As I run past the RIM buildings, I see these posters - <AUTHOR> http://fightandroid.org/ <comment><USER2> I love the quotation. I guess having a website means you make nonsensical statements and then be quoted on some smear campaign's website?

"This campaign may be the dumbest thing ever posted to the Internet" -- Jonathan Rockway, jrock.us.

Credible!

(Also, while Google ads may have funded the beginning of Android, it has enough corporate sponsorship now that it could easily outlive Google. Samsung or HTC could easily take over Google's role if some shiny new Web 2.0 startup kills it. But I'm not holding my breath. All I can say is man... people on the Internet are _dumb_...)

<comment><USER3> Do you think that Android in its current incarnation as quasi-open-source, free to adopt, would survive? Or do you think it would be death by a thousand forks, where Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc. all grabbed their own copy of the repository and made TouchWiz, Sense, and Blur respectively a core part of the UI? I just can't see how Android as a device-agnostic OS would survive without a relatively neutral curator.

<comment><USER4> An open foundation _could_ work. Imagine Apache Android. Sure there would be fragmentation, but at the moment the need for apps is pushing them together. If web apps win then the APIs look a bit different, with more scope for UX differences.

Not that this will happen.

<comment><USER5> I would assume the other 81 members of the Open Handset Alliance (<http://www.openhandsetalliance.com>) wouldn't just do nothing if Google went away...

<comment><USER6> Exactly, many of the members have too much invested in android to just drop it and move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a resident of Waterloo and student at UWaterloo, I can tell you this does not represent the opinion of the student body. It is true, UW has got a lot of benefit from RIM and we are very grateful, but half of us have also interned there, so know from experience that the company has a lot of problems they need to work out.

I use an iPhone. Most of my friends have a Nexus S or other androids.

<comment><USER8> Google's Kitchener/Waterloo office is growing rapidly. Google has been hiring many of us (UWaterloo students/grads) for intern/full-time positions. I, for one, welcome our new Android overlords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ... every 6 seconds, a BlackBerry device is thrown into the trash(hopefully a recycling bin) due to the evils of better devices like Android.

Devices like Android smartphones are creating a "better" model when it comes to user experience, apps, and price, yet how can we define "better"? Is it by a truly better experience? No. We like to define better as "stfu google, rim r0x0rs, tr0l0l0l0l0l! I'm not listening to what you're saying! Go away. RIM ruuuuulz". So next time people tell you that google is better, shove fingers in your ears and kick him in the nuts, because rim is just awesome.

\---

Edit: Seriously though? TomTom needs to fight google? Thats laughable. Why wouldent I want to buy a device that costs me extra ($150-400), is bulky, non- free map updates, and is known for selling user data to whoever offers money and a good enough usage case?

I don't think google is so bad.

<comment><USER10> I knew a girl that threw hers into the pool (then, foolishly, bought another).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to a whois the site is run by the owner of this site: <http://www.paybuyer.com/>

PayBuyer appears to be an ad network. In other words, the guy could care less about Android and is just mad that AdSense/AdWords dominates.

It's funny that supporters of RIM have taken it seriously without doing 30 seconds of research.

<comment><USER12> Also, it says that directly on the site itself.

<comment><USER11> Whoops. Just zoomed right past the site's About. Not sure how anyone can take this thing as more than a publicity stunt.

<comment><USER13> They don't claim it's anything more. From their website:

""" 1\. "Isn't this just a gimmick to promote a startup?" Yes, of course, FightAndroid.org is intended to help a startup (Paybuyer) – a startup that will indeed damage Google's AdWords and Android if it succeeds. To see why, view this PowerPoint presentation given to RIM executives in late March. """

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see nothing about "building a better machine" from a technical perspective on their site, which I'd expect given the byline.

I'm no fan of google's business model (advertising in the vast majority of cases == worthless noise), but at least they are using their position to further technology in good ways, which is more than I can see coming out of RIM.

<comment><USER15> They have a white paper:

<http://www.paybuyer.com/about/white_paper/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think people are taking this more seriously than intended. It's a PR ploy for a company unrelated to RIM (and as spaetzel pointed out, possibly unrelated to Waterloo too).

Unfortunately their little PR ploy looks embarrassing to Waterloo, UWaterloo, and especially RIM. As a UW student, it's a little insulting that they expect to appeal to protectionist urges to help their own little company, which appears to not even be from Canada let alone Waterloo.

I hope this is ignored as it deserves to be.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this one of those "it doesn't have to make sense, it's just for publicity" things?

Why are the uni students holding a rally? What connection do they have to"Paybuyer, LLC" which funds this Adwords competitor?

<comment><USER18> > Is this one of those "it doesn't have to make sense, it's just for > publicity" things?

Pretty much.

> Why are the uni students holding a rally? What connection do they have > to"Paybuyer, LLC" which funds this Adwords competitor?

It's not a rally; they're holding up giant signs to face traffic. I think it was four people to a sign. (It didn't occur to me to take a picture until I was already far away.)

This is just a PR stunt from a new Waterloo-based advertising startup. They're simply piggy-backing on the whole RIM vs Android thing with weirdly-phrased anti-Android propaganda.

<comment><USER19> It's not even advertising. It's a mashup of the yahoo directory (from the early 1990's) concept combined with a Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes model.

There are no ads that are put onto publishers' websites to get paid. In order for this to work people have to manually go to the web-based "yellow pages" and then register their intent to buy say, a washing machine, and then that gives you a lottery ticket where if you win, you have to prove that you have purchased a washing machine within N days of registering your intent.

So suppose I have already decided to buy a washing machine, and GE, Maytag, and Kenmore have all bought into this scheme. This allows me to get 3 lottery picks, which might have an expected value of 10 cents each ($100, with a 1 in 1000 chance of winning, say). Presumably GE, Maytag, and Kenmore will all have to pay 15 cents, with the startup pocketing 5 cents.

The question is whether GE, Maytag, and Kenmore get 15 cents worth of value. Remember, I was a motivated buyer who had already decided to buy a washing machine. The only question was which one. This isn't going to reach someone who hadn't yet decided that they were going to buy, and so didn't have the motivation to go to the startup's web page.

To think this would disrupt a true advertising based system, whether it's Adwords, or even the pullouts in the Sunday morning newspaper is just silly.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. That was a very helpful explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So.. they hate Android. But their explanation of why is to point to some blog post which by my view concludes that Android is bringing 'perfect competition' to the marketplace. Soo.. I presume they are against that, but what's funny is the blog post they point to even discusses how perfect competition benefits the consumer and how preventing it would be detrimental.

Sounds like the blog post they point to doesn't exactly give reasons to hate android like they think it does...

</comment><comment><USER21> As a fellow Waterloo resident, supporting local companies is cool. However, I see no evidence that Paybuyer is located in Waterloo, this page <http://www.paybuyer.com/help/prove/> has a Arizona address, and the WHOIS <http://whois.domaintools.com/paybuyer.org> also gives the same Arizona address.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More context: As I'm jogging to work, there were students holding up boards with those posters right in front of the RIM buildings. I feel embarrassed as a fellow Waterloo student.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, cooping in Toronto right now, just asked a bunch of my friends at school about this... I share your embarrassment. It actually hurts that a company is trying to manipulate us like this. Not just because it's so blindingly obvious, but because it will work on enough people.

<comment><USER23> Wait, they're doing it and not getting paid by someone to do it? I mean people (usually ridiculously hot women) stand out on the street holding up signs telling me how awesome red-bull is.

It's pretty easy to pick up a street promotions crew. The job generally tends to have Abercrombie-style hiring practices, pays a bit more than minimum wage, and is pretty flexible.

I'd honestly be shocked if there were people dumb enough to do that for real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A new form of Jingoism. This is not how you are going to succeed in the long term. Even if this is half serious, appealing to the protective, negative instincts of people suggests that RIM's future is bleaker than I thought it was

Edit: It's not clear to me though if RIM has anything to do with this.

<comment><USER25> Nothing to do with RIM. It's marketing for paybuyer.com.

<comment><USER24> So it's just a marketing campaign trying to appeal to protectionist instincts. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The website is laughable. The claims made all end in nonsequiturs. Paybuyer is highly speculative and vastly overestimating its ability to disrupt Google Adwords, even with their proposed backing from Waterloo and RIM.

Furthermore I don't pity RIM in the least. They made their bed. They chose to keep their products "business oriented" and got left behind when it came to innovation and, in the end, productivity. Why should I chastise Google for opening their platform and offering services for free? Google's model was clearly a better one at drawing customers in, which in turn fuels their advertising through use of mobile advertising in free apps.

The website claims Adwords funds Android and that's why it's evil, because it creates a "moat" around Google that makes it nigh impossible to compete with Google. I disagree. I believe Adwords and Android are symbiotic. They fuel each other, and if your company can't compete with Google then DON'T TRY TO COMPETE WITH GOOGLE. Choosing to do so is a huge risk, though it may net huge rewards. By taking them on you accept your fate, be it failure or success. Don't ask us to intervene on your behalf. I gain nothing by backing Paybuyer.

Also, Paybuyer is a horrible name for a company.

</comment><comment><USER27> He hits a nerve, though. The evangelism for companies has been rising at an insane rate. Why do people feel the need to defend their favorite company against the encroachment of other companies?

I could understand if their paycheck was on the line. If you write iPod apps and Android starts taking market share, that threatens you. (Assuming you can't also write Android apps, for whatever reason.) But most people just go crazy with no stake at all.

<comment> a-priori Hypothesis: Brand loyalty is the new Nationalism.

