GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/19/17480912/github-ice-linkedin-scraping-employees <comment><USER2> Q "But don't we sell the same kind of data to our paying customers?"

X "Yes, but when we do it, it's not doxxing"

Q "Why not?"

X "Because we would never do it for any nefarious reason"

Q "What about that time we scraped the data of those groups that were linked to that reporter, so that one company could do oppo research and prepare a PR counterattack, targeting specific journalists"

X "That wasn't nefarious. We made a lot of money doing that"

<comment><USER3> 'Doxxing' is such a useless term anyway. In this case all the database is is the search results for 'ICE' on LinkedIn. That's data these people filled in themselves. But now that attention has been called to it it's 'doxxing'.

The phonebook is full of 'doxxing'. Who cares.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention that most govt. employees record of employment is public info( in the us anyway). Being law enforcement this may be a little different, however this info may be foiable or even just sitting on the ice web site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sam Levigne is a performance artist. The context for this work is that ICE plans to increase its surveillance of immigrants, including surveillance of social media accounts. Sam argues that if this level of transparency is too invasive even for our public figures, then why do we demand this for prospective citizens?

After a public backlash, ICE recently suspended its Extreme Vetting Initiative, which would scan social media history and automatically flag people for deportation based on the exact criteria from the original Muslim ban. The Brennan Center discusses why this is bad: [https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/ice-extreme- vetting-i...](https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/ice-extreme-vetting- initiative-resource-page)

ICE will still require five years of social media history: [https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/politics/immigrants-social- me...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/politics/immigrants-social-media- information/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> > "I think that's a totally valid question to bring up," Lavigne said earlier > today about whether the database could be used for targeted harassment, "but > I think that the information is already out there, and if people want to > embark on individual campaigns of harassment, then they're going to be doing > that no matter what."

That does not mean you have to make it easier

<comment><USER7> There can sometimes be a fine line between "enabling" and "meddling"

I mean, surely you can't expect a site like GitHub with thousands of projects happening every day to be able to keep track of each one and make sure that something bad isnt being done with the project.

<comment><USER8> What? Yes you surely can expect that. That's what moderation is. That's what every site on the internet that allows user-submitted content does. Thats what Twitter does, YouTube does, Facebook does, Reddit does, and HN does. That's what GitHub does. GitHub is ultimately responsible for everything that is hosted on their site, and so _of course_ they track each one and monitor them for violations of their policies. If they couldn't do that, they wouldn't be in business.

<comment><USER9> Then how comes that gitlab is still hosting this content? Do the have a different policy? Or is it they just didn't notice?

<comment><USER8> GitLab isn't still hosting the content. They too have taken it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The database included information like job title, profile picture, and > general location of work.

Ah, yes. The White Knight of Severely Violating People's Privacy because You're Right and They Aren't. Truly the most moral person in the world.

In the current political situation in the US, afai can judge it, will enable harassers to seriously harm or even endanger the lives of these people for the crime of having the wrong employer (they might not even be involved in any of the bad crap you see on TV but who cares, wrong employer!)

In other countries or, for example, the EU, such behavior would be a crime, end of story. And you'd be responsible for the damage that comes from doxing people.

Saying "the information is already out there" is no excuse. It's like a swatter saying "it was just a prank".

<comment><USER11> If you sign up to be in the police, or ICE, or any such governmental arm used to jail the poor and protect the rich, and are passively accepting these policies you are supporting them. As such by supporting these despicable policies those enforcing them are scum in my books, and if they are doing these things I see nothing wrong with publishing their information. Maybe now they will be as afraid as the people they persecute.

<comment><USER12> What if you're an law enforcement agent and do your job ethically (refuse unethical orders, etc.)? Or what if you're pressured by your supervisor to do things that unethical and know that the consequence of not doing those things is getting your and your family's lives ruined? Should your private info be exposed so you can be harassed?

<comment><USER13> i'll leave this here

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/10/21/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/10/21/they- were-just-following- orders/34d2eb42-daf6-49b9-af28-37a9582d0688/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7bed9bdaada2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So if I get this correct; this person wrote a program to gather information about individuals that may or may not be responsible for things related to the government agency and published that list with the intent that people who are angry about that should do what exactly? Contact them? Threat them? Stalk them? I see no other possible outcome of this action.

Either you:

1\. Don't care

2\. Use this information in a bad way, like harassing or stalking the individuals that are doing their job (I'm assuming).

I don't understand people who do this kind of things and also expect support and sympathy. You have none from me at least. It is great that Medium and Github removes such databases to protect individuals that probably are innocent.

<comment><USER15> Sadly I think this is the new way of doing things. It gets more and more acceptable to crucify people using social media. But at the same time I don't agree with your conclusion that this makes it right for Medium and Github to remove this. They should keep out of the judging/censoring business. Steam is sadly the only good example of how it should be done at the moment.

Edit: Because really otherwise they should remove the information from LinkedIn (or make it non-searchable) which also makes it very easy to get and they don't do that.

<comment><USER14> Yes I agree with you that sadly this is the way people do stuff today. An allegation is more important than truth it seems sometimes.

That said, we must protect people that are having their information leaked with a nefarious intent. In Sweden for example, you can take this information find out their addresses and social security numbers since all of this is basically public information.

Github and Medium simply don't want their platforms to be used to harass and stalk people, which is a real problem that anyone with experience can attest to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the sake of completeness and putting moral questions aside, what is currently the best way to publish similarly questionable information in a hard-to-censor way?

<comment><USER17> BitTorrent is fairly hard to censor.

Mega.co has an okay track record at this point, though it's centralized obviously.

Tor hidden service offering a link to the files + bittorrent magnet link may be the best option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So the author copied data from one Microsoft site (LinkedIn) to another Microsoft site (GitHub).

Both sites use PII to target people and companies: how many annoying emails have _you_ received from LinkedIn this week? And I mean the creepy ones, suggesting contacts based on minute details from your profile, or encouraging you to import all your contacts so they can be spammed?

But I guess if a user does it, it's doxxing. I wonder if this is political, or maybe Medium and GitHub are just trying to avoid a potential fight with a federal agency.

<comment><USER19> > I mean the creepy ones, suggesting contacts based on minute details from > your profile, or encouraging you to import all your contacts so they can be > spammed?

None at all. The only emails I get from linkedin are friend requests and message notifications. That's how I set the thing up.

I'm not sure that's super creepy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And now the Verge article has been scrubbed of the link to the Gitlab copy of the "ice-linkedin" repository.

The real casualty here is going to be Linkedin. They don't publicize much how easily their data can be acquired in bulk.

<comment><USER21> You mean legally?

<comment><USER20> No, that this will probably cost Linkedin their users who work for government or government contractors.

<comment><USER22> A user violated the TOS and wrote a screen scraper that pulled down public profile data. Yeah, real "easy". You cannot protect from this sort of behavior outside of completely disabling this functionality altogether. Anything a human has access to, so does software.

<comment><USER23> > A user violated the TOS and wrote a screen scraper that pulled down public > profile data. Yeah, real "easy".

Yep, that's pretty easy to do. But I'm pretty sure this was even easier since I don't think they wrote a screen-scraper. They just accessed a JSON endpoint.

> You cannot protect from this sort of behavior outside of completely > disabling this functionality altogether. Anything a human has access to, so > does software.

You say that like it changes anything. People don't care if it can be protected against easily, people just care if it can happen at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron So, I have to ask as it's not noted anywhere in the article... What does the acronym ICE stand for in this context?

<comment><USER24> Immigration and Customs Enforcement

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't get it... the author has a web site of his own. If he wants to distribute information, why not put it there instead of relying on third parties? (not offering any opinion on whether or not the data should be distributed, just questioning the means).

