The Dark Art of Pricing - <AUTHOR> http://www.jessicahische.is/obsessedwiththeinternet/ <comment><USER3> _If you think that is a good price for a professional designer to earn crafting what is essentially a logo for a huge company, you are mistaken._

Huh? Why would the size of the company and the reach of the logo matter in the slightest? It's this type of thinking that makes dealing with designers somewhat frustrating.

I will never (EVER!) pay royalties for work that I commission. If I'm paying you to build it, I'm paying you to build it _for me_. It's mine.

The thing is, I've yet to have trouble finding someone to do that for me. I've run into this situation on a few occasions. On each I've politely said no thanks and took my business to someone who was willing to do it for a reasonable fee with full rights assignment to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am seeing this request made more and more frequently by designers:

 _By helping to keep pricing standards high, you not only help yourself by avoiding the title of "The Poor Man's Marian Bantjes" (essentially the creative equivalent of a knock-off handbag), you also help every other young designer struggling to get paid out there, and help every designer that came before you to continue making a living doing what they love._

Low wages here are a sign of a labor market saturated by qualified designers. Pleading with youth to raise their wages in order to protect the interests of those whose careers and income are already established is disingenuous at best, and naive at worst.

<comment><USER5> I attribute low wages to the lack of education of industry-standard rates. The author brings up a great point about the concealment of pricing amongst creatives to prevent others from knowing your annual income. How can students be expected to know how much to charge when their instructors and peers aren't inclined to speak openly about their numbers?

Without this baseline of information, young designers (myself included) fall into the trap of pricing far below market due to misinformed notions of 'this is great experience!' or 'I need to get my name out there'.

An aside: Qualified is an ambiguous term in relation to design. Expand on what you consider 'qualified' please.

<comment><USER6> I think concealment is a big problem in most industries, and one of the main reasons companies try the "not allowed to discuss your salary" trick. The other one is so that people who aren't as well paid as others but think (or are) better at the same (or harder) jobs don't get fed up and either demand more or leave.

So... Ultimately talking about your salary hurts no-one honest and open. Because trying to prevent staff from being unhappy at being unfairly compensated OR having to pay a fair wage isn't either of those things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about "The Dark Art of Getting Your Client to Pay You the Agreed Upon Amount in a Timely Manner"?

<comment><USER8> Here is a great talk on that subject; well worth the 40 minutes if you are interested in this subject:

"F*ck you. Pay me.": <http://vimeo.com/22053820>

<comment><USER6> I do love that talk, but it all basically boils down to: * Have a lawyer * Have them create you a standard contract * Don't ever talk without lawyering, to their lawyer * Never assign rights of any sort "Until full payment is received" (At least for that point in the work)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently finished _Priceless: The Hidden Psychology of Value_ by William Poundstone [1]

A number of great lessons in this, but perhaps the key one was that pricing is not as much of a 'dark art' as many of us believe. There's a good deal of scientific research into pricing successfully and profitably, which is detailed therein.

In relation to the OP, of course you need to know where to start - <USER2> $100/hour high or low for my industry and my experience? - etc. Once you have that information you can build your pricing strategy

The next step (as chopsueyar alludes to elsewhere in this discussion) is clearly communicating all of the right expectations so you do what the client wants, the client is delivered what they want, they pay you on time, and you have the choice to delight them and win loyalty and/or referrals.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Priceless-Hidden-Psychology- William-...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Priceless-Hidden-Psychology-William- Poundstone/dp/1851687823)

</comment><comment><USER10> I will join the book recommendations with THE book on pricing - The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing

[http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics- Pricing-5th/dp/013610...](http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics- Pricing-5th/dp/0136106811/)

I'm reading it for a second time right now and it's stuffed with actionable information on pricing, value communication (aka marketing), price communication, purchase cycle, pricing over the product lifecycle and so on.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is an excellent article on pricing, published in Harvard Business Review some years ago (it is such a great article, I feel obligated to provide it to the HN crowd)...

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005RZ5D/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005RZ5D/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=littdidd-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217153&creative=399701&creativeASIN=B00005RZ5D)

 _How Do You Know When the Price Is Right?_

by Robert. J. Dolan

Published Sep 01, 1995

<comment><USER11> It appears that there is a free version of this article available here: [https://www.u-cursos.cl/ingenieria/2009/1/IN578/1/material_d...](https://www.u-cursos.cl/ingenieria/2009/1/IN578/1/material_docente/objeto/225558)

<comment><USER7> Nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could this be applied to development work as well? I.e Mobile / web apps...

<comment><USER13> Thankfully the software development game isn't quite as arcane and antiquated as the visual arts. If you pay a coder $250 an hour to write some code for you from scratch, you generally get to use it for more than a year or on more than one specific server without being charged additional "licensing" fees. And that's a _good_ thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To whomever's site this is, the font looks really bad on Google Chrome: <http://i.imgur.com/MZuXS.png>

<comment><USER15> Whatever browser you use, fonts look gorgeous on Google Chrome: <http://img6.imagebanana.com/img/x10gyshc/Selection_002.png></comment></comment>


On HTML 5 Drag And Drop - <AUTHOR> http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/08/16/on-html-5-drag-and-drop/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or has HTML5 strayed away from defining how content should be interpreted and rendered in favor of defining how the resulting page should interact with the system it's running on?

Even the video element is made awkward by codec issues, thus depending on the browser implementer or underlying platform to function properly.

<comment><USER3> Before the sexy new "HTML5" moniker, that specification was known as "Web Apps 1.0" and aimed to specify extensions to HTML that would make creating richer, desktop-like cross-browser applications possible (largely by reverse- engineering IE's implementation). It was only after Hixie realised how woefully under-specified the rest of HTML was that the spec shifted to the more useful goal of formally specifying all current browser behaviour.

So, in a sense, you have it exactly backwards. :)

<comment><USER2> Why is 'formally specifying current browser behavior' a useful goal? Do you perhaps mean 'formally specifying how the browser interacts with the system'? Why would anyone even remotely think this should fall under the auspices of the HTML specification.

<comment><USER3> Back in the early days of HTML standards, there were comparatively few browsers, and comparatively few HTML documents for them to read, and the HTML working group seemed to feel it was reasonable to release updated standards that specified what browsers should do with conforming markup, and assumed that non-conforming markup would be rare or wildly broken enough that nobody would depend on any particular behaviour.

In the modern age, we know that broken and non-conforming markup is the vast majority of content on the Web, and not only does this content depend on certain parsing behaviours, but those parsing behaviours are fairly reliably implemented across browsers. Of course, that interoperability is far from perfect, and took vast effort to achieve (legend has it that in early versions of IE, Microsoft reverse-engineered and re-implemented parsing bugs Netscape didn't even know they had, and later Mozilla had to do a lot of the same work on IE's behaviour). This is a good part of the reason that there's only four reasonably useful HTML rendering engines on a planet of six billion people.

One of the goals of HTML5 is to reverse-engineer and document what it is that browsers actually do to turn tag-soup into an internally consistent DOM tree, in the hope that future browser vendors won't have to reverse-engineer the wheel yet again. For example, ".innerHTML" is a property on DOM elements that allows script to quickly change the content of that element. It's widely used on websites, and supported in all major HTML engines, so you'd think it'd be pretty easy to get right and interoperable, right? Wrong:

        http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1158969783&count=1

How about the property "document.title", which should just reflect the content of the title element?

        http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1161121410&count=1

In short, yes - I think formally specifying browser behaviour in the face of the existing web is a truly noble and useful goal, especially if it helps increase competition in the field of useful HTML renderers, and it falls under the auspices of the HTML specification because what other specification will tell a browser vendor how to understand and display the existing corpus of HTML documents?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Courier Prime: It's Courier, Just Better - <AUTHOR> https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/ <comment><USER2> This is a really neat solution to a very constrained problem space. For those who don't know, Hollywood lives and breathes 12 point Courier. It is the standard font for screenplays. Producers won't even look at a script that is set in anything else because it implies the author doesn't know industry culture and norms.

Also, by having a standard font size and metrics, it means that the number of pages in a script directly corresponds to a certain quantity of text. That in turn roughly corresponds to a certain length in time. The guideline is about a page a minute. So people who work in film know that a 90 page screenplay will be about a 1 1/2 hour-long film.

So Courier Prime is trying to improve the readability of that font without touching any of the metrics that the industry relies on or alienating readers who might think anything "not Courier" means "not professional".

<comment><USER3> Thanks for explaining this. I was having trouble to understand what was the concrete problem this font was trying to solve. That makes a lot of sense. Especially the standardization of text length to determine actual playtime.

<comment><USER4> I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric.

And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be important for screenplays too.

Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate.

So to me it seems that if the industry indeed insists on everything being in courier, that's more likely to be a traditionalist remnant from the typewriter era rather than a rational decision. But I admit I don't know this industry at all.

<comment><USER5> In addition to using a very standard font, screenplays have a lot of other very strict formatting guidelines involving use of things like particular whitespace rhythms.

It's the combination of the whole, including and especially the whitespace rhythms (which are still connected to font metrics, of course), that lead to the 1 page is approximately 1 minute guideline metric, because scene descriptions and actions have different whitespace from dialog.

Interestingly, compared to your expectation that a Tarantino screenplay would be more dense than the Fury Road screenplay, it is actually dialog that has a lot more whitespace overall in the screenplay format (they are subject to smaller inner columns) than scene descriptions/action descriptions (which use the full width of the page). Word count wise, action involves a lot more prose than dialog and many of the best action screenplays have more overall word count than a more dialog-heavy screenplay. (What I've seen of the Fury Road screenplay read like a novel, though as is pointed out elsewhere it is fascinating because it was written storyboard first, which is the exception rather than the rule.)