<comment><USER28> When do we get out Congress of Vienna and World Wars on brands/IP then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> OK so after walking past the boards, I think its nothing except a marketing ploy to get Kitchener-Waterloo residents to support the local team.

Image - <http://twitpic.com/5on93a> Image full size - <http://twitpic.com/5on93a/full>

The posters say to email the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, and Tom Tom to stop Android because these companies have "lost tens of billions of dollars" (wtf do i care if they lost money?)

RIM building is in the background.

Students/PR firm (some look like students but they also have your typical hot, bare-waist chick helping) is having a hard time keeping the boards up, the wind keeps knocking them down. Guy in the orange seems to be calling the shots.

Drawings look like work of students.

I personally like RIM, really want to know whats going on here.

</comment><comment><USER30> I doubt that college students are going to be upset by an open source project 'Destroying Wealth'. Why would anyone other than RIM share holders care if RIM is loosing market share to Android?

<comment><USER31> You care if you are a college kid who helped develop a competitor to Google's AdWords and you want to pitch it to RIM and MS. At least I think that's what is going on here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Huh a website to promote a startup, by talking smack about google and android. This is both foolish and deceptive.

I certainly hope that this isn't the new way to do startup marketing.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't really understand this but I'm not sure which questions to ask. What's the point? Is this just a smear campaign? Why is this getting upvotes?

</comment><comment><USER34> I smell the scent of Astroturf.... does my nose delude me?

<comment><USER35> Yep. Bad Astroturf at that.

<comment><USER36> I thought it was bad satire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Surprisingly, that strip of land they're standing on is actually Waterloo city property. It's a strange stunt for a service that looks pretty crappy but it sure did attract a lot of attention from bemused RIM employees milling about this morning.

</comment><comment><USER38> "I know what to do: let's combat our competitor's overwhelming tactical advantage with faux moral outrage! It's a win-win-win for us!" -- rtperson, just now, sarcastically.

</comment><comment><USER39> The existence of something like this is an admission of defeat.

<comment><USER40> Not really. This appears to be a marketing tactic by a small startup trying to rile up all the Android fanboys and anti-Googlers in Waterloo; the hometown of RIM. So I wouldn't say that it has anything to do with RIM PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks like these guys have finally figured it out. This campaign is sure to make Waterloo and RIM look good. Oh wait, no, this is actually embarrassing.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm... so confused. This doesn't actually seem to have anything to do with android and everything to do with AdSense.

</comment><comment><USER43> So, an Ad company (Paybuyer - "a tiny startup with a major technology") makes a website campaigning people not to use AdSense?

> "Help defend RIM, your city, and universities by joining a rally outside > RIM's Annual General Meeting"

I feel sorry for those who will actually go there, thinking that by this they will help RIM, and not that in fact they're helping Paybuyer.

EDIT: One more thing, instead of ignoring this kind of stuff, it gets submitted on HN. By doing this it get's spread. When someone is trolling and someone else replies to him, guess who wins. This shouldn't have been submitted at all.

<comment><USER44> Don't you perpetuate it too by responding? Wait, didn't I just perpetuate it further?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So Paybuyer sponsors the website and the website asks people to petition RIM to buy Paybuyer in order to "fight Android". Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER46> If your biggest incentive you offer is to disrupt the business another product, you must not have a very good product.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have long had a distrust for Google so I can understand the anti-Google sentiment. If we want a competitive battleground in the market, every player needs to be balanced. I was one of the earliest Android adopters but now I see that I must move on to one of the other underdogs (i.e. Nokia or HP).

<comment><USER38> > every player needs to be balanced

Correction: at least two players need to be balanced. iPhone, to my mind, provides just such a balance. Trying to boost every single also-ran product into a position of strategic equity is a waste of time. Right now, RIM is the poster child for the _Innovator's Dilemma,_ and there's little anyone including RIM can do about it.

<comment><USER40> You mention 'at least two players' but from your explanation, you seem satisfied with ONLY two players. I disagree. I'd rather have multiple competitive players than merely two.

<comment><USER47> I can't recall the name off hand and my googlefu is failing me but there's a theory that says a system that supports multiple political parties eventually evolves (or devolves) into two parties.

I think there's a business correlary as well.

Markets aren't designed to support more than one or two players. There's not enough market share in a given space for it. Eventually you'll have first, second and everyone else. The people in first and second may change but there's always a disproportionate market share between number 2 and the rest of the pack.

You might want multiple COMPETITIVE players but you will rarely see it. Eventually the minor market folks will quit because it makes no sense financially to continue in the space.

<comment><USER48> _Markets aren't designed to support more than one or two players. There's not enough market share in a given space for it. Eventually you'll have first, second and everyone else._

What are you talking about? I've never heard that anywhere before?

How many car makers are there? Honda, Toyota, Ford. Right there is three, and they're all pretty darn big. And this ignores some pretty large folk like Chevy, GM, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes, and other household names.

How many PC computer makers? Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo. Four, and all pretty big.

How many casual shoe makers? Nike, Reebok, New Balance, Adidas, Sketchers.

Retail stores? Macys, Sears, JCPennys, Walmart, Costco, Target.

There are tons of industries where there are more than two large players. IMO, it seems pretty clear that there will be at least three major players for mobile:

1) iOS. Only Apple. 2) Android 3) Some other phone that is licensed to the same OEMs that make Android devices. They want diversity so that a single company, like Motorola, can't just become the de facto leader. It's likely Windows Phone. Longshot is WebOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Woah, two whole signatures on the petition. This is going to change the world. <http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/call_to_arms/signatures>

</comment><comment><USER50> The part about making ad directories to kill Google is probably the stupidest things I've ever heard. Also, RIM should embrace Android. They can't fight it. Certainly not with their own OS, and theirs alone. At best, they might have a fighting chance adopting HP's WebOS, together with Samsung and a few others.

Together they could easily make a much more successful OS than WP7, and a worthy competitor to Android. Alone, they don't stand a chance. Nobody does, except Apple, because Apple has a lot of other advantages besides just an OS. The problem is they think the only way to be as successful as Apple is to have your own OS. And that's not nearly enough at this point.

</comment><comment><USER51> This site lists all the ways to fight android except saying build better RIM products and fight in the market...

</comment><comment><USER29> Um...how is Android destroying businesses again?

And what should I do if I want to help? PS: I have an Android phone

</comment><comment><USER52> I'll start fighting Android as soon as RIM makes a phone that doesn't suck.

</comment><comment><USER53> Wait, this is serious? It smells like satire, or at best a troll. If you have a legit startup why in god's name would you act like RIM is the source of value and innovation in mobile? Why would you wed yourself to a company that's doing so poorly?

</comment><comment><USER54> Cute marketing campaign. Pretty straight up CHE-UP.

</comment><comment><USER55> please mind my ignorance, can some point out whats the main "reasons" Android is bad?

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm sure Apple will be first to join the fight against Open Source, what with all the money they invested creating their Unix systems from scratch.

<comment><USER56> I meant that sarcastically. Apple used FreeBSD for much of the Unix underpinnings of OS X. They used KHTML as the basis of WebKit, which drives Safari. I just don't think the "fight Android" crowd will win much favor in Cupertino as Apple seems pretty happy working with Open Source.</comment></comment>


Cisimple partners with Kickfolio to make mobile app testing... simple - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/09/cisimple-exits-beta-makes-mobile-app-building-testing-deployment-well-simple/

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to jump in and describe a bit of what we're trying to do over at cisimple. We know testing is hard, specifically for mobile and automating it with a CI process is even harder. So, what we've done is make it very easy to select which platforms you want your tests run on and have them automatically run every time you commit code.

We've partnered with Kickfolio so that you can also pull up your entire build history and just click a link to interact with that build. Our hope is that this makes it easier for mobile developers to reproduce and catch issues.

I'd love your input on what we're building and what would be helpful for your process.

<comment><USER2> Do you support testing multiple iOS versions (e.g., 6.0, 6.0.1, etc.)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently support running on Simulator versions 4.3, 5.0, 5.1, 6.0 and 6.1

If you'd like more information feel free to reach out at kevin [at] cisimple dot com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I still get a kick out of seeing apps running in the browser. It blows my mind. Oh, quick link if you want to try a few <https://www.cisimple.com/featured_apps>.

</comment><comment><USER4> Continuous integration is huge, both for productivity and company culture. Nice to see mobile dev tools start to catch up with web tools. I'll be giving this a try for sure.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mobile startups needs to build CI and proper build process into their development workflow.</comment>


With 5G mobile, wireless will go even faster than fibre - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21646962-5g-mobile-wireless-will-be-faster-fibre-your-phone-steroids?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/yourphoneonsteroids

<comment> SG- What a ridiculous and false headline.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber- optic_communication#Reco...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber- optic_communication#Record_speeds)

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed this quote:

> Such wireless bit rates are beyond even the scope of the optical-fibre > currently used to deliver internet access and high-definition television to > the home.

FTTH is typically 1Gbps because that's all anyone has to connect with at home. The fibers can trivially do much more, but nobody is going to pay the extra $1000 for CPE with 10Gb NICs on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be a wish list of features rather than any actual technology.</comment>


The biggest gains come from knowing your data - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/33805-the-biggest-gains-come-from-knowing-your-data/fulltext <comment><USER2> Although I know it's petty of me, for some reason that smarmy grin photo of his really gets on my nerves, even the smaller version that normally appears on his blog.

I'd probably read and think more about what Greg writes if he found some other mugshot or just ditched that picture entirely.

