoly, and that's what Staples may be in danger of doing here. And yes, I know Staples doesn't hold a monopoly over the entire internet but the value of brand identification / trust and convenience of in-store pickup shouldn't and won't be overlooked by regulators.

</comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this the ultimate goal, though? To be able to charge people exactly what they're willing to pay, no more, no less? The method they're using (your geographic location) is a little crude, for sure, but surely as retailers are able to build a better profile of their customers this is only going to happen more often.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why are Swingline staplers perpetual objects of injustice?

</comment><comment><USER11> How about a simplistic argument against location-based pricing? (Yes, _simplistic_ , but sometimes such an argument serves a purpose.) You're shopping "on the Internet", where there is no physical, "bricks and mortar" retail outlet. [1]

At most, put real differences in shipping costs into the "shipping" portion of the final total. (Something readily auditable.)

Anything else should get a long, hard look.

(I'd consider it akin the "redlining" in the real estate marketplace. Geographically based, but having an outsized impact upon specific demographic/cultural/racial groups.)

\--

[1] Certainly, in the U.S., retailers have loved to embrace precisely this argument, from the perspective of avoiding state sales taxes.

</comment><comment><USER12> How was WSJ able to connect from every US zipcode? Through tor? Something similar?</comment>


In Remembrance of Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtworks.com/articles/remembering-aaron-swartz

<comment><USER2> I think we can all agree that the criminal justice system needs a system redesign. The Criminal Justice System treats programmers like trash.

Like a defective airplane that kills a bunch of passengers once in a while, the fact that it works most of the time for non-programmers is insufficient.

I believe that programmers are a minority that are discriminated against by the Criminal Justice System, and this is unacceptable. We need a programmer's bill of rights, to protect our right to tinker and explore the realms of possibility without being immobilized with fear because we might accidentally click "save as" on an open server and get 35 years in prison for doing so.

I do believe that the US Justice system has a phobia against programmers. As a member of a minority of programmers hated by the US Judicial System. I will oblige them and design my next startups and programs without their benefit in mind.

The United States criminal justice system has vendettas against, discriminates against and has prejudice against the most capable computer programmers among us.

As a member of this community, this worries me that my profession is so unwelcome in this country that they would give me 35 years in prison for Exploring the realm of possibility.

I will indulge them and consider the feelings mutual. When a nation alienates the best and brightest among by treating them like shit, then programmers having unwavering loyalty to that system is illogical, unwise, and evidence of naivete.</comment>


iPhone 7 – finger print on display screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2015/0036065.html <comment><USER2> Qualcomm's Sense ID already works this way, although curiously no one has implemented it yet (it hasn't been out for a long time, though). I wonder if this would make it more easy for malware to steal that same fingerprint pattern, though.</comment>


Google doesn't have to apply right to be forgotten globally, says EU court - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/eu-rules-on-google-right-to-be-forgotten-case.html <comment><USER2> god i hate google.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking on making my own "spreadsheety" system for software development – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com<p>I'd like to hear some interesting unusual ways you use spreadsheets. Especially some use cases for which Excel seems like a total kludge but manipulating visible data instead of symbols still helps. <comment><USER2> I couldn't figure out a way to import transactions sanely into Yayoi Kaikei (the Quickbooks of Japan) to satisfy Japanese requirements for double-entry bookkeeping, so I implemented double-entry bookkeeping up to Japanese GAAP with about a dozen spreadsheets. It had to reconcile with information I got from a half-dozen systems, in varying formats. Also, most of the information coming in was in dollars, English, and either PST or GMT -- all three of which would get a look of disapproval from the Ogaki tax office -- so there's extensive use of historical lookup tables to massage the data to meet requirements without having to pay a bilingual bookkeeper to manually process everything.

If you add in the one-and-done Ruby scripts that I made to grab the information from the various computer systems and then spit out CSV for copy/pasting into Excel, this is unquestionably the worst bubble gum and duct tape programming job I've ever had the misfortune of participating in -- but it let me submit my tax return in time for the deadline, with numbers that looked pretty reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, what were the main difficulties/problems in implementing your project using spreadsheets?

I assume that one of these was having to write Ruby scripts to connect things together instead of working directly with your data sources, was there anything else?

<comment><USER2> I have never had the need to do anything particularly complicated in Excel before, and had to learn how to express things that would have been very easy for me in Ruby, like "Servers, domain names, telephone bills, Twilio credits, and the like count as 通信費. Sum the total of all 通信費 given a list of all of your expenses for the past year."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When working for a bank I was asked to maintain an ongoing list of approximately 1,500 prospective M&A targets, I did so in excel. I stored basic information about the M&A targets (approx. revenue, # of employees, etc.) as well as CRM type information (last contacted, relationship owner,etc). I then created a two documents that could be generated based on a unique identifier I had created for each M&A target. The first document was a "one slider" on the prospect. A user could enter the unique identifier of a prospect and what was returned was something that looked like a one slide summary on the prospect created in PowerPoint. I formed the "one slider" by re-sizing all the cells on the spreadsheet to 2 by 2, for design flexibility, and using a combination of vlookups and hlookups to retrieve data. Similarly, the other document produced was a questionnaire that an executive could print out before a meeting with an M&A target so that he/she knew what information we already had on the target and what information we still needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> So as I understood you wanted the ability to generate nice-looking report from your data?

So you had to resort to making extremely small cells to allow for precise positioning of elements, correct?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As you embark on this project, I'd like to point out the relationship between spreadsheets and Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) : each cell with a formula is what one could call purely functional (referentially transparent) in FP, and their chaining together is basically functions depending on other functions.

When you use Excel's "Trace Dependents" functionality, you're basically asking for a Call Graph!

In this sense, a spreadsheet is a tangible functional programming system. @see Conal Elliot's Eros : [http://conal.net/papers/Eros/eros.pdf](http://conal.net/papers/Eros/eros.pdf)

I get the feeling there is a GREAT idea in this space waiting to happen, so by all means, go ahead and rock it! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand relation to FP. I even think of having lazy-evaluated infinite sequences in my system :)

BTW, great thanks for the paper, it seems to be closely related to what I'm working on.

<comment><USER4> > I understand relation to FP. I even think of having lazy-evaluated infinite > sequences in my system :)

Nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great concept, and in fact already exists as an Excel addin - [http://schematiq.htilabs.com](http://schematiq.htilabs.com)

It's paid-for software, but available free for personal use. Put simply, it extends the concept of what can be stored within a single cell on the spreadsheet, enabling much more powerful functionality.

There is also a Q&A forum at [http://schematiq.htilabs.com/community](http://schematiq.htilabs.com/community) so if you need to ask any questions you should be able to get some help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats interesting, thanks!

I plan to build something less limited to the traditional spreadsheet UI though. Same concept but more flexible UI, so that for example you may process image data by manipulating pixels as cells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a personal favorite - [http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/01/spreadsheet-as- music-t...](http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/01/spreadsheet-as-music- tracker-sequencer-with-libreoffice-nee-openoffice/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is nice – I visualised something like this in my head, but never knew somebody already implemented it :)</comment></comment>