Ask HN: Why did dynamic CMSes become the norm? - <AUTHOR> I have been using static site generators for a while, and with Netlify, the convenience seems unparalleled. Just do a git push to publish. Although I understand a non-technical person would find it hard to deal with a version control system, I can't think of any reason why more tooling can't develop to address that concern.
Static sites have incredibly low overhead (hosting-costs wise) and are very reliable—you can be reasonably sure that a random plugin or high memory usage won't pull down the whole site (a pervasive issue for anyone dealing with WordPress).
That brings me to my question. Why did dynamic CMSes like Wordpress become the norm? It's not like static site generators couldn't exist in 2003 when the CMS was first released. <comment><USER2> Well, it comes down to a few things really:

1\. These CMS systems made it easy for non technical users to add or update content. That's important given that for these people, even stuff like Git is seen as confusing and archaic, whereas 'go here, use an editor that looks a bit like Microsoft Word, publish' is easier to get the hang of.

2\. Many popular systems like WordPress and Drupal ended up creating a large ecosystem around plugins, themes, etc. So for a non technical user, it was easier to just download or buy a plugin/theme that does what they want rather than have someone code it from scratch or bridge it with another system. It also led to companies where their only skill was to either build CMS plugins/themes or to install existing ones, and those companies then had a good incentive to suggest the same system for their future customers.

3\. Shared hosting was/is still easier to understand for many people than a VPS or AWS might be. Even now, what do you think people are more likely to understand? Press a button in a tool like CPanel to auto install a CMS or manually set up a static site generator themselves? Stuff like Docker or containers or Git or SSH or whatever else all seem like black magic for many smaller development agencies, let alone end users who have no idea what a CMS actually is.

4\. If you wanted dynamic features (like a comments system, poll, user login/account setup, etc) then you needed a CMS or programming knowledge. Hell, even today you need one of those if you don't want to be stuck relying on a third party service for your website. Do you trust Disqus? I sure don't.

5\. Finally, I guess popularity just begets popularity. People like jumping on bandwagons, and once WordPress started growing in popularity, that meant a whole bunch more people wanted to use it as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> What was revolutionary about the blog 15 years ago was the comment system. In 2003 you couldn't embed something like Disqus on your blog. If you wanted commenting, it had to be dynamic. The same with other features like trackbacks and pingbacks. And search.

Upload speeds were also a consideration. If you wanted to update hundreds of pages and upload them all, that could take an afternoon.

Finally, version control was far more clumsy than it is now. Subversion was basically the most advanced option out there, and there was no Github equivalent to host repositories.

There was no S3 back then. $15/mo got you all-inclusive shared hosting at a flat rate, and it included PHP and MySQL whether you were going to use them or not. It wasn't cheaper to host a static blog - at least not at the outset.

Your average blog wasn't pulling enough traffic to have any sort of resource problems even in shared hosting; and there were caching plugins you could install that could scale traffic if your site got popular. If that still wasn't enough, you would get enough advertising to cover the cost of a VPS or maybe a managed dedicated server.

</comment><comment><USER4> There were static site generators in 2003. Dreamweaver and FrontPage were the big names, but there were many many more.

With the tooling of the day, simple tasks (ie - adding a new page to a main menu) were error prone and time consuming. Some early ssgs offered templates and includes, but they were complicated for nontechnical people to setup and use.

Version control sucked so in the wild, most Dreamweaver sites lived on one person's computer. If that computer's hard drive crashed, panic ensued.

<comment> m-localhost Dreamweaver was pretty nice (compared to the mess that Adobe GoLive was) and definitely close to what static site generators are doing today, just with a gui. It was really awesome, when I discovered Dreamweavers dynamic templating, because at that time, I had no clue how to get PHP and MySQl to work. Now that I know everything about PHP and MySQL I have a hard time understanding node.js (beside grunt) etc.

<comment><USER4> I had managed to forget the hell that was GoLive. Fuck you!!! :) (I kid)

I had a hard time understanding node.js too. I'm old enough that I remember when jQuery was revolutionary and it really hurt my JavaScript for awhile. Then, I built something non trivial in vanilla ES5 and now, I'm okay with node. I still don't always understand the ecosystem, but the JavaScript community is not for mere mortals like me to understand!

The point is, there's hope, if you want there to be hope. Otherwise, PHP and MySQL are very useful, so if you're happy where you are, you've got a good set of tools behind you.

Keep having fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I can't think of any reason why more tooling can't develop to address that > concern.