<comment><AUTHOR> He's actually a really chill guy -- see for example the first video here:

<http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=greg+linden>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clearly we should just throw nondeterminism at our data. Then, as long as we have a good metric, the algorithm will have maxed the metric. Where's my prize?</comment>


Can your microbiome shift in only a week, after a dietary change? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubiomeblog.com/one-week-change-in-my-microbiome/

<comment><USER2> No error range is reported so it's very hard to tell if those differences in one week are meaningful, much less accurate to 3+ significant digits.

To start with, what's the variation in microbiome from 10 samples taken throughout the same day, or even the same hour? If the variation after a week is in the same range as the variation after 5 minutes, then it isn't really significant, is it?</comment>


Lexis – word counting made easy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/k4m4/lexis <comment><USER2> wc <textfile></comment>


Interesting but lesser known data structures - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/500607/125382 <comment><USER2> I feel like there isn't a good excuse for programmers to not know about a lot of these structures. Yes, some of the examples are somewhat unknown (I didn't know about the 2008 paper on "Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees" for example), but many of these are something that would be at least mentioned in basic college algorithms or data-structures courses. (I have a feeling the voting is skewing my perception, and people are voting up what they've heard of and _think_ are lesser known, and ignoring what they don't recognize at all).

I don't have a CS degree, nor am I solely a programmer, but I make sure I'm aware of the underlying fundamentals of my profession. Even without taking courses, one could easily take some time to read through the related wikipedia articles - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_structures>

P.S. I was trying to think up a good analogy to another technical trade, but I can't think of one where you can be completely unqualified, and work without licensing or certification.

<comment> Trey-Jackson IMO, 99.9% of the time you don't need the more obscure data structures. And I speak from experience working in companies on software requiring high performance (runs taking 6 hours to two days are not uncommon).

That said, I was disappointed nobody had added the corner stitched data structure - I found that to be a very intriguing idea (and in my world, it turned out to be very useful).

<comment><USER2> > IMO, 99.9% of the time you don't need the more obscure data structures

Absolutely, and familiarity with these data structures is what's required to prevent these mistakes. I think a good understanding of these is more likely to prevent one from using them, or in some cases, "inventing" them.

<comment><USER3> _huge_ point. Nothing like seeing someone hand-implement (poorly) a balanced tree.. and usually be very proud of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previously on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370847>

Certainly worth re-thinking nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER5> Also: binary decision diagrams (BDDs), Prolog's difference lists, and the persistent variants of common data structures. I like skip lists, too, though they seem to be fairly well-known among programmers who don't just naively use linked lists and generic hash tables for everything.

<comment><USER6> BDDs are already on there (I'd never heard of them before Knuth's fasicle, but I guess he's sort of popularized them), as are a lot of persistent variants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Noob question: I hacked together my little mobile website and am looking to cut down on search time for a "similar search" I built.

Short Description: Each "unit" has x attributes in the form of strings (tags). Searching queries a database using a standard mysql regexp search for each tag across all "units" and sorts responses by # of tags matching Desc.

I know this isn't StackOverflow so this isn't really a tech question. What I want to know is if the problem is just that I'm a noob (just learned to code/do web development in the past few months) and need to learn more about data structures or if that's just the nature of php/mysql regexp queries (if its a database structure issue, let's not even get into it lol)

<comment> T-R You probably got downvoted for being off-topic - it'd be better to ask that kind of question on Stack Overflow. Leave out the subjective "is it because I'm a noob?" parts, and stick with the more objective "is there a better way to do this?", and you'll probably be able to figure out from that where any holes in your knowledge/experience might be.

<comment><USER7> I appreciate the constructive response. I'm going to do that. Just joined this community so just learning the rules now. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure one could call it a data structure but who remembers the so-called Sneaker Network or Tackie Network, which consisted of someone copying information onto a disk and physically walking to the other machine to copy the information. Networks were so slow/buggy that it was often quicker to transmit information using this "data structure"

<comment><USER8> Yes the Floppy disk is the Data Structure, which is interesting in itself, but in order for this data structure to work it must be both loosely and tightly coupled to the transport layer....

edit: To the downvoters - is a sense of humour not allowed on HN?

<comment><USER5> If you're going to try to be funny, at least include it as part of an otherwise worthwhile comment, otherwise it just adds noise to the discussion (and encourages more of same). I know HN seems kind of neurotic about this, but we're trying really hard to keep away trite "first post", "[citation needed]", etc. comments, and given HN's age, it actually seems to work.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Your private Reddit, best topic messenger - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trigger-topic-based-messenger/id968265755?mt=8

<comment><USER2> If you want a private reddit...you can just make a private subreddit

I agree, the reddit comparison does not work here.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. IRC fits better

<comment><AUTHOR> And more conversational IRC, still have a lot of potential for mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> does this actually have any relation to reddit, or is that just a comparison? Your description doesn't really make it clear, it seems like it might not be but you really mention reddit a lot.

if it isn't linked to reddit, then i don't really understand your tagline. what is a "private reddit"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Trigger uses Reddit-like structure but in for your private discussions. So it provide more organisation to your conversations, or currently messaging apps.

Things are easier to find, you can have much better flow with all the conversations.

<comment><USER5> The comparison to reddit is terrible and confusing. I would remove this ASAP, because all this really is is a What'sapp group conversation, with the twist that you can group things by topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like the suggested conversations feature. I think it would be interesting if each of a wide group of friends could select specific interests, then suggested conversations appear just to those people who are interested in that class of topic. Looks slick as well.

Some questions:

\- How do you make money?

\- What's your privacy policy? How do you ensure message privacy (the app description calls it 'private')?

\- Is it iOS only, or can I connect via the web, desktop client, Android etc.?

<comment><USER7> Hi I am James, the co-founder and CEO of Trigger. Thanks for asking. Please add my Trigger to discuss more. ID - james Email - firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER8> When I go to add a contact, occasionally I see your id and email show up under the search box besides "My ID / Email".

Edit: Got it to happen again. Was able to see it on my 4s.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, we are working on it, bear with us. Should be back now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> small grammar suggestion for your tagline - "a topic-based messenger that organizes all of your conversations."

Also it wasn't clear to me what "my private reddit" meant at first. Aside from that I think the suggested conversations from trending topics is a great feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we are testing out your suggestion of descriptive line "a topic-based messenger that organizes all of your conversations." vs more catchy Reddit derivative.

please find more detail: thetrigger.io

<comment><AUTHOR> www.thetrigger.io

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome. I've been searching for things like this for a long time (recently I've found Point and Branch), but hey, links! Links are web things, not phone things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we are trying give better conversation experiences both contextually and inter-personally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am sorry that the server went down for two minutes.... We got several thousands new users at the same time and somehow our server processing went wrong. Now should be ok !

</comment><comment><USER11> So how does it work exactly ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi WandH, I am jimi one of the co-founders of the Trigger team. Trigger is a messenger that allows you to base your conversations on topic. It's a more powerful for organisation and elegant way of doing IM.

Better conversations start from the trigger topics to friends to keeping up every single conversation.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but how does it works? I think what we are asking is for technical details (technology, servers, security, privacy)

<comment><USER13> Basically we're using Node.js&Mongodb as server and use socket.io for the realtime data transmission. Also we got a really complete RestfulAPI behind, we're looking forward to release it and make more possibilities of the future communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Typo in your title!

<comment><AUTHOR> upadted, cheers for pointing it out!

<comment><USER15> typo here too! :p

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good!!!</comment>


Snap's CEO weighs in on Facebook's long history of copying him - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17407530/evan-spiegel-interview-code-conference-2018 <comment><USER2> Maybe they should return the favor by copying the idea of having a profit.

<comment><USER3> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Snark is also deprecated: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).</comment></comment>


Cheap DIY whiteboard substitute for teams on budget - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/look-what-i-made/f73ae0529b8a

<comment><USER2> Even cheaper solution: $15 at Home Depot gets you 4'x8' showerboard. Which you can write on with dry erase markers. You have to be a little more meticulous about cleaning than a true white board, but it is definitely cheap.

Ex: [http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-Thrifty-White-32-sq- ft-...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-Thrifty-White-32-sq-ft-Hardboard- Panel-Board-709106/202090193)

You can still cut it to size and put some frames on to get it to look "nice" too.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone interested in having their Code painted (oil on canvas)? - <AUTHOR> I am doing a larger show in San Francisco in about 6 months (show is mid Feb) that combines programing languages and fine art. A few are underway which you can check out here: http://codeartproject.com/. If you have written code that is a bit on the poetic side and would like to be part of the show you can submit here: http://codeartproject.com/submit_code
All contributors are given credit for their work and I am open to other arrangements but currently do not plan to profit from the project.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> blum.c by Carsten Haiztler (rasterman):

      #include <stdio.h>
      #define blowjob sex
      #define sex int
      #define joint char
      #define reefer joint
      #define froob(y) sizeof(y)
      #define smoke printf
      #define on_the_beach main
      #define suckitin(puff) {sex l;l=strlen(puff);memfrob(puff,l);}
      #define bacon 0xf
      #define eggs 0x3
      #define frubfrub(x) scanf("%i",&x)
      sex on_the_beach(sex everywhere, joint **is_good){sex *blum;joint *blimblim,
      *vendu, buttox;joint ganja[]="c\012BK\\O\012\017C\012H_^^ER\012DE]\040\000";
      reefer pot[]="bE]\012GKDS\012H_^^ER\012NE\012SE_\012BK\\O\012\040\000";
      suckitin(pot);smoke(pot);frubfrub(pot);suckitin(ganja);blimblim=(joint *)
      &buttox;blimblim+=froob(sex);vendu=blimblim;blimblim-=vendu-(joint *)
      &buttox;*(vendu-froob(sex))+=(((buttox<<1)|bacon))&eggs;blum=(sex *)blimblim;
      smoke(ganja,(*blum)&eggs);}

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have received a few submissions - Thank you. I am standing by to answer any questions. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> No questions. This is really cool. I hope to hear about a follow-up!</comment>


Facebook Overtakes Myspace - <AUTHOR> http://awis.blogspot.com/2008/05/facebook-overtakes-myspace_07.html <comment><USER2> Alexa sucks?

