Companies that *can* support remote workers will win against those that can't - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidtate.org/2013/01/companies-that-support-remote-workers-win-against-those-that-dont/

<comment><USER2> Duplicate post from 2 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039904)</comment>


Try Arc - <AUTHOR> http://tryarc.org/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this! Arc is really a great language - I use it every day to power my Chinese e-commerce site (there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support). Libraries are no longer really a big problem: with aw's additions in Anarki, it's really easy to call Perl and Python libraries, in addition to all of those from Racket. And Anarki has a healthily growing set of indigenous libraries as well.

The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).

<comment><USER3> _there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support_

Those claims were not bogus at the time. When arc was released Paul Graham explicitly stated that unicode support was not there and was low on the priority list.

<comment><USER2> Nope, they were bogus then too. I was hacking a Chinese website at the time. Basically what happened is PG didn't use utf8 and didn't check to see if it worked, but it did anyway. From the very beginning,

      (def 什么 () 1)
      (什么) => 1

worked. Python, for example, can't even do that. As is often the case, the people complaining didn't even bother to try it out to see what they were actually complaining about.

There were a few tiny places that needed improving (I know, because I wrote most of the utf8 improvements in Anarki), and they almost all revolved around parsing / producing web-related utf8 stuff.

<comment><USER4> As of Python 3, that finally works :)

      Python 3.1.1 (r311:74543, Aug 24 2009, 18:44:04)
      [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
      Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
      >>> def 什么():
      ...     return 1
      ...
      >>> 什么()
      1

<comment><USER5> It didn't work before partly by design. There was a long discussion about this on the Python development lists a couple years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I apologize for the downtime to anyone who has had problems accessing the site. Temporary outages have come along with my modest traffic spike. I hope you'll try back in a few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Arc seams to be just like Scheme. I can't see anything that makes it mutch better. What is better in Arc then in Scheme?

What is the concurency story (does it have one)? Does arc have full tail call optimisation?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Does arc have full tail call optimisation?_

Yes. Arc's reference implementation inherits TCO from Racket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe you could make the keyboard shortcut handling stop detecting presses when meta-keys are held down?

For example, if I type cmd-w (on a Mac) it types 'w' instead of closing the tab as I would expect.

I've written a lot of keyboard shortcut junk for web apps so I've had to do this before as well. :)

I was actually using Try Arc the other day to see how it compares to other lisps that I'm familiar with. I like it!

</comment><comment><USER8> Came across arc some months back. Could you give a link to Why Arc ?

<comment><USER9> I evaluated it a few weeks back while porting a Common Lisp system to Android, and if you ask me, Arc is better suited as a resident language for a handheld device than most other languages.

Paul's insistence on brief symbol names, and heavily simplified Lisp syntax didn't make a lot of sense 8 years ago. But today, it's just what the doctor ordered for mobile.

Should be a good language to script Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a pity that some things in the arc tutorial linked to at the top of the page won't work - e.g. (defop hello req (pr "hello world")

</comment><comment><USER11> I get the following error:

Unknown or expired link.

Does this mean the site is down?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you got that error at the REPL after being on the site for a few minutes, your sandbox probably got garbage collected due to high traffic. Please see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814494>

If you got it when you first arrived or in some other context, you're bug reporting. Tell me more!

In either case, if you (wait a few minutes and) reload the page, it will probably work. Thanks for your patience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> arc doesn't even pass its own challenge. "link unknown or expired"... great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Providing independent sandboxed evaluation for every visitor to the site costs a lot of memory. On my Linode 512, it only takes about 90 users before all the memory is consumed and I have to start garbage collecting. If you saw that message when you tried to evaluate something, you probably got GC'd.

I'd like to find a more graceful way of handling this. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER13> JS Arc interpreter? Hey, if they can do it for Haskell…

<http://github.com/johang88/haskellinjavascript>

;)

<comment><USER14> Nostrademons wrote one, but it's pretty old, and I think the site is down.

<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1629>

<comment><AUTHOR> It's still up at <http://jonathan.tang.name/files/arclite/index.html></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wholesale Privacy violations in the European Union - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/Wholesale+Privacy+violations+in+the+European+Union <comment><USER2> I have a slightly controversial theory here.

The UK has the worst rep for anti-privacy measures because a lot of it surfaces; and actually if you keep track we have a good record of curbing the stupid ideas (deep packet inspection was trashed comprehensively, body scanners has stalled at one installation and I doubt it will expand, ID cards have been pushed aside)

Whereas the EU has a fairly good rep for respecting privacy - but really it all gets snuck in behind the scenes. As highlighted here. No one hears about the Hadopi laws outside of France but they are, basically, being pushed through (no idea of the status at the moment) with no regard for the public. German record for privacy invasion is, behind the scenes, generally bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a respected tradition of civil disobedience where you are?

<comment><AUTHOR> For some things yes. I think my chances are fairly good. We used to have a draft here and dissenters did get locked up though so we'll see.

<comment><USER3> Getting locked up is often part of civil disobedience. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take that risk.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass "Infinite Jest."  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> I like DFW, Infinite Jest, and The New Yorker, but I question the increasingly regularity of this kind of content on HN and would like to gently recommend metafilter.com.

Here is this article posted there:

[http://www.metafilter.com/79589/David-Foster-Wallaces- unfini...](http://www.metafilter.com/79589/David-Foster-Wallaces-unfinished- opus)

<comment><USER3> It's hard for me to get too wound up about DFW stuff being on the front page when it's otherwise occupied by "AngelGate" drama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still haven't been able to finish Infinite Jest. It's just... not that interesting, I guess. Part of me thinks English is not a very good language for what's been attempted there; English as it is usually written is too terse and direct, which is precisely the opposite of what DFW was going for.

Novels like 2666, written in Spanish, feel a lot more natural in their distorted rambling and crazy deviations from what you guessed should be the plot.

But then again, I can't judge it until I finish it. These are just my thoughts after having it around for over six months.

<comment><USER5> "English as it is usually written is too terse and direct"

If only. Too many people waste too many words dancing around what they really mean to say.

English _can_ be terse and direct (love those anglo-saxon words!), but having glommed so much from so many other languages it affords endless variety for circumlocution.

<comment><USER4> Not endless. I'm brazillian, and more than once when translating a good, terse, phrase in english to portuguese I felt the need to "pad it up" with rethorical and discourse markers that have no meaning in themselves; conversely, when translating from portuguese to english most of a sentence becomes unnecessary and the final result is a lot terser. I can give you examples if you want.

<comment><USER6> Well, I'd like some examples :-)

<comment><USER4> A sentence I extracted from a particularly idiomatic piece of portuguese:

> O primeiro, presença ofuscante na consciência social, tem nome definido e > inscrição temporal supostamente clara: a crise financeira global.

If you translate it idiomatically to English you have

> The first of them is the global financial crisis.

But if you translate if literally you have

> The first, a blinding presence in the social consciousness, has a definite > name and a supposedly clear temporal inscription: the global financial > crysis.

You will not believe me, but in portuguese all this extra unnecessary rhetoric reads a lot better than the equivalent in english. Also, there is a tendency in portuguese to write using as erudite a word as you can think of, which in English mostly sounds pathetic. I'm looking for better examples right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its sad to hear he struggled so mightily to write more novels given the incredible power of his essays and short stories. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", about the pleasures and distractions and ultimately the "despair" of a 7-Night Caribbean cruise (which he helpfully abbreviates 7NC) is both the funniest and one of the most stark and cold works I've ever read.

<comment><USER8> Here is a link to that essay:

[PDF] [http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-000...](http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had to stop reading when they said he wanted to write a story that would show people how to lead good and happy lives. Too sad.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, all I could think was "physician, heal thyself."

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Evidently The New Yorker doesn't like linking to the printable version. Link below should work:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max)</comment>


What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can't Be Bought or Sold - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jelenawoehr/what-marissa-mayer-brought-to-yahoo-that-cant-be-bought-or-sold-4ee82382e4ee <comment><USER2> Heh, I remember Jelena from discussion on devel-random. I would like to correct (mildly) a couple of anecdotes in her article, because I was there and closer.

> _A friend relayed this story: The Sunnyvale campus had a building with > redundant turnstiles, which required a badge scan seconds after employees > had scanned their badges to open the main doors. People complained about it > when the building was remodeled years before, and kept complaining through > several CEOs. After Marissa read an email griping about the turnstiles, they > were gone the next day._

I remember it a little differently. This was Building D, where the executives sit. Before Marissa got there, there were plans to put an additional set of card-activated turnstiles inside the door. (This building is also where the Yahoo store is, and the main reception desk). Yahoo was plagued with leaks, and some people thought that adding an additional turnstile will keep people from tailgating in.

When Marissa got there, she took one look at the turnstiles and said, "this is stupid", and ordered them removed. Not only that: there were card-activated gates in the parking lots, and those were gone too immediately. She didn't want barriers to coming in to work.