This is what a dynamic CMS basically is. Tooling to work around the deployment process of a static site.

WordPress became the norm because of its plugin system and its ability to scale. Creating a static site works well if you are a developer capable of writing the code or a single person writing nothing more than a small blog.

A system like this would not scale, for example if you wanted to add some dynamic content such as comments or an e-store. At that point your static site simply falls apart. For a non-developer, writing or getting someone else to write all that code is an expensive proposition. WordPress, even with paid plugins, is way much more cheaper and hassle free for the job.

And the WordPress admin page is a website accessible from any device with a web browser and does not require a setup of development tools on said device.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux There are lots of cases where a simple static site generator won't work well. For example:

\- company intranets which need different editing permissions for different users

\- blogs that want a 'subscribe' feature where users can get notified of new posts by email (not via RSS)

\- blogs that want to allow comments

\- password-protecting parts of a site

A lot of static site generators recommend third party services for some of these features (e.g. Disqus, Mailchimp) - a messy solution that is arguably a worse experience for users who now have to contend with being tracked by third-party sites.

We used to have static site generators before WordPress became popular (e.g. Moveable Type). Today's static site generators simply aren't user-friendly. Maybe friendly to the developer, but certainly not to end-users.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's somewhere between the tooling and designer market. I can get a theme for any kind of business for wordpress in minutes, get a plugin for dealing with any kind of service integration, and point a non-tech person at the admin panel - done.

Even though I use static sites normally and I'd definitely use that for a personal, technical business, I didn't even consider that as a possibility when setting up a service for someone else recently.

Also, there's middle ground: edit wordpress, publish static - [https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply- static/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was thinking about the performance troubles of Magento, and thinking about how all of the product pages in the site, and the home page and category pages could be pre-rendered as static pages, and then the filter pages could be built dynamically...and if after a change the CMS could re-render the static parts in the background that had been changed...it's not like other changes to Magento are instant, due to all of the cacheing

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it is because of the plugins. A lot of non technical users like to install plugins like Yoast Seo, Content lock, etc that require some sort of backend code in order to run. Not sure if that can be fully done with a static cms.</comment>


On Forking a FOSS project - <AUTHOR> http://haineault.com/blog/108/

<comment><USER2> Ok, so he made changes you wanted to make but didn't get around to? Simple solution:

        git pull ...

<comment><USER3> Are the changes all compatible? Or are some of them incompatible for trivial reasons because "it's a fork, no reason to be compatible"?

<comment><USER2> While I was being a little glib, it probably won't be that difficult to incorporate some or all of the changes. Certainly easier than redoing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Two things struck me:

"Had he contact me before forking my project I would have gladly discussed with him about improvements that could be made and I would most likely had invited him to join the project."

and

"My project is currently stagnating because I don't have much spare times and I have to focus on other things for now, that said some help would have been more than welcome."

Sounds like a lose-lose situation for the forker.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it just sounds like he wanted to have the fun of implementing something, but someone else beat him to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fork early, fork often. It's the GPL that legalizes merging, past that, the worst that happens is that someone wastes their time on code that doesn't get used. If it's the fork, tough cookies for them. If it's the "original author", they can choose whether and how to benefit from the code that has been written to extend their codebase.

If you're angry that he forked your code, fork his code back into your project. Or at least the parts of it that you want. The parts you don't, leave behind. Does it burn that you didn't get to order him around on how the project should have been improved? He doesn't need your permission, get over it.

</comment><comment><USER6> So you are telling us that someone modified the source code you released as 'open source'?? That Bastard!

And he didn't discuss this with you before? That's absolutely disgusting!!

</comment><comment><USER7> Obviously not a DVCS user.</comment>


Indoor Air Quality – Do we think about it much? - <AUTHOR> https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/indoorairquality/

<comment><AUTHOR> After a few visits to manufacturing shops, specifically CNC job shops I noticed that the air felt different and I knew it was due to the mist that is created during the machining process. I came back to my office and started some preliminary research on air quality. I wasn't surprised that a machine shop like that would struggle with this scenario but I started thinking about my own office. What am I breathing in, what should I be concerned with? I wanted to get a sense of how other people out there viewed this topic. Would this be something you bring up to your boss? Would you take matters in your own hand and get one of those little air purifiers? Or maybe people don't think about it at all?