<comment><USER3> Much less so with top 100 sites. Surely it is right more often than it is wrong.</comment></comment>


Earth might have a tiny new moon - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235427-earth-has-acquired-a-brand-new-moon-thats-about-the-size-of-a-car/ <comment><USER2> One of the facinating things about this is that simulations show that it "may have been captured by Earth around 2016–2017" [1].

In 2017 we had a visitor from outer space called ʻOumuamua :)

This new object is also about 2-3.5 meters according to wikipedia so I want someone to send a ship to capture this Van Neumann probe [2]!

(Yes I know it's not likely but it is cool to think about)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_CD3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_CD3)

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

</comment><comment><USER3> It's technically correct, but let's not cheapen the word moon for this rock. "Natural satellite" will do.

<comment><USER4> So, not Luna, but a diminutive Lunita? :)

<comment><USER5> Luniculum

<comment><USER6> Luna is a feminine noun in latin. So, lunicula.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So now any space station can claim to be "moon-sized fortress"

<comment><USER8> Is there a petition to rename the ISS "The Death Star" yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it were a fair bit bigger it could be attached to the front of the ISS - you never know when things like that might come in handy...

<comment><USER10> Seveneves reference?

<comment><USER9> Yes - couldn't resist. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A tiny asteroid captures the attention of astronomers that may have been around for a year, but will be gone in the spring.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why are space agencies not scrambling to capture this one? It's a 5 ton virgin asteroid, the scientific value must be high.

Also, practicing emergency missions would prepare us for investigation of unusual objects like Oumuamua.

<comment><USER13> Paging Elon Musk...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We should call it Minmus.

</comment><comment><USER15> This also happened in 2006. The 'moon' 2006 RH120 stayed with us for about 11 months.

</comment><comment><USER16> Assuming that this isn't space Tesla, I'm curious how much damage it could bring to Earth if it hit it

<comment><USER17> Likely very little to none. Something that size mostly burns up in the atmosphere. Maybe a schoolboy would be slightly singed by a pebble while walking home.

[https://www.space.com/6833-boy-hit- meteorite.html](https://www.space.com/6833-boy-hit-meteorite.html)

Famous previous case:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_\(meteorite\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not really but kind of. In the same way we have hundreds of thousands of small satellite bodies.

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought to be classified as a moon you needed a distinctly observable gravity field?

<comment><USER19> Technically the earth hasn't cleared it's orbit because of the moon.

So the earth is not a planet.

<comment><USER20> If we're going down to that level of pedentry (and why not?), the Earth is not a planet in that sense, it's part of a double-planet system.

<comment><USER19> That was Alan Stern's take if I recall correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The orbit isn't stable, so eventually 2020 CD3 will be flung away from > Earth.

<comment><USER22> But could we keep it if we wanted to? Is it possible to make any use out of it?

<comment><USER23> No much point - it's tiny. A Falcon 9 can put 3-4 times [1] that mass (~4,900kg [2]) into a stable low Earth orbit.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_systems)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_CD3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_CD3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's no moon...

</comment><comment><USER25> Curious question: what are the red-blue-green artifacts on the picture ? Is it due to the CCD sensor ?

</comment><comment><USER26> I imagine this mini moon could be ejected from orbit if it gets sling shot by the moon in the right way.

</comment><comment><USER27> If that's a moon then so's the ISS.

<comment><USER28> That's no moon. It's a space station.

<comment><USER29> They set you right up for that one ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are you off Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

Privacy is cited a lot but I'm curious if there were other reasons that prompted you to stop using Facebook.
P.S: Please clarify whether you've deleted your account completely or just stopped using it. <comment><USER2> I have a facebook account, but I don't use it anymore.

I hate to see how awesome other people's life seems. I can't stop but get envious and disappointed. Yet, I kept coming back for more. I had the unhealthy compulsion to keep scrolling through the happy stuff, while feeling bad for my "mundane" living.

I stopped using facebook. I feel much better.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I think its not about hate and envy, but the "my life is perfect" image shown to you when in actual fact everybody has their own insecurities or are going through tough family, friends and relationship (personal and professional) issues. We all know life has its ups and downs, but we pretend like the downs never exist.

The majority of the population never speak about the "bad" things happening in their lives, because it makes you vulnerable which is a feeling we refuse to show in todays world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just slowly trailed off using it. I wish I could say something more defined like other posters in this thread, but I just stopped. I first just never logged in on my computer (I think I may have Firefox private browsing and Do Not Track to thank for this since I had to enter my password every time I wanted to go on rather than just hit the URL). It wasn't as interesting at work for a quick break as Hacker News or USA Today, etc. I still had it on my phone and would look at it when I was waiting for the bus, sitting at a restaurant waiting for someone, or in the washroom. But then I started using Twitter and Instagram. All the news that I was interested in was on Twitter, and all the pictures of friends I wanted to see were on Instagram. So all that was left on Facebook was articles form Buzzfeed and ads. One day I realized that it was just taking up space on my phone's home screen. I deleted it so I could move Slack and Snapchat up to the first screen. I still like Facebook Messenger, and keep that app on my phone. Its good to always have something to get in touch with friends with (especially when traveling). The irony is that I deleted WhatsApp so I could move Messenger up to my phone's home screen. So Facebook and Facebook-owned companies are sort of replacing themselves for me.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, just re-read the full question. To clarify, I still have an account. I do not log in anymore. I deleted the app off my phone and do not visit the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a Web developer and Internet Citizen (TM), I can't wait for Facebook to complete their AOL-ification, which will surely include its eventual death spiral.

Rage-deleted my account after getting tired of being constantly presented with reminders of parts of my life that should have been moved-on-from, except Facebook decides what parts of your life you should be seeing.

If Facebook hadn't steamrolled Evite due to the sheer percentage of general population with accounts, I don't think I'd have any regrets whatsoever. People have to go out of their way to invite me to things, which has definitely had an effect on my specific social network.

<comment><USER6> Invitations are the only reason I signed back up after deleting my account, several years back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've deleted my account completely.

Time is a finite resource. What is the most economical way to spend it? Watching The Shawshank Redemption is probably more economical than reading Facebook memes. And similarly, there are hundreds of other things you could do at any given moment with more entertainment value than Facebook.

Now, you could say, "facebook is not entertaining, but is useful". I do not find Facebook useful. If you're interested in networking benefits, there's LinkedIn and email[1]. If there is no answer you can give to the question "Why are you on Facebook?", then you should probably not use it (I'm assuming it has a very low entertainment value for you, which may or may not be true).

"because everyone else is on it".. is not a good enough answer for me. Therefore, I deleted my account completely.

[1] EDIT: and instant messaging.

</comment><comment><USER8> Jealousy, for the most part.

Now that I've stopped using it I find that I'm in a better, more stable mood throughout the day. Not being reminded of my inferiority means I find I can concentrate better on self-improvement i.e. the things I should be doing if I want to be as successful as these people I'm so jealous of.

</comment><comment><USER9> Never joined.

Facebook has too much central control.

Social networking should be based on a decentralized system of independent nodes such that no single authority owns the whole damn thing and makes everyone obey their rules, and has everyone's personal info. (And all protocols documented, and implementations open-sourced, needless to say).

<comment><AUTHOR> The fastest way to fan out messages efficiently between a group is through one node that is always online. I think no decentralized architecture can be more efficient compared to a centralized system.

Again, a social network only needs to know whom to send your message to and need not know about the contents of the message, If USPS opened our letters, would we argue for a decentralized architecture where we individuals ourselves drove around delivering letters in our spare time?

How were so many of us tricked into handing over so much control?

<comment><USER5> > The fastest way to fan out messages efficiently between a group is through > one node that is always online.

I am curious to know what you're basing this statement on --"Fast" and "efficient" are not necessarily related.

(For instance, there seems to have been an explosion of decentralized message- queueing mechanisms available for coordinating distributed software systems. A centralized system can suffer from efficiency issues as easily as a decentralized one.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Routing messages between peers in a decentralized system need to take into account that both senders and receivers could be online and offline at multiple times.

This means the storage location of the messages you are supposed to receive could change often, making retrieving messages a two step process, looking up the current online location and then retrieving messages. The place to lookup messages is fixed in a centralized system, hence you'll receive messages faster.

This can definitely be sped up by increasing the number of times the messages are replicated in the decentralized system and a constant shuffling of the message between nodes to ensure it is always available for the receiver when they come online, hence inefficient.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for your detailed and informative response!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm trying to avoid Facebook as much as possible. Partly because it cuts into productivity. (The "rabbit hole" effect, where a few seconds of reading a blurb lead to a longer article or video...)

But I also do believe the gist of that study which claimed that people feel more depressed after using Facebook. If you're craving human contact, visiting Facebook is a temporary distraction at best -- and the second you leave, you're no better off than you were before. In fact you probably feel worse, because now that temporary distraction is also suddenly gone....