And about devel-random, or "d-r": I was pretty active on that. No one told Marissa about d-r, but just a couple of days after she got there, on a Saturday IIRC, she responded to someone on d-r. This sent shockwaves throughout the upper echelons, and soon senior management were clamoring to get on d-r. Most of them dropped out, exhausted by the volume; but she stuck around.

Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

It's the small things that mattered a lot to the battered egos at Yahoo; and Marissa did a lot of good. She was the best CEO of all the ones Yahoo had seen, bar none (OK, I wasn't around during Koogle's tenure).

<comment><USER3> > Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature > in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

Ok, now that is amazing. That speaks more about her culture and background than a hundred random actions.

<comment><USER4> Oh wow! She used pine! Freakin' pine! She sent the company down the tubes, but... holy shit did she ever read her emails in a terminal!

Also: Way to dogfood Yahoo Mail. Shows how much faith you have in your own products - as CEO no less.

<comment><USER5> I mean, I get your point on pine, but I think the jury is still out on whether she was the cause for Yahoo's demise. I think the media definitely overhyped her, but Yahoo was in pretty dire straits when she took over in 2012

<comment><USER4> True, but, it seems that much like US presidents, CEOs want all the credit for good results and excuses for the bad ones.

<comment><USER6> It'd probably be a more accurate version of reality to accept that CEOs and Presidents have relatively little to do with either kind of results. That'd require that we give up the very human tendency to believe in Great People and force us to believe in Ordinary People involved with Great Things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty?

I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even more, according to rumors). Here's an article from around that time; I wish I had time to dig up more: [https://3qdigital.com/analytics/terry-semel-you- owe-1000-yah...](https://3qdigital.com/analytics/terry-semel-you- owe-1000-yahoo-employees-200-million/)

But you never hear his name ever brought up. Because he was a white, male CEO?

<comment><USER7> > It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or > thereabouts) earnings over 4 years

Why? That is $50mil/year which is an _insane_ amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes _per year_ to fail.

It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already failing when she came in and nobody could turn it around!" She was hired to turn it around. She did fail at the job she was hired to do. It doesn't matter if it was impossible, she took it on and she's getting tons of money despite failing. For me her compensation is one thing but the truly objectionable part is the $50mil golden parachute. And it's not just her, tons of execs that fail at their jobs get these golden parachutes and it's awful. She's just the latest high profile example.

If I take a developer position at a company with terrible project/team management, terrible culture, nasty legacy codebase, etc. and I do a bad job I'm still going to get fired. I'm not going to get a massive golden parachute. I _might_ get two weeks severance. I'm not going to get a full year's severance.

Combine that cushy parachute with salary that is so out of sync with what the average person makes and yeah, people are going to go "What the fuck?" It shouldn't surprise you.

<comment><USER8> >She's just the latest high profile example.

She's attracted an order of magnitude more vitriol than any of the other "tons of execs." It's her that HN chooses to complain about. _It matters_ which instances you choose to be vocal about.

And it's _extremely_ suspicious, to say the least, that an industry which insists it has no sexism problem because men are just better at it, spends a great deal of time and energy attacking a woman who presides over a collapse but glosses over or barely acknowledges the men who have done the same.

<comment><USER9> That's a slippery slope right there. I don't care about Yahoo or celebrity CEO culture at all. But I also feel like people should be able to express their opinions on a CEO and not be worried that doing so constitutes being labeled a sexist if the CEO happens to be a woman. There have been many males CEOs that have been derided as well - Bezos, Jobs et al so lets keep this in perspective. Star CEOs with their insanely outsized pay packages and their carefully cultivated public images make them targets for derision, not their sex.

<comment><USER10> I think this issue the other poster is referring to is whether we should act to decrease sexism (their argument) or ignore sexism (your argument).

There's no right answer, but the other commenter has a point that _if_ sexism is what causes Mayer to appear more often in stories about underperforming CEOs with exit packages (sexism), and we comment negatively on all stories of the like (neutral), then we become complicit in generating a sexist culture. Essentially because sexists chose the only things we saw to comment on in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From a non-insider perspective, it certainly looks as if MM accomplished the mission. Stock price went up, and she locked it in with a well-timed sale. Her compensation package appears to have been designed to produce exactly this outcome. It's not Steve Jobs' return to Apple. But she did help the investors salvage a respectable outcome.

<comment><USER12> Was it down to luck more than anything else? She made a few bets. Most failed. One did spectacularly , yet seems to have very little to do with Yahoo as a company.

<comment><USER11> She inherited a depreciating asset in core yahoo, managed to hold the line on further losses. She is also managing a "strategic transaction" that could go very wrong if done poorly. I would guess that (if successful) this deal will be thought of as a success, and probably comes as a relief to the board and officers. But again, I only know what I read on the Internet which surely is missing some important facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" if I'm ever in a position like Marissa's, I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the house."_

I'm grateful for this article reminding me why I never really will fit in with the techie fanatics. Yesterday I went home at 5p, after a very productive day, and trimmed plants in my garden, not checking my work email until the next day.

(Well maybe for $200M over 5 years you could convince me to do that. But then it's back to books and gardening and developing pictures)

Also oddly reminiscent of this post from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718)

<comment><USER14> There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us -- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine.

Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for that reason -- I treasure the ability to turn off 'work mode' for a little while every day.

<comment><USER13> I work with high level executives at a well known company regularly. Most of them are normal people. Hard working, smarter than the average? Sure. Answering emails at 1am on a Sunday with a newborn? Certainly not. In fact, my director just took a month off when his second child was born, and is taking another month off soon.

There is no "better genetics" or "sleeping 4 hours a night". That's just the media and tech echo chamber doing its thing.

<comment><USER14> I work with major company C-suite guys on a regular basis, and while not _everyone_ is the "4 hours a night" type, they're definitely overrepresented. Keep in mind I don't see this as a positive thing -- I think it's unhealthy and sets a bad example for your employees. But there are some people who just have more stamina, and that's something I've had to accept. I have less stamina, so I need to be more effective with the time that I do have and delegate work to others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

<comment><USER2> > I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

This. Larry Ellison fucks around on a sailboat. Larry is busy with "X" for years. And no one bats an eye.

<comment><USER16> Oracle and Google both make astonishing amounts of money. Nobody (least of all shareholders) is marching on their headquarters with torches and pitchforks. So nobody cares what the leaders of those companies do with their time -- _so long as their companies continue to make astonishing amounts of money._

If the money dries up, rest assured that the line of people demanding that the leaders start paying attention to the business would rapidly become quite long.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. Ellison seen on a mega boat tells you how well he is doing and thus the company. MM answering low-level employee emails in the middle of the night says she doesn't know what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's a good read. Just goes to show that it's important to remember people's humanity, especially when all the cards are stacked against them. People have said some really ugly stuff about MM.

<comment><USER19> Yes- it's important to stay human while thousands of employees get laid off and the CEO makes a few hundred million for the valiant effort of letting good employees go

<comment><USER20> "Good" tends to be very subjective. Actually good people rarely get let go, unless there is a very good reason. At the same time almost everyone who gets laid off thinks they are a very good employee, which obviously is not the case.

And execs get paid for the expectations and responsibility. You are just being salty right now.

<comment><USER21> Sometimes the reason doesn't need to be "good" in the sense that it's a great reason, but in the sense that it was the right decision.

I worked as a engineer at a huge billion dollar company in a newly created slot. There was 2 on the team and I was the third. Then massive layoffs. Thousands of people let go. I was one of them. Was I "good people" ? I don't know. I like to think I was, that's why I got the position. Of the 3 people on the team, I was the right choice though, least experience with the company's infrastructure, etc.

The real issue at hand was the disconnect between the team manager (who found out he had to let me go the morning it happened and was quite upset about it) and upper executives. Why was adding my position approved by upper executives in the first place if they knew that a month later they would be laying off so many, you would think they would have had a massive layoff of that size in the works for more than just a few days.

So there was no "good reason" other than "cutting cost" but if someone had to be let go, the 2 others on the team deserved the job more than me.

<comment><USER22> But that's the point. You weren't a "good" employee if you're judging on one metric: experience with their infrastructure.

You were clearly good enough to get hired but all things considered you were the correct person the let go.

The distinction, and you seem to understand, is that it wasn't a personal thing. People say stuff like "let go of good people". What does being a good person have anything to do with running a business?

Not saying any of this is right or wrong but more musing over what drives business decisions and how people will often mix personal feelings into non- personal decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While her great experiences illustrate a caring and hard-working person, I still can't forget writeups describing someone who was unable to develop a product strategy / roadmap in a timely manner, resulting in a lot of miscommunication and execs left in limbo (see the Forbes article written in early 2015).