For those people who do have control over this issue in their own work place, do you care about your employees enough to do something about it? Is it worth the money? The link to the OSHA site states that $15 billion dollars per year is lost because of worker absences and reduced efficiency from poor air quality. In an age when a lot of people spend most of their time indoors, is this something that people think about on a daily basis?</comment>


My work as a prostitute led me to oppose decriminalisation - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-41349301 <comment><USER2> A decade ago, San Francisco had a ballot initiative, Proposition K (2008) to decriminalize prostitution. [1] It got 41% of the vote and failed to pass.

The trouble with the New Zealand law [2] is that it empowers brothel operators. There's a presumption in the law that sex workers must work for a brothel. That put sex workers in a weak bargaining position. Nevada is like that, too. The UK, though, allows prostitution but not pimps or brothels. So it's all phone and Internet based.

(I had this explained to me by one of the people behind Prop. K, a high-end call girl who was also a labor organizer. Definitely not a victim. She wanted to empower sex workers, not pimps. But she was having a hard time getting that message across. At the city level, all they could do was reduce the level of police harassment, not fully legalize sex work. So they couldn't really make rules for sex work.)

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/us/01prostitute.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/us/01prostitute.html) [2] [http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2003/0028/latest/D...](http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2003/0028/latest/DLM197815.html)

<comment><USER3> This is one reason why we're excited about our company (info in profile). By operating anonymously, we can choose ethics over legality. By erring on the side of sex workers, we can shift some of the power away from abusive clients and review culture. Since we are involved in every transaction and serve as a commercial focus point, we can encourage unions and collective action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everyone must have the complete right to do what they want with their own body, so long as they are not hurting anyone else. No person (especially government) should ever be telling you what you can and can't do with your body.

But let's say we could get pasted the ethical boundary of controlling peoples rights over their own body. Making prostitution illegal does nothing to protect the legitimate women (and men) in the industry. By making it illegal you force people who want to work in the industry to have little to no legal rights: \- If a client rapes or performs unagreed/unconsenting actions, there is no legal place to go for help \- If a consenting prostitute discovers trafficking they are unlikely to report it because they have a distrust of the police \- Legitimate people who would want/enjoy being in this industry stay out, making unground businesses resort to trafficking and abductions.

We already have a legal system capable of protecting and punishing those who kidnap, rape, abuse, molest and hurt other people. All criminalisation of any industry does is prevent participants from receiving government protection.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's any women choice to be a prostitute. Did you read the article? She had an abusive step-father and had nobody to talk to.

People are forced to do it and when they start is hard to end. Goverments should have something to say as they are to protect people and being a prostitute is not a solution for lack of education or money.

<comment><USER4> Yes I read the article and shouldn't the government then focus more time on providing emotional support for adults who were abused as children rather than criminalising an industry because one person (or even a group of people) are in it because they were abused. I'm sure whether she was a sex worker or working in another job she would have struggled emotionally with what happened to her.

What about the people who have to work in McDonalds? Should the government also ban those jobs, where staff are around dangerous hot cooking equipment, rude customers, rude management, dangerous spills that could make them fall? It's a hard life and people have to make money. By criminalising an industry you are preventing people who don't share your own ethical beliefs from making a living. And sex pays a hell of a lot better than McDonalds and has better working hours. Just because people (government) thinks (and it is "thinks" not knows) that sex is unethical and dirty does not make it true.

Also while people may believe that no one wants to be a prostitute that's simply not the case. There is a great deal of people who enjoy it or at a very minimum see it as a legitimate way to make money. You (and government) have to be very careful that they don't enforce their own ethics and policies on people unless it is absolutely necessary (e.g. rape, killing, etc)

<comment><USER6> > sex pays a hell of a lot better than McDonalds

That's the problem. Drug dealing also pays a lot, I don't think that should be legalized either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People sign contracts for terrible work conditions all the time, is that a reason to make one specific industry criminal? And this is before mentioning that a contract that specifies "everything" as the job description renders the industry irrelevant - if an accountant signs an employment contract that includes "everything" in the job description then technically that also includes prostitution, coal mining, deep-sea diving, assassinations etc.

<comment> jim-jim-jim >People sign contracts for terrible work conditions all the time, is that a reason to make one specific industry criminal?

Yes. Absolutely. Even setting aside the ways in which legitimized prostitution can still be ripe for individual abuses, the message it sends also needs to be taken into account. Prostitution (and pornography) condition society to see women as commodities. That's unacceptable.

I expect this comment to go gray with lightning speed.