<comment><USER26> Throwing it in a git repository ensures that every person who clones it can readily republish it. Hosting said repository on Github, when anticipating an utterly massive spike in traffic, is an easy way to not have to pay for said spike in traffic (either from provisioning or data transfer).

I didn't look at what format the "database" is in, or if the size would make it (im)practical to simply zip it up and email it around, but if the format isn't readily consumable by non-technical people, there wouldn't be any reason to not utilize a tool like git anyway.

<comment><USER27> Why not host the repo on his site? At least a read only copy.

`git clone --bare` is enough.

<comment><USER26> Git itself was a bit of a red herring, even though it was somewhat relevant to that specific point. I know nothing about what hosting platform the author is currently using, so to make a quick assumption:

\- hosting on AWS is not free for super high traffic (assuming the free tier can't keep up) \- serving files from S3 is not free (though it's cheap enough at low read levels, it adds up)

At a typical level of traffic, the author's current host may be sufficiently inexpensive. Assuming the author was assuming many, many times the usual traffic (even if everyone is kind enough to bare clone), it would be a pointless expense.

Of course, third party hosting can take the content down... and this is where git became relevant. Assuming the author was more interested in distributing the content than the prestige of being the distributor, even though Github etc. took down the repo, every person who has since cloned is now capable of re-publishing to any new upstream repository of their choosing, on any server.

Assuming, again, that all of this was the goal, it probably made sense to utilize the free, fast, scalable third party hosting as long as possible rather than risk self-hosting slowing down or collapsing under traffic, or creating a massive spike in cost.

That's a whole boat load of assumptions, any of which could be wrong. In the realm of possible motivations, though, I think it's a fairly logical conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a broad right to privacy if you work a job that is funded by the taxpayer? I know the states of Maryland and California disclose the salaries of all professors, postdocs, and grad students, and I believe generally public servants as a class.</comment>


A program should be able to open its own files on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html <comment><USER2> A program should be able to open its own files, and Firefox should _not_ be able to claim it can open all files under the sun, then maintain its own mimetype-to-application database.

Rant++</comment>


A graphic novel resume - 'On The Run' - <AUTHOR> http://resume.oxygenflow.net

<comment><USER2> This is amazing work. This shows that guy is creative and a great story teller. I could hire him, I would have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every chapter is a new story.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dude, that's pretty awesome!

</comment><comment><USER5> Good piece of creativity

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks great!</comment>


New Twitter Personal Organizer - <AUTHOR> http://www.mytwitternotebook.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing this is an app to help fill the hole left by I Want Sandy?

Izak30, I think the site is broken right now. I never received a message from the tweetnote bot when I signed up. I logged backed in and it looked like my account was working.

I tried sending a direct message, which caused a flood of failure messages to be sent to my twitter account. I also tried submitting a message to the contact us page, and got an error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah! Thanks..I'm not seeing what caused you not to get the message, I ran over my API limit though.

I reworked the contact page and the direct message thing, so you don't get a million messages if there is a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks pretty cool/handy. I signed up to test it out (twitter=NotoriousBRK)

I created something similar for personal use a long while back that I could access from my Palm VII to keep track of all the stuff I can't seem to keep track of :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've completely changed this, to use the twitter auth API instead of a stupid Verify scheme. It was too confusing.</comment>


Ex-Uber employee claims he wasn't allowed to take bathroom breaks - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/former-uber-safety-driver-not-allowed-to-take-bathroom-breaks-2018-12 <comment><USER2> > he felt as if he wasn't allowed to take bathroom breaks the month before he > was fired

Clickbait headline from business insider. And people wonder why pubs are dying.

<comment><USER3> Clickbait?

Let's quote a bit more:

>Stopping a test vehicle for a bathroom break could disturb it and ultimately require up to an hour of rebooting or troubleshooting, Kelley said, which would decrease the number of miles it would drive.

>"They made it clear you probably should hold it," he said.

What more would you expect to justify the headline?

"Uber asked its employees to avoid taking restroom breaks" would be a better headline, but, let's be honest, it really does mean the same thing.

Also, whoever built a system so shoddy it would be disturbed by a restroom break should really reconsider whatever they are doing right now.

<comment><USER4> > What more would you expect to justify the headline?

For starters, that the allegation had any merit.

If you read the article you'll find out that the objective statement made by the accuser regarding unscheduled stops was that the car required "rebooting or troubleshooting" that could take an hour, which had an inpact on how may hours the car would be driving.

That's the full extent of the claims.

From that point onward, everything is a string of unbelievable hyperboles, such as spinning the need to troubleshoot a reboot as prohibiting a driver from taking a break.

In fact, the article quite clearly depicts the ex-employee as someone with an axe to grind, and is trying to hurt the company where it is more vulnerable even if he is grasping at straws.</comment></comment></comment>


20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/05/million-dollar-businesses-youve-never-heard-of-entrepreneurs-serial-startups-10-million-dollar_slide.html

<comment><USER2> 1\. Rent-A-Green Box Entrepreneur: Spencer Brown * Product/Service: Environmentally friendly moving supplies, delivery and pickup Start Date: 2005 Startup Costs: $7 million Revenue: $2.6 million in 2009

2\. Mabel's Labels Entrepreneur: Julie Cole Product/Service: Personalized, permanent labels for kids' stuff Start Date: 2002 Startup Costs: About $10,000 Revenue: $4 million in 2009

3\. Fatheadz Entrepreneur: Rico Elmore Product/Service: Sunglasses for large people Start Date: 2004 Start-up Costs: About $500,000 Revenue: Estimated $2 million in 2010

4\. Stave Puzzles Entrepreneur: Steve Richardson Product/Service: Hand-made wooden jigsaw puzzles. Start Date: 1974 Startup Costs: About $5,000 Revenue: $2.5 million in 2009 Ranging in price from $125 to $5,000, these puzzles are made of cherry wood, covered with a dry-mounted image drawn by one of 100 licensed artists, and individually hand-cut into as many as 2,500 pieces. Bill Gates has one, and Barbara Bush gave another as a gift to Queen Elizabeth. "We try to make them hard to put together," said 71-year-old Richardson, who calls himself the company's chief tormentor.

5\. Texas Driving Experience Entrepreneur: Dawn Stokes Product/Service: High- performance driving lessons and retreats Start Date: 2004 Startup Costs: About $500,000 Revenue: Estimated $1.8 million in 2010

6\. Litecubes Entrepreneur: Carl VanderSchuit Product/Service: Fake ice cubes that glow Start Date: 2001 Startup Costs: About $100,000 Revenue: $1.3 million in 2009

7\. Smarter Fuel Entrepreneur: Dave Dunham Product/Service: Biodiesel fuel from restaurant frying oil Start Date: 2004 Startup Costs: $50,000 Revenue: $3 million in 2009

8\. Sky Zone Entrepreneur: Rick Platt Product/Service: Arenas covered with trampolines Start Date: 2009 Startup Costs: About $2 million Revenue: $3 million-plus in 2009

9\. Sanidoor Entrepreneur: Gale Lemrand. Product/Service: Sanitary, touchless restroom-door openers Start Date: 2009. Startup Costs: About $3.5 million Revenue: Estimated $2.2 million in 2010

10\. Geese Police Entrepreneur: Dave Marcks Product/Service: Geese abatement using collies Start Date: 1987 Startup Costs: About $3,000 Revenue: Estimated $2.5 million in 2010