</comment><comment><USER11> It made me feel sad. FOMO and all that. At the end of the day, I just didn't like who I was after using it. I'm a happier person without it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Deleted permanently. It isn't interesting anymore, unless you enjoy only seeing posts that involve mundane bs mixed with advertising. Sad how it went from being an exclusive university friends only joke to a "serious enough to apply for employment with" joke of a site that everybody's grandmother uses regularly.

</comment><comment><USER13> I shut down my facebook account about two years ago.

I did it because I can't figure out why I should spend time reading something that no one cares whether I read or not.

Since I left, I noticed something. I think the word 'poser' has been overused and turned into a bizarre cliche, but surely there is a lot of posturing on facebook. I think the I-know-you-knows are a lot of the appeal, and that element is certainly lost with IM/Email. Personal tastes vary, and spending a lot of time on cheap social signals seems to be a pretty human passtime, but I just don't enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just don't like it. It's a big boring time sink. My friends who I actually care about what they have going on in their lives, I just talk to them the people did "back in the old days". I do however still have a Facebook account so my friends can tag me in whatever thing they have going on, but I don't install the app on my phone, nor do I log into the website, and I have everything setup to not send me any type of notifications

</comment><comment><USER15> After being an user from 2007 I've deleted my account in February 2013, then re-registered in October 2013. It doesn't contain any private data now, only close circle of friends and acquaintances and is primarily used as a contact holder/event responder.

It might be a generational thing, maturity or otherwise, but IMHO Facebook (and other social networks) has impacted our lives in unhealthy ways, more then being useful. Specially since businesses and everyone came on it (parents, relatives). This switched it from a cool place to hangout to some serious business.

Those two articles explain it more: [http://seersuckermag.com/opinion/read/facebook-isnt- giving-b...](http://seersuckermag.com/opinion/read/facebook-isnt-giving-back- what-we-put-in)

[http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes- us...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy)

</comment><comment><USER16> I created an account back in 2005. It started out being a great way to re- connect with friends that I had lost track of and then to keep in touch. I deleted my account two years later for the following reasons.

1\. I had come to believe FB couldn't be trusted with my data.

2\. The more friends I gained the worse the experience became. It went from people showing their vacation photos, which I was ok with, to a stream of meaningless nonsense that I didn't want to see. I.e Yeah, OK, you had a coke at lunch, but should I really care?

3\. It became an unpleasant chore having to keep on top of even the valid activity.

It's worth noting that in the last year of use I just put a status up declaring that I no longer actively used Facebook so please contact via email instead, but the distrust of Facebook grew to a point where I ultimately decided to delete my account.

I'll never go back, and I hear they're full of ads now.

</comment><comment><USER17> I deactivated my account. It's still around, of course, and I can log in again when I want. But I didn't want the distraction anymore. I found that checking the feed on my phone became an automatic habit for no observable benefit. I don't mind so much the whole privacy thing, because I don't think Facebook is that evil. Your information is public somewhere, and you're being tracked by someone, whether you like it or not. And this happens outside of the internet -- it's how business works. So it's not a big deal to me.

The usefulness of Facebook _is_ a big deal though. And it's just not useful anymore. My friend group tends to be pretty selective, and is mostly made up of people I know and interact with in real life. So I do that instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to be a heavy facebook user. Now I log in once a week for messages.

Privacy was not the major contributing factor of me stopping the usage of facebook, but how "nosy" I felt in other peoples lives when I don't even talk to them. The more I used facebook the more alone I felt.

Another issue was the cluttered feel to it. The addition of a twitter clone feed made everything feel like an "all-in-one" solution.

After going on a month long without Facebook, whenever I met my colleages, I would have _a lot_ more to say to them and genuinely ask questions about whats going on in their lives. I default alot less to my phone after I meet with friends.

</comment><comment><USER18> I stopped using it when I realized that 99% of what my "friends" were posting was total shit. The 1% interesting stuff I can get with a phone call or stuff like that.

I still have my account though, I just don't use it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I only go on for college club/team notifications, other than that, I am off it completely.

My news feed is polluted with ads and garbage news that have been shared by people I hardly know. I've added so many 'friends' that are hardly acquaintances now, and I don't feel like deleting them, because my real friends hardly use Facebook either so its not worth it.

An additional annoyance is notifications for things that I don't care about: invites to facebook games (why are they even a thing?), notification of friends activity, and updates from pages I liked years ago. Its just become more of a hassle.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reading my wall posts became a list of people essentially saying "my life is awesome and yours isn't, here's why", which was explained by photos, videos, and wall posts.

One of the girls in my social circle at the time I had an account made herself a "public figure", I'm not sure what the criteria is for that on Facebook, but her offline life is anything but that of a celebrity/public figure. The level of people "faking it" just gets annoying.

</comment><comment><USER21> The problem not only resides on Facebook but to me all mainstream networks are selling out to the "ad revenue model". I may be speaking for myself but let's be honest the internet is wayyyy outdated. Most people can agree that after surfing CNN TMZ stopping by Mashable and Twitter the day is pretty much done with an occasional rinse and repeat. Where is the fun and innovation that the internet first brought to us in the early 90s.

</comment><comment><USER22> Everything has it's time. Facebook had a nice run but something will inevitably replace it. Social beings will constantly be craving what's next. Exclusivity amongst college students was what ignited the fire, but younger generations are gravitating away from this platform day by day because it's too complex.

P.S. - people are lazy, and FB makes people work. It's cluttered and doesn't have a core value anymore that Twitter or Instagram or SnapChat can't already deliver. Best bet is to keep the acquisitions going to eliminate competition.

</comment><comment><USER23> I haven't deleted my account, I've just stopped using it. I log in and check it out every month or two, but never stay for very long.

I don't use it because I don't find it very interesting. If I care what's going on with someone, I usually keep in touch via other means. And even for those people, I don't find their day-to-day posts very interesting.

Also, when there is something I need to know posted on Facebook that I haven't heard about via other means, my wife usually fills me in.

</comment><comment><USER24> Lack of meaningful connections.

Also, I don't want to participate in their facial recognition database. I find this to be the worst in terms of the privacy I give up because I can be tagged in a picture without ever posting a thing. Anonymity goes away once anyone can identify anyone else through a simple picture. Then they can see who you work for, where you live, your family life, your sexual orientation, political beliefs, and so on. The downward spiral goes on from there.

</comment><comment><USER25> I still have an account, but I don't really use it anymore. Facebook is just not very fun anymore. It's busy, sort of confusing and I never seem to get things written on my wall, or see what people are up to right now. I see popular stuff that is non-chronological, and I'm a little fuzzy on whether walls are a thing anymore

</comment><comment><USER26> Lots of noise, and very little signal.

For every interesting announcement from a friend, I had to wade through weeks of "What NATO country are you most like?" results, past their expiry memes, political grandstanding, videos of puppies and people falling over, and endless pictures of food. There's just no compelling use-case I can see.

</comment><comment> o0-0o Exclusivity. Facebook feels a lot like eating a burger at McDonald's. It's just not that great.

</comment><comment><USER27> I deleted my facebook account about a year ago. I got so sick of seeing all the whining, political arguing, hoax type posts, etc... and if I blocked all of the people that did that stuff, I wouldn't have anyone left on there to follow. I don't miss it at all.

</comment><comment><USER28> Using it less and less. It has just become like everything else: always trying to get your attention.

</comment><comment><USER29> I pretty much only use it for messaging and the occasional event registration. Mostly because I find my friends' updates uninteresting. Would much rather browse strangers lives on IG or my own site.

</comment><comment><USER30> Closed my account a while ago. Now using Diaspora* and quite happy with the result.

</comment><comment><USER31> Here's a number of reasons why I (like the author) am not on Facebook anymore (permanently deleted account 2 years ago):

[http://saintsal.com/facebook/](http://saintsal.com/facebook/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Too many buzzfeed links from people who I have nothing in common with. It takes a lot of effort to scroll through pictures of people you hardly knew back in college. Being socially aloof does not help either ;)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a junkheap of human banality -- deleted my account many moons ago.

</comment><comment><USER34> FB is a marketing tool that is operated by a company that want's to make money.

I decided to take the marketing in my own hands and now have more control over it and reach the right people.

</comment><comment><USER35> It is boring.

I occasionally use it as a way to contact someone if I don't have their current email or phone number though.

So I still keep my account but I post a picture or status update roughly biannually.

</comment><comment><USER36> Keeping up with it is a full-time job and I already have one.

</comment><comment><USER37> Never had an account. I just don't really care what my former classmates and associates are up to. Friends know my cell # and email.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love it

"I can't wait for Facebook to complete their AOL-ification, which will surely include its eventual death spiral."

</comment><comment><USER39> I hardly use it to keep up with friends anymore. I only find myself on facebook when I'm taking a shit.

</comment><comment><USER40> > deleted account completely many years back.

Felt that living life is so better than recording all of it in facebook.</comment>


How Not to Build an Aircraft Carrier - <AUTHOR> http://warisboring.com/how-not-to-build-an-aircraft-carrier/ <comment><USER2> > "Navies around the world have been using arresting systems for more than a > century to land aircraft on ships."

I have a hard time believing there was aircraft carriers as of 1917 !