<comment><USER8> No, prostitution and pornography condition society to see sex workers (20% of them are Male, and likely a significant portion transgendered as well. Thought it was interesting that you only mentioned women) as workers, which is what they are. The argument against legalized prostitution is ridiculous.

Prostitution will always be around - there's no benefit to leaving sex workers to live in the shadows. If you legalize the industry - and not just the workers - you can have at least some amount of control over the health, safety, and quality of workers, employers and clients. By legalizing the industry you also help to normalize sex, which is IMO on way too high of a pedestal in most societies. Sex workers are perceived the way they are largely because of how "sacred" sex is - if you take that power away from sex, then you remove this stigma of sex workers being objectified or somehow less than others because of how they make their living.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From what I've heard on the subject so far, decriminalization aims to make it harder to profit off of human trafficking, i.e., to help those who are forced/enslaved into prostitution, or at risk of such. Taking a prostitution job by your own decision won't afford you the same perspective as those whose entire lives have been claimed as property of someone else.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a sensitive and complex topic. I found it clear after reading the article how even people personally involved struggle to address it well. It's unsettling to me how definite and confident some of the comments in this thread are. This will sound patronising, yet.. Please do think twice before posting - you're talking about someone's life.

</comment><comment><USER11> An individual's personal journey falls some way short of a rationale for public policy.

Policy in this area surely has to focus on harm minimisation rather than ideal worlds. The question to ask isn't if decriminalisation doesn't do any harm; it's whether it is better than criminalisation.

</comment><comment><USER12> After skimming that I still have no idea why she opposes it. Because it made her cry? Because she doesn't like the businesses that offer all inclusive packages? Not a great article.

<comment><USER13> well, i'm kind of surprised that decriminalization of prostitution included decriminalization of pimps. To me it is an area where agency of a service provider should be protected (similar to how it is protected in law and medicine, even if for a different reason).

<comment><USER14> It sounds like sex workers more than any other type of worker need a union.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim It's refreshing to see a major outlet carrying perspectives like this, at a time where "sex-positive" liberal feminism seems to dominate popular discourse.

<comment><USER15> but this article was about, "sex-positive liberal feminism"?

if you read the article, she is against what happened in NZ where decriminalization also included decriminalizing the pimps/johns, who are essentially forcing the women they hire in the brothels to work to do "anything" for a set price.

<comment><USER16> What if she falsely says she was raped - how is the customer protected? Having a sympathetic middlemen helps.

<comment><USER17> What if _anybody_ falsely says they were raped? The same rules apply.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who makes the little promo videos that startups typically have? - <AUTHOR>

Most consumer web startups have a little video on their website that quickly explains their product. They all seem to be made with the same style. Is there one company producing them all or are there many such studios? <comment><USER2> Sandwich Video make some of the most well-known, though far from all of them. <http://sandwichvideo.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> The thing you are paying for most of the time is for someone to beat the shit out of your story to make sure it's as succinct and compelling as possible -- while being 100% jargon free. Whoever you hire, you want to make sure you get that out of the deal if you are paying $$.

You can see examples of videos our team has done along those lines over at <http://whatnowexactly.com/>

And to answer the style question - there are probably 10 good companies in the U.S. that do these sorts of videos and we all know one another ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> They don't necessarily have to come from a company. We hired a freelance animator to create ours which can be seen on Kuhcoon.com. The point of these videos is to explain your product in a way that is easy enough for users of all ages to understand. They are super effective, but can be costly. Luckily I am personal friends with the animator so we got a good deal, but from research I've done these animations typically cost around $300-$500 for every 15 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.epipheostudios.com/> have had some big clients, including Facebook, Google, Yelp, Microsoft

</comment><comment><USER6> Checkout <http://fiver.com/> People are loving to do such videos fro $5. I have never tried any of them myself.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out:

<http://www.revolution-productions.com/portfolio/>

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want to do it yourself, 2 sites (from the same underlying company) are: onetruemedia.com and spotmixer.com

</comment><comment><USER9> How much should one reasonably expect to pay for a well made 60s product video?

</comment><comment><USER10> inDinero, the Fridge, AnyBot and the iconic (every time I fly Virgin) HipMunk video were all done by GrumoMedia[1].