<comment><USER2> 11\. Neuberg & Neuberg Entrepreneur: Larry Neuberg Product/Service: Importing gold for gilding Start Date: 1962 Startup Costs: Virtually none Revenue: Estimated $3 million in 2010

12\. Deeplocal Entrepreneur: Nathan Martin Product/Service: Promotions mixing the digital and physical Start Date: 2006 Startup Costs: Financed out of initial $30,000 contract Revenue: Estimated $1 million-plus in 2010

13\. BlackSocks Entrepreneur: Samuel Liechti Product/Service: Sock subscriptions Start Date: 1999 Startup Costs: $30,000 Revenue: $5 million in 2009

14\. DNA 11 Entrepreneurs: Adrian Salamunovic and Nazim Ahmed Product/Service: DNA artwork Start Date: 2005 Start-up Costs: $2,000 Revenue: $1.4 million in 2009

15\. The Fiero Store Entrepreneur: Matthew Hartzog. Product/Service: Parts and accessories for the Pontiac Fiero Start Date: 1991 Start-up Costs: $5,000 Revenue: $2 million in 2009

16\. Heritage Link Brands Entrepreneurs: Selena Cuffe and Khary Cuffe Product/Service: African wine Start Date: 2005 Start-up Costs: $75,000 Revenue: $1 million in 2009

17\. Jimmy Beans Wool Entrepreneur: Laura Zander Product/Service: Knitting and crochet supplies Start Date: 2002 Startup Costs: $30,000 Revenue: $2.8 million in 2009

18\. PetRelocation.com Entrepreneur: Kevin O'Brien and Angie O'Brien Product/Service: Pet travel Start Date: 2004 Start-up Costs: $97,000 Revenue: Estimated $4 million in 2010

19\. Murray Associates Entrepreneur: Kevin D. Murray Product/Service: Eavesdropping detection and counterespionage Start Date: 1978 Startup Costs: $5,000 Revenue in 2009: $760,000

<comment><USER3> thank you so much. I was interested in the article, but couldn't continue reading past the labels. I'm surprised that forbes.com (ostensibly a reputable magazine) has gone with a "2leep" style layout.

Adsense "clickbombs" everywhere and completely unreadable.

This is 'content farm' quality at best, which is a shame because it seems an interesting article.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry you feel that way. As a Forbes developer, I can tell you we are trying to make the site as usable as possible. If you have any specific feedback I can pass along drop me an email at buley.reports at gmail

<comment><USER5> I don't care so much about the all in one page, but having to roll over the image to see the text was too difficult. Took me a minute just to figure it out. Have the text below the image without having to roll over it. I also had trouble figuring out at the opening shot where to click. Took me forever to find the next button, I found it just in time. I almost left!

Check out the design books: The Design of Every Day things Designing the Obvious Information Dashboard Design

for a primer on UI design.

<comment><USER6> Hear, hear. Too many graphic designers know nothing about UI design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These are what I call real startups. Many of them are imaginative and solve real customer needs. I hope that many of them can grow into thriving businesses.

One point that I think is interesting is that even though they're all "offline" businesses, most were started with very little capital investment.

I sometimes get the feeling that the HN crowd is a bit (understandably) myopic and focuses too much on simplistic websites. But I believe that more articles like this, which showcase business ideas in other fields, could be very valuable in inspiring people and getting the creative juices flowing.

There's a much bigger world out there than one might imagine!

<comment><USER8> _the HN crowd is a bit myopic and focuses way too much on simplistic websites._

Perhaps. But we focus on websites because those are what we know. This is a web-based community of web-based hackers. We've got that in common.

Presumably the communities of "breeders of goose-chasing dogs" spend a certain amount of time discussing the realities of the goose-chasing dog business. I know for a fact that communities of chicken breeders know something about the free-range egg business, and that if you hang around with enough folk musicians you will eventually learn something about the folk-musician business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is with the ridiculous use of "In Pictures" features now days?

If they want the page views, put each company on a seperate page, but don't pretend that the pictures count for more than 1% of the interesting aspect of this feature, and don't use a terrible slideshow system that makes it actually annoying to read the text.

<comment><USER10> It racks up page views and saves them from actually writing any compelling content. And it also means they're driving people away from their site as fast as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A great bunch of ideas but hopeless presentation. Why the heck does Forbes use this slideshow style of presenting ?

Loved the rent-a-green box idea and also the socks subscription :). Who could've thought about socks and underwear subscription, really :). Thanks for posting.

<comment><USER12> The socks idea is interesting, but the blurb says the company estimates it will save the average customer 12 hours a year buying socks. Really? 12 hours per year?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where's the justification for most of these businesses actually being worth 20 million dollars? I mean they're awesome stories, but when you have $1-2 million in revenue and have to deal with physical products, you won't exactly have millions in profits. So if you're generating, say, $200K in profits, who exactly is going to give you a 100 P/E and pay you $20 million for that business?

Why does Forbes need to go the bullshit "How This Kid Made $60M" route to rouse interest? Can't it be awesome enough in itself that someone is making a very fine living selling labels or socks? Oh no, unless they're worth eight digits, they're not worth talking about. Sad.

<comment><USER14> I read it as "here are 20 different one million dollar businesses" which seems more in line with the numbers presented.

<comment><USER13> Ha. That would make sense. And this would qualify as a terrible fucking headline as it can be read as (20 million-dollar) businesses, (20) million- dollar businesses, and (20 million) dollar businesses.

Forbes is terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another good presentation like this was done by AdaFruit, the open source hardware company. The founder and an editor at Make: pinged 13 OSH vendors and found in aggregate they were doing $50MM a year in revenue. I'm fairly impressed by it considering they are mostly 1-3 person operations.

[http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/05/03/million-dollar- baby-...](http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/05/03/million-dollar-baby- businesses-designing-and-selling-open-source-hardware-making-millions/)

</comment><comment><USER16> revenue != profit.

take the Fiero guy...sure 2 mil is impressive...but car parts are expensive...and his profit margin is most likely only 7%(seems to be the average for car parts)...which turns his 2 mil into $140K.

<comment><USER17> Prior to quitting my day job, I was propositioned by an Englishman living in my town to improve his website, which he had hand-coded in PHP. There are several million owners of vintage Japanese cars in the world, there are several thousand places locally you can find a carburetor for a '82 Camry (I have no clue if that actually makes sense -- work with me here), and there is _precisely_ one man in town who can match up "Customer in England with '82 Camry" and "72 year old owner of used auto store in central Japan."

Which is a long way of saying that I have exactly one data point for the profit margin of a particular niche auto parts business. Suffice it to say that -- after you deduct shipping, duties, and cost of goods -- it is _still_ higher than mine, and all I do for order fulfillment is a SQL call. (Quote: "If they don't like my prices, then they can either learn to speak Japanese or sod off.")

<comment><USER16> yes when you have a monopoly you can charge anything you want and people will pay it.

The Fiero example is different, since it's an "iconic" car, which means there are plenty of aftermarket suppliers/vendors who sell this stuff(usually other enthusiasts), so he can't really gouge.

Plus, since its a GM product from the 80s/90s..everything is interchangeable...which means he can't really charge a premium for Fiero stuff, since those exact parts can be found in any number of other Chevy, Pontiac products.

For example the 4 cylinder that came in the Fiero, also came in Chevy Astro, Camaro, Citation, Lumina, S10 and Pontiac 6000, Phoenix, Celebrity, Grand Am, Firebird, as well as Buick Century, Somerset, Skylark and Oldsmobile Cutlass and Omega.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice list, hated they way they were shown.

<comment><USER19> They just got 20 times the amount of page views though. If they provided a list that means you could have skipped through and decreased their page views.