The screenplay format really is a fascinating thing to study. There are some great books out there on the screenplay format and how it came to be what it is today.

<comment><USER6> Any top recommendations for those books? Super intrigued to read more.

<comment><USER5> The big one that left a lasting impression for me at an early age was Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434. It does a very good job illustrating a lot of the technical mechanics of the format and the Hollywood guidelines and expectations that have built up around it (including the page per minute expectation, and even the expectations on page per act, which is another formula that Hollywood has), and some of why, using an example screenplay throughout.

(Just be forewarned it is not a great example screenplay in the usual fashion of such teaching examples because it is designed more towards the lesson plan than coherency/quality as a story of its own; and also arguably another example of that old weird maxim "those who can't, teach" given Lew Hunter's mostly TV Movie writer IMDB credits.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great.

Also, making it heavier is 1,000% necessary -- Courier has always been so anemic it can actually be difficult to read when printed (and Courier New is even worse). I don't know the history, but I've long wondered if it was because digital Courier was based on the (thin) metal typewriter letterforms, rather than the letters set to paper which would presumably have (thicker) bleed.

Now I just wonder if script readers will react "ooh, I don't know why but this looks _nice_ " or "ugh, something's weird about this script but I can't tell what."

<comment><USER8> > I don't know the history, but I've long wondered if it was because digital > Courier was based on the (thin) metal typewriter letterforms, rather than > the letters set to paper which would presumably have (thicker) bleed.

That is _precisely_ why. Courier New was digitised off an IBM Selectric typeball, and they didn't correct for the ink bleed which the typeball was designed for.

<comment><USER9> Do you know why the people who digitized Courier made that (seemingly grave) omission? It seems like far too big of an oversight to simply sweep under the rug, after comparing the on-screen/printed-from-computer version with the typewriter version.

<comment><USER10> This is actually a common problem with digitisations of metal fonts, not specific to Courier. Many (although not all; Adobe's been pretty good about avoiding this particular failing, for example) of them are too anemic for screen use at body text size, presumably (although I have no hard evidence) because of not taking account of ink bleed. Victims include Bembo (the first one, not Bembo Book, which partially fixes this), several Caslons, Sabon, Janson, (an extreme example) Simoncini Garamond, and even Computer Modern (where the problem wasn't so much a transition from metal to digital, since Computer Modern was designed digitally, but from METAFONT - which can be parameterized, allowing "blackness" to be adjusted for ink spread - to Type 1 - which isn't).

Speculating a bit, one of the problems that digitisers may have encountered is that ink bleed affects fonts differently at different sizes. At small point sizes, ink bleed is proportionally large relative to the stroke width; at large point sizes, ink bleed has negligible effect. This is actually exactly what you want for readability's sake: at small sizes, you want to avoid thin strokes, and ink bleed does exactly that. At large size, "thin" strokes aren't actually thin any more. But a perfectly scalable digital font does not capture this beneficial effect of ink spread.

<comment><USER7> Ah ha! I've long thought that of the Garamonds as well, it just never seemed as extreme as with Courier.

The point you bring up with different proportional amounts of bleed at different sizes is also quite relevant.

OpenType fonts have so many options now... I almost wonder if it would make the most sense to have a bleed option built into the rasterizer that could have defaults set by the typeface designer, but also adjusted by the user (e.g. more bleed when using white-on-black). There are so many arcane options on macOS's OS-level typeface options palette, it seems pretty reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does the ř (r with háček diacritic) in the "Europhilic" Czech text sample appear so different from the normal letter r? Is it intentional? It's quite jarring to me.

Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/h6yNHCo.png](https://i.imgur.com/h6yNHCo.png)

<comment><USER12> strange. mine looks different (but ř is also a totally different shape) [https://imgur.com/a/VpiXcGI](https://imgur.com/a/VpiXcGI) (Firefox on Windows)

<comment><USER13> Probably your browser falling back to a default font. Sure that Courier Prime includes that symbol?

<comment><USER12> probably. and I sure hope so, since they use it as an example.

but why in the world would you have that happen on a font demo site? use an image/svg. otherwise it's risking becoming a demonstration that it's unreliable/you don't know what you're doing. (not that browsers make this stuff easy... but still.)

<comment><USER4> The fact that it renders in two very different ways for different people suggests this is an error. A pretty bad one indeed for a font demo page. I hope they fix it.

Has this been reported already? If not, I will. (Edit: I reported it on their support page.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like here's the original announcement, which has more background on motivations and has a comparison with regular Courier:

[http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier- prime](http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime)

<comment><USER15> John August also talks about it in episode 74 of his podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes: [http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole- punchdrunk](http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole-punchdrunk)

Although you need to pay to access archived podcasts they have all of them transcribed: [http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-74-three-hole- punc...](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-74-three-hole-punchdrunk- transcript)

I highly recommend the podcast to anyone even remotely interested in the movie industry. I've been listening for around 6 months now and can't stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably good for full-screen writing. Anywho.

Feel free to add an opinion, I've been evaluating and whittling choices of fonts for _code development:_

So far Monaco and Source Code Pro seem best.

\- Fira Mono [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Mono](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Mono)

\- Hack [https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/](https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/)

\- Inconsolata [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata)

\- Monaco [http://www.gringod.com/2006/11/01/new-version-of-monaco- font...](http://www.gringod.com/2006/11/01/new-version-of-monaco-font/)

\- Pragmata Pro [https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/](https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/)

\- Source Code Pro [https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code- pro](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro)

I think monospaced, sans-serif, semi/bold, large punctuation and disambiguated look-alikes with antialiasing on works best on a low res laptop. Monospaced serifs seem to look better for code online.

<comment><USER17> Fira Code is Fira Mono with coding ligatures:

[https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode)

I used to prefer Consolas (Inconsolata is a ~clone of Consolas) but the ligatures made me switch.

<comment><USER18> Ligatures really are neat, indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a screenwriter, but Courier Prime Code/Sans seems very interesting. Have to try it out on my various screens.

The italics are a bit distracting. The subjective tilt of letters seem to vary, e.g. 'j' and 'l' may be have the same tilt but the 'l' appears more vertical (as does 'i'). Also the tilt on the center line of 'e' seems weird to me, but that's perhaps an intentional stylistic quirk.

<comment><USER20> Hack[0] is also a very nice font for coding. I use it on my terminals and IDEs with joy.

[0]: [https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/](https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be nice to see a visual diff vs Courier or Courier New, particularly for development purposes.

<comment><USER9> alangpierce commented with the original announcement, which has a much better close-up comparison: [http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier- prime](http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it just my device or is there something wrong with the r in Europhilic Dobre?

</comment><comment><USER23> I just made specimen paragraphs in Courier, Courier New, Courier Prime and Prime Code, and Cousine[1]. I believe I much prefer the latter, for code and editing. Also, despite looking beefier, Cousine text takes exactly the same horizontal width as the Couriers do at the same nominal point size.

[1] [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cousine](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cousine)

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel really old now that I realize we aren't talking about IMAP servers. Also slightly let down, since that would have been a fun blast from the past.

<comment><USER25> IMAP is much more recent than the Courier font, so you should feel young here.

<comment><USER24> It's less about how old it is, and more about how long it's been out of the general public consciousness. The courier font hasn't been (out of public view) in recent memory, so it doesn't have the same nostalgia factor.

<comment><USER25> Courier font has been in public memory for a very long time (but most certainly people didn't know its name). It is much more known than IMAP is, and most importantly, has been for decades

It's an industry standard for screenplays, and I think we all remember having seen a screenplay in a movie or picture, with this weird monospace font.

You are certainly an outlier here.

<comment><USER24> You read my comment as the opposite of what I said. Specifically, I said "The courier font hasn't been (out of public view) in recent memory". That is, there's no nostalgia, because it never left. And I'm not saying anything about IMAP, I'm saying something about _Courier IMAP_ , which even as IMAP goes, hasn't been in favor for a long time.

Being a top level comment, I would assume my comment is read with at least the submission title in mind, as that was my intention. I was noting that I initially interpreted it as referring to Courier MTA / IMAP (and referenced IMAP servers to distinguish which _Courier_ I was referring to).

So, to be _very_ clear since apparently event my clarifications are being misconstrued, the courier font _has_ been in public consciousness for as long as I can remember. I believe the courier MTA _is not_ in the public consciousness any more. If this submission, titled "Courier Prime: It's Courier, Just Better" was talking about mail servers (specifically, original courier and a cleaned up fork of courier as the title would theoretically allude to), then that would have been a cool blast from the past. It's not about mail servers being things of the past, mail servers was just used as a way to explain what other courier I thought it was originally referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is a bit confusing that the body text of the site has set Avenir Next as font family.

<comment><USER27> First, the site for the font isn't itself a screenplay; there's no reason for it to be set in Courier. Second, setting the site in a neutral typeface draws attention to the Courier font in the callouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Source at [https://github.com/quoteunquoteapps](https://github.com/quoteunquoteapps)

</comment><comment><USER29> The "code" version doesn't seem to work very well for me on a screen. I'm using vim in Gnome Terminal. It seems to be much less crisp than my personal favorites, Fira Code or Hack ([https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/](https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/))

</comment><comment><USER30> It's nice, but a quick comparison in VSCode shows me that I still prefer Fira Code to Courier Prime Code.

</comment><comment><USER31> Adobe has done a good job of this too.

* Source Code Pro | Adobe Fonts || [https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-code-pro](https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-code-pro)

</comment><comment><USER32> This reminds me of my preferred typeface from when I had a Selectric, Prestige Elite. You don't see it much these days, as Courier is bundled with PostScript printers and Windows, whereas Prestige Elite isn't free.

Courier has a pitch of ten characters per inch, while PE runs twelve per inch. Ideal for business correspondence, but probably a bit too dense for scripts (and college papers!).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_Elite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_Elite)

</comment><comment><USER33> I installed this immediately in Ubuntu Gnome and set it be the system font for documents & the interface. Courier has, for some reason, always been my favorite font. It looks great!

</comment><comment><USER34> Some time ago I actually designed a visual identity for an architect using Courier Prime Sans ([https://www.behance.net/gallery/60374133/Juliana-Camara- Abit...](https://www.behance.net/gallery/60374133/Juliana-Camara-Abitante- Brand-Identity)). In that case I was more interest in its visual attributes - monospaced type that implies technical ability, but with a friendlier, softer character.

</comment><comment><USER35> Some more detail on courier variants for screenplays. [http://www.rolandstroud.com/Fonts-1.html](http://www.rolandstroud.com/Fonts-1.html)

For trelby[0], we recommend courier 10 point, which renders much better on more environments. [0] [https://www.trelby.org/assets/courier10point.zip](https://www.trelby.org/assets/courier10point.zip)

</comment><comment><USER36> After years of switching between programming fonts, I finally settled on SF Mono. Not planning to switch any time soon (and hopefully ever).

<comment><USER37> I think Courier New is a decent programming font. I think Courier Prime Code is a bit too stylish. I'm currently using DejaVuSansMono. Consolas has been my favorite for it's great LCD sub pixel anti-alias, but it's Windows only and with better pixel density screens we no longer have to use sub-pixel anti- alias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Neat! This post reminded me of a mobile app I started developing, but then abandoned it. I planned to create an iOS app that would cater to drama clubs to help the cast members learn their lines. The motivation for me was to create something that might be beneficial for the arts (in some tiny way), and this app was the only thing that came to mind.

</comment><comment><USER39> I suppose the issue with Liberation Mono is just that it looks too "different"?

If I'm recalling correctly, it was also metric-compatible with Courier, as that was largely the point of the Liberation fonts.

</comment><comment><USER40> Italics seem too similar to regular for coding. And anyway terminus or consolas are better for that.

Maybe for screenplays it's the best.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm curious as to why there is an extra Cyrillic version. Doesn't the font have glyphs for unicode?

</comment><comment><USER42> Does it allow me to hit the page count of my essay even easier?

<comment><USER43> You might be interested in Times Newer Roman. [1] It's like Times New Roman, but 5-10% wider so enables you to write 13% fewer words.

[1] [https://timesnewerroman.com/](https://timesnewerroman.com/)

<comment><USER44> Of course that's a thing! Although 13% doesn't sound like a significant amount. The trick I used in high school: Write the essay. If it's too short by 20-30%, increase the verbosity in every place you can until it's long enough. If it's short by more than 30% then you have bigger problems. If your essay only needs an extra page on a 15 page assignment, chances are you can add fluff and easily hit the 15 page mark.

<comment><USER45> I think I'd have more use for the opposite: a font that's 13% _narrower_ , to stuff more words into a page limit. It's harder to make text more concise than more verbose!

<comment><USER44> Yes, I agree. Concision is an art, verbosity is a chore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _But there's no reason Courier has to look terrible._

With such small modifications (afaict) it seems odd to claim/imply that it goes from "terrible" to great (or whatever). I like the "y" descender tho. And more Unicode support is basically always good.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_\(typeface\))

[https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/courier](https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/courier)

[https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/courier- prime](https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/courier-prime)</comment>


LA entrepreneur looking for private office on the cheap - <AUTHOR>

My little bootstrapping company has a private office available in our suite.  It's just what a sole proprietor professional needs, and could be a great fit for somebody getting their business off the ground and in need of an office to meet clients in.
That's more or less how your suite mates are as well. We're a little entrepreneurial business bootstrapping ourselves along, so you'll be in successful and driven company.
There's a conference room you can make use of, a little refrigerator you can share with us, some storage cabinets that you can put some stuff in, a water cooler you can use, and you can also use our printer if you're willing to pitch in for paper and toner.
165 SF in the office, while the suite is a nice size including an entry area, a foyer, a couple of private offices, and the conference room.
$600
Call 818-839-2301 <comment><USER2> what part of town?</comment>


Facebook Lockdown - <AUTHOR>

10 minutes ago everyone at my house got their facebook account locked. And now I'm looking at trending tweets and apparently it's all over. Any idea what's happening?<p>https://twitter.com/search?q=%23facebookdown&src=rela <comment><USER2> Same here, myself, 4 housemates and 1 of their partners.

</comment><comment><USER3> Look at facebook inc salaries

[http://www.salarysquare.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&company_jo...](http://www.salarysquare.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&company_job_title=FACEBOOK+INC+&company_name=FACEBOOK+INC+&job_title=&location=&city=&state=&zip=)

<comment><USER4> What are we looking for here?</comment></comment>


Introducing YOS 1.0 - live today - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/yos_10_launch.html

<comment><USER2> It's incredibly gratifying to finally have something to point people at when they ask what I do at Yahoo.

Please keep the comments coming here and on the blog post. Feel free to message me if things don't work. If I can't answer your question, I'll be able to at least bug the person who can. Direct feedback is always the best.

<comment><USER3> Cool. Do you know Ryo?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I do. Very smart guy. We lost him to Google, tho :'(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a big win for Yahoo. I think they're realizing developers are their best chance to stay in the game, so they're opening up anything and everything in an attempt to hold on.

Definitely a smart move.

I'm mostly interested in YQL (Yahoo! Query Language): <http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/docs/>.

I find it surprising they didn't go with an existing technology for querying (ala SPARQL: <http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/>).

That being said there's lots of stuff developers can build leveraging this information. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with BOSS (<http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/>).

I think this is on the same page and is definitely a step in the right direction for Yahoo.

<comment><USER5> <sarcasm>Developers their best chance to stay in the game? Ballmer knew that a long time ago... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE> </sarcasm>

<comment><USER4> Right, I've heard Ballmer scream "Developers, Developers, Developers" just like everyone else--but what are they doing about it (when it comes to search)?

The best I can find is Live Search API: <http://search.live.com/developer/>

Which is nothing compared to what Yahoo! is offering.

 _Edit: Sarcasm doesn't work on the Internet ;)_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I heard there might be something akin to Facebook Connect for site logins, but it doesn't sound like that's in here. FB connect, OpenID and the like seem like an area with big potential. I think Facebook stands a good chance at taking that market outright since they have such a huge active user base already.

Yahoo could also become a lot more relevant to the average web user if these things gain some uptake. Good luck to them, I don't use many of their services but have to recognize the significant contributions to open source and the web they've been making recently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yahoo! has been an OpenId provider since Jan 30 of this year ([http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/yahoo- openi...](http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/yahoo-openid- beta.html)). Also YOS supports OpenSocial, so it's very much similar to Facebook Connect (Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see any features FB Connect has that YOS doesn't). I'm not sure about the market share point you bring up because although FB has lots of users, Yahoo! has roughly 400M more ("500 million monthly users. 180 billion monthly page views. 233 countries."). Not to mention YOS is live and FB Connect isn't. Either way I'm excited for both!

<comment><USER6> I had said active users specifically. Facebook has exceptionally active users. Yahoo has a lot for sure, and I wouldn't want to underestimate them (they may be hurting in the stock market, but they do have a real and large online presence still), but also a lot of inactive users, accounts registered because someone had to in order to use one of their services like Yahoo Groups. Myspace I would bet has a huge number of inactive users too. Plus, the perception is that Facebook is on the rise and Yahoo is on the decline. That makes YOS seem like a desperate move and FB Connect seem like innovation, when they're very similar in reality and both innovative.

As for OpenSocial, yeah it is pretty similar so we'll see. OpenID on the other hand has yet to be implemented in a way that makes sense to non-techies and that makes non-techies actually care about it. FB Connect, with the right partnerships (which seems like that's their strategy) could really take off, and is dead simple for the end user, unlike OpenID. I have my doubts that OpenID will ever be made easy enough and gain widespread use.

<comment><AUTHOR> "500 million monthly users" means users who are active at least once a month, which I think qualifies as active. That's not counting every registered account at all (I'm not sure there's any official numbers on that but it's a lot higher than 500M). Sure it's arguable Facebook users are more engaged, but point taken. Facebook is cooler and on the rise in peoples minds. I'm not sure I see how Facebook Connect is any more easy to authenticate with than OpenID from a user perspective.

<comment><USER6> Not to beat it to death :) but I look with a bit of skepticism at their 500m active users. I'm not saying it's not a true figure, but I know I personally fall into that number since I log in about once a month to do something on a Yahoo Group for example, and while I'm definitely a monthly user I'm certainly not an actively engaged user, and Yahoo will have a hard time getting someone like me on board with their social efforts. I bet a substantial portion of their users are in the same boat. Maybe they use their mail or groups or sites or something else, but I think it will be tough turning that into a coherent social network just like I think Google would have a tough time doing the same with their user base, and their accounts have been synchronized across services from the get-go.