There's no doubt that it was extremely hard to turn that ship around, so I'm not at all attributing the company's failure to her. But as a product person, at the end of the day, my best experiences with CEOs has never been about whether they've rejuvenated a certain company culture but rather their ability to help provide vision and strategy (among other things).

Furthermore:

> But I know that, if I'm ever in a position like Marissa's, I want to be the > kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from > herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the > house. I want to be the kind of person who has time to hear people out, even > when they're saying things that hurt me.

Honestly, I'm happy when my CEO answers e-mails at reasonable hours and has work/life balance (as much as a CEO can get).

</comment><comment><USER24> Thanks for all the great discussion here & thank you Jess for submitting my article to HN. (In case anyone is curious, Medium currently credits this post with 13,362 views on my Medium post.) I have another HN account--sadly underutilized, I have to admit--but didn't want to tie it to my real name, so here's a brand new baby account for this thread...

I'm glad to see a few comments here from other ex-Yahoos who felt the same thrill I did when Marissa came to Yahoo. It really was like night and day.

I've seen a lot of discussion here, on Twitter and on Medium critiquing the way I responded to Marissa's late-night email habits. For a lot of people it seems late emails from an executive are a negative and demonstrates an expectation that others also be on email at 1 AM. I was surprised by that because I've always really enjoyed working for workaholic/fanatic CEOs, but I understand because I've also encountered some toxic personalities who do use late night email runs to demonstrate that they're "working harder" than everyone else (when in reality they're only putting more work into playing the game, not into deliverables). Because that was never remotely the case with Marissa, I didn't even think about it while writing. With Marissa, hearing from her late at night sent the message "I'm always thinking about what you need from me," not, "I'm always thinking about what you should be doing FOR me."

Of course, I'm a little bit of an unhealthy fanatic workaholic type myself, which is definitely part of why Marissa is such a powerful role model for me. She doesn't pretend that her sleeplessness or fanaticism is the most healthy or balanced way to live, and she doesn't advise others to be exactly like her. She just demonstrates that being naturally that sort of person is survivable and is compatible with having love and happiness in your life. That alone was huge for me. If I can be who I authentically am and survive it and have people around me who love me anyway, even if I shorten my life and don't necessarily have human relationships that are AS fulfilling as a Type B personality might be able to have, I'm ok with that outcome.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have to admit that when she started in Yahoo, they tried to do their best to not suck that much, but I think it was too late. In a time where internet and word of mouth can punish very hard bad PR/bad UX, they tried with Tumblr showing they weren't going to screw up anymore, but still they couldn't go back to what they were before.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, Marissa Mayer is how I was first introduced to the concept of the glass cliff: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff). I don't think she ever had a chance.

<comment><USER27> This explains the seemingly easy path Theresa May had to becoming Prime Minister following the Brexit vote.

<comment><USER26> It's definitely a reasonable explanation. Her only real opponent was a woman as well.

<comment><USER28> Mainly because her potential male opponents stabbed each other in the back until they were no longer viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _Her performance ranking program was so badly implemented by Yahoo's_ ugly layers of middle management _that it deserved every bit of the mocking and criticism it got, both on devel-random and in the tech press._

I think one thing that could possibly "save" Yahoo would be to fire every single middle manager and above immediately (and probably most of the 1st line management as well), and then rebuild the management from the ground up.

Yes, Yahoo would be a mess for a year or more, but it already is a mess and has been for years - and it seems like a common thread is the entrenched management that isn't willing to change and has a lot of incompetency. Time to throw out the baby with the bath water.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha it would be great to see a troubled company try that. One suspects that we'd _hear_ it more than see it however, as the great wailing and gnashing of teeth by PHBs would be audible on other continents. It would have to be a completely vendor-driven company, however... er, excuse me, "a company that concentrated on its core competencies". After all, the paychecks still have to go out, for the peons left after the great firing, and you can't just give the bank accounts to some random person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Off topic but what would the selling price for Yahoo have to be for MM to be considered a success? 20B, 100B,..

<comment><USER31> Success would have been growing revenues, instead of watching them decline.

Success would have been at least one really successful mobile app.

Success would have been not selling Yahoo....

<comment><USER32> Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value.

I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the company and get the shareholder's some payout. Considering where the company was when she came in, I'd say she did an admirable job at this.

You might say that's not success, but I think the (shareholder elected) board had the company on that trajectory before she was hired. She came in to finish the job.

<comment><USER33> > the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder > value.

It always bothers me to see this, as I feel it is the reason many companies decline. The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy" since happy employees help implement the first rule. If rule one and two are achieved then as a side effect shareholder value is maximized.

<comment><USER34> >The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy"

if you burn through your cash reserves doing those things and now you don't have any money, that doesn't do anything for you since you burned all your cash - even if employees and customers are happy

the first rule should be "make money", the second rule should be "spend less money than you make"

if those two are achieved, THEN shareholder value is maximized

<comment><USER35> Not true. Sometimes shareholders want metrics like Return on Equity, which forces the hand of management to sell profitable parts of the business... but not profitable enough. That's the insanity of trying to maximize shareholder value.

<comment><USER28> That's only insane if you assume the success of the business is the goal, rather than the success of the shareholders.

<comment><USER35> Success of the business and success of the shareholders is not a zero-sum game. You can usually have both.

What is insane is sacrificing the success of the business for the success of shareholders. That affects employees, and you end up getting situations where entire towns get fucked because the profitable-but-not-profitable-factory gets shut down because of some obscure metric.

<comment><USER32> I think a culture has developed -- in the United States specifically -- where we expect companies to act according to some undefined ethical principle. We're upset when they don't pay taxes, close factories, pollute the environment or whatever. The problem is these principles are always moving goalposts and more often than not, immeasurable. A business exists to make money. That is a concrete and measurable goal and thus one that the organization is made to pursue. If a business it not in it to make money, it's something else: perhaps a non-profit, an NGO, a union, a cooperative, etc. There are places for organizations that don't exist to make money, but publicly traded exchanges are not it.

It's really the responsibility of communities to plan, governments to regulate and enforce and people to rationally choose the best for themselves and their community. As pointed out above, there are a variety of ways to do this, it's a matter of choosing the right ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting discussion and I wanted to call out a particular part: The CEO's willingness and constancy in responding to employees.

I worked at Global Crossing during the entire time that John Legere (of T-Mobile fame) was CEO and he had a very similar policy, though I can't say for sure he didn't fire folks for writing him things he didn't like[0]. He swore up and down that he reads every message sent to him and that employees are always welcome to write him. I did so in the later evening on Christmas Eve (I'll admit I had a few beers in me) about some finishing touches I was putting on an application we were deploying to production the following week. I received a reply just after midnight on Christmas, clearly sent from a Blackberry. I can't remember the contents (it was something along the lines of "nice work") but I remember feeling quite good that the CEO was willing to take some time to reply to me on a holiday at a very odd hour.

As "employee engagement" goes, this certainly improved mine.

[0] I honestly don't know. Global Crossing had a total of "zero" good years in that every six months or so another 10% of the staff would be let go. Did some of that originate from a bad message sent to the CEO? No idea, but they were looking for reasons to get rid of anyone they could throughout my tenure. Though I'd written him a few times, I'd written him a few times but never in a manner that would have had cause to get me fired.

</comment><comment><USER37> IMO Yahoo was just unfortunately not salvageable and MM gets a lot of criticism from a lot of directions (I've seen a lot of articles by women criticizing her for not taking "enough" maternity leave, for example). I feel like she's just a favorite target.

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/marissa- may...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/marissa-mayer-s-two- week-maternity-leave-is-bullsh-t.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> Always several sides to any story - super appreciated this one. Whether Marissa failed or not - this piece was well written and worth the read.

</comment><comment><USER39> > Yahoo may be a failure but Marissa was a success

This is low tier bait. I am convinced the author is trying to ruse anyone who reads his garbage post.

</comment><comment><USER40> The problem with this is: this means MM is a very good executive regarding technical details, daily operations and the like. However, she wasn't hired to be HR or COO. She was hired to be CEO, in a company that faced deep existential challenges in a market that was rapidly making its products irrelevant. When she took over, I wasn't sure what value Yahoo really provided other than a "yet another portal and email provider" type of thing, far from being a peer of FB and Google that it aspired to be. The company needed to execute a pivot of epic proportions and in this, we have heard very little. And maybe there were some projects in their skunk works that may yet get written about, which never saw the light of day.

Morale of the troops? great. Making employees' lives better? great. But it doesn't mean squat if your company still doesn't have a viable product at the end of the day...

</comment><comment><USER41> I was a Yahoo for a couple of years before getting caught up in the recent layoffs. When I talk about my time there, I use the term "organizational inertia". It's amazing how people will fight for products, methodologies, and workflows that are clearly not going to be feasible if the company is going to survive. A company that's been around for as long as Yahoo has, and has locked in to a certain way of doing things, is hard to turn around no matter how good the CEO is.