<http://grumomedia.com/>

<comment><USER11> At Grumo we specialize on demo videos for startups. Also if you want to learn how to make them yourself we have an entire animation course at <http://grumoschool.com> Cheers!</comment></comment>


CIA-backed rebels are now fighting Pentagon-backed militants in Syria - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/america-is-now-fighting-a-proxy-war-with-itself-in-syria#.tsmk91wjqz <comment><USER2> [...] In a scene in Woody Allen's film Bananas, US paramilitaries are flying to the troubled, Latin American backwater San Marcos, where insurgents are attempting to overthrow the military junta. One paramilitary asks out-loud, "[are we] for or against the government?" "The CIA is not taking any chances," responds another officer, "some of us are for it and some of us are gonna to be against it [...]

[https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-55-no.-4/driving-the- yanquis-bananas-the-feeling-was-mutual.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Managing proxies, puppets and suzerains is an important part of a global empire. It's just a shame that America is so bad at it, whereas it worked brilliantly for TE Lawrence and the British Empire.

The worst instance of this was probably Ahmed Chalabi, who convinced the "Project for a New American Century" group that he was a viable leader of Iraq in exile, thereby starting this whole mess at a cost of a trillion dollars and a million lives. We'll probably never know if he was an Iranian intelligence agent or not; if he was he might be the most effective saboteur in history.

There's also the question of how much ISIS are Saudi proxy forces ...

<comment><USER4> Um... this crap in Syria and Iraq is us still dealing with the aftermath of the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire.

War casts long dark shadows through history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "It's very strange, and I cannot understand it," said Ahmed Othman, the > commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan Murad, who said > he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in Aleppo this > week.

This seems like an appropriate time to quote Major General Smedley Butler:

> "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the > most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international > in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars > and the losses in lives."

> "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that > period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, > for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for > capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American > oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the > National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of > half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I > helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown > Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the > American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the > American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that > Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have > given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket > in three districts. I operated on three continents."

And perhaps even more relevant:

> "Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. The > was the "war to end wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for > democracy." No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No > one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their > dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that > they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one > told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be > torpedoed by submarines built with United State patents. They were just told > it was to be a "glorious adventure".

</comment><comment><USER6> And now I can't get the image of weekly get togethers of generals and CIA spooks watching live satellite streams of the infighting, betting while doing pristine and cheap coke courtesy of the mess

<comment><USER7> "La guerre, un massacre de gens qui ne se connaissent pas, au profit de gens qui se connaissent mais ne se massacrent pas." Paul Valéry - 1871-1945

Loosely translated to: "War is a massacre of people that don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but do not kill each other."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> World would be a safer place if US military found more contained way to get rid of their current military gear so they can purchase new toys.

<comment><USER9> Well, a recycling program would seem a little pinko, wouldn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Divide et impera - nothing new in politics since 2000 years.</comment>


EBook Readers for Android - <AUTHOR> http://codecondo.com/free-ebook-readers-for-android/?hn

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately this article contains almost no actually useful or interesting information.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you satisfied with your news app? - <AUTHOR>

Are you fully satisfied with current news apps like Flipboard, Pulse, and Facebook Paper? If not, what do you think they lack? Anything you would like added? What features do you enjoy? <comment><USER2> I want a curated news aggregator that persistently covers important topics for the long haul, keeping an eye on activity even if it's not particularly interesting _for now_ but remains an important topic. Example: the topic "Benghazi" is not particularly news-worthy at this time, yet important processes are underway and the consequences could topple the US administration, so I want to be kept aware of what's progressing and reminded that it is, still, an important topic. Another example: space probe FooBar 12 is launched making an interesting headline, then for the next 15 months it's not newsworthy but I'd still like at least a one-line "FooBar 12 is now 37% thru its trip to Saturn" reminding of its progression and maintaining awareness that things will get interesting when it arrives. Pick the top 100 matters and dig for ongoing material for them; conversely, note when subjects make headlines and are unlikely to have further impact (say, Oscar winners) and present them in a distinct separate view.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just thought up a couple of solutions that might give you what you want. Thanks for the valuable insight.

<comment><USER2> Oh, one other feature I'd like: prediction confirmation & statistics. Plenty of news stories & opinions declare "X says Y will happen by date Z"; I'd like to mark keyword Y for followup, either reporting that it actually happened or that date Z came & went (or, say, it happened but a couple weeks late), and in the long term document X's success rate as a prophet. Lots of predictions get made in the news media, but nobody ever holds 'em to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds interesting. Not sure the most effective way to implement something like that but i'll definitely think about it. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Most effective way is a prediction market, but it's hard to create a legal one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does the question only apply to apps that aggregate news like those mentioned in the post? Personally, I use the BBC News app a lot. Very good interface, clearly delineated sections, stories automatically downloaded for offline reading (something that's annoyed me about other news apps). It gives me an overview of the important things going on, so I know what I want to read about in more detail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if there was any confusion, this question applies to all news apps. I'm thinking about building a news app so I'm trying to see if people are satisfied with current news apps and what features they enjoy. So thank you for the feedback, I'll check out the BBC News app!</comment></comment>


M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150624-arts-most-famous-illusion

<comment><USER2> > Occasionally, one gets the impression that this meticulous, sober man could > be a little stuffy.