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Pennsylvania_(ACR-4)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Pennsylvania_\(ACR-4\))

"On 18 January 1911, a plane flown by Eugene Ely from the Tanforan airfield in San Bruno, California landed on a platform constructed on her afterdeck. This was the first successful aircraft landing on a ship, and the first using a tailhook apparatus, thus opening the era of naval aviation and aircraft carriers."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: work for Apple or continue bootstrapping my startup - <AUTHOR>

I need HN's advice. I have been bootstrapping a first startup that failed. Now I am starting a new one, but no income in sight.
On the other hand, Apple is offering me a high-paying job as a senior developer. Because it's Apple and their working conditions are crazy, plus all the secrecy, there is just no way to pursue a bootstrapped startup on the side. For Apple, you're all in or you are out.
What should I do?
[kept anonymous for obvious reasons] <comment><USER2> A startup business is supposed to make money. Don't get caught up in the "oh, we'll worry about revenues later" nonsense.

If you have no idea how your startup will make money, get the job at Apple.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just an assumption but I assume you applied for the job at Apple and must have had some sort of interview to know that its a high paying gig. If you've gone that far, coupled with what others have already echoed, Apple should be the right choice for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is not a hypothetical.

But am I wasting my "entrepreneurial skills" by going for work for a large company, even if it's called Apple?

<comment><USER3> Being an entrepreneur is more than a set of "skills". If you have to ask, you should be working for Apple. There shouldn't be any doubt and this post wouldn't exist otherwise. Having said that, there is something to be said in regards to "a time to learn and a time to earn". You sound like your in a phase in your life where you still have a lot to learn and a lot to make up in your mind. Pursue entrepreneurship when its the only thing in your thoughts and you aim to take it head on without a doubt. Currently, that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because you said "no income in sight", and it is a "high-paying job" I would say go work for Apple. That way you will

1) Get more experience, that will prove valuable if you ever found another startup

2) Broaden your connections and networking. That is extremely valuable if you found a startup later.

3) Save some cash with your "high-paying job" so that later it would be safer for you to pursue your enterpreneur dreams.

Yes, that would mean delaying your dream of becoming an enterpreneur and startup owner, but not necessarily give it up completely, and it has advantages if you can delay your gratification...

</comment><comment><USER5> I went through a very similar stage like this over the past summer. I was trying to boot strap a number of startups that ultimately didnt pan out, and I was finally working on one that was making some income (but still ramen status). Around June, I was offered a job working with a VC firm, which I ultimately took. So far, I think I have made the right decision. While this is also an "all-in" position, I have found that the few free moments I have can be used to think clearly on my next ventures I plan to build. Dont underestimate the stress that will evaporate when you have steady income.

</comment><comment><USER6> As you are asking the question I'm assuming you'd like to work for Apple.

My basis is that you've mentioned nothing about the company you are looking to start.

<comment><AUTHOR> What info should I add about the startup I'm working on right now? It's one of those Web 2.0 projects, hard to tell if it will ever make money. It's kind of cool, has a few users, needs a lot of work to grow it seriously and attract real funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a hacker by any means, but I think any entrepreneur should have the same qualities.

If you are even asking this question, especially for others to decide for you, you should just take the Apple job.

The start-up will only be a success if you KNOW it will. You cant be predisposed to having any doubts. You seem to lack the confidence and determination required to be an entrepreneur. I'm sorry if it seems I am being harsh, but it takes more than an idea to become successful with something like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been eating ramen noodles for two years, so the determination certainly was there. Would you spend 5 years of your life on ramen? When is enough, enough?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Work for Apple, learn a lot. Nothing says you can't leave Apple later and pursue something.</comment>


Google compression algorithm Zopfli may lead to faster Internet - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57571982-93/google-compression-algorithm-zopfli-may-lead-to-faster-internet/ <comment><USER2> So we distribute our game client over HTTP and it's something like 4GB compressed using gzip.

When I saw zopfli, my immediate reaction was that it should save a non-trivial amount of money for us while leading to a slightly faster download for our users. Hearing a 100 times increase in compression time doesn't sound like much compared to the number of times the files are downloaded right?

The last incremental patch we did to the game took 79 seconds in our build system to compress with the usual gzip. This is only compressing the files that were changed since the last patch, not the entire game client, so larger patches would take longer. If we changed to zopfli, it would take 2.2 _hours_.

That would put a serious dent in our agility. When we are trying to deploy a new patch, adding 2.2 hours (or more) somewhere in the middle of it really isn't viable. (It's already maddening when the rest of the process takes ~40 minutes with all the automated tests that we run).

So then lets look at the savings that this would buy us. We distributed about 30TB yesterday. Bandwidth costs 2c per gig. This would save us about 30 dollars a day.

So much for that!

<comment><USER3> 4GB is really pushing the boundaries of what you should be using HTTP for. It's a nontrivial download for users with slower connection speeds, so you should really have better failure recovery than a simple HTTP download provides.

You should distribute it in pieces, or use bittorrent or rsync or some other protocol which allows correcting a bad block in transit. Users should download a small downloader program which speaks whatever protocol, then the downloader downloads the actual game. (Think about the way Blizzard does WoW updates.)

Checking blocks should theoretically possible using HTTP transfers with byte ranges, if you have a separate index file with checksums for each block. That way you get failure recovery but serve your content from Really Efficient Webservers like nginx or Amazon S3. Anyone know of any projects that do this?

You should also consider using a more modern compression algorithm like bz2 or lzma, if you have control over the application running on both ends of the connection. I'm guessing you'll see these results with Zopfli:

       gzip -c9 > zopfli -i1000 > bzip2 > bzip2 -c9 > xz   # compressed size
       gzip -c9 < bzip2 < bzip2 -c9 < xz, zopfli -i1000    # compression time

Not really sure about xz vs. zopfli for compression speed, but I'm sure that xz's LZMA algorithm gets way better compression than gzip for most data, due to fundamental limitations in the design of gzip's format.

The only real reason to use Zopfli is when the client only knows gzip compression and you can't change it (for example, many, many people have static webpages, CSS, JS, etc., which need to support several different web browsers as clients).

<comment><USER2> I absolutely agree that improvements could be made to our patching system, so here are a few more details as to why we do things how we do them.

1) It is actually working right now. This is the biggest deal at a startup. It's good enough. We have lots of other features to work on that will give us higher bang for our buck.

2) We wanted to be able to use an "off the shelf" CDN for distribution. It's nice to be able to farm out parts of your infrastructure you don't want to deal with.

3) We don't want to have to deal with versions in the patching system. Our patching systems first use is right in our office. The same deployment infrastructure that deploys the game to production runs in our office with every commit from a programmer or artist. When someone runs the game client (or one of the in house tools) the patching system syncs up the files to the latest version.

For real production clients, there can be several versions between the last time someone ran the game client and the next time. It's easier conceptually to deal with.

4) The client is over 100,000 files. Each file is generally quite small which limits the damage of not using an actual diffing solution. The larger files like textures and audio don't diff very well anyway when artists make changes due to the nature of the data formats.

5) It was really fast to develop. It's just libcurl. Once again, we are a small startup so we have lots of things we need to be focusing on that are not our patching system.

All the files are checked against hashes after download so we can correct errors. This is especially important due to the surprisingly large number of buggy caching proxies that some users seem to have in front of them.

One day I would love to make the best possible patching system. Unfortunately it's just not as high on the list as so many of the other things we need to be doing!

<comment><USER4> From a user perspective I wish you guys would switch to something better like bit torrent (at least offer an alternative torrent download).

I almost gave up before playing the game when an interrupted download meant that I had to start again, and it is pretty frustrating not even maxing out my slow internet connection at peak times for patches.

The fact that you don't have any kind of diffing solution seems like absoulte madness to me.

<comment><USER2> You don't have to start again. It's just that the progress bar starts from zero again. If you download 2GB of 4GB initially then start again, when you restart it will show 0% of 2GB to download.

It's effectively a diffing system where the block size is on average the size of a file (about 42kb).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Due to the amount of CPU time required — 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more > than zlib at maximum quality — Zopfli is best suited for applications where > data is compressed once and sent over a network many times, for example, > static content for the web.

So it's not a magic bullet, and only results in 3-8 percent shrink compared the zlib at maximum compression. It is interesting that it is able to be decompressed by existing algorithms, which means it can be rolled out immediately instead of waiting for it to be adopted by enough browsers to make the compression time investment useful.

Google's blog post is here: [http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com.es/2013/02/compress- dat...](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com.es/2013/02/compress-data-more- densely-with-zopfli.html)

<comment><USER6> Well it uses the same deflate algorithm which is used by zlib, gzip etc.

There are many much more capable compression algorithms which will get much better results with alot less cpu time (lzma comes to mind), however the big deal is that deflate is supported by all browsers and thus it is a standarized means of compressing content.

With that, being able to squeeze out 3-8% more compression for compressed web content can likely be attractive if it is a decent part of your bandwidth usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nitpicking: the thing should be called Zöpfli (note the umlaut). The diminutive in Swiss German often also affects vocals in addition to adding the li suffix.

A Zöpfli is a small Zopf which is the bread the algorithm is named after. To make matters worse: in the process of being diminished, the word even changes gender from masculine to neutral at least in the dialect I use. Pro tip: never waste your time learning Swiss German unless you know it by growing up with it :p

I can't really add a lot from the technical perspective aside if the fact that its really cool to be able to invest more time into compressing such that decompression still uses the unaltered old decodes, requires no more time (to uncompress) and still produces significantly smaller compressed data.

<comment><USER3> > the thing should be called Zöpfli (note the umlaut)

No, it shouldn't.

A few years ago I downloaded a tarball of Java code. Every file had one of those "ö" characters, because the author spelled his name that way, and his name was in a comment at the top of every file as part of his license notice.