<comment><USER20> Really? I stopped at the second one and decided to read this thread instead (where the currently top voted comment is a pertinent summary)

<comment><USER21> That's still twice the page views that they would have received if it was all on one page.

<comment><USER20> But way less user engagement / time on site / likelihood of me coming back

<comment><USER22> A data point to back this up: after reading high quality articles presented in a good fashion I have actually typed in and gone to <http://www.theatlantic.com/>. This was a good article presented as if it was on aol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love the green boxes. Last time I moved my roommate spent almost $50 on cardboard boxes. After unpacking we immediately threw them away (with the additional hassel of disassembling them). This is a far better solution.

I hope they become available in my state next time I have to move.

<comment><USER24> I think the idea is great also. <http://frogbox.com/> is a company started here in Vancouver who does the same thing. they also have started franchising it. I have never used them but had a friend looked into using them and said it was too expensive compared to regular boxes. It looks like it cost about $110 for boxes for a two bedroom rental. Guess the convenience and green benefits are the selling factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Design of article widget makes me want to fail.

Also, not many of these are high margin businesses. Meh, you have a $2mm revenue shipping business with 10% margins and 10 employees that takes all your time to run. I would rather own a $100k/year web service.

</comment><comment><USER26> As any great entrepreneur or hacker or opportunist would say... Who wants to copy one with me?

<comment><USER26> Up votes but no replies to actually take do it. I am no where near the ability of most of you on the coding side but can take care of any other aspect of the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I must be really sleepy. I clicked on the article thinking ... 20 million "dollar businesses" ... wtf? Parse Error. Need more caffeine.

<comment><USER28> Join the club. I read it as "$20 million dollar businesses" ...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel I must apologize for not pointing out the UI issues on the page right after I posted the piece - I should know better. I almost didn't submit it, but couldn't find an alternative on any blogs. Thanks to DevX101 for taking the time to post the "meat-n-potatoes" of the story! Thanks to everyone for chiming in w/ your opinions.

Thought it was pretty good rep management for the Forbes dev to stop by and leave an address for feedback - props to taylorbuley for that!

</comment><comment><USER29> Another one not listed: Cheeseheads (from old sofa cushions)

[http://www.smartbrief.com/news/entrepreneurs/storyDetails.js...](http://www.smartbrief.com/news/entrepreneurs/storyDetails.jsp?issueid=0ACD01EB-0AB6-43C6-9D6C-EB8071F724EC&copyid=38CB323C-F612-432F-A1B9-771628B36775&campaign=twitter&ref=twitter38CB323C-F612-432F-A1B9-771628B36775)

</comment><comment><USER30> However we are here aiming for billions, Sir.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sock subscriptions - what an awesome idea!

<comment><USER15> There is another startup like that in Boston called "ManPacks". A subscription service for socks, tshirts, etc. I thought it was a kind of dumb idea, but if that sock revenue number is real they are onto something big!

<http://www.manpacks.com/>

<comment><USER32> Subscription services for regular, physical goods are a blessing. They may seem gimmicky and lazy at first, but once you realize the benefit of delegating and automating a part of your life, you'll jump right on it.

Of course, it takes the customers to realize that they do in fact tend to run out of boxers, socks and other supplies regularly, but people in their twenties should already have had that epiphany.

In my country, there's currently an online (e-)grocer where I can buy a week's worth of groceries (with no risk of buying snacks when I shop with the munchies!) and use that half-to-one-hour time for each trip on something else.

They even accept return deposit bottles so I don't have to go down to the grocer and redeem them.

What's gimmicky laziness to one is optimization, delegation and automation to someone else. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you don't mind me being a bit of a contrarian, I notice that apart from the green boxes and the biofuel ones, none of these companies seem to be "saving customers money". And many are selling straight novelty items (puzzles, racing car school... glowing icecubes?) Am I missing anything here?

</comment><comment><USER34> Last one is impressive. At $7000 a day the guy only has to work 143 days to reach a million per year.

<comment><USER31> I've met people who are kept very busy at a somewhat higher daily rate - nothing to do with technology though. They do have to dress _very_ oddly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's worth checking out Nathan Martin's talk given at TEDxPSU in 2010 (CEO of Deeplocal, #12).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju9ZJSSP2h8>

</comment><comment><USER36> springwise.com is a good site for seeing interesting businesses; check it out

</comment><comment><USER37> I interviewed Spencer Brown of Rent-A-Green-Box almost two years ago via phone. He is a really cool guy and was happy to talk to a student for about half an hour. His strategy for marketing was mostly what he calls the Gorp cloud - the interconnected world of green media which can mention him to all prospective customers. He spent a fortune on R&D in the beginning (<http://changingclothing.recojeans.com/introduction-2/>) but was profitable cashflow wise in the first week.

</comment><comment><USER38> Fatheadz - awesome idea. I probably couldn't be described as 'big' or 'fat', but my head is wider than normal, which means 90% of sunglasses look absolutely ridiculous on me. I can only wear 150mm+ lenses, such as 'large' Ray-ban Aviators, which are 150mm exactly hinge to hinge (I've measured).

Fatheadz is one of the only sunglass websites that explicitly states the width, in mm, of their frames.</comment>


Show HN: Allow uploads directly to your Google Drive - <AUTHOR> http://filepiper.com <comment><USER2> I appreciate this is a beta, but it is hard to know what already works and what is planned. Also, does not seem to allow uploading files over 100mb, which leads me to ask what exactly is the 200MB , 10 GB or 100Gb Transfer limit on the various pricing models?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Everything mentioned on the landing page works, except for the Dropbox integration. Transfers limits is the total data transferred for a month. We are busy improving uploads so that they are resumable, then we will remove the 100mb upload limit completely.</comment></comment>


Polyglot Programming with Groovy    - <AUTHOR> http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GROOVY/Polyglot+Programming+with+Groovy Calling Clojure from Groovy looks cool <comment><USER2> I looked at Groovy a few months ago and really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, I couldn't really find anything that it did that made it stand out from the other mountain of choices of languages that live on the JVM.

Between Scala, Jython and JRuby, I think Groovy is going to have an uphill battle for adoption.

Are there any Groovy developers out there who can shed some light on what it provides that you couldn't get from a language with a larger audience?</comment>


Ask HN: Solutions for sending large volume of emails in a social network - <AUTHOR>

Assume you are Foursquare and you want to send e-mail notifications to your users when
* someone adds you as friend or confirms your request
* someone comments on your check-in
* monthly newsletters etc.
Therefore if you reach more than a few thousands of users, mail deliverability will become a problem. I'm looking for solutions to my startup with almost the same use cases. My criteria are deliverability (sent messages are not considered as spam), low cost (per mail).
First solutions that came to my mind are:
* local mail server setup
* Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
* other solutions?
Any experiences on this issue? <comment><USER2> I've heard good things about this company:

<http://sendgrid.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> FWIW at foursquare we use sendgrid for this.</comment>


Show HN: Web scraping page analyzer - <AUTHOR> https://www.apify.com/page-analyzer <comment><USER2> I entered a URL and pressed enter, wondering why nothing happened. Only then did I scroll down to find the 'Analyze' button. I wasn't looking for specific attributes, and the strong color contrast of that section made it look like nothing else of interest would come below.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh... Clearly I need to work on my UX skills, I will improve that in next iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just a quick update: Thank you for using it and playing around with it. Looking at the usage and results I found a quite a lot of things to improve. Which is great, since it's hard to develop something like this without real usage data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome tool! How do you handle scraping data that's hiding behind layers of ~fancy~ JS libraries? Is it as simple as triggering click events, pausing for loading, and then grabbing the information?