> when Mick Jagger wrote to "Maurits" asking for permission to reproduce one > of his pictures on the cover of the Rolling Stones' album Through the Past > Darkly, Escher refused, informing the rock star's assistant: "Please tell Mr > Jagger I am not Maurits to him."

Just want to point out, this could be a cultural difference and have nothing to do with his personality.

Note from the wikipedia article ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_customs_and_etiquette#Ad...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_customs_and_etiquette#Addressing_people:_formal_and_informal)), in the Netherlands formal address is used for people "one does not know, or is only slightly acquainted with."

For us Americans it is hard to understand why it'd be a problem being too friendly -- you are simply trying to be nice and signaling that you are cordial and open, right?

Imagine that a stranger at a bus stop wants to talk to you: instead of caustiously approaching, and trying from few feets' distance to get your attention first, they come in for a full hug like a close friend would greet you. You might not want to interact with them further from that point.

<comment><USER3> I've lived in England and the Dutch speaking (Flemish) half of Belgium. Certainly trying to appear you're someone's friend when you don't know them is frowned upon. But Mick Jagger's English so he knows the customs - and they're fairly similar between England and Holland. There's probably quite a few people that would love to be called by their first name by Mick Jagger, but clearly Meneer Escher wasn't one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way.

To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abstract for them; more room for imagination about the work itself, rather than its subject.

Take his work "Hand with Reflecting Sphere". To most people it is a very well executed drawing, but not much more. But it _is_ much more. The reflection in the sphere is infinite. It encompasses the entire room; the entire world even. A two-dimensional drawing of an entire room projected onto a tiny surface. Those properties recur in his "Circle Limit III" piece.

I'm not sure I would regard him as an artist. Perhaps he's more a philosopher that chose drawings to express his thoughts rather than writing. Regardless of which label we put on him, his works are fascinating to me in an almost Zen- like way.

<comment><USER5> My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher is an abstract video artist; that is, she doesn't make TV shows, she makes videos that often don't make a whole lot of sense to anyone.

What you describe is "Didactic Art" that is, art whose message is plainly apparent. My take is that Didactic Art is in fact quite important, it serves society in many profoundly important ways.

That Napoleon was eventually defeated was the result - in part - of a painting that depicted a giant, rather inattentive, absent-minded giant eating a human corpse like a candy bar.

However, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design is heavily into what Bonita calls "Art with a Capital 'A'". More or less, that's art that only other artists understand, as well as art historians. I learned a great deal about art history while she studied there, and attended a few lectures, spent time in its small but excellent library; again there are many important reasons why we have Art with a Capital "A".

Escher was reviled by the other artists of his day because they regarded his work as revoltingly ugly. Consider that at the time we had stuff like Bauhaus and Art Deco.

I at one time had the email firstname.lastname@example.com

Hilarity ensued because everyone thought I was Christopher Escher, Apple's chief public spokesman. In reality I was hired as a contract script monkey for MacTCP, but I worked my way up by debugging its broken test tool strm_echo.

<comment><USER6> > Escher was reviled by the other artists of his day because they regarded his > work as revoltingly ugly.

I think this is still true, or at least aesthetic objections remain the principal rationalizations for deprecating Escher that I hear from the artists in my life.

My wife and I live in The Hague. She's an illustrator and photographer from a family of artists: her mother, a painter and now an art therapist; her sister also an art therapist; her father, an abstract painter. (Not as hobbies, or idle trustafarian pursuits, these are their real livelihoods.) When her family comes to visit, "going to see the Escher museum" is a recurring joke, as in "ha ha, never going to do that." Whenever I ask why, the mumbled complaint is usually "it's ugly and boring."

Really, 'reviled' remains the right word.

I think it's snobbery, to a great and unacknowledged degree - the visual art equivalent of "genre fiction" in the literary world. The problem I have with lumping Escher with hack painters of cowboys and motorcycles, or airbrushers of vans as "unserious art" is that it ignores his innovations in subject, form, and style and mastery of technique. But then, the "serious" art world of the west is very much a class construct of which snobbery is essential part.