The project would not compile.

I tried compiling with Eclipse. I tried the included Ant script. I tried compiling directly by typing a javac invocation into the command line. I tried every permutation of the locale environment variables that Google knew about. My environment was very conservative, an official Sun Java toolchain from apt on a recent Ubuntu.

Finally, I wrote a script to delete that line from every file. It compiled just fine after that!

Putting anything but ASCII in source code will give everyone who ever tries to build the code endless nightmares of toolchain breakage.

<comment> X-Istence So what you are saying is that Java was broken. Not that using characters containing an umlaut is a terrible idea.

The world is no longer ASCII, unicode is here to stay. I don't see that disappearing anytime soon, get used to it.

Speaking of which, code I write in Python that deals with ØMQ has the Ø in it ... i've found some editors that don't deal with it correctly, but that is the fault of the editor, not the file.

<comment><USER3> > The world is no longer ASCII, unicode is here to stay.

I wouldn't have a problem with it, if Everything Just Worked. If everything international was UTF-8 and Just Worked, I'd be cool with that. But:

1\. > some editors that don't deal with it correctly

2\. You need fonts installed, otherwise you get boxes everywhere.

3\. You need to specify locale somewhere. This is currently sometimes manual: Applications can't automatically agree on locale, because not everybody uses UTF-8, and not every format that can be in multiple locales puts it somewhere.

4\. Linux insists on "generating locales." Now _that's_ a mess.

Now people who want to show how edgy they are by insisting on using the empty set symbol are wasting my time, because when I install $COOLAPP that depends on $AWESOMELIB which requires $YOURPYTHONZEROMQLIB, then I discover after hours of Googling cryptic error messages and browsing multiple forums for these different projects (plus the OS(es) and programming language(s) involved), that your Python was compiled with wide-character support, and I have to bootstrap a wide-character-compatible gcc in order to build wide- character-compatible Python that can run $COOLAPP, but I have to also create more locales and change the LC_ALL environment variable, which (when I finally do it) will of course cause another obscure error message, and it turns out that $OTHERCOMPONENT really doesn't want to use wide characters because it only knows UTF-8, and there's really no way to have multiple processes in the same address space because different character widths can only run in different chroots because they're like amd64 and i386 before Ubuntu grew multilib support...

I haven't had this exact breakage, but the point is that this is the sort of rabbit hole you can find yourself falling down, all because you wanted two dots over your 'o', or a slash through it, just to show how edgy and hip and modern you are.

Fortunately you have contact information in your profile, so when your code does this and I end up wasting 10 hours of my life with this garbage, I know where to send the invoice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Deja vu - this was just on HN 48 hours ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5301688>

7zip does it in a fraction of the time within 100 bytes

       92629 bytes  jquery-1.9.1.min.js
       31783 bytes  7z.exe -mx9 -tgzip a "jquery-1.9.1.min.js.gz" "jquery-1.9.1.min.js"
       31688 bytes  zopfli.exe -v --i1000 "jquery-1.9.1.min.js"

BTW if you need a windows binary, mingw compiles it without any trouble.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been wondering how this compares to straight-up AdvanceComp. I've used that for pre-compressing gzipped files for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can browse the code here [1]. You can also find the pdf paper here [2].

[1] <https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/source/browse/>

[2] [https://zopfli.googlecode.com/files/Data_compression_using_Z...](https://zopfli.googlecode.com/files/Data_compression_using_Zopfli.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Compression is always a trade off between time, memory, and size. If zopfli keeps compatibility with deflate, there will be those that will find a use for it.

The poster that suggested zlib until zopfli would be ready has the right idea where dynamic is coming in and awaiting compression.

</comment><comment><USER12> What would be nice is a library that you can load with LD_Preload and replaces zlib compression. That way I could easily use e.g. Optipng with this new algorithm.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that would be of much use, since only it only deals with compression.

<comment><USER12> It only needs to overwrite the compression methods

<comment><USER13> Right, but compressors are easy to change, it's decompressors that are in hard-to-update software.

<comment><USER12> Also the compression for example in libpng

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Compression advantage over zlib =~ 3-8% CPU time over zlib's maximum compression =~ 20x-30x

Definitely would not want to use Zopfli compression on demand unless it is going into a long-term cache.

<comment><USER15> ... Which is exactly Zopfli's intended purpose. Many things are read a lot more often than they're written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do we really need a new compression algorithm to use compression with http?

<comment><USER13> It is the same format as gzip (deflate).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _up to 8 percent smaller than zlib._

Always with the spin, cause if you say on average 3% people yawn even more than they are yawning at 8%.

Wake me up when there is a stable/reproducible quantum parallelism (I don't mean Schumacher compression either) means of compression, not a tweak in an existing compression algorithm - Sorry to sound grumpy, but I just don't see this as news worthy or anything to get exited about. Many of us did this with similar results in grad school or in our spare time as a hobby. You can even find some of them on SF or GH if you don't believe me.

This is one of those stories where something is dressed up to sound really good and a couple of years later you wonder to yourself, "What ever happened to that?" You go look it up and find a dead end, usually because the original concept was over-hyped or unachievable.

After enough false optimism, the sane human will start to sour on "breakthrough" news and become cynical - because "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" (Einstein) is the very definition of insanity right?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the stupidest thing you've ever done? I'm doing it now. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've built websites, companies, started products, I think I'm intelligent but this is probably the all time dumbest thing I've done. "Going to Maui with my ex for 2 weeks and thinking it would be amicable".

<comment><USER2> Are there children involved? If so, you're doing something quite admirable!</comment></comment>


The Lawless Way to Disable 8chan - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/how-disabling-8chan-became-cloudflares-job/595606/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't anyone get how CF works? They didn't disable, remove or close 8chan. They simply stopped providing optimization and DDOS protection services. The site would still work fine (after pointing DNS back to their original servers) and they haven't lost control of their domain - only thing they lost was optimization, caching and DDOS protection.</comment>


What Would an Entrepreneur-First Political Platform Really Look Like? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/what-would-an-entrepreneur-first-platform-really-look-like/261762/

<comment><USER3> A little from column D (healthcare not tied to employment, sensible immigration policies), a little from column R (simplifying taxes, relaxing certain SEC regulations, corporate tax amnesty), and a little from column 'completely neglected' (patent reform, internet freedom).

<comment><USER4> How would corporate tax amnesty benefit entrepreneurs?

<comment><USER3> acquisitions

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I'm still not really following.

You mean that big, international corporations would bring more cash back into the US, which they could potentially spend more to acquire smaller companies? Seems like a long shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Universal single payer health care would cause an explosion of entrepreneurship the likes of which the USA has not seen in a long, long time. In the current situation, anyone with a family or a chronic condition is pretty much restricted to working a BigCorp job unless / until this happens.

<comment><USER6> > Universal single payer health care would cause an explosion of > entrepreneurship

No, it wouldn't.

The fraction of folks with chronic conditions isn't high enough to support your argument. Morever, the vast majority of them aren't shackled if they pay attention. (Staying married and/or staying covered is adequate in most cases and there are other ways to solve the problem.)

Do you really believe that there are a lot of good potential entrepreneurs with chronic conditions who can't handle this?

<comment><USER7> Your question is a straw man argument.

1) It's just not for entrepreneurs without coverage. Though that's not trivial - healthcare costs are non-trivial even for relatively healthy people, and the risks are very high particularly during a period where you're perhaps earning less money because you're starting a business.

2) It's not just about chronic illnesses, all healthcare costs money. Most people will have some expenses during any given year. It's a significant additional risk.

3) To grow a company you need to hire people. People need healthcare. You either are restricted to employees who can work without healthcare or you have to pay a lot for it because plans are more expensive at that scale. Healthcare is a challenge hiring older people with more experience.

There are lots of talented people who are discouraged from starting businesses or from joining startups because of the burden and risks associated with our staggeringly expensive, inefficient, employer-based healthcare system.

I have two children. I am divorced. Healthcare is always a concern when I choose to start a company or move to a company. This is not an atypical case.

<comment><USER6> > It's just not for entrepreneurs without coverage.

That was the claim. If you want to argue that said claim is wrong....

> healthcare costs are non-trivial even for relatively healthy people

Oh really? I've paid out of pocket for high-end healthcare plans while "old". Housing was a much bigger issue.

More to the point, you're going to pay one way or another.

And no, the US govt is not an efficent middle-man. Yes, they can cut a check cheaply, but the fraud admitted to by govt healthcare advoctes dwarfs the administration and profit of private companies. Since the likely numbers are higher....

No, you don't to point to other countries. We're stuck with the govt we've got. Fix existing govt healthcare programs (starting with IHS) and we'll talk.

> 2) It's not just about chronic illnesses, all healthcare costs money

Yes, but it doesn't get any cheaper funneling it the money through third parties.

> 3) To grow a company you need to hire people. People need healthcare.

And you're going to be paying for that, one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Roll back the bankruptcy laws to pre-2005 to reduce the cost of risk.

<comment><USER7> This is a big one. The change of bankruptcy laws to benefit huge financial institutions, that then got bailed out by the same tax payers against whom they lobbied to get these draconian changes to bankruptcy laws passed was... well not just shocking... not just a demonstration of how corrupt and off- track our political system has become... not sure what the word is but it goes beyond hypocrisy.

I remember growing up outside of the US learning quite explicitly that one of the geniuses of the American system, a key factor in its dramatic success compared to other countries, and a competitive advantage, was its bankruptcy system that allowed people to try things; put in best efforts; but in the worst case scenario get a fresh start.

Getting rid of that was insane and I worry about its long term consequences. US entrepreneurs already face additional risks versus their overseas counterparts - like lack of a healthcare system not tied to employers - <USER2> taking away a major structural advantage they had is almost certainly going to have a detrimental effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like catching up to the rest of the western world on universal healthcare would go a long way for you guys.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Laissez-nous faire_ \-- Le Gendre.

That said, I can't help but wonder if public healthcare _would_ unshackle a lot of employees from their employers.

Not that public healthcare is kittens and icecream. Here in Australia we spend a lot of time fretting about waiting lists.

<comment><USER11> _Here in Australia we spend a lot of time fretting about waiting lists_

It might be worth pointing out that the waiting lists are typically for _elective_ surgery.

This is mostly because our hospitals are overcrowded. There is no single cause of that, but one big problem is that health systems are mostly administered by the states but funded federally. The tension inherent in that model is pretty unhelpful.

<comment><USER10> Well, yes. But there's also the curious fact that if you set the upfront cost for something to zero, demand is higher than if you set some other price on it.

I don't think the vertical fiscal imbalance is the causal thing here. People want as much medical help as they think they can get.</comment></comment></comment>


The wealth gap: how changing fortunes tear close friends apart - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/11/the-wealth-gap-how-changing-fortunes-tear-close-friends-apart <comment><USER2> I've made as little as ~30k and as much as ~220k, and I've learned the hard way to not share (or implicitly show) how much you make when you're at either extreme end. Most people have very unproductive and toxic kneejerk-reactions to it, and you'll just pay for it in one way or another.

<comment><USER3> An uneven earnings history can play out quite badly in a divorce as well. There is some attempt at fairness in the law, but it's not difficult to fall through the cracks and end up with an appalling result. It's kind of like smoking--you probably won't be unlucky enough to get a worst case, but if you do, it will be quite awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe this is just in my circle of friends, but it seems rather ridiculous to have to worry about splitting bills 'evenly' when we have quick payment apps like Venmo et al. on dial. Especially for an admittedly expensive dinner in some of these examples where price is a concern.</comment>


New Version of jsbin.com - <AUTHOR> http://jsbin.com/welcome

<comment><USER2> I thought I'd post here with some of the features jsbin (version 3) comes with. There's a blog post being prepared too, but pending that.

The big change in jsbin is the live aspect:

* Start typing, your code is saved and continues to save as you type.

* As you type the live output is updated automatically.

* Open the the full preview url (without /edit) in any other window - be it browser or mobile phone, and _that_ will update in real-time too. So you can edit on your desktop, and the rendered output will appear on you mobile devices.

* If you share the url with /watch on the end, people can watch what you type in real time.

More detail will be in the post later today. I'll try to answer more questions here if they come up.

It also continues to be completely open source: <http://github.com/remy/jsbin> \- so welcoming any contributions :)

<comment><USER3> The thing I like the best is the live preview URLs, especially across devices. I caught one of your live demos of this recently, and was blown away.

What's the library/service you're using to do this? I recall finding a reference in the JSBin source, but please remind us. I would love to get live previewing working in my web design web application, Edit Room, which also has shareable review links. (link in profile).

<comment><USER2> It's called "the spike", but it's nothing more than EventSource triggering an event to refresh or inject.

The client code (for both remote rendering & codecasting): <https://github.com/remy/jsbin/blob/master/public/js/spike.js>

The server side: <https://github.com/remy/jsbin/blob/master/lib/spike/index.js>

Very simple, but requires an event based server - so Node was the obvious choice for JS Bin.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recall using jsbin a month or so ago and had it fail on some basic JS I had inputted to test it out. Anecdotal and without proof but that is what made me decide on using jsfiddle. Going to give jsbin another try with this new version.

*edit:

This frustrates me so much on jsfiddle and I'm guessing it's a default browser formatting thing but why don't you guys make the curly braces NOT leap forward from where my cursor is?

Example : <http://i.imgur.com/mZXTO.png>

<comment><USER5> WRT formatting, a lot of JS coders think you should always begin your curly braces on the same line as the statement, not on the next, or you risk the wrath of automatic semicolon insertion. The formatter seems fine if you do it this way, and it's also a generally good idea to avoid bizarre, hard to track down bugs.

But I'd understand if that's not an acceptable answer for you.

<comment><USER6> > not on the next, or you risk the wrath of automatic semicolon insertion.

That's to e.g. return an object though.

On the other hand, allman with anonymous functions? That's completely bonkers- looking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have I really been the only one who uses jsbin instead of jsfiddle? It's always been cleaner and, for me, much more responsive. I hope it gets more attention as a result of this.

<comment><USER8> I used jsfiddle in the past only because I knew its name. jsbin is a lot less clunky. I'm sure I'll use it a lot more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite neat, I hadn't heard of this.

Nice to see it even lets you use CoffeeScript, LESS, and some other compile- to-js and compile to CSS languages that I hadn't heard of (Traceur and Stylus?).

Also seems like a nice UI. Might try it out as an alternative to JSFiddle for a bit.

</comment><comment><USER9> I clicked the link last night, played with it a little, and liked some of the features, especially the column view.

I clicked on it this morning and it loaded the welcome article on the right and html on the left. Good shit!

</comment><comment><USER10> I have no idea what this site does. I've read 7 paragraphs and suppose I should "Open the CSS panel" (although the name implied something javascript related) because it's the only call to action, but it does nothing.

<comment><USER11> It's just an HTML/CSS/JS sandbox with collaborative features, similar to jsfiddle, which I believe is more well known (at least, among the people I work with).

I haven't used jsbin before, but the interface looks nice, and the redesign is pretty. Jsfiddle is utilitarian; jsbin looks like it is meant to have a little more humor. They both seem to cover the same functionality, so I guess it comes down to which interface you prefer.

For quickly sharing some small piece of front end code with a remote colleague, either one of these tools is very useful.

Edit: I just noticed that visiting jsbin.com skips the whole landing page with the spinning robot, so it seems that it is as utilitarian as jsfiddle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks like another great alternative to JsFiddle/Plunkr (both of which are excellent).

One question though: why is my download button grayed out?

<comment><USER2> Download will only be downloaded in the initial state of jsbin - i.e. if there's nothing to download. When you type, it'll save your bin and you can download that. You can also directly access each panel on the url, like jsbin.com/abc.css or jsbin.com/abc.less, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Needs to be clearer how to access the actual site. Took me a long while before I finally saw and clicked edit in the top right.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, for some reason the url posted was just a full page bin, ie. the output of my saved code. So I've tweaked the page a little so it'll redirect to the /edit version so you can _actually see_ JS Bin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really great! I'm thinking about starting CoderDojo. So I've been looking for this kind of app.

I know jsFiddle, CodePen, cssdeck and Mozilla thimble. Does anyone know any other site?

<comment><USER15> I put together a similar site a few weeks ago: <http://www.livefiddle.com/>

It's not as feature rich as jsFiddle or JS Bin (it only allows editing the javascript, not HTML or CSS), but is different in that it's geared towards canvas animations and games. You can edit an init function that gets called at the beginning of an animation, but the rest of the code gets executed inside a draw loop, allowing you to modify code as the program is executing.

Another difference is that you can modify magic numbers in the code using a GUI. Selecting a number brings up a slider that allows you to change it, and selecting a color brings up a color picker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great work Remy - and works much smoother now than the previous versions

Love the "Convert to" feature with HTML, CSS & JS

</comment><comment><USER17> Keep clicking/tapping on Dave. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER18> Love that you have Stylus and LESS, will Sass and SCSS be implemented sometime as well?

<comment><USER2> Stylus and LESS are being rendered on the client side - so there's no round trips just to render your HTML in the page. SASS and SCSS was on my list (or SASS was) but there's no client side solution. Feel free to contribute here, I'm definitely interested in adding those processors: <https://github.com/remy/jsbin/issues/176>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice one. JsFiddle.net actually gives a lot more features. Did I miss anything?</comment>


Ask HN: I've an idea but not all skills required, what do I do? - <AUTHOR> I've an idea for app that I think could be really useful but while i can do backend side of things I need someone who can do Android and iPhone. I could pay someone but I want someone whom I can throw ideas back and forth.. I had one friend in mind he said no. What do you guys do in this situation.
It's very simple thing, if I don't get anyone I'll just make web version but probably will have to change Target users.
But I'm still curious if you don't have friends who are interested how do you find a cofounder. <comment><USER2> If you can build the backend, then you wouldn't have much trouble getting familiar with basic ios and android development. So, really, just start. Build one feature and iterate. There's so much about your app that you don't know yet, and you will discover more and more with each step. Your problem is not the lack of a potential cofounder, that may come in time. Your problem is in thinking that you need a cofounder to build the first iteration of a mobile application. With all due respect, you're asking the wrong question(s).

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing you could try would be to find 10 customers who would give you money now in exchange for getting it for free in 1 - 2 months time. Then go on [https://www.upwork.com/hire/ios-developers/](https://www.upwork.com/hire/ios- developers/) and hire a dev to build the most basic version possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have following option -

1\. Hire Developer on contract basis (fiverr.com, codercv.com , upwork.com) OR

2\. Build Hybrid app, "WebView app" or similar, OR

3\. Launch web version get feedback and learn to build on mobile or hire full time, OR

4\. Pitch to Investor with NDA agreement.

<comment><USER5> VC don't sign NDA do they?</comment></comment>