</comment><comment><USER42> > _the company was also stacked with some of the least motivated._

Every company has unmotivated people for the CEO to deal with. Yahoo is not unique in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER43> "on a Saturday IIRC, she responded to someone on d-r. This sent shockwaves throughout the upper echelons, and soon senior management were clamoring to get on d-r."

So, basically Marissa ruined devel-random, too? Nice. Is there anything Marissa can't do?

</comment><comment><USER44> Great story, thanks for the different perspective on things. I did giggle at the title here on HN though.

"... That cannot be bought."

I guess MM, being an acquired CEO could be considered bought. It just didn't give the result they wanted..

</comment><comment><USER45> Sorry, so she raised comfort of some employees (which developer "on a mission to save a company" really needs free food instead of interesting challenges?) and decreased the ability to hire top talent by introducing other employee- unfriendly policies like banning remote work, i.e. working while living on Hawaii, giving superb motivation to stay at Yahoo and see it prosper. The rest seems more like a COO would do and not a strategic CEO. It is still fact that a little team of 5 can accomplish huge things, yet they weren't able to recruit any, while blowing insane money on useless acquihires. And also looking at technical decisions like replacing Netty with node.js in their infrastructure and resulting 4x slowdown and probably increasing operating costs reeks of following useless fads and really useless management.

<comment><USER46> I may get downvoted for saying this since it's not fashionable to say things like this but I will anyway:

When a company is going down, the type of people you need is people who are enthusiastic and team players. The last type of people you need are competent yet not so much of a team player. It's because:

1\. Pampering these people will only result in lowering rest of the team's morale. 2\. When a company is going down, a 10x or 100x or even 1000x developer (whatever that means) won't be able to save the company alone.

In a sense I think she was trying to filter out people who were not "all-in", because that's what it takes for a sinking ship to have even 1% chance of coming back up.

<comment><USER45> I believe what you actually need is to hire 2-3 teams of 10x developers/artists including a few visionaires and let them figure out projects that might one day become cash cows keeping company afloat (and give them massive stake in success). You need to both expose them to problems of the company so that they feel pressure as well as completely isolate them from toxic culture that brought down your company, so that they can give an all-out effort.

Imagine if that lone guy at Microsoft didn't figure out trick with 286 protected mode that allowed Windows to survive and wasn't heard by top management - we would all be running OS/2 10 now.

<comment><USER47> > Imagine if that lone guy at Microsoft didn't figure out trick with 286 > protected mode that allowed Windows to survive and wasn't heard by top > management - we would all be running OS/2 10 now.

I haven't heard this story before. Got a link?

<comment><USER48> I believe this is it: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/fa...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/faster- syscall-trap-redux/)

The IBM way required IBM BIOS and an absurdly long time (as I recalled it was hundreds of milliseconds, not just milliseconds) to re-enter real mode.

The motivation was to be able to run DOS real-mode programs as well as protected mode programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Do Yahoo employees really call themselves "Yahoos"?

<comment><USER50> No different than calling yourself a Googler.

<comment><USER51> Which itself has silly variants, like Noogler gor new employees or Doogler for dogs. (Google is, explicitly, a dog company. Dogs are welcome at Google facilities. Cats are officially strongly deprecated.)

<comment><USER52> Interesting given the number of cat videos this "dog" company distributes. ;)

<comment><USER53> They're cats. They have to feel they're unwelcome before they want to be there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > Yahoo is a Failure, but Marissa is a Success

I have to be living in some alternate universe. Because in my universe, if you do not accomplish the goal (revenue grow) you failed. It could that the goal was too hard to achieve, maybe the goal was impossible to achieve, etc. But, at end of the day, she failed.

And as result of her failure people will lose their jobs :(

<comment><USER55> > And as result of her failure people will lose their jobs

They will most probably get jobs again like they did earlier. Life is full of ups and down, you can blame one person for that..but try not to.

<comment><USER35> She gets paid $50M/yr for the sole purpose of being held to blame and credit for everything that happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I remember that is was usually claimed that Yahoo's valuation (net of Alibaba's stake) was either zero or negative.

She was able to sell it for $5B.

That sounds like an amazing success story.

<comment><USER57> It turned out that after taxes and other factors, Yahoo's core value was worth more. I doubt she had a significant effect on it, other than the ~700 mil loss they took on Tumblr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I guess I don't think it's particularly good that she was an email junkie, to the point of being on email a couple hours after giving birth? But beside that I can understand why some took her as an inspirational figure.

</comment><comment><USER59> $200M for handing out free lunch, a self-esteem boost, a poorly implemented personnel ranking scheme, and a few emails at weird hours ... sounds like a pretty sweet deal. sign me up!

<comment><USER60> You could use this same argument for any CEO. Pick 3 things then say $X m for a b and c that's a pretty sweet deal. Sign me up.

<comment><USER59> another non-reader. i picked out the main points the writer specified.

<comment><USER60> I read it. My point is you can make the same class of argument - pick one or two trivial achievements and a fuckup for almost any CEO or indeed professional and make it sound like their job is easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I self-published a programming book, here's my story - <AUTHOR> http://blog.filipekberg.se/2012/08/27/self-publishing-a-book-part-1-where-it-all-began/

<comment><USER2> > They said "This is the worst type-setting I've ever seen"...This got me > thinking, if the first reactions are not even constructive

Uh, actually, I think that that's wonderfully constructive advice: if someone says that, then you immediately know that your graphic design is such a big problem that nothing else you're doing is even getting through.

I'd __LOVE __to get advice that's that clear, pointed, and actionable!

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. "This is the worst book I've ever seen" is not constructive. Specifically calling out the type-setting is one of the best pieces of feedback he could have hoped to receive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As soon as I read his opening piece I thought 'this guy needs to use LaTeX', so I'm glad that he did in the end. I've benefited a lot from the stories and comments here at HN, so I'd like to offer my help in getting you started with LaTeX if you'd like to do something similar.

I'd say that the major of downside of LaTeX is that it's not very accessible. One of my goals at the moment is to improve that, and that's part of my motivation for working on ShareLaTeX [1], which is probably one of the easiest ways to get started with LaTeX (I am of course biased.) We've cut out all of the installation and configuration needed to set up LaTeX, so you can dive straight in.

[1] <https://www.sharelatex.com>

<comment><USER5> The biggest accessibility problem I have with LaTeX for bookwriting is that the stylesheet language is very strange by modern standards. You can ignore it if you're writing academic papers with a provided stylesheet (or with one of the default ones), but you often will want to do some custom formatting if you're writing a book. I've heard ConTeXt might be an improvement, though.

<comment><USER6> Context is better for book type content, if you want to do things like sidebars, colors, etc. It's also a little more "do what I say" vs LaTeX's "do what you think is best", which generally produces good results, but can be infuriating when e.g. you really want a figure and certain text on the same page or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> nostarchpress is pretty good. you can simply email them your idea and if they like it, will parter you with editors and designers to take care of all the typesetting/layout. this according to some friends of mine i'm not published by nostarch

sounds better than the rest of the publishers who want a full draft

i'm too obscure to be published, i have no alphabet soup credentials so i self publish. majority of sales were from my site which was linked in the ebooks i sold on kindle, warriorforums and smashwords

never heard of LaTeX I'll check it out, I write everything plain text in emacs and then pay somebody in Uzbek to slap it together using minamalist design

</comment><comment><USER8> What about writing it in Markdown then doing conversion to LaTeX using pandoc? I'm working on a research paper this way and it is working out nicely. Pandoc allows you to include a LaTeX template that you can customize to your heart's content yet still keep separate from your content. (you can also do html and epub directly from pandoc, with templates, if you desire)

<comment><USER9> I've been living in Emacs + Auctex for a while now, so my questions about markdown/pandoc: I have grown very accustomed to regex (and normal) searches on my bibtex/reference database and easily plugging in citations in my document. Is there support for this (reftex) in any of the markdown editors? I don't know if I've seen a good solution to this.

The other thing is preview-latex which inline-png's all equations, section titles and images in the emacs buffer. This is very valuable to me to easily see a figure without needing to tab between windows. I don't think markdown would support something like this, as far as I'm aware.

I like the idea of complete separation of content and appearance/layout, but Latex has many customizations (psfrag for image text replacement, tikz, programming custom macros) that I would be somewhat lost without. For instance, I start all my outlines in org-mode, and love having quick html, or tex->pdf output, but for the real nitty-gritty content, I _need_ my straight latex code.

<comment><USER8> Citations: Pandoc has its own format for citations that it translates to LaTeX etc as needed. Most Markdown editors I have seen or used don't have any support for pandoc's extended features. So while I am sure this could be possible with work on Emacs (or vim, or whatever) I'm not aware of anything that does what you do out of the box. Personally, I am writing in Byword (with some tweaks in macvim as necessary) and storing/looking up citations in BibDesk.