<comment> ArtBot-1 I think that's all true. Escher's art is accessible, it has very fine technical control, superficially it's a one trick pony.

Isn't real art messy? Escher isn't messy.

But it's one hell of a trick. The math is more complicated than it looks, the draughtsmanship is incredible, and there's real mood and atmosphere.

I wouldn't say it's ugly or revolting. I would say it's unique. It's a new visual language, and no one has ever copied it successfully.

But I could be biased. I'm an artist, I work with code and math, and I can appreciate the technique and the content.

Artists who hate code and math probably don't get it at all. If all they see is some monks climbing an infinite staircase then yeah - that's going to seem gimmicky and boring.

<comment><USER7> It reminds of a conversation R.P. Feynman had with an artist friend that goes like Artist:"When I see a flower, I see beauty; you scientists pick it apart, examine meticulously and it ceases being so beautiful.", while it seemed Feynman had a hard time explaining that he saw _other, (sometimes) more profound_ beauties, not just the one arising from it's color and immediate looks. It's probably because the artist didn't even know what he was missing, so the discussion is very asymmetrical in a way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite aspect of Escher's art is seen in Belvedere, Ascending and Descending, and Waterfall. I love how it ties in with arguments about the Coherence Theory of Truth:

        Consider two propositions which do not belong to a
        specified set. These propositions could both be
        consistent with a specified set and yet be inconsistent
        with each other. If coherence is consistency, the
        coherence theorist would have to claim that both
        propositions are true, but this is impossible.[1]

There's an analogy to Escher's art. When viewing those three images (and a few others) though a restrictive hole, Every possible circle viewable through the paper is drawn to be physically coherent! But of course we know that the systems in his prints are inconsistent.

When looking at an entire system through a keyhole (the way we edit code bases), it's possible that what we see at every possible view may well be coherent, and yet the entire system may still not be consistent.

[1] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth- coherence/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-coherence/)

<comment><USER9> Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach mentions aspects of self- reference and logical consistency in Escher's works.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you haven't been already, the Escher museum in the Hague is worth it. Seeing his works live gives you the idea of the amount of work and dedication he poured into his works.

</comment><comment><USER11> The bit in the article about Escher being approached by Kubrick to work on "2001"\- that would have been quite the Chang rig he had said yes. I always felt the abstract visualizations at the end of the film lacking something. While it's fairly obvious that Bowman is going through something formless and indescribable, trading it for the surreal visual vocabulary of Escher would have made an much more memorable statement.

<comment><USER12> Not so sure. Escher's worlds strike me as locally coherent and tidy if globally impossible (as a commenter remarks above). My interpretation of the end of 2001 suggests that _everything_ was being chaotically dismantled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quote from OA

 _"Although he created something absolutely new," says Piller, "Escher has not directly influenced any artists."_

No school, no younger artists working with the Master, and no teaching in the modern way in an art school, hence no tradition. I'm not sure the artist was especially worried about that mind you.

<comment><USER13> That quote is saying more about artists than about Escher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminded me of some graffiti next to the East Side Gallery, Berlin, which I found striking. There's a picture of the artist surrounded by the words: "MC Escher would be like, who the fuck is OBEY?"</comment>


GitHub teams-like access control without paying for GitHub Organizations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gene1wood/github-collaborator-manager <comment><USER2> Neat idea! You could use the npm package serverless to make it easier to deploy. If you don't like the node dependency, you could include a Cloudformation template that takes the github token & location of the lambda zip and does the iam/sns stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya, good call, I should make a Cloudformation template to simplify the installation process. I'll do that, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey this is pretty cool. GitHub orgs for free!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! So much is possible now with the AWS Lambda free tier (it seems like)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the state of the art in virtual doctors? - <AUTHOR> How good are virtual doctors compared to human doctors? <comment><USER2> You have to be more specific. Diagnostics? Brain surgery? Heart surgery?

Here's a medical robot stitching a grape from 2 years ago:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XdC1HUp- rU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XdC1HUp-rU)

AI better at diagnostics than humans 3 years ago:

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2494918/healthcare- it/a...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2494918/healthcare-it/ai-found- better-than-doctors-at-diagnosing--treating-patients.html)</comment>


Phantasy Star 1 English Retranslation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maxim-zhao/psrp <comment><AUTHOR> "Retranslation" undersells the feat of reverse engineering this is - <USER2> manages fit a new text rendering system, add support for FM music and patch several issues with the game while _still_ maintaining the original ROM size.