All my friends and family are already on Facebook. They all use it actively, and daily, for posting photos, events, keeping in touch, pokes and eaves dropping, etc. It's the new email, it's the new IM, it replaces our need for flickr and a bunch of separate services, and so on. It provides a personal experience you don't get with Myspace et al, and you'd be hard-pressed to pull them away from that.

If a site I go to, or they go to, has the little FB icon they can click it, they may already be logged in and simply click "allow this site to access my profile" or whatever. If not, they enter their FB login info which they'll remember because it's a) their email and b) a password they enter all the time, and they're off. Since the Connect portion is on Facebook already, Firefox may already pre-fill their login info too. Compare that to OpenID where you have to remember something that looks like a URL on top of your username and password for your OpenID provider. The fact is, average users aren't grokking OpenID (didn't Yahoo themselves just publish something to this effect?), and I personally think it's a failure in the design of OpenID itself, which makes it particularly hard to fix.

The biggest play for OpenID right now I think is Windows Live becoming a provider. That may change things, but Yahoo being on board I don't think will do it. But we'll have to wait and see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. (Are you a little smitten with Facebook? :P)

<comment><USER6> Not really :) I tease my girlfriend because she's on it sometimes for an hour or more at a time, but it's 'cause she's using the chat mostly. I'm generally more antisocial online; I disable chat and basically use facebook to keep up with out of town family and to play chess/scrabble.

I do think there's something important to people about what they've built though, which is something hopefully Yahoo and the others will be able to figure out too, but has so far eluded the other social networks. I like Yahoo, and I'm actually rooting for them. I'd really like to see Yahoo get back on its feet, and I hope it can do so independently of Microsoft. That would be great to see :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly off-topic, but not completely:

I would LOVE to see some quantitative measurements of the effect that opening up a platform to developers has on the respective company.

End of the day, is (extra_revenue_from_custom_applications_and_exposure - resources_to_maintain_platform - customers_lost_to_crappy_apps_or_platform_issues) > 0?

Obviously the formula is more complicated and varies from company to company, but I would love to see a good discussion from an insider who's gone through it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also posted on the main Yahoo! blog: <http://ycorpblog.com/2008/10/28/were- open-have-at-it/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Any chance this means there's a calendar API?

</comment><comment><USER9> What data sets does this open for developers and start-uppers to use? Is there a list?

<comment><USER10> In particular, you can use the new Yahoo! Social Platform APIs to access social data for Yahoo! users. For example, your application could easily post activity from your existing app to Yahoo! using the Updates API.

Lots more offered by YOS 1.0 is listed here: <http://developer.yahoo.com/yos/intro/yos-options.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> did yahoo just "out whataburger"* google app engine, by letting us use any language we want?

*<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbCiOkcAo0I>

<comment><USER2> Actually, App Engine is a different kind of thing.

GAE is a platform where your app is hosted on their servers.

YAP is a (mostly) open social compliant app delivery platform that lets you create apps and deploy them on our web pages.

GAE is a competitor to Yahoo Small Business, I suppose, since it's a paid hosting service. We're working very closely with Google, MySpace, and a bunch of other partners on making Open Social a success. (NB: you can also create Open Social apps for those other platforms, as well.)

In addition to Open Social, there are things like YQL and other extensions that Yahoo has developed in-house. Some of those may make it into the OS spec, where it makes sense to do so.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do if you're not good at your new job? - <AUTHOR> I'm a statistician with ten years of experience and I recently accepted a data scientist job in SV. Long story short, I'm not a good developer and the past four months have not been too kind. Thus, I'm realizing that while I'm a solid statistician, programming is not my strong suit, and really isn't something I enjoy. What would you do in such situations? <comment><USER2> I know nothing about you or your struggles, so I'll answer this from a point of experience -- a personal story. I'm currently working as a Full-stack dev and system architect for a certain SV startup, I've crawled my way here. When I was starting that journey I worked as social media coordinator, which in short is a person who manages a brand's social media presence/reputation. I hated every minute of it. I didn't quit because I had bills to pay. That went on for 8 months before I had the expendable income to make the transition.

Point of the story is -- Find what you love doing, don't be tied down to something you do not enjoy, however do so tactfully. The saying says "Best time to find a job is when you have one"

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to improve as a developer, I'm sure people here can offer advice. (In that case, you should probably elaborate on what you think your shortcomings are in programming.) But it sounds like you've decided you don't want to.

I think your options are either 1) find a new job and leave, or 2) see if it's possible for you to be useful at your current job without writing your own code. If you trust your management, you could ask them which makes more sense there. If not, you should probably leave anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the employer and a lot of the work that I do. However, I'm just not good with the logic behind automating statistical analysis in a production environment. I'm used to statistics first and programming second, and this current role is programming first and statistics second.

I want to become a better developer, but I'm still going to be a stats guy in the future</comment></comment>


New Rocketr about to launch  - <AUTHOR> https://rocketr.com/

<comment><USER2> Wonderfully designed. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


17 Babson College Startups & Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.collegemogul.com/content/competition-17-babson-college-startups-entrepreneurs

<comment><USER2> Even with everyone discouraging me from perusing business management, my babson acceptance hurt to turn down.</comment>


Ask HN: Best learning resources for System administration - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I've been developing webs over shared hosts, and both desktop and phone apps, but I never had to configure or take care of a server. <comment><USER2> I'm guessing you're asking about Linux sysadmin and not Windows sysadmin, but correct me if I'm wrong.

What sort of Linux experience do you have already? Are you looking to spend money on resources or free stuff only? Also, are you looking for generic "sysadmin" concepts, or for how to implement on a particular operating system like CentOS or Ubuntu?

Someone else on HackerNews just open sourced his tutorials: [https://github.com/snori74/ebook1](https://github.com/snori74/ebook1). They're written for someone new to Linux but has some Windows background.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it starts with you telling us which OS. While the basic concepts are the same regardless of the OS, there are targeted sites/books/videos for each that can shorten your specific learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER4> System Administration Body of Knowledge: www.sabok.org</comment>


How open source changed Google and Google changed open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/how-open-source-changed-google-and-how-google-changed-open-source-1206582 <comment><USER2> > And then Git itself wasn't working for us anymore because it wasn't scaling > when we'd have an operating system release. So we ended up hiring most of > the Git team.

I didn't know most of the core Git team worked for Google. Has this changed the development of it by much? How did this solve the scaling problem?

<comment><USER3> I didn't know most of the team worked there either, but if I remember correctly, they have employed Junio Hamano for some time.

Hamano is the person Torvalds trusted to keep maintaining Git when he stepped down as maintainer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always thought hadoop, mapreduce, hbase (via bigtable) were Google's biggest contributions to open source. The new generation of Operating Systems for mobile devices existed before android came to fruition (iOS on iPhone for example). But hadoop introduced a new paradigm of distributed computing to the world.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's funny that Android is "Google's biggest contribution to Open Source", because it isn't open source.

<comment><USER6> [https://android.googlesource.com/](https://android.googlesource.com/)

Whats this?

<comment><USER5> I guess OS X is open source too then: [http://www.opensource.apple.com/](http://www.opensource.apple.com/)

And I guess hamburgers that contain salad and tomato are vegetarian.</comment></comment></comment>


If you use 'haha', you're probably old - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/hahaha-vs-hehehe <comment><USER2> In my personal experience "ha ha" is an almost default result of trying to avoid "lol." Why I try to avoid lol is a deeper question, but it has to do with AOL and how AOL looked from Compuserve in the early 90's. Anyway, yes I'm old.

<comment><USER3> lmbo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly enough, I use "Haha" to denote sincere laughing. Mischievous laughing goes as "Hehe"; imitating an overweight person goes "Hoho" and normally imitating a timid person (or a woman, and I swear they are not related!) goes as "Hihi."

<comment><USER5> I use "heh" to denote "I read your message, but I'm busy and I need you to stop talking to me". "I read your message, and I was mildly amused, but not enough to continue talking" is "hah". "I actually thought that was funny, but I'm still busy" is "haha". Real, actual laughter that wants to continue the conversation is "hahaha".

I'm 32.

<comment><USER6> I thought this was a secret code only I knew. Now I have to conjure a different way of subliminally communicating my indisposure to chatty friends.

Also, "hehe" means "only mildly amusing, but I'm not busy so I'll keep talking". (Unless you say "hehe" after something you wrote yourself, in which case it's creepy.)

I'm 29.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All of these have different meanings to me:

ha haha hah aha ahaha 'ha ha' hahaha HA HAHAHA hahahahahahah haaahaaa lol LOL LMAO lawl elohel 'ha, ha' ha. heh hehe bwahaha 'ha,'

though it's really hard to describe exactly the differences between them.

context: I'm in my twenties and grew up using AIM and FB and playing MMOs. I think those are all relevant to the exact 'vernacular' I've ended up with.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget "lolololololol", which is different in meaning from all those you listed. (Specifically it is a form of sardonic laughter, as in "did you hear that Trump is running for president again?" "wtf no again?? / lololololol".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have enough Latin American Facebook friends that "jejeje" is starting to seem like the canonical e-laugh.

<comment><USER9> In Brazil it's "ha ha" too though.

<comment><USER10> On a free online game I play, Brazilians use "jaja" or "kkkkkk" or "huehuehue", how is that? Is it a "lol" equivalent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In Arabic, people use هههه (hhhh) without vowels because of the Arabic Harakat (حَرَكَات) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics)

<comment><USER12> In Japanese, people usually end a statement with "w" as it is short for 笑う (romanized: warau) which means to laugh. It even parallels "lololol" by adding more "w"s (i.e. 偶然だwww).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> interestingly, in Korea the laugh is keke / kek / kkkk / etc., while in Japan the laugh is w / www / etc.