Same deal with preview-latex - you can include LaTeX directly in pandoc documents, but no editor I know of will do previews of it for you. I do think that is an awesome feature though.

Overall I think the audience for Markdown is people who don't want to get down in the weeds with, say, LaTeX and Emacs like you do. Thus, the feature set for Markdown-focused editors is still fairly simple. Pandoc is useful because it lets you add a layer of complexity on top of your Markdown as necessary (through templates) and get it into different formats easily. (The same can probably be said for other Markdown systems like MultiMarkdown but I like Pandoc) I have managed to set up my workflow to get Pandoc-flavored markdown into an apa6 LaTeX template without any significant issues, due to pandoc being fairly flexible, but it's not quite at WYSIWYG-style writing just yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My only concern about all this Markdown, Latex etc. is "spell checking". I'm Turkish and written several books (jQuery, php, javascript) but all of them were written in Microsoft Word because only Word has the most comprehensive spell checking for Turkish.

Can someone suggest me a good Latex editor with good spell-checking (other than English)?

<comment><USER11> Since someone mentionned emacs, I feel obligated to mention vim :)

Much like emacs, a great editor. I have used it alongide the LanguageTool[1] plugin for the spell checking part. I didn't like the fact it required Java (the plugin, not vim) to do it's job, but having spell/grammar checking within vim without having to resort to dirty tricks with Word / LibreOffice was well worth it. [1]<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3223>

<comment><USER12> Just to be clear, Vim has had built-in spelling checker since v7.0 (released 2006). The LanguageTool plugin may be handy for spelling and other grammar checking issues but users requiring straight-forward spelling functionality will most likely have essential spell-checking features available out-of-the- box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just curious here: Are _all_ publishers interested in proposals from first time authors?

How hard it is to get a publisher interested in promoting your book?

<comment><AUTHOR> All the publishers that I've been in contact, where I initiated the contact, they wanted proposals that followed a certain guideline. The guideline can be different from publisher to publisher. Some publishers don't even respond if they don't like your initial presentation/idea.

I've been contacted with publishers after publishing this book where they had a plan for the entire project but the royalties aren't even worth comparing against self-publishing or where you initiated the contact with a "big" publisher.

If you have a good idea and have written a Chapter that is based in the middle of the book containing about 30 pages, then I don't think it's too hard getting a publishers attention. Or do you mean if I wanted to get a publisher to promote the book now afterwards?

<comment><USER13> Yes, I was mainly interested in the promotion part. For instance, if I want to target US market, but I'm not from US.

I realize that there are many factors, like for instance you background, qualifications, etc. But I was particularly interested in this aspect. Every author publishes their first book at one point, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right! As far as I know either you go all-in with a publisher or you don't go with them at all. So they won't help you promote the book if they haven't helped you published it.

However, CreateSpace that I've used to self-publish the book has options for expanding distribution to other channels such as book stores in U.S. That requires that the book store buys the books, so you're still back to square one; getting them to know you exist.

Technology books are a bit different from "Normal" books from that I've heard. If you publish a normal book the publisher want the entire book before they make a decision. As for techical books they just want a chapter or two before they say yes or no to your book. If you go with a publisher they will help you with everything from proofing to marketing in all different channels and you will sell a lot more books but get a lot less royalties.

What I did to enter new markets such as US and Spain was that I sent some free copies to influential people that I knew liked to read and talk about technology books. If they liked what they read they would talk about it, if they didn't they would at least know who I was. This of course requires that you pay for the marketing yourself.

Hope this answered the question, sort of!

<comment><USER13> I did. Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you create an awareness of your book and promote sales? If you have a publisher and you have a print edition of the book, that may give you the advantage of being able to have your book on store shelves to speak for themselves, but if it's an e-book then getting the word out seems harder.

</comment><comment><USER15> The most useful part for those considering self-publishing is the stylesheet linked later in this series of blog posts,

<https://github.com/aginiewicz/createspace>

</comment><comment><USER16> How does this compare to tools like Sigil?

<comment><USER17> Sigil is, as far as I read (since I've never use it), tied only to EPUB format. TeX can be compiled and converted to multiple formats. To make an EPUB one just need to create appropriate sructure and opf/xml, then pack it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How have your e-book sales compared to your print ones?

<comment><AUTHOR> Since the e-book is included when you purchase the printed copy, the printed versions have sold better because you get everything.

Maybe 1/3 is plain Kindle/PDF sales and the rest is printed.

When it's time to write the next book I will certainly be targeting all the different formats again because everyone likes to read differently. A lot of the printed sales haven't even requested the e-book.</comment></comment>


Kafka in a Nutshell - <AUTHOR> http://sookocheff.com/post/kafka/kafka-in-a-nutshell/ <comment><USER2> Are there any alternatives to kafka that are also modeled after the "message queue as a log" concept? In particular, I'd like to be able to reconsume arbitrary ranges of 'already processed' log/event/message data as well as trust the log as the ultimate deterministic source of truth for the state of the system.

The reason I don't just use kafka is because the "quorum" style scaling is overkill for our needs since the app will be for internal use only and will likely never exceed more than 1000 simultaneous users. Also, I've heard that zookeeper (required to use kafka) has its own technical overhead that I'd like to avoid dealing with if possible.

<comment><USER3> Google Cloud Pub/Sub perhaps [https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Conceptually, how do these types of pub/sub messaging systems work at scale? How does the number of subscribers impact the efficiency of updates being distributed to the subscribers? Is the server pushing these messages to them all simultaneously, or is there some logic that might result in one subscriber receiving an update faster than another? Is the publishing server opening up a ton of ports to handle the communication, or from a networking/ports perspective how is this handled?

<comment><AUTHOR> With Kafka specifically the consumers of messages use standard TCP to receive messages by pulling them from Kafka. Kafka is not a push system. Consumers can come and go in and ad-hoc fashion.

<comment><USER4> So I guess to address user volume, you just scale horizontally increasing the number of server instances in your cluster?

<comment><USER5> Linkedin blogged about how kafka is their data backbone.

[https://engineering.linkedin.com/kafka/running-kafka- scale](https://engineering.linkedin.com/kafka/running-kafka-scale)

When combined, the Kafka ecosystem at LinkedIn is sent over 800 billion messages per day which amounts to over 175 terabytes of data. Over 650 terabytes of messages are then consumed daily, which is why the ability of Kafka to handle multiple producers and multiple consumers for each topic is important. At the busiest times of day, we are receiving over 13 million messages per second, or 2.75 gigabytes of data per second. To handle all these messages, LinkedIn runs over 1100 Kafka brokers organized into more than 60 clusters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post, but one thing to note is that the number of partitions DOES NOT need to be equivalent to the number of consumers. A consumer can reasonably consume multiple partitions, as most do. On the other hand, it does provide an upper bound to the number of consumers in one group, as a consumer can only reasonably consume as few as one of the partitions.

<comment><USER7> so do you drop the idea of partitions completely because you have shown its structure proves a soft, reasonable, upperbound?

implying overworking

what do you replace it with?

what problem was 'use the same number of partitions as consumers' trying to fix?

<comment><USER7> or if you keep it, how do you measure the optimal partition count?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is AWS SNS/SQS equivalent to Kafka? And what are the differences, advantages/disadvantages of either one?

<comment><USER9> Kinesis is the AWS alternative to Kafka, minus some features.

<comment><USER10> Kinesis is for streaming computations. It's closer to Apache Storm (which typically uses Kafka) than Kafka.

<comment><USER11> You might be thinking of Simple Workflow Service, which is closer to Storm. Grandparent had it right.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Virus storytellers challenge China's official narrative - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/8455474af114e6b298cec8cd5da65b65 <comment><USER2> This Wuhan Fever is getting scary, the government is saying they have it under control but then we see hospitals being built in less than two weeks. People being disappeared for reporting on infections and all this is happening while the virus continues to spread. Wuhan Fever was confirmed in a case in Mumbai 10 days ago, I wonder how they will be able to keep it contained there?

Maybe they should rename Wuhan to Racoon City!</comment>


France government approves 3% tax on internet giants - <AUTHOR> https://techerati.com/news-hub/france-approves-tax-on-big-tech-despite-us-threats/ <comment><USER2> "The tech industry warns consumers could pay more."

Oh no, a cost increase on a free service?

<comment><USER3> I'm willing to pay 3% more.

</comment></comment><comment> 100-xyz Each of us is seeing the emergence of economic giants with monopolistic attributes and who not only want to control a maximum amount of data and make money with this data but also go further than that by, in the absence of rules, escaping taxes and putting into place instruments that could, tomorrow, become a sovereign currency.