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool basicaly performs the simplest data loading, it opens the webpage, then waits till most xhr requests are done, wait's a second (tio give JS time to manipulate DOM) and then loads data from the page. This way, it has what user sees when he opens the page in browser. So if the data is visible, or loaded through XHR or hidden in global JS variable it will see it.

For more advanced usage (like clicking, or submiting a search request) it would need to have some kind of scenario like: "Click on this" -> "wait till this loads" -> "type something here" -> "scroll to this" -> load data.

Which is possible with headless chrome, so the trick is to make it general and easy to use (something like recording what user does through chrome plugin). Maybe in future versions :)

<comment><USER4> Could be an interesting enhancement. Sounds a little bit like what Capybara, a test framework for Ruby apps can do[1], things like

      click_link('Link Text')
      fill_in('Password', with: 'Seekrit')
      choose('A Radio Button')
      check('A Checkbox')
      uncheck('Another Checkbox')
      select('Option', from: 'Select Box')

1) [https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara#navigating](https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara#navigating)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool tool!

* _shameless plug_ * Our little startup, Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage, utilizing Chrome for full-rendering and many other tweaks & techniques under the hood for seamless & scalable indexing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks awesome! Does the tool work when trying to access websites behind web application firewalls? eg. F5 WAF [1]

[https://f5.com/glossary/web-application- firewall](https://f5.com/glossary/web-application-firewall)

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on whether we access the website from a proxy that is known by the WAF. But for most websites it's just a single normal request. If it's an issue in the future we could make browser extension, that will do the analytic on page loaded by the user, so that we don't have to use proxy to connect to it. If you are talking about actually scraping the websites, then that is usually on case by case scenario. Mostly it works, but sometimes it's a bit harder to get around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not giving me anything useful on this pretty straightforward table:

[http://www.dsden93.ac- creteil.fr/spip/spip.php?page=ecoles](http://www.dsden93.ac- creteil.fr/spip/spip.php?page=ecoles)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is probably the problem, when I looked for the text it returned:

[ 0:{ "selector":".bloc-blanc > p:nth-child(1)" "text":" 0 école(s) correspondent à votre recherche " } ]

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha! I see, it shows data based on POST request from FORM on this page [http://www.dsden93.ac- creteil.fr/spip/spip.php?page=annu1d](http://www.dsden93.ac- creteil.fr/spip/spip.php?page=annu1d) so if you provide just a link to the results page without the POST data then it will show you nothing. Sadly the tool currently does not allow for sending POST requests to the websites.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for your replies, I've successfully been parsing this page with others parsers though.

Edit: the page changed and it's not working anymore. Sorry for the false alarm, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Similar but just for getting normalized metadata: [https://microlink.io](https://microlink.io)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm still testing it and improving it (there are so many different websites with different responses...), so If you have any comments I'm looking forward to what you think about it.

<comment><USER9> Suppose I wanted to extract an image that gets loaded async via Javascript (For example, a Pinterest page). How would that work? Looking at your documentation, it looks like I could parse the XHR array you supply. Could you suggest any other ways? I'm calling out Pinterest as an example here because they try to block their images from being easily downloaded, but if you have any other examples I'd like to hear them.

It would be great if the page analyzer could supply a list of all the assets loaded with the web page; for example, any asset with a media type of image/* is listed in an images array, and so forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually the list of assets shouldn't be that hard. Looking at pinterest the xhr requests for images are loaded immediately when page is open, so potentialy it then it's catched in onRequest function (only now I'm aborting the requests to save network trafic). I will try it our tomorrow and let you know in comment.

Also, looking at pinterest, it's server rendered through ReactJS, so there is #initial-state script tag with first few images preloaded as urls, so if you cared only about the images on top without scrolling then this is the safest bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We use this for some stuff at my office. It's handy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is data shared between accounts if two accounts both want to retrieve information from the same exact URL?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, there is no caching now, every run of the tool has a single instance and writes the output into separate file. I'm using it to test stability of cloud when multiple users are using it and to test proxies. It would not be much of a test if one user opened the demo page and then every other use would just get the results from a file. But when I'm happy with how it works I will add caching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice work! It seems that it only supports microdata and not RDFa at the moment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep only microdata. I completely forgot about RDFa. I'm immediately writing RDFa to my todo list. It would be a great addition.

<comment><USER13> Speaking of which, do you think you could support more ontologies than schema.org? It's easy to use schema.org without understanding the rest of the RDF ecosystem, so I'll elaborate in a minute, but I'm on my phone right now so it's difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a way to access an authenticated web site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly not for now. Our company has a solution for that (for some websites), but currently this tool does not have this functionality, since I wanted it be as simple as possible. Maybe in the future.

<comment><USER15> Authentication support on this would make it an instant purchase for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some general authentication (like separate input fields for your login credentials on the website) could be potentialy done (but very unsafe for user of the tool, since you would be sending us your credentials as plaintext). But authentication as whole is sadly not as general as semantic data on the web. Not every website has the same login form(different fields), some use captchas, some use authenticators, some do robot checking for too fast logins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just wanted to say great tool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, still lot's of things to improve (for example 404 handling) but it's great to see positive feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> hmm, no joy getting rating information from an amazon.com product page

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazon is unfortunately not using any metadata information for reviews (probably to prevent easy scraping for competing companies). You can only get it from from html (At least from what I can see).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Love this.</comment>


Redis caching – speed up your API - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/techlabs-emag/redis-caching-speed-up-your-api-f4722f490c43 <comment> tony-allan Nice article but formatting errors are a problem.

Lots of... [snippet id="xx"] messages.</comment>


Let's Make DNS Outage Suck Less - <AUTHOR> http://kvz.io/blog/2013/03/27/poormans-way-to-decent-dns-failover/ <comment><USER2> dnsmasq --interface=lo --all-servers --server=172.16.0.23 --server=220.127.116.11 --server=18.104.22.168

echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" > /etc/resolv.conf

<http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html>

 _\--all-servers : By default, when dnsmasq has more than one upstream server available, it will send queries to just one server. Setting this flag forces dnsmasq to send all queries to all available servers. The reply from the server which answers first will be returned to the original requester._

Dnsmasq also has avoidance of unresponsive servers built in, this is a bit more of a blunt instrument.

<comment><USER3> The example you gave won't stick for most people:

        echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" > /etc/resolv.conf

If you use dhcp3-client (chances are you do), add this line to /etc/dhcp/dhcplient.conf to try your local DNS cache first:

        prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

Note that this will slow down stuff like captive portals at airports that want to push you to their "accept terms" page first.

I use djb's dnscache instead of dnsmasq, but dnsmasq works fine too.

<http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-cache.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You know, sometimes the simpler solutions work best. I like this one.

I'm sitting here contrasting this against my normal approach* and the approach here is:

        1) easier to explain to others
        2) self documenting
        3) just as effective as running a caching nameserver

* i have vm hosts configured in CM to have a bunch of promises applied, one of them is to run a caching nameserver, these hosts are the only ones allowed to do zone transfers. The vm instances running on top of these have a promise applied which has them use their underlying dom0 for dns queries.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you use the rotate option with timeout you'll quickly hop to the next working resolver. <http://edwin.io/optimized-resolv-conf>

Do you have data you can share regarding "Amazon EC2 resolving nameserver (172.16.0.23) is unreachable too often" ?

<comment><USER6> You don't need to do rotation, either -- suppose the first nameserver, when up, is consistently faster than the others. Just setting a timeout of 1 is appropriate, then.

<comment><AUTHOR> A timeout of 1 can result in false positives. 3 seconds is recommended according to the manpage. Should the occasional false positive be none of your concern, then you still add at least a second to every request. If you make many, that's many seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They're using DNS for DB communication. That's a major faux pas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using IPs for communication to Amazon RDS instances is inadvisable. You'd have to use WAN addresses outside of EC2, and LAN addresses inside of EC2. Addressing them by domain resolves this. Additionally I don't think Amazon guarantees your box will be accessible on the same IP addresses after Multi-AZ failovers.

<comment><USER7> You're definitely doing it wrong.</comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox Easter Egg? - <AUTHOR> http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=45299&replies=22

<comment><USER2> Here's a video screencast I just made of it:

<http://youtu.be/Yxz6D83Ljp0?hd=1>

<comment><USER3> Interesting choice of music Pud -- re: skillet -- [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Skillet_(band...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Skillet_\(band\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone else find it awkward that the post is by a user with no other posts? Releasing your own easter eggs is kind of lame :)

</comment><comment><USER4> For those not on Mac OS, it pops up a window that shows you all the Dropbox founders (and maybe some other engineers or something) and then sends a message about how they love working on Dropbox, and then some platitudes like "be yourself" and "love thy neighbor"... all animated between scenes, etc. like old Demo Scene stuff.

<comment><USER5> The animation looks like bog-standard CoreImage effects.

<comment><USER6> A good thing, it means that this Easter egg takes up the least amount of space possible :p.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tom Hoover is Drew's fraternity bro, MIT '05 Course 6 classmate, and Bit 9 co- worker prior to Dropbox taking off.

He also installed Gentoo on my old laptop so I could take a Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics.

</comment><comment><USER8> It only seems to work once so make sure you wait and watch the animation. I was going to record it to put on YouTube but couldn't make it happen any more times :-(

</comment><comment><USER9> image of the ending: [http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/5455/screenshot20110930at857....](http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/5455/screenshot20110930at857.png)

</comment><comment><USER10> Neat. I'm pretty sure that text at the beginning is a reference to a similar easter egg from an old version of windows (95 maybe?).

<comment><USER11> I remember this as well. Found a video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFclEc4sCUo>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kind of reminds me of the Quake 2 easter egg / hidden room after the final boss (forward to about 2:55)

<http://youtu.be/xCuTQ0pVQQQ>

</comment><comment><USER13> I find it weird that so many easter eggs turn out to be the credits for a piece of software. Shouldn't that stuff be proudly displayed front and center?

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks to me like someone was having a little too much fun playing around with CoreImage effects :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone else suddenly reminded of that Windows 95 easter egg?

<comment><USER16> Yes, other people were reminded of that. Search the comments for the word "Windows". (Ctrl+F or Apple+F in your web browser.)

<comment><USER15> i sped read gud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I stumbled upon another well-known Dropbox easter egg last week: [http://duzour.tumblr.com/post/10499147971/dropbox-is-so- awes...](http://duzour.tumblr.com/post/10499147971/dropbox-is-so-awesome-i- want-to-marry-it)

<comment><USER18> I hope you don't mean the "grab a snickers" wording. That is not an Easter egg.</comment></comment>


Getting all your data out of Google Reader - <AUTHOR> http://blog.persistent.info/2013/06/getting-all-your-data-out-of-google.html

<comment><USER2> ArchiveTeam is extracting _all_ the data from Google Reader and uploading it to the Internet Archive. Help out by submitting your OPML file: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5958119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5958119)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks mihaip!

Worked successfully in Windows CMD for me, without using the \bin shell script:

      cd C:\mihaip-readerisdead
      set PYTHON_HOME=C:\mihaip-readerisdead
      C:\path-to-py27 reader_archive\reader_archive.py --output-directory C:\mystuff

Locked up at 251K out of 253K items for me, though. Restarting... success! Looks like it might have locked up trying to start the "Fetching comments" section on my first try.

<comment><USER4> I'm trying this on windows and seem to be missing base.api module. I can't seem to find this module as well - anyone have a clue where i can get this module?

<comment><USER5> It's in the \base folder. Set the main folder to be the Python root, as in the grandfather post, and it should be able to find it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! For what ever reason, setting the python root did not help, but i just copied the 'base' folder to python lib folder and that seems to have done the trick.

<comment><USER6> I also had success (on W7) using this method. Thank you, mihaip, I am truly grateful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Warning to other impatient users:

I didn't read the instructions too well, so the half hour I spent carefully deleting gigantic/uninteresting feeds out of my subscriptions.xml file was all for naught. Because I didn't know I needed to specify the opml_file on the command line, the script just logged into my Reader account (i.e., it walked me through the browser-based authorization process) and downloaded my subscriptions from there -- including all the gigantic/uninteresting subscriptions that I did NOT care to download.

So now I've gone and downloaded 2,592,159 items, consuming 13 GB of space.

I'm NOT complaining -- I actually think it's AWESOME that this is possible -- but if you don't want to download millions of items, be sure to read the instructions and use the opml_file directive.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is excellent, thank you for making this! I'm using it right now to make an offline archive of my Reader stuff.

My only gripe would be the tool's inability to continue after a partial run, but since I won't be using this more than once that's probably OK.

All web services should have a handy CLI extraction tool, preferably one that can be run from a CRON call. On that note, I'm very happy with gm_vault, as well.

 _Edit: getting a lot of XML parse errors, by the way._

<comment><USER9> The tool caches the API responses (in the _raw_data directory), so if you're re-running it, most of the initial requests will be served from the cache.

If the XML parse errors are listing any item IDs, feel free to email them to me (mihai at persistent dot info) and I'll see if there's any workaround from my side.

 _Edit_ : If it's "XML parse error when fetching items, retrying with high- fidelity turned off" messages that you're seeing, then those are harmless (assuming no follow-up exceptions). The retry must have succeeded.

<comment><USER10> Have you tried the JSON API? (See the requests that Google Reader itself makes.) It requires no cookies and supports getting up 1000 items per continuation.

<comment><USER9> I _wrote_ most of Reader's JSON API in 2006-2007 :)

The tool uses the "high-fidelity" Atom output mode for getting at item bodies. That preserves namespaced XML elements and other extra data from the feed. It uses JSON for everything else, and will fall back to regular Atom output if the high fidelity mode is not well-formed (it was added in late 2010, as things were winding down, and thus never got a lot of testing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for this! Now I can procrastinate on my own reader app for much longer :)

Should we be concerned with errors like this?

        [W 130629 03:11:54 api:254] Requested item id tag:google.com,2005:reader/item/afe90dad8acde78b (-5771066408489326709), but it was not found in the result

I'm getting ~1-2 per "Fetch N/M item bodies" line.

<comment><USER9> Usually nothing to worry about, see [https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead/commit/19d3159c985b6e...](https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead/commit/19d3159c985b6e1eb3f06360df2921e5e0dc7a2e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an impressive bit of work. I have had, though, an interesting thing happen, in that it's apparently trying to pull every single item from explore and from suggested items in, to the extent that I get a message saying I have 13 million items, and still going strong -- it pulled about 5 or 6 gig of data down .

Is there some way to avoid all the years of explore and suggested items with reader archive? I tried limiting the maximum number of items to 10.000 but it was still running and growing after 12 hours. Interesting though, what it was able to accomplish in that time.

</comment><comment><USER13> If this does what I think it does(And it seems to be doing it now on my machine), then this is truly, truly awesome.

Thank you. mihaip, if you are ever in Houston I will buy you a beer/ and or a steak dinner.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm getting "ImportError: No module named site"

echo %pythonpath% gives c:\readerisdead

I copied 'base' from the readerisdead zipfile to c:\python27\lib & also copied the base folder into the same folder as reader_archive.py

C:\readerisdead\reader_archive\reader_archive.py --output-directory C:\googlereader gives "ImportError: No module named site"

What am I doing wrong? How can I get this to work?

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess archived RSS data for me isn't terribly important since most people seem to hide the rest of their content behind a "More" link to get those precious ad views.

<comment><USER10> Really? Pretty much all the feeds I've seen are full-text feeds. For the few that aren't, [http://fulltextrssfeed.com/](http://fulltextrssfeed.com/) and [http://fullrss.net/](http://fullrss.net/) are around.

<comment><USER15> Wow! Thank you very much!</comment></comment></comment>


Clientside CoffeeScript with jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2011/05/30/clientside-coffeescript-with-jquery/ <comment><USER2> Is this meant to be published already? I'm having difficulty making sense of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Simple client side code sample followed by a reference to more elaborate tutorials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Those iframes are nasty to deal with. 2000px tall and it still has a scrollbar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pardon that, the embedded JavaScript of markdown blows, plus an attached image was coming through poorly.</comment></comment>


You Don't Want to Work from Home - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/you-dont-want-to-work-from-home-623146dcc619?source=linkShare-60dc419b36a1-1526870469 <comment><USER2> FWIW - I've been working from home for maybe 10 years now and I personally don't have a problem with focus (even with a toddler shouting 'papa' very loudly every half hour :).

But in all the jobs I've done there is a gradual erosion of communication with in-office teams which can only be remedied by regular office visits.

Not sure what I can do to remedy this; office visits are hard (the office is in a different country), Slack ends up being noise, and emails, well who has time for emails? The only thing that seems to help is regular video calls; which is time consuming.

I remember that the chap who runs Automattic uses P2 (a Wordpress theme) to communicate with his team; I've tried to use the corporate Confluence/Jira in the same way but it never seems to take hold.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried actually measuring your productivity with something like rescuetime [0]?

[0]: [https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find I'm much more productive outside of the home. At home it's too easy to interrupt yourself with non-work related chores. In the same respect I don't exercise at home, I go to the gym and get the workout done without distraction.

Since I don't work for a company per-se, everyday of the week I go to a different place to work -- libraries, cafes, and coworking spaces. Occasionally I meet with a friend who has the ability to work remotely -- we work together at cafes with wifi. Luckily, he's a programmer and we can share ideas like this article suggests.

At a regular office your forced to be with certain coworkers regardless of how valuable their ideas might be to you, or how pleasant they are to be around. I feel fortunate to be a part of the remote workforce in this way and feel it provides worthwhile benefits over the traditional workplace.

<comment><USER3> You're not completely forced, you can choose to move companies. So unless financially constrained, either you enjoy the company of the people you work with enough to stay there or you should move.

Also sometimes it takes a while to get to know people and you don't necessarily know ahead of time who that will be. Saying that I've had maybe one friend who I would still speak to 5 years after leaving a company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe working from home is possible with the right set up and social network. He said that he lived with his grandmother who needed help when working from home. That implies that he probably wasn't able to fully focus on work for 8 horus at a time. Working from home is only efficient (IMO) if you have a room that you solely use for work. You need to have a clear boundary between work and free time, separate physical spaces help.

As for the people, that is true but can be achieved while working from home. It certainly takes more effort but by meeting people for lunch several times a week and meeting others in the evening you can be as social.

One aspect he doesn't mention is the commute. For many of us, that's easily 1 hour a day that you get back to use it otherwise (e.g. to meet friends).

<comment><USER6> I've worked from home for years and from an office for many more years (been working as a programmer for about 16 years now).

IMO the main disadvantages of working from an office can be alleviated by just working fewer hours - unfortunately companies are not very fond of that (it's almost impossible to find a job as a programmer for less than 40h/week).

My optimal work situation would be a commute of up to half an hour (15 minutes in each direction) and working 9am to 4pm.

<comment><USER5> > My optimal work situation would be a commute of up to half an hour (15 > minutes in each direction) and working 9am to 4pm.

I certainly agree to that but as you say, this is hard to get. A short commute is probably better than no commute (to prime your brain for the different environment) but most service sector jobs focus on large cities (since few people appear to be willing to move to the country side).

<comment><USER7> This is true, but the some of the same factors that facilitate WFH can also facilitate those companies locating their offices in suburbs or in large towns/small cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've worked for nearly 8 years remotely in Belgium. Further to that I moved here from the UK and started working remotely at the same time.

The only people I knew were my parter and her mother who we were living with. The other in-laws lived close by but that was it. Effectively I've made zero friends here, certainly no-one who I'd be going for a beer with. Two years ago we moved to live on our own with the child we've had since moving here.

I have the daily standups with work but apart from that there's relatively little communication with my work. I do work with good people so it makes working remotely as easy as it can be.

There's been various ups and downs in productivity, a crash is down to 90 billable hours in a month with an upper value of 190 billable hours.

One of the hard aspects is that the flexibility of the hours makes it unclear for your partner when you're working. When an 3rd party decides what hours your working, i.e. a company then you both know when you'll be home and when not, so there's no room for argument. This is similar to when I finally decided to put a TomTom in the car. Before then car journeys could be a source for arguments because you have to plan ahead and that puts extra burden on both. Having that 3rd party to blame takes the stress out.

I go to a cafe pretty much every morning now, I living in a town of about 30,000 people but there's not a single remote tech worker here that I've ever seen in a cafe. I've tried the odd co-working space and got semi-settled in one, but the commuting time plus the cost of it wasn't worth it. It's just as lonely being surrounded by people you don't know as it is working from home.

I'm finally going to stop working remotely and work at a company in Belgium in October. I'm very intrigued as to how it will work out.

</comment><comment><USER8> After working remotely for around 5 years in total, I can say that a nice balance of remote and office work is the best.

Remote work might seem great in the first few months but I eventually miss the office interaction.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are single and live alone and have a decent home office setup there are no issues with distractions.

Toddlers and partners and family members don't apply to everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Being single and working from home for me was isolating and I found myself gradually becoming more seclusive while wanting to be social. When I was living with family I found myself wishing for more seclusion. In the article I try to write more of the abstract :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't get any real work done if I worked in the office all the time. But I need to go into the office regularly for the social aspect.

</comment><comment><USER11> you != me</comment>


Revolution R Open: The Enhanced Distribution of Open Source R - <AUTHOR> http://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/

<comment><USER2> > includes The Intel Math Kernel Libraries, which bring multi-threaded > computations to R.

Say no more, I'm sold!

Now that I can use multiple threads, please let me distribute my calculations over multiple machines and I can drop python.

I used to be the compiler developer for a proprietary language that was vectorized like Matlab and R. If R was where it is today in 2000, we probably wouldn't have created a new language(Quicscript) for quants to use.

I can't recommend R enough to anyone doing modelling. It's almost replaced excel for me and, in finance, that's pretty high praise :)

<comment><USER3> This doesn't negate what you are saying, but I happened to be helping a friend yesterday optimize her already optimized R routine by writing a C++ extension. In this case, a straightforward translation gave us about a 10x speedup, due much less memory shuffling. Switching to intersecting 2KB bitmaps with AVX2 intrinsics instead of non-vectorizable IntegerArrays (average length about 20 ints) gave another ~10x speedup. Profiling with 'perf', staring at the generated assembly, and choosing very specific syntax that g++ didn't mangle gave another ~2x (although Intel's icpc is still about 20% faster, and I haven't yet been able to trick g++ into generating the comparable).

Was this worth it? In this case, I think so. It me took a day and half, and brings her per model runtime down from about 3 minutes to 1.5 seconds. The project requires running about 30,000 models, so the improvement will reduce her total CPU time down from about 2 months to about 12 hours. The AVX2 requirement means she can no longer run it on the usual cluster, but the speedup is enough that she do multiple runs per day on a standard Haswell desktop.

This is to say, while there are great things about prototyping with R, and multithreading can't hurt, raw speed and efficiency may still be issues for some users.

<comment><USER4> Cool result. But:

"Was this worth it?" \- looking at the last step of optimisation, it looks like that would be the hardest to do correctly without bugs, hardest to maintain, document and so on, but it produced a gain of only 12 hours of compute time (so cheap it's almost free).

On an 8-5 schedule, 12 hours is 24. Was it really worth, or just fun?

<comment><USER3> > Was it really worth, or just fun?

That's the question for just about everything, isn't it? This was unpaid to help with her PhD thesis. Maybe that makes it "not worth it" from the start? Does the lack of financial incentive make "for fun" the only applicable answer?

The project models the correlation between air quality in school classrooms and student absence rates. Maybe twice as fast means that she can do twice as many runs in the same amount of time, and produce results that are accurate to one decimal place more? She'd probably graduate in either case, and the chances that someone will act differently based on the difference in the results is very low. For that matter, the chance that someone will act at all based on results published in a PhD thesis is very low.

Had someone been paying me by the hour to optimize for them, perhaps that would make it worth it to me but not to them? Is it just for fun if you are learning details and gaining experience that you can apply elsewhere? At what point does further learning become superfluous? I've never figured these out. As it is, I learn more and more about optimizing code, my social capital among friends increases, and my financial state grows worse and worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure I feel about this. It reminds me of Enthought or Anaconda python or RStudio or RedHat for linux. Should companies be able to 'own' an open source software by funneling a majority of users through their distributions and by funding developers to build the language in a way advantageous to the company? In some way, sure, since it can be mutually beneficial to the company and the users. But in another way, it goes against the spirit of a community, rather than oligarchy, contributing to the software.

EDIT: On second thought, it seems naive to think that any large scale open source software doesn't have some corporate backing. For instance, Google and python / Go. I guess that's not so bad.

<comment><USER6> RStudio has the Open Source AGPL v3 version that, ostensibly, is only different from their commercial offering in that it there is support for the commercial version, I'm perfectly fine with it.

This MRAN looks to be a similar situation (that is, it's available on their OSS offering Revolution R Open)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> R has high-quality libraries for just about everything. You're good to go if your need mostly involves stringing together calls to them.

Main problem for me was expecting to find things like namespaces, utility classes, and other things you'd take for granted in more modern languages like Ruby or Java. I loved R for whipping out quick analysis utilities, but writing larger ones became insanely painful. I switched to Ruby for this kind of stuff. The library support isn't as good, but it's reached critical mass and the actual coding side is so much easier.

<comment><USER8> There are namespaces, but you have to put your code in a package to use them.

</comment></comment><comment> bipin-nag I checked their site. Revolution R has 4 products: Open, Plus, Enterprise, Cloud

1\. Open: "This one's not a difference at all: Revolution R Open 8.0 beta is based on R 3.1.1. No modifications are made to core R".

Simply put it is a repack, comes with extra packages like Reproducible R Toolkit, and has a mirror for CRAN.

2\. Their Revolution R Plus is what is RHEL to linux. They provide technical support on top of the Open distribution.

3\. This is where it smells fishy. "Revolution R Enterprise Workstation is licensed for a single named user, and available in two editions:". But is it a modified R version. They mention no change to core for open, but not for this. If they use R which is licensed under GPL how can they sell it ? Else if it is proprietary why call it "R"?

4\. They provide assistance in running Revolution R Enterprise on a Server.

<comment><USER9> I believe chollida comment, placed 10 hours before yours answers the question how they can sell it:

It's linked with the Intels commercial BLAS, see here:

[http://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/documents/rro/open/#inte...](http://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/documents/rro/open/#intelmkl1)

<comment> bipin-nag 2 issues here:

1\. You can't package GPL stuff into another and then sell the new product.

2\. If it is required for Intel's commercial BLAS and they are giving it away for free, it would be a great loss to Intel. So whatever they are giving away must be available for free. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Edit: Open version makes use of non-commercial license MKL, which you can get anyway, see [https://registrationcenter.intel.com/RegCenter/NComForm.aspx...](https://registrationcenter.intel.com/RegCenter/NComForm.aspx?ProductID=1461&pass=yes). And most likely they are using commercial version for enterprise. But again can you compile R like that and charge for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting to me that Open Revolution R supports R Shiny (developed by RStudio). A natively multi-core version of R could be really useful in dealing with the larger applications that are built on shiny, as computations, input, graphing, and DB i/o are all (often) thread blocking.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone please provide some context to the submission? Is this something new?

edit: politeness.

<comment><USER11> It looks like they released it yesterday

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish there would be a maven for R. Hope the "Reliable R code" (RRT) can achieve a similar effect. Currently CRAN is heavily broken. Installing exactly the same version of the package will work today but might not work tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER13> What functions benefit from the multi threading? The examples they give are matrix PCA and SVD, which is cool, but would this help normal library functions? (E.g lm() and glm())

<comment><USER14> Various linear solvers (either via normal equations, QR, etc.) all have really fast multi-threaded implementations in, e.g. OpenBLAS. These could directly benefit lm() and glm(). That said - there's no reason why you couldn't already call out to these (multithreaded) libraries with (single threaded) R.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this anything more than a repackaging of R? If you can put multithreaded libs behind core R functions, why not do it on the main codebase instead of repacking the project?

</comment><comment><USER16> iPython / SciPy

R

MATLAB

Julia

C

It's nice to have so many options today, it means when you bang up against the shortcomings of one language/system you can often jump to another one to get what you want (e.g. speed, or specific libraries, or graphics niceties, etc).

I only wish MATLAB wasn't so expensive and so proprietary.

<comment><USER17> > I only wish MATLAB wasn't so expensive and so proprietary.

Try Scilab or GNU Octave.

<comment><USER18> I have, and I wish matlab wasn't so expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain why R is preferred more than Python for modeling?

Is it just because of ggplot2?

<comment><USER20> My 2c is that R has a wealth of libraries and utilities (for statistics, machine learning, finance, etc.) that are not as easily available for other languages. Things like scikit-learn for Python close some of the gap, but looking at packages on [http://cran.r-project.org/](http://cran.r-project.org/), it seems that Python might have some catching up to do.

I make no representation as to the _quality_ of the libs available for R, as I don't have a whole lot of experience with it yet.

<comment><USER21> Quality is all over the map in R, but given the choice between an R library and a Python library for the same recently developed stats method, I would think that the R library has been more widely used, had more attention from experts, and is probably more robust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How does this compare in terms of speed to SAS?</comment>


Stem cell transplant restores memory, learning in mice - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/04/22/stem.cell.transplant.restores.memory.learning.mice

<comment><USER2> We have the most awesome health care system for mice!

On a less humorous note, I expect more human stem cell research in less "regulated" places is already on going. I suspect it won't be the first time that a "more developed" nations find themselves behind "less risk averse" nations. But worse than that I also expect some really sad stories to emerge, especially in poorly regulated gene therapy experiments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Alternate link [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130421151613.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130421151613.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> So they put human neurons into a mouse brain?

<http://i.imgur.com/MZoWVEX.gif>

</comment><comment><USER5> Blood transfusion from young people is another one. It works.</comment>