Kind of like how animal sounds are very different across countries and cultures.

<comment><USER14> Korean actually has a generous share of onomatopoeic words: for laugh, there's at least haha, hehe, hoho, heoheo, huhu, and kkalkkal, and that's just counting more or less standardized words that would probably appear in most dictionaries and have well-understood connotations.

Interestingly, Korean internet somehow settled on ㅋㅋ (literally, "k k"): the closest word I can think of is 크크 (keukeu), which is... well, the kind of laugh a villain might make after explaining to a captured hero how he will be thrown into an elaborate death trap.

(And don't believe some internet sources that say Koreans laugh "kekeke". It's simply because the sound I wrote as "eu" ("Close central unrounded vowel", or /ɨ/) has no English counterpart, so people wasn't sure how to write that in English. Besides, nobody's gonna pronounce "keukeukeu" correctly anyway, so why bother.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The cool kids don't say 'lol' any more because uncool old people have started using it.

Not it's all about 'lel' or 'kek'

If it's really funny 'top kek'

<comment><USER16> So... WTF is 'kek'?

<comment><USER17> World of Warcraft: When Alliance member said "lol", the Horde member saw it as "kek". Imitation of different languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In Thailand 'haha' is used extensively but it is written 55 because in Thai the number 5 sounds like 'ha'. So it's a useful shorthand.

<comment><USER19> I know many Korean speakers use "ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ" to express laughter. The "ㅋ" symbol has a sort of "kih" or "kuh" sound, so it's meant to represent a snickering "KihKihKihKihKih!"

<comment><USER20> In my experience, Brazilians do something similar, typing "kkkkkkk" (or sometimes "rsrsrsrsr," I suppose because riso=laughter in Portuguese).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd add that "bwahaha" comes across as a laugh at a person's expense.

<comment><USER22> na man that just makes you sound poorly socialized

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another 'haha'er here. I can't stand LOL, though this TED [1] talk gives an interesting look at its use.

[1][http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_lan...](http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk?language=en)

<comment><USER24> I can't stand lol either, I recently was taught by my daughter that I was using heh a bit too liberally, and hurt her feelings. In rl its pretty hard to get more than a smirk from me, been using hehe more, correctly or not...

<comment><USER25> IMHO "lol" needs to die and take "meh" with it. I have no idea where the latter came from...some rancid corner of Memeville, TV no doubt.

<comment><USER26> 'meh' was largly popularized by The Simpsons.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh#Popularization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh#Popularization)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The first paragraph resonated with me a little bit. When I was younger (14-16) I'd always try to type as correctly and "seriously" as possible. I literally thought everyone who didn't do the same was just stupid. My IMing style is pretty much the opposite nowadays. And as much as one hates being biased I have to admit I still judge people on their typing style a bit. It's pretty hard to gauge one's tone/feeling/attitude without having all the hahas, emoticons, smileys, redundant words etc. Do they not like me? Are they trying to be rude? Are they being creepy? Are they just not much of an internet chatter? Is that just an aspie-like trait?

</comment><comment><USER28> I used "haha" mostly to avoid saying "lol." As crazy as it sounds, I got too lazy to keep doing that. Lol is all wIth one hand, and doesn't denote true laughter. It's more, "I received your message" than anything.

</comment><comment><USER29> In Thailand, the default is "555" since the word five in Thai is pronounced "ha". Everyone in Thailand knows what it means, and the rest of the world must think we're crazy.

</comment><comment><USER30> And if you use muahaha you're probably a villain of some kind.

</comment><comment><USER31> On a side note, my personal favourite is the Bender laugh... "AHEHAEHAEHAHEAHE". It denotes forced amusement with a side of cynicism. And it's brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER32> 'hihi' or 'hi hi' is another, fairly rare, written variant that is used as laughter in morse code, and has migrated to written text by people that commonly use morse code.

I'm not sure the exact reason, but it does make all the letter dits. 'ha' is spelled .... .-, but 'hi' is spelled .... ..

</comment><comment><USER5> Fifteen years ago, I got temporarily banned from an English-speaking IRC channel (#gamedev on AfterNET) for my part in instigating the ironic usage of "kekeke", which was very well known at the time due to the popularity of Starcraft in South Korea.

</comment><comment><USER33> It feels weird using "hehe". I type it exactly how I laugh, "haha hahahahahahaha". Although if I feel I might look stupid I try to tone it down with a simple ":D" or the emoji with the laughter to tears.

Oh and I'm 22 ;)

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of this [http://www.lolwithme.org/wp- content/uploads/hahahahah.jpg](http://www.lolwithme.org/wp- content/uploads/hahahahah.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER35> In my experience and if I'm remembering correctly, hehe and haha were equally common on the dial up BBSs. I've used both all these years.

I don't think the connotations have changed!

</comment><comment><USER36> the oldest 'haha' in chinese word is from a book called Water Margin,written 600 years ago. that's really old.

english version: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin) chinese version: [http://baike.baidu.com/view/11282.htm](http://baike.baidu.com/view/11282.htm)

</comment><comment><USER37> A friend who spent some time in France always write MDR (mort de rire - "dying of laughter"). Before she went she was a hardcore LOLer.

</comment><comment><USER38> What a meaningless parade of speculative bullshit. There's a science for discussions like this -- it's called corpus linguistics. There are people who have spent years of their lives trying to understand observed patterns in behavior using real data and statistical analysis. This a handful of anecdotes that even the most generative of armchair linguists would roll their eyes at.

</comment><comment><USER39> I always took he he as a making fun of, like Nelson from the Simpsons.

</comment><comment><USER40> Has the New Yorker ran out of ideas for important issues to cover? It's funny, granted, but with everything going on in Baltimore and Nepal, it seems misplaced or at last badly timed.

<comment><USER5> And it really seems like they've been on a trend of "OMG gen X, you so ooooooold" lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Haha :-)

</comment><comment><USER42> We have `kek` and `w`.

</comment><comment><USER43> What about kekeke?

</comment><comment><USER44> I love the movie "marmaduke"</comment>


CouchDB 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.couch.io/

<comment><USER3> Congrats, guys!

I have to say, though, while you were busy inching towards 1.0 I've fallen in love with other production-ready NoSQL db's (namely Mongo and Cassandra). I'm excited to play with Couch, just to play with it, but as someone who is already very satisfied with other NoSQL technologies (when I need them), what would be your pitch for why I should give Couch a serious look?

<comment><USER4> I've got truly offline replication (as in you can run me on Android and your laptop and keep them synced via the cloud).

Also, none of the other NoSQLs are really set up for schemaless queries like I am. Incremental map-reduce lets you normalize a bunch of different heterogenous document structures in your view, which is more flexible than the key-path indexes Mongo has, and more real-time than Hadoop/Google style map reduce.

<comment><USER5> Offline on Android support sounds really amazing.

I'm poking around DroidCouch and only see a wrapper for the CouchDB REST API:

<http://github.com/sig/DroidCouch>

Should I be looking at another project for offline support?

<comment><USER4> You can get my Android installer here: <http://www.couch.io/android>

Remember it's only a developer preview, but it should be fully-functional. Requires Android 2.1 or 2.2

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't realize CouchDB was < 1.0! Seems like you guys have been forever and have been rock-solid!

Congrats on hitting "the one" then!

Loving your updated design, by the way. Here's a great example: <http://www.couch.io/case-studies>

</comment><comment><USER4> Being 1.0 feels so ... reliable.

</comment><comment><USER7> Other than being a great tool for its problem domain, I think part of the reason CouchDB is successful is because Chris Anderson (jchris) is hilarious. Watch his video (<http://vimeo.com/5288034>)...

When asked about writing CouchDB in C++ he replies "C++ is great- but then you have to use it." Priceless. Anyways congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER8> I also threw my congrats out into blog-space this morning after updating the install on my laptop. Even though MongoDB fits most of my specific application needs better than CouchDB, CouchDB is a great project.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think it is pretty cool that <http://couch.io/> is a website served directly by CouchDB.

Server: CouchDB/0.12.0ab71f475-git (Erlang OTP/R13B)

<comment><USER10> $ telnet couch.io 80 Trying 22.214.171.124... Connected to couch.io. Escape character is '^]'. GET /get HTTP 1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:28:23 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered- By: PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny8 Vary: Accept-Encoding Connection: close Content-Type: text/html

<html> <head> <title>Unknown Domain</title> </head>

      <body>

The Domain "" is not available on this server.

      </body>

</html> Connection closed by foreign host.

<comment><USER11> HTTP/1.1 is essential for conserving our dwindling IPv4 address space, so I think it's reasonable for servers to require it.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't wget still use HTTP/1.0?

<comment><USER11> Apparently they added Host headers and keepalive, even though it's not a fully conforming HTTP/1.1 client. Makes me wonder how many servers out there accept Host headers from HTTP/1.0 clients.

[http://wget.addictivecode.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions?actio...](http://wget.addictivecode.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions?action=show&redirect=Faq#head-8fe3535fb98ed94722f377f2413d7dfc9788a5d7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great job but the site does a terrible job in telling a new visitor what exactly CouchDB does. I'm still not clear what it does - why are they offering a download before actually communicating the benefits.

</comment><comment><USER10> CouchDB fills an important niche between embedded databases, like SQLlite and Distributed NoSQL solutions, like riak. Also it's seems to be targeting once popular "Mobile/Offline Databases" sector (it was before 3G and even GPRS took off and when wireless bandwidth was limited and not always on (i.e. dial up). I think about CouchDB as a modern version of MS-Access and/or Lotus Notes ;-)

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems very popular, so maybe it's just that I'm not cool enough (not in the target audience/mixing with the _right_ crowd, virally speaking) - but being upfront about what something is and what's great about it, would seem to me to be an important for encouraging adoption. OTOH, I'm noticed many successful projects don't do this, so maybe it isn't important. :/

My history shows 5 pages from the landing page before I found one that said what CouchDB is (the faq), and I'm still not sure what distinguishes it.

btw: awesome logo and poster.

<comment><USER15> I think <http://couchdb.apache.org/> is a better site for finding out what CouchDB is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Changes since 0.11.1:

        * More efficient header commits.
        * Use O_APPEND to save lseeks.
        * Faster implementation of pread_iolist(). Further improves performance on concurrent reads.
        * Added authentication caching
        * Faster default view collation.
        * Added option to include update_seq in view responses.

from <http://couchdb.apache.org/downloads.html>

</comment><comment><USER17> What are the advantages / downsides of CouchDB compare with other schemaless DB like Mongodb, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet etc. ?

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats, guys! I'm just starting to take a look into CouchDB at the moment. I look forward to getting to know it better.

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats! But that is by far the most arrogant and obnoxiously self-indulgent website I've seen in a long while.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone give me a quick synopsis of what I would use this for?

Is this only for Facebook size scaling or is it of use for those of us just starting out?

<comment><USER21> I'm not a CouchDB pro by any means but I've been following it from a distance for some time.

The main feature of CouchDB is that it's a fast, scalable database that also allows you to host your apps inside of it, with each "view" being stored in the database itself.

I believe some people use it for large installations but as far as I know that is not the primary focus.

<comment><USER22> It's a "fast, scalable database" that isn't focused on large installations? What?

While I haven't used couchdb much personally, its most significant characteristics seem to be that it's a document-oriented database (each record can have its own structure) and that it inherits all of Erlang's infrastructure for fault-tolerance.

<comment><USER23> The offline replication is the one thing no other database touches. (Maybe Lotus Notes but that thing is long in the tooth.)

<comment><USER24> Well, that's taken long enough. Lotus Notes has _everything_ to do with CouchDB. Damien was a product developer at Iris/Lotus, and in a lot of ways CouchDB is a modern rethink of the best of what Notes/Domino is. When you take away the client and the need to be backwards-compatible to the late Bronze Age (Notes V2 applications from '93 can run unmodified in the current version 8.5 client), you're free to make a lot of improvements, but you also get to keep the good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> After looking into Erlang for a while now (still in chapter 3 of ERLANG Programming by Francesco Cesarini)

I have to state that writing something this big in Erlang was bold, really, really bold.

Erlang is not really that fun or exciting to use

<comment><USER26> > Erlang is not really that fun or exciting to use

It depends what you use it for. Its brilliant for infrastructure - <USER2> that has to live forever and survive no matter what gets thrown at it. It makes a lot of the hard problems go away so you can focus on the fun and exciting stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hey CouchDB, do you have a page of people using you in production?

<comment><USER4> What up samratjp?!

Check out <http://www.couch.io/case-studies>

And a longer list here <http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/CouchDB_in_the_wild>

<comment><USER27> Thanks Couchdb for the comforting thought :-p Man, I didn't know BBC used you - awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If only it worked. The test suite is giving me a crapload of errors on *.couchone.com. I spent a couple hours getting it installed on my laptop (docs have incorrect dependencies among other things) and the first test just hangs. CouchDB 0.9?

</comment><comment><USER29> this is pretty cool news, though I'm a might concerned about how the links to the couchone hosting seem to be broken :p

<comment><USER23> We're getting hit by lots of 10x waves right now, so while we're doing what we can, if the hosted stuff is sluggish today we'll be faster tomorrow.

Cheers, Chris

<comment><USER29> cool. Might I suggest that after the pace gets saner, you add a script that fires a confirmation email before creating the instance + includes a "how to use the hosted instance" mini explanation.

This might a) free up some instances that are created only because certain folks have this silly habit of retrying a form with new values when it doesn't work the first time, and b) will make it easier to couchdb novices to get started.

Otoh, I might just be speaking for myself and my own silliness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> couch.io is invite based at the moment, right?

can I have an invite? :D

<comment><USER31> {"error":"bad_request","reason":"invalid UTF-8 JSON"} when i try signing up

<comment><USER23> This could perhaps be an issue with your browser (or something due to load). Can you email firstname.lastname@example.com with details? Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well done guys. But don't forget to credit Bryant Cutler (<http://bryantcutler.com/>) for the awesome logo.

update: downvoted? why? I really think the guy should be credited. He did a fricking awesome job which CouchDB has based its whole image on. The faux movie poster linked at the top of this story has a giant size version of his logo as the very backdrop. This shit is important. Credit him, says I!

<comment><USER33> I down-voted you just now because you complained about being down-voted, which isn't good etiquette.

<comment><USER34> Upvoted again!

<comment><USER23> I still don't know how to down-vote. Do you need super powers?

<comment><USER35> >200 karma, you're almost there.

<comment><USER36> It's 201 karma. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My favourite CouchDb commercial: <http://vimeo.com/11852209></comment>


How Google's build system works - <AUTHOR> http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/08/build-in-cloud-how-build-system-works.html <comment><USER2> It's a little annoying that every big tech company has solved this problem in house in their own way. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft all have internal build systems that do basically the same things.

<comment><USER3> Are there any open source build systems that work similarly? I looked at basically everything out there, and none provided this functionality. So my company ended up rolling our own, based on the Google model.

The particular characteristic that I saw missing was package-level build files. All the open source guys really wanted you have one big build file that described how to build everything, rather than bunch of small ones that could be composed.

<comment><USER4> This is the problem, no there are not any open source systems which can build systems like Google has. I think that is in part because there are no open source projects of the complexity and scale of what Google builds and thus those teams haven't run into the problems that Google did and had to come up with their own ways to work around them.

When I worked there Google had 20,000 employees. More than half of them were engineers, and probably at any given moment in time 5,000 unique users might type 'build' at their desktop after having checked in a change. That means 5,000 instances get build, 5,000 regression test suites run, following at least 5,000 different 'views' into the repository. (which sat one some Perforce servers that nearly glowed from all the work they were being asked to do).

There are few places where such scale is needed, perhaps a couple of dozen, and they all have competent engineers so they all come up with their own build system.

If open source were ever to address this particular challenge, it would have to be in the creation of some really solid interfaces which would allow a build system to emerge from the tools, rather than trying to explicitly create a build system from scratch.

<comment><USER3> That is true, although my comment referred to how the build was configured, rather than the scaling issues you mention.

Even at my current ~12 developer company, we have too big and interconnected of a codebase to reasonably manage with ant, or buildr, or anything else I saw. We won't run into "we can't build our code fast enough" for a long time still :)

There is just a huge gap in build systems, for teams between ant at the small end and and google3 at the astoundingly huge end

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rumours has Blaze, Google's build tool the article describes, is being open sourced. At least this information was floating around early 2011.

</comment><comment><USER6> I need to read more before I really understand, but what was the problem with something like distcc, ccache and CMake? The two downsides I see to the distcc/CMake approach is slow dependency resolution (looking at lots of files instead of just packages), and duplicate coping of files by distcc to remote machines.

<comment><USER7> This is quite a high level overview, so possibly underneath they're using distcc. This at least used to be true for ad-hoc builds on their corporate network in previous years.

<comment><USER8> Don't know if it still holds true, but they used distcc a few years ago: [http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/08/distccs- pump-m...](http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/08/distccs-pump-mode- new-design-for.html)

I also recommend ccache, but it might run into problems with the pump mode, although it works fine with regular distcc.</comment></comment></comment>


Once Again, Thieves Enter Swift Financial Network and Steal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/business/dealbook/swift-global-bank-network-attack.html <comment><USER2> I guess this will accelerate the adoption of block chain technologies as a replacement for existing systems like swift

<comment><USER3> Blockchain would be great with the robosigning scandal, or anything else where the chain of actions has to be maintained.

Also, somebody got all the info and then wired Bangledesh's money to a private account. It's an inside job, hard to stop those.</comment></comment>


Amazing service lets you Unsubscribe from unwanted emails at once - <AUTHOR> http://www.technewsbest.com/2012/06/amazing-service-stops-unwanted-email.html

<comment><USER2> This is cool, but it's nothing new. Unroll came out months ago. In fact, the focus of the product is more as a newsletter aggregator, which is and of itself a cool concept. I've been using it, and it works to a certain extent. It's not perfect, but it's a nice idea.

Also, you might want to check out Safe Shepherd (née MelonCard), which is similar.

<https://safeshepherd.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> How can you unsubscribe from spam? If you didn't subscribe to it in the first place then no amount of pleading will make them stop and if you did subscribe then it's not spam. The only things that help is aggressive filtering and and a good email client. Everything else is in the hands of sysadmins.

I do not see the purported usefulness of this.</comment>


The rich are much richer than you and me - <AUTHOR> http://cnnmoney.mobi/wk_snarticle?articleId=urn:newsml:CNNMoney.com:20101223:rich_wealth_gap:1&category=cnnm_business <comment><USER2> _"The typical person lost more because a bigger percentage of their wealth in 2007 had been the value of their home," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with EPI._

Cheap credit seems to have wiped out the very people it should have helped most (according to activists, anyway). There goes the decades old policy of "home owning".

It should be clear by now that having a mortgage does not make you a home owner, just a renter who can't move out.

A couple "underwater" is very nearly chained to the land; moving out means a huge credit rating hit, so they'd be reluctant to seek a better job in another city.

</comment><comment><USER3> Filler. There's more in Wikipedia

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States)

And there's...

[http://www.good.is/post/americans-are-horribly- misinformed-a...](http://www.good.is/post/americans-are-horribly-misinformed- about-who-has-money/)</comment>


Building a Modern Back End with TypeScript, PostgreSQL and Prisma: REST API - <AUTHOR> https://www.prisma.io/blog/modern-backend-2-dcba1ps7kip3/ <comment><USER2> honestly these are my favorite posts, free information, love it</comment>


Rob Pike: Reflections on Window Systems (2008) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://epresence.kmdi.utoronto.ca/1/watch/630.aspx <comment><USER2> "To be honest, looking back on it, Unix today is worse than the systems that Unix itself was created to get away from."

<comment><USER3> Can anyone here corroborate that there are better alternatives to operating systems than the Unix-likes? Maybe anyone that agrees with Rob Pike's view on this in particular? All I seem to hear is that Unix-y OSs are great, but I don't hear much about any potential alternatives. So I'm curious about them.

<comment><USER4> What Rob Pike is refering to is of course Plan 9 and its derivatives (say Inferno). Whether you want to consider them Unix-likes or not is your choice (many HNers will say it's more Unix than Unix).

If you look for desktop alternatives to Unix, OSes to look at are BeOS (an open source clone is developed under the name HaikuOS) and the Windows NT kernel (don't hurt me: the Windows NT kernel is IMHO far more elegant than, say Linux or Mach. What is crappy is especially the WinAPI; please look deep below the surface: Here Windows gets nice).

The reason why you won't find many desktop/server alternatives to Unix can be read here: [http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf](http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf) Thus lots of OS reserach is either focused on embedded stuff or virtualization instead of desktop or server.

Accepting this, especially have a look at the L4 kernel family (a family of very small and fast microkernels). If you like highly secure designs, you'll probably like seL4, the first formally verfied kernel. Also QNX is worth a look (QNX is Unix, accepted; nevertheless a very elegant kernel design).

<comment> vezzy-fnord I'm not sure what huge technical advantage the BeOS model offers over contemporary Unix-likes in this day and age, other than its file system support for extended attributes, which are a controversial topic and nonetheless still used by things like XFS.

I'd also like some clarification on what you think is good about the NT kernel. It seems far too entangled with other cruft that forms the Windows stack.

That said, I'd also like to mention the Hurd. At this point, it's really a fragile ad-hoc reimplementation of 9P file servers on top of a modded Mach, but such a model was still quite daring for general purpose computing back during the Hurd's original window of opportunity (1989-1995, or so). Probably would have advanced the state of modern OS at least a bit, if it weren't for managerial incompetence.

It's still a Unix at heart, though, despite many important extensions.

<comment><USER4> > I'm not sure what huge technical advantage the BeOS model offers over > contemporary Unix-likes in this day and age, other than its file system > support for extended attributes, which are a controversial topic and > nonetheless still used by things like XFS.

BeOS was very optimized for multimedia, which is an interesting property I think. Also the GUI library used multithreading from beginning. This surely isn't interesting for servers, but for desktop computers.

> I'd also like some clarification on what you think is good about the NT > kernel. It seems far too entangled with other cruft that forms the Windows > stack.

For a lack of time for explanations I will only give one example: How to do fast asynchronous I/O (You know: Asynchronous IO: The hot thing that node.js is about ;-) ;-) ). Under FreeBSD/Linux asynchronous I/O is just synchronous non-blocking I/O (FreeBSD needed to implement kqueue to even allow this in a fast way; the Linux developers implemented epoll (which is incompatible to kqueue :-( )). Under Windows NT it is an easy problem that has been solved (from beginning?). See

> [http://sssslide.com/speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how- > we-...](http://sssslide.com/speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed- > the-gil-and-exploited-all-cores)

for details.

<comment><USER5> > BeOS was very optimized for multimedia, which is an interesting property I > think. Also the GUI library used multithreading from beginning. This surely > isn't interesting for servers, but for desktop computers.

BeOS _claimed_ to be optimized for multimedia, but that does not mean that it was. I remember, that I was able to have fluid DivX (3.11) playback on PII-300 running Windows and Linux, but not on BeOS.

What BeOS _did_ have is DirectShow-like media architecture, using nodes and pipelines. But at the time, it was not an effective architecture.

(And yes, the BeOS engineers never managed to support VESA GTF in their display drivers, meaning that the picture on my monitor was always shifted compared to other OSes).

<comment><USER6> DivX?

Back when BeOS was still on sale, Windows latest versions were Windows 2000 and Windows 98, with XP around the corner.

I never remember using DivX on those systems.

<comment><USER5> Yes, DivX.

The original hacked codec appeared in 1998. It got boost in popularity when the movie The Matrix came out (1999).

This happened in Windows 98 timeframe. Windows 2000 was in early beta, not yet on sale and XP was unheard of yet. The current linux were Redhat 5, 5.1 and 6; BeOS 4 and 4.5.

<comment><USER6> Actually I think I was still only using Real back then, but cannot really remember.

I would need to go dig into my Zip floppies collection, a few thousand kilometers away from my current location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i loved plan9. i was into it before the 3rd edition was released and i built a small career out of it. it was and still is the most enjoyable system to work with.

i'm happy it's getting its dues in retrospect and is now considered a cool thing, but i can't help but remember how just after the first open release everybody and their uncle kept complaining about trivia: "how can I become root?" "it doesn't do x11?" "its license isn't gnu-open?"

rob is probably right: licensing killed plan9, but so did everybody who couldn't see the forest for the trees. the linux juggernaut was too popular back then.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure licensing was the only reason. A pitch that goes "we work like X, but better" is unconvincing. Especially when it ends with "in an incompatible way."

<comment><USER9> their motto if i recall was never that. they had two demos about being Unixier... one involved tar-ing a process in one machine, sending to another one (or mounting that machine cpu over the network, don't remember) untar-ing and the process continued from when it was first packaged with ui state and all.

<comment><USER10> That was Plan B. I've never used it, or read the papers or the manual, but everything was centralised on a single box. The reason the tar thing works at all is because all it contains is pointers to your centralised state. In case anyone is trying to wrap their heads around the above comment.

The closest Labs equivalent would be Protium, which is for writing programs like he mentioned with the sam/samterm split but with reattachability. Like all the most interesting application-level softwares for Plan 9, that actually do something for you, it wasn't released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Blit video he mentions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emh22gT5e9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emh22gT5e9k)

A similarly interesting talk by him on CSP-inspired languages (Occam, Erlang, Squeak, Newsqueak, Limbo, Alef, Go): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo)

Slides (not shown in the video): [http://go- lang.cat-v.org/talks/slides/emerging-languages-cam...](http://go- lang.cat-v.org/talks/slides/emerging-languages-camp-2010.pdf)

Interesting as well: From parellel to concurrent (on Sawzall and Go): [http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang- NEXT-2014/Fro...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang- NEXT-2014/From-Parallel-to-Concurrent)

</comment><comment><USER12> In the middle of the talk, Pike said that the idea of a workstation in every office was one of the stupidest things he'd ever heard, but then decided not to digress and explain why. Has he discussed that at length in any other paper or recorded talk?

<comment><USER10> They're more expensive first of all. and each one has to be administrated individually, especially if it has a local disk. If the kernel is kept locally, then you have to go around each machine every time you compile a new one. Same thing for applications. Same thing for let's say /usr/dict or something stupid.

Plus it's another mechanical component which can fail.

If the user directories are local instead of on a central box, then you

1) need to be at a specific one to get your stuff, and you

2) can't just cd into someone else's /usr/*/src and collaborate.

The Labs word for timesharing was "communal" computing, if that helps.

For a school or company, in which the computers are provided by the organisation itself, the Plan 9 way is very obviously better than insular systems.

There's more, but it's another whole tangent.

Since you asked, the main Plan 9 paper ("Plan 9 from Bell Labs", 1995) does say

"the early focus on having private machines made it difficult for networks of machines to serve as seamlessly as the old monolithic timesharing systems. Timesharing centralized the management and amortization of costs and resources; personal computing fractured, democratized, and ultimately amplified administrative problems."

but even more to the point would be: with a terminal, you just plug it in and turn it on.

<comment><USER13> "For a school or company, in which the computers are provided by the organisation itself, the Plan 9 way is very obviously better than insular systems."

Only if you can guarantee 100% (or close to) access to high-speed network connections at all time. The value of a computer with meaningful local storage and execution is that it continues to work when the network is gone or isn't performing well. And it takes a lot less bandwidth to send data to a user's computer and let local applications worry about dealing with the data than it is to send a full screen to the user, if you're talking about GUI. You can also smooth out latency issues a lot easier.

So I don't think it's obviously better in those cases. But it's very obviously worse OUTSIDE of those institutions. Here's Pike's description of his dream setup[1]:

"I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called 'terminals'. Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that."

That's fine, so long as all you want to do on your home computer is do more work. But that's such an incredibly narrow vision of computing. The truly personal computer enabled a lot of things that weren't possible under the old dumb terminal model Pike pines for, and has made computers accessible to many more people. We'll continue to get some of the benefits of this as the "cloud" continues to be integrated into things, but I don't think we're going back to the "communal" computing model, and if we do, it's going to be because someone looks at the benefits of the personal computer model and finds a way to provide them in the communal model, rather than sitting there and pining about how it was in the old days before the peasants ruined everything.

1) [http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/](http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/), thanks to tjgq for providing the link below

<comment><USER10> > dumb terminal

> send a full screen to the user

I think you're confusing Plan 9 with thin clients. Even the Blit in the video was a smart terminal ("you can run programs on it"). The way Plan 9 works is

> send data to a user's computer and let local applications worry about > dealing with the data.

It was apparently different in the 90's ("terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it") but nowadays in Plan 9 you do nearly everything on the terminal. For different reasons: the WM, the browsers, the editors run on the terminal for responsiveness; image and music decoders run on the terminal because they need a higher bandwidth to the screen/speakers than to the fs (jpegs, mp3s, etc are compressed); plumber and factotum run on your terminal so that you get exactly one instance of them per session, and that they die as soon as you end your session.

The central boxes are only really used for FS/backup, auth, cron, maybe mail servers or whatever.

So nearly everything runs on the terminal, but it's a Plan 9 terminal so it's still just a matter of plug it in, turn it on, set up netbooting (once).

> it's very obviously worse OUTSIDE of those institutions.

What I was going to say before I decided that it was too much of a tangent was: and Plan 9 NOT being a proper distributed OS could be a plus: it's possible to use recover(4) or lapfs(4) and bring the laptop outside the network. No-one actually does that, and lapfs isn't even a real Plan 9 program in C. but it's still made feasible by the fact that your editor and so on is not on the far side of a connection and isn't going to go anywhere. unlike on e.g. an Amoeba terminal, which really is just a window manager, no editors locally, no browsers or viewers.

I dunno about using "backup" to describe the Plan 9 file server, but that's even more unrelated to my original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who's the guy at the end saying "let's forget where I work and where you work", asking the "hard" question?

<comment><USER14> Bill Buxton. He works for Microsoft now but used to work for Alias|Wavefront (also in Toronto as I understand it.)

<comment><USER15> I don't know how famous he is in programming circles, but in HCI and Interaction Design he is a well-known and respected for his fantastic research on two-handed interfaces.

<comment><USER14> I encountered him in a talk at Siggraph 2001. He is a charismatic guy and used a lot of creative examples of interface design. In particular he showed [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammassalik_wooden_maps](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammassalik_wooden_maps)

It is sad that Maya is now an Autodesk product: Autodesk is such a square, white bread, corporate outfit. The interface to their flagship AutoCAD is ludicrously clunky and antique, while something like Revit (another acquisition) is clever but really dumbed-down and limited in scope. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For anyone else wanting to watch this on Android, or just have an mp4 and slides in pdf: the archive is linked near the bottom of [http://genius.cat-v.org/rob-pike/](http://genius.cat-v.org/rob-pike/)

<comment><USER16> and more talks from DGPis40 here (Pike's link to the event is broken): [http://hciweb.cs.toronto.edu/DGPis40/webcasts.html](http://hciweb.cs.toronto.edu/DGPis40/webcasts.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> but I guess we're stuck with it until we come up with a better way to install emacs

</comment><comment><USER18> An interesting bit of trivia about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space): The film's title was the inspiration for the name of Bell Labs' successor to the Unix operating system.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there a mirror of this somewhere that doesn't require Flash?</comment>


No text? No problem for Chrome's search by image - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57605596-92/no-text-no-problem-for-chromes-search-by-image/ <comment><USER2> I used it few times and it is amazing. It can tell you where was the vacation photo of your Facebook friend made. Or what is original author of the artwork reproduction on your hotel room wall.

Another (Google-independent) tool like that: [http://www.tineye.com](http://www.tineye.com)</comment>


You could have invented the LMAX Disruptor, if only you were limited enough - <AUTHOR> https://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2018/08/you-could-have-invented-lmax-disruptor.html <comment><USER2> What this says to me is that Java's reputation for sluggishness is a result of its idiomatic coding styles more than the language itself. In particular the casual way people allocate and discard objects for everything they do.

If you program it like it was C then you can get good performance, which make sense given that the language was built for embedded devices with anemic processors. Of course you undoubtedly give up some maintainability when you do that, but the tradeoff is getting 6 million packets through the thing per second.

This would also explain why Java benchmarks so well but still tends to be slow in the real world.

<comment><USER3> Java's reputation for sluggishness was really formed based on people's experience with Applets and Swing applications and especially badly written Applets and Swing applications.

Java in the real world is fast. That's why it's used as the backbone of so many large organizations and so many scale out solutions (Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, etc) are written in Java.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'd take this in conjunction with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824575) : "language speed" and "UI responsiveness" are only loosely related, and there are so many ways to end up wasting time blocking or locking without really realising it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the kind of thing I really love reading. It's ostensibly about a technical subject, but that's really a jumping-off point for examining how we think and talk about things, how portions of our field become Balkanized, how what we encounter shapes our sense of what's possible and ultimately hardens into "common knowledge".

<comment><USER6> Reminded me of the reaction to this paper in Medicine [https://doi.org/10.2337/diacare.17.2.152](https://doi.org/10.2337/diacare.17.2.152)

It's just rudimentary integration approximation to a mathematics undergraduate but to those in Medicine unfamiliar with it, it was an achievement.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds really interesting. Can you point to any of those reactions?

<comment><USER6> When it was discovered by the Mathematics community it was met with bemusement. Sorry, I'm recalling from memory here from years ago when I was a graduate student in Mathematics and don't have ready posts.

Meanwhile, it accumulated 300 citations in medicine and chem [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C4&q=A+Ma...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C4&q=A+Mathematical+Model+for+the+Determination+of+Total+Area+Under+Glucose+Tolerance+and+Other+Metabolic+Curves&btnG=)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Give me less, I'll pay more - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/give-me-less-ill-pay-more-6e13b3844541 <comment><USER2> From Aug 10, 2016</comment>


Artificial Intelligence May Have Cracked Voynich Manuscript - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/artificial-intelligence-may-have-cracked-freaky-600-yea-1822519232 <comment><USER2> This happens every few months, always with one or two sentences "decoded" and never another peep from the researcher. You should take this with a massive grain of salt.

<comment><USER3> i recommend a whole NaCl crystal

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Importantly, the researchers aren't saying they've deciphered the entire Voynich manuscript. Rather, they've identified the language of origin (Hebrew), and a coding scheme in which letters have been arranged in a particular order (alphagram). Kondrak says the full meaning of the text won't be known until historians of ancient Hebrew have a chance to study the deciphered text._

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what future researchers will think about Kyle O'Quinn's twitter feed...</comment>


AMS Feature Column: Singular Value Decomposition - <AUTHOR> http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/svd.html

<comment><USER2> A regularized singular value decomposition is one of the most powerful machine learning algorithms available. Two decent open source implementations are SciPy (<http://www.scipy.org/>) and SVDLIBC (<http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/svdlibc/>).

Timely Development also posted the full c++ code they used for the Netflix Prize <http://www.timelydevelopment.com/demos/NetflixPrize.aspx>

<comment><USER3> SVDLIBC's fastest sparse matrix algorithm uses Lanczos, which is still not good enough for large data sets.

Of particular interest to web scale projects would be incremental SVD methods that enable online updates to the SVD. <http://www.merl.com/publications/TR2006-059/>

There's also been research in academic circles regarding the use of the much more efficient (though nondeterministic) CUR decomposition in the areas of network analysis and collaborative filtering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related to the Netflix prize, take a look at the Hodge decomposition: <http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1067>.

<comment><USER5> A videolecture on this paper: <http://videolectures.net/aml08_lim_ghrl/> (warning: microsoft streaming technology).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> SVD also has an interesting application in image compression. Here's a fairly good example.

[http://online.redwoods.cc.ca.us/instruct/darnold/LAPROJ/Fall...](http://online.redwoods.cc.ca.us/instruct/darnold/LAPROJ/Fall2001/AdamDave/textwriteup.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Although SVD can be applied to images, it's not a particularly good compression method. It's fairly expensive to compute, and the Discrete Cosine Transform (JPEG) or Wavelet Transform (JPEG2000) provide similar quality at a fraction of the cost.

The fundamental problem is that SVD is a linear technique -- it finds the best _linear_ approximation to a matrix. However, real-world images contain several non-linear effects which are very expensive to approximate linearly.

In recent years, however, various newer techniques have been developed which use SVD (actually, the closely related Principal Components Analysis (PCA)) as a building block for achieving good compression.

One such approach is "Clustered Blockwise PCA for Representing Visual Data" -- which applies PCA to different regions of an image and then another PCA on all of the resulting blocks. The intuition is that although the whole image is not linear, many regions within it are indeed linear and thus compress well, individually.

[http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/publications/pdfs/Nishino_P...](http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/publications/pdfs/Nishino_PAMI05.pdf)

<comment><USER6> If you examine the images compressed using SVD, you can actually see the effects of the linear approximation in the form of light/dark bands. Great link. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> SVD is the swiss army knife of linear algebra.

<comment><USER8> It's more than a swiss knife. It's a _sledgehammer_!! It breaks almost any problem you may encounter...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. This helped straighten up my idea that svd is just eigenvalues for nonsquare matricies.</comment>