Very well said.</comment>


The Call for an Open Source Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://kennethreitz.com/blog/the-call-for-an-open-source-social-network/#

<comment><USER2> Django on LAMP is the obvious answer for an open source social network? Um... why? What is wrong with Ruby or the 6 trillion other Python web frameworks or Lighttpd or CouchDB or... the list goes on and on.</comment>


Show HN: Goalee for iOS – Don't lose track of your life's goals - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/goalee/id1438115216 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, HN!

The idea behind Goalee is that all the annoyances, conflicts or so-called problems we face in our everyday lives pale in comparison with our true goals in life.

The issue I faced, as many others, is that I tend to lose track of what I desire most, exactly because of problems here and there. I started by writing down my goals on a sheet of paper, but that wasn't quite enough. I eventually started overlooking them.

I then tried using to-do apps, or habit tracking apps for this. But this isn't something to be checked off, something to record progress of, nor a habit to build; it's a mindset change, if you will. So I ended up building Goalee to add long/mid-term goals and remind myself about them on a daily/weekly basis.

Don't lose focus; don't forget what you desire most; or it will end up forgotten in the sea of daily struggles.

Roland

<comment><AUTHOR> Been a while since I launched something, so I totally forgot these even exist :)

        http://tokn.co/cgz55cx6
        http://tokn.co/jxhnybnw
        http://tokn.co/rpnpp4sc
        http://tokn.co/pz34a3gt
        http://tokn.co/e4ajchcx

Please use top to bottom and comment with the one you used, so others don't waste time. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Just bought it to check it out!

Was looking to build something similar for myself (notifications to remind yourself to think about the big picture, goals, etc.) but this might just be what I was looking for!

Happy to provide feedback after I use it for some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

Hope it _is_ what you're looking for!

Happy to receive any feedback and impressions.</comment></comment>


Apple takes on Google and Microsoft with iWorks real-time collaboration - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-takes-on-google-microsoft-with-iworks-real-time-collaboration/ <comment><USER2> My kid's elementary school has recently shelved the iPads in favor of Chromebooks.

Usable keyboard, multiple logins, gDocs collaboration, low replacement cost, etc etc etc.

The fact that the iWorks collaboration was highlighted in an education talk tells me a lot.

<comment><USER3> My kid's were issued Lenovo Thinkpads and the machines are total garbage. I don't understand why they didn't go for Chromebooks.

<comment><USER4> You rather have a sub 300$ device than a premium above 1000$ product? I know the Thinkpad brand is being abused with Ideapads and their similarity but to say Chromebooks are better is a lie.

<comment><USER3> The Thinkpad's are $400 devices (11e is the model), and they are indeed junk. The battery lasts around 3-4 hours which means kids have to find an outlet to work. The charging circuit makes an intermittent high pitched whine that many kids are complaining about (I can't hear it). When my daughter's is plugged in, the time until charged is always "UNKNOWN". Apparently, that's a common problem.

There have been issues with the touchpad as well, although my daughter's has been fine.

So, yes I wish they used Chromebooks. We could at least just buy a new one, log in, and have everything there ready to go.

<comment><USER5> The 11e is quite simply not a ThinkPad.

One of the biggest problems with Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's laptop division is their constant dilution of the ThinkPad name. Initially, in the first few years after the acquisition, Lenovo introduced a line of budget devices under the 'E' series and these were _not_ marked with the ThinkPad identity because they were of significantly poorer construction and did not come with the same warranty and service options. In the years since, though, they've started slapping the ThinkPad name on these and a number of new low-cost product lines.

In practice, it's only really a ThinkPad if them model number starts with a T, W, or X. Unfortunately Lenovo itself is working hard to eliminate this distinction, positioning ThinkPad as another Dell or HP instead of as a high- end enterprise and luxury product line.

<comment><USER3> The 11e is indeed a ThinkPad. You might not think it's deserving of the name, but that's where ThinkPad is these days.

I've had a bunch of ThinkPads over the years and two are still in use.

I have a T520 that I now use basically as a terminal. It's a very creaky, heavy, machine that never gave me more than about 3 hours of battery, and the keyboard was terrible. But it sits there and keeps working (I use an external keyboard, monitor, and mouse).

I also have a ThinkPad Yoga 12.5. I really like the keyboard, but again the battery life isn't weak (4 hours). I occasionally think about getting something a little bigger, but the small size is pretty nice for traveling.

<comment><USER6> I don't think Lenovo has ever had a laptop with good battery life, outside RT Yoga 11 (12 hours?) and Yoga 2 Pro (9 hours).

You buy thinkpad for the great keyboard the red-dot-whatsitsname-thingy. And the fact that it can stop bullets. But not for the battery life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really understand the point of iWork. I did back when Apple was worried that MS would not maintain Office on the Mac, and when Office didn't run on iOS. But since those cases aren't true, it's a lot of engineering expenditure for a feature that will not cause someone to buy a Mac, iPhone or iPad. Even now they are still toys even less capable than the clumsy google docs apps.

Any ideas as to why this is worth Apple's time?

(This isn't an anti-Apple rant: I am a heavy user of their hardware).

<comment><USER8> In addition to the other points that have been raised - Office is expensive! True, Apple's hardware also tends to be pretty expensive, but when you can buy a new iPad for $400 (or MacBook for $900) that'll last several years, an extra $50-$100 per year for Office 365 is a significant addition. Even on more expensive hardware, that's likely the most expensive _software_ purchase most users will ever make... which means that rational or no, some users will shy away from it... and they'd be stuck without an office suite. In comparison, iWork used to cost ($80 back in the days of iWork '09, later $5-10 per app for the rewrites) but has been free for a while now.

Google Docs is free, but as a browser-based interface it's slow and nowhere near the kind of native experience Apple likes to promote; it requires an internet connection on anything but Chrome; it will never be a poster child for the latest macOS features like trackpad-pinch-to-zoom or Versions or the share sheet or whatever. That's on the desktop; on iOS, Google has a set of native apps but they're quite feature-limited.

Also, both Word and Google Docs are owned by companies that directly compete with Apple, and the apps promote the respective company's ecosystem (e.g. for storage, they push you to OneDrive and Google Drive respectively rather than iCloud). For better or worse, Apple wants to control the whole experience and make it all seamless. Not to mention that Apple probably wants to avoid situations where in the future it could be held hostage to some extent by the owner of a 'must-have' app for its platform.

There are less popular alternatives, but they all have their own problems.

Personally, I neither need to open people's Word documents nor have particularly strenuous requirements for a word processor or spreadsheet (or presentation software, but I'm pretty sure Keynote has some fairly decent pluses compared to PowerPoint anyway). So I am quite satisfied by iWork.

<comment><USER9> LibreOffice on the other hand is free and can actually be a replacement for Excel. I wish Numbers would be a reasonable alternative but it's missing all of the features that actually make Excel useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does it work on the web even for the people that don't own anything Apple, maybe only an iTunes account? Because if it's not interoperable with non Apple devices and OSes it's going to stay small. Think of Google Docs working only on Android and Chromebooks.

<comment><USER11> iWork on the web already had real-time collaboration, the Mac and iOS version didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> More like catches up. No small achievement, but it was about time.

<comment><USER13> Is realtime collaboration offered in any competing desktop apps? On the Mac at least there is none in Office.

<comment><USER14> > Is realtime collaboration offered in any competing desktop apps?

Office 2016 does have realtime collaboration in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, in both the desktop and online apps.

<comment><USER15> Desktop office is not real time - it's synced and since office web sucks compared to gDocs - gDocs win new markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's kind of crazy to me that TechCrunch misspelled the product name in both the headline and body of the story and no one has noticed. It's iWork (singular), not iWorks: [http://www.apple.com/iwork/](http://www.apple.com/iwork/)

Edit: Looks like they fixed it.

</comment><comment><USER17> This should have been introduced to the iWorks suite a long time ago. They've lost whatever lead they had by ignoring iWorks for the past decade or more.

<comment><USER18> It should be emphasized that they've ignored iWorks for a long time.....it's hard to trust that it won't regress again after the renewed emphasis.

If they had spent the last decade making iWorks a replacement for Office (making it handle Excel, for example), they would be in a really good place right now. Instead, it's hard to take them seriously.

<comment><USER19> You're being silly. They have spent the past decade making iWorks better, and in fact, the whole app was revamped from the ground up about 2 years ago, to bring perfect compatibility across platforms from mac to ios.

It's a far better application than anything Microsoft or Google is giving. Google's only run in the browser, and poorly compared to Apple's browser choice, and Microsofts is expensive, buggy and while it has immense numbers of features it has terrible UI.

<comment><USER6> > It's a far better application than anything Microsoft or Google is giving. > Google's only run in the browser, and poorly compared to Apple's browser > choice, and Microsofts is expensive, buggy and while it has immense numbers > of features it has terrible UI.

None of the points you made are true. Granted things like UI can be very objective, but how someone can with a straight face say Excel is uglier than Numbers (have you seen those awful randomly colored icons?) is beyond me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Microsoft's implementation of collaborative work is completely moot for the at home user.

</comment><comment><USER21> alt: oss collaborative online tools: [https://framalab.org/](https://framalab.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> It's about time. Office 365 collaboration just sucks!

</comment><comment><USER23> How is this the first female presenter at an Apple Event?

"On stage, Susan Prescott — Apple's vice president of product management and the first female presenter at Apple's event"

<comment><USER24> Maybe because 16 of the 19 top Apple executives are white men. (Women lead retail, HR, and public policy.)

[http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/](http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/)

Aren't there sufficiently talented women -- and also people of Hispanic and Asian ancestry -- who could serve as leaders and role models at Apple?

<comment><USER25> No, it's because it's not even decent journalism. Apple had multiple presenters at WWDC Keynote that happened to also be female.

They also had some of the same set on stage the prior year.

<comment><USER23> WWDC is not a Apple Release Presentation. So not poor journalism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to imessage without an apple device? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know how to use imessage from a PC or Android 'phone? Thanks <comment><USER2> Not sure if this helps, you can send imessages from the Messages app in Mac. [http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5395](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5395)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks blufox but i have no Mac device. It isn't my religion. I'm not religious anyway. I think that restricting comms to your own cult is retrograde, anti free speech and kind of proprietary, like religion, possessive etc. We should share as much as possible and speech is free. That imessage deserves to be got around for these kind of reasons and I had hoped that some whizz kid or whazzy old person reading my post would have the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I expect Apple to run in the same issue that Blackberry had with BBM if they don't open it up to more platforms soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let it be so

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe with a Virtual Machine?

<comment><USER5> Not without violating your Eula

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't want to do that adenner, any more than necessary

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> not possible :(

<comment><AUTHOR> how d'ya like them apples mihahall? Shall I buy an ipod touch iOS5 or later then register an Apple ID, Apple account, Apple subscription direct debit, warranty insurance with payment protection and t-shirt printed with the password in tiny alpha numeric characters and sequences of prime numbers scattered with symbols so that I have to take it off in public to read it, just so thaT I CAN WISH MY SON who is hiking in the HIMALAYAS a ___HAPPY BIRTHDAY_ __because he only took an ipod hoping that he could escape this sort of crap from me just once in his life on the last mountain in Tibet NOT to have wi-fi, thanks for being positive, it 's all too hard, too much for me, suffocating in devices, can never find the right one, HUH ?? Just leave it to human beings to make it simple for us all. Sorry, this was intended for the eula guard . . . . . Please disregard</comment></comment>


Dear Theresa, see you in court - <AUTHOR> https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2014/dear-theresa-see-you-in-court

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're in the UK, please donate £5 per month (payable by BitCoin if that's your bag).

[https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join)</comment>


Potential solution to overheating mobile phones - <AUTHOR> https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6469/1125 <comment><USER2> The original title is " _Magnetization switching by magnon-mediated spin torque through an antiferromagnetic insulator_ "

From the Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or > linkbait; don 't editorialize._

</comment><comment><USER3> I clicked this and expected to read about new kinds of thermal paste or whatever, not to be slapped in the face with a whole field of solid state physics I'd never even heard of before (magnonics). I'd complain about being paywalled by the website but I'd probably not understand anything beyond the abstract (and even then, hardly). Can someone offer a dumbed-down explanation of this to someone who only barely understands Maxwell's equations?</comment>


The problem with Twitter's efforts to pop our information bubbles - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1383954/the-problem-with-twitters-efforts-to-pop-our-information-bubbles/ <comment><USER2> Twitter popping bubbles? Ha. Didn't they just double down on banning conservatives, and supporting the openly racist liberals?</comment>


The Education Startup Backed by Mark Zuckerberg – NBC News - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/education-start-backed-mark-zuckerberg-n425946 <comment><AUTHOR> an update on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9485470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9485470)</comment>


Lucky to be a Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/lucky-to-be-a-programmer

<comment><USER2> Some evenings, my girlfriend comes back home to find me stuck to my computer, and she asks "What are we doing tonight?" and I answer "well... I'd kind of like to work... but I'll spend the evening with you _meek smile_ "

Surprisingly, she's still with me. I think it's mostly because I smell nice.

<comment><USER3> Despite the whining, it is a great thing to do.

Some days.

Other days you want to give it all up (usually just before a breakthrough which provides the rush that keeps you working for the next breakthrough).

<comment><USER4> Astonishingly accurate--I think programmers self-select that way, I've historically been not quite smart enough to get that next breakthrough before giving up, so I'm not a programmer, despite several attempts.

<comment><USER3> Its a horrible depressing feeling. You feel worthless, sometimes angry, always frustrated. But there is always a tipping point, and the rush is incredible. You feel 8 feet tall, the sun shines brighter, food tastes better.

Either that or I have mild bipolar ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article, I absolutely agree. I grew up in a farming community, and I worked some of the worst jobs imaginable in my youth. When I ever get angry with software I consider I am getting paid 10 times the amount to challenge myself intellectually.

It really is quite humbling.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's lucky to be a [enter profession] if you can appreciate it and accept it.

Comparing with other fields and thinking that ours is better is like saying one religion is better than another. Which some people argue it is how we should be thinking anyway. Because if other fields/religions are better/more correct, then why are we in this field/religion.

<comment><USER7> The existence and abundance of free/open-source software seems to indicate that programming is different. You don't often hear about lawyers or MBAs or doctors or chemists or carpenters or even writers and musicians who happily work without pay just for the fun of it and give away the results of their work.

<comment><USER8> Well, I don't think that's necessarily true.

Writers and musicians: have you been reading the internet at all lately?

Doctors, lawyers: these activities necessarily involve working on/with someone and involve a massive amount of trust due to the amount of responsibility involved. This is why there are necessary qualifications before you can call yourself a doctor or a lawyer. Once you have those qualifications, it's not so hard to find someone to pay you for it, although even then people do it for free. (aid work, pro bono legal work)

Carpenters: you're way off. I know fully trained carpenters whose main job is something else and they do carpentry in their spare time. Don't forget the results of that labour aren't as readily duplicated as anything in purely digital form, so visibility isn't going to be anywhere near as high. You can't just upload that chair to WoodForge.

Chemists (or any "hard" science): uhhh, _grad school_?

MBA: yeah, you got me on that one :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _...these programming blitzkriegs are some of my favorite periods in life. Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal._

Couldn't have said it better myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the End of first para! its a killer for me and my friends!

</comment><comment><USER10> Cliffs Notes version: "I like programming."

</comment><comment><USER11> Great post. I plus-voted you.</comment>


Logitech Circle - <AUTHOR> https://secure.logitech.com/en-us/circle/camera <comment><USER2> It's funny because I'm currently reading "The Circle" by Dave Eggers where having cameras recording every moment of your life is a central aspect of the story. No, actually it is not funny. It is creepy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Always on network connected camera in my home.

Yeah I'm not installing a panopticon myself thanks.</comment>


My Delorean runs Perl - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl <comment><USER2> > "Because I don't have a lot of time to plan out the full requirements of my > objects, it has been a great boost to productivity to just toss in an > additional few attributes on unsuspecting objects, or quickly sort through a > list of objects based on criteria that would require awkward reflection code > in Java or C++."

In Java, sorting objects based on arbitrary criteria doesn't require reflection. Just pass in a Comparator to one of the JDK-supplied sort methods. It's not awkward. I'm not a C++ programmer but I suspect it's similar.

<comment><USER3> Yep, in C++ you can pass in a lambda to create the comparator inline:

      std::sort(
        myvec.begin(),
        myvec.end(),
        [](obj& A, obj& b) {
          return A.attr < B.attr;
        }
      );

<comment><USER4> If you use std::begin and std::end instead of the member functions this will even work with old-school C-style arrays.

<comment><USER5> .. and Herb Sutter recommends those free functions over the member functions for this reason -- genericity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still fall back to perl for experimental/recreational programming. Possibly because it is the first scripting language I really felt fluent in, but I think just because it is so quick and flexible to write.

These days, anything I inflict on others in this category tends to be redone in Python, but for hacking? Perl just hits a sweet spot like no other language for me.

<comment><USER7> Perl is joy to write (especially with Modern::Perl qw(2016) and feature qw(signatures)) but is hard to read. I can write lot of code in single line with map/reduce/split/join/regexps, but without chaining of operators it is mess, because order of operators is opposite to order of execution. It because of traditional function or operator invocation syntax: "x(a1, y(a2, z(a3, a4), a5), a6)", instead of modern chain of calls: "z(a3,a4).y(a2, a5).x(a1, a6)" . The more operators I pack into single line of code with traditional syntax, the harder it to read.

Perl6 has "feed operator", but it is not ported to perl5 to date. Perl6 syntax is clean:

        my @array = <7 8 9 0 1 2 4 3 5 6 7 8 9>;
        @array ==> unique()
               ==> sort()
               ==> reverse()
               ==> my @final-array;
        say @final-array;

but perl6 is slow, so it is not gaining any popularity.

<comment><USER8> perl can be hard to read. but then again it can be easy e.g. [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/a229b77c8ab25026633f1ab819...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/a229b77c8ab25026633f1ab819c29a78)

<comment><USER7> I can write readable page of code. I want to write readable line of code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems directly related to Larry Wall's (Perl founder) "Laziness, Impatience, Hubris " idea: [http://wiki.c2.com/?LazinessImpatienceHubris](http://wiki.c2.com/?LazinessImpatienceHubris)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a fan of car modding myself, but I don't think replacing the entire instrument cluster with a single centralised system --- where one fault can leave you with _no_ instruments instead of just one inop --- is such a good idea. Adding a secondary display for less critical indicators would be useful, however.

<comment><USER11> Why is a failure of the cluster readout display, during driving, a big deal?

If it fails, it would be fixed soon. The driver still has the window. I'm struggling to see how an immediate failure of speed readout etc would immediately endanger the car? Assuming it performs no control function.

<comment><USER12> _> Why is a failure of the cluster readout display, during driving, a big deal?_

It's true that you probably won't die immediately. But for most people, driving a long distance without a cluster display would be extremely dangerous. Especially at night on an empty road. For me, I start relying on the readouts for speed and rpm around the four hour mark. Tired brains don't work well.

Which means you probably have to get it fixed ASAP. If that happened more than a couple of times with a car, I'd sell the car / not buy it in the fist place.

<comment><USER13> You aren't wrong, but if you really are concerned about those sorts of things, you should probably drive a late-model Toyota, not a Delorian.

They stopped making this car in 1983; it is far beyond it's design lifetime already, and was never a particularly reliable car to begin with, from my understanding. Like most classic cars, you probably shouldn't drive it unless you enjoy maintaining it, and are okay with (and carry substantial liability insurance for) a car that is dramatically less reliable and less safe than a modern car. Like most classic cars, you probably shouldn't drive it places where you are likely to die or otherwise suffer dramatically bad consequences if it breaks down. This isn't a criticism of the Delorian specifically as much as it is a truth about early '80s automotive engineering and running vehicles beyond their service life.

Of course, as a society, we've decided that this (tradeof off cool car vs danger) is a reasonable choice to make; we don't force people to buy newer cars because they are safer. Within this context, the addition of a special instrument panel seems to me like it's not adding substantial additional danger to the system.

<comment><USER14> The DeLorean is actually more reliable now than it was back then because we have 37 years of test data available on what goes bad and how to prevent it. There's also a number of improved components available made from newer materials.

Also it did really well in the crash tests of the 80's and current owners baby them, so the insurance is pretty cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is a great idea to program a dashboard to one's taste. Most dashboards these days are terrible and illustrative of somebody else's UI dreams. Imagine something more useful than what Audi or Tesla provides and not the crap Apple/Google gives us on our phones

<comment><USER16> Tesla owners have been writing javascript websites to run in the web browser on the 17" touchscreen ever since the Model S was released. You can't do much of a car dashboard, alas, but you can do weather forecasts, TODO lists, geofenced content like work server status while I'm driving to work, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting project. The real issue with the Dolorean however is the engine and drivetrain not the dash.

<comment><USER18> That can be fixed. Here's Stanford's all-electric, self-driving, self-drifting DeLorean.[1] With a computer display as the dashboard.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4)

<comment><USER19> That video is awesome, but self-driving is only true if you want to drive in tight little circles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Who else was hoping to see some Perl scripts running in a shell on the dash of the Delorean..

</comment><comment><USER21> That's a lot of lines for "it's my $##& project and I wanted to use perl."

More power to 'im! I use lua for such things myself. Because I like it.

That's the beauty (and even a big part of the reason) for solo projects. You get to do it your way.

</comment><comment><USER22> Perl 5 or 6?

<comment><USER23> It's clear that he's using Perl 5. XS and CPAN are concepts exclusive to Perl 5.

<comment><USER24> I don't think that is entirely true.

> Uploading a module to CPAN is the preferred way of distributing Perl 6 > modules. [0]

Though XS was replaced with NativeCall in Perl6, so he is still using Perl, not it's new brother.

[0] [https://docs.perl6.org/language/modules#Upload_your_Module_t...](https://docs.perl6.org/language/modules#Upload_your_Module_to_CPAN)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how long it takes to boot up the system before you can drive with this approach.

<comment><USER26> It is easy to tune Debian Wheezy such that it boots into your X application from rotating HDD in less than 15 seconds from powerup on typical Atom ITX board. For newer distributions with systemd you don't even need any special tuning for the boot time to be dominated by BIOS POST.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now what I would like to know is ... is this perl code on github?

</comment><comment><USER28> > embedding C++ code into Perl

What could posibly go wrong.

No seriously, the project looks amazing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Let me get this straight. You have a DeLorean DMC-12, a touchstone of '80s aesthetics and American pop culture icon, and you tear out the instrument panel and replace it with contemporary over-engineered Linux-powered glitz?

You ruined it!

<comment><USER14> The DeLorean was famous exactly because it wasn't 80's aesthetics; it STILL looks like the car of the future. But the instrument cluster? it's made of cheesy analog gauges that bounce with the fluctuations of the system voltage. It desperately needed an upgrade. (but I have all the original pieces and no parts were cut in the process of the mod ;-)

<comment><USER29> But that's part of the experience, is it not? Analogue gauges!

Also, assuming you're the one that did this modification; How long does it take for your instrument panel to boot? Fast enough to see the tach needle (or replacement thereof) jump up as the engine starts and then bounce back down to normal? Being in a car where I wouldn't be able to see that happen would be… surreal.

<comment><USER14> My kernel takes 2 seconds, and the userspace takes about 4, mostly waiting for Xorg to initialize the display (which I could probably improve using a hardcoded xorg config, rather than autodetect). The real killer is BIOS though- my FitPC 3 takes about 7 seconds to POST. However, I power it on when the door opens, rather than when the key turns, and one of these days I'll get it connected to my remote unlock button. The microcontroller is always on and consumes almost no power. I would buy a new PC if I knew for sure that the post time was less, but nobody ever advertises that statistic, and anything based on BIOS/UEFI tends to be abysmally slow.

Meanwhile the display rendering should be within ~50ms of the measurements from the microcontroller, so the tach and other measurements feel really "tight". (the tach is that curved column of horizontal bars on the left)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Where's the flux capacitor?

</comment><comment><USER31> People who like Perl are weird.

:-)

<comment><USER32> But productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages)

Objective-C? Or maybe Ada is more contemporaneous…</comment>


Ask HN: How did Codeacdemy run code so damn fast? - <AUTHOR>

What's the secret recipe for code execution? I don't really think this is a secret thing... lots of websites probably have done something similar. Any idea?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> I work at codecademy and in particular one of the two programmers working on code execution. It's going to be hard to give this question the answer it deserves without spending sometime going over many of the decisions we've made designing the system. Here is a very short list and in no given order:

1) Lightweight sandboxes: unlike many services we don't start full-blown VMs for each user to sandbox they're code and execution environment.

2) Persistent interpreter sessions and environments: Not having to suffer interpreter startup time each time you want to run a piece of code.

3) Websockets: Use of websockets on the browser to open a bi-directional communication channel with the server, which is much faster than ajax. Falling back to xhr-polling, jsonp etc. for older browsers or clients behind firewalls.

4) Output buffering: Stdout from interpreters are buffered and debounced.

5) Responsive server: This is basically like saying we did a good job programming our servers. We thought an event-driven server would be best for our use case (many child processes, idling connections etc.), but then you still have to do a very good job making sure you never block or do anything time intensive.

6) Easily scalable: Investing time in deployment and build process, setting up load balancers etc. allows us to bring new nodes fairly easily when we need them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't used the site before, are you asking about the content of the website and the training material... or are you asking about the actual website compile and display times?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you go to Python and type in import os; print os.getcwd(); you can tell that they are not fooling users. The Python code is executed and returned. I am just surprised how fast they are able to run and return.</comment></comment>


The browser desktop, developer tools - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/05/04/browser-desktop-developer-tools/

<comment><USER2> More of my tools in the browser would really be great for iPad.</comment>


Show HN: Writing and Publishing Made Simple - <AUTHOR> https://www.lacunabooks.com

<comment><USER2> Nice idea. Wonder if it's responsive to touch devices... would be great to be able to write books for ipad this easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! HTML version is not using media queries explicitly, but it's readable on ipad. EPUB probably works better on smaller devices.</comment></comment>