The SMS Power page for it has screenshots: [https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS- EN](https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-EN)</comment>


CERN's Large Hadron Collider achieves the hottest manmade temperatures ever - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/hot-stuff-cern-physicists-create-record-breaking-subatomic-soup.html <comment><USER2> > to momentarily create a quark gluon plasma, a sub- _atomic_ soup

It's even a sub- _nuclear_ soup. It's not obvious until you think to it, but an atom is just enormous when you're talking at nuclear scale: a typical nucleus in its atom is like a tennis ball in a stadium! [http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/MinChall- en.htm...](http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/MinChall-en.html)

<comment><USER3> What I find mind blowing is there at energy levels where making these mater mater vs mater energy collisions is practicably meaningless. At 7Tev a collision between 2 protons has enough energy to create over 3,500 proton anti-proton pairs. And honestly anything that makes antimatter collisions seem like small potatoes is just insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What constitutes "hot" at such a small scale?

Years ago I addressed "hot" in terms of molecular speed, applying relativistic limits, calculating an upper limit on temperature and finding a large, but not inconceivable, maximum. Alas I've lost the paper (which was probably wrong anyway, but it was a fun exercise). The question has long bugged me: is there a real upper limit on temperature?

<comment><USER5> There's certainly a relativistic limit - i.e. if the mean velocity of randomly oscillating particles in the gas / liquid approaches c. (I leave aside the question of what is used to confine such highly energetic matter)

<comment><USER6> That in itself wouldn't limit the temperature. The average speed of the particles could approach c and their average energy would continue increasing.

Molecules will break apart above a few thousand degrees. If you take a gas (say Helium) above a certain temperature (probably ~1e4 K) the collisions between the atoms will knock the electrons off and you'll be left with a plasma.

Confining a plasma could either be done with magnets (e.g. a fusion reactor), or with more plasma! (in the case of stars, where the gravity keeps itself from exploding).

Above 1e7 K you start to get fusion of Hydrogen, and I think above 1e11 K pretty much any nucleus will fuse/break down.

So it's difficult to say there's a maximum temperature, as it's quite hard to define.

What's your maximum temperature? About 41'C... above that and you'll die...

<comment><USER7> That last line worries me...I live in phoenix and most summer days are above 110' F...41'C is 105.8' F :/

Hopefully there is some clarification to explain how I won't die...

<comment><USER8> I've been in a dry sauna as the temperature gradually reached its max peak of 105 C. At that temperature, the trick is to not move so that there's a relatively static layer of air around you. You also have to breathe slowly so as not to burn your nostrils/throat. And you perspire like crazy and the evaporation of your perspiration cools your body. It's still crazy hot though and you can't last very long before having to exit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Late to the party, but I thought I'd clarify on what temperature really means.

Many people are familiar with temperature as characterized by "average thermal velocity" of, say, air molecules. However, in statistical mechanics (the physics of many particle systems), temperature is _defined_ in terms entropy and energy.

Specifically, temperature is the rate-of-change of _energy_ with respect to _entropy_. (In math: T = dU/dS.) This arises as a natural definition if you think of temperature as "the thing that is equal between two systems in thermal equilibrium".

Think about it this way: A cup of water and an ocean have VASTLY different energies. Similarly, the ocean has an enormous entropy compared to the cup. However, if they're at the same temperature, the unit change of entropy per energy added is the same.

Coming back to the article, the temperature being reported by ALICE is derived from the entropy and energy of the collisions. Specifically, they're looking at quark-gluon plasma from the heavy-ion collision at LHC.

Under normal conditions, quarks and gluons are _confined_ to hadrons like protons and neutrons. Quark-gluon plasma occurs only at extreme energies, and in these collisions it is a essentially a chaos of quarks and gluons. The chaos (entropy) is not a thermal property but rather largely comes from the nature of the strong force. So, changing the energy of a quark-gluon plasma doesn't have a huge effect on its entropy. Conversely, you could say it takes a lot of energy to change the entropy, and so by the definition of temperature, you get a very large value!

</comment><comment><USER10> Before reading the article, I wondered how hot that would be, like 5000 degrees C or something. For reference, the surface of the Sun is approx 10000 F/5500 C.

They're claiming 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius. My mind is unable to comprehend that. A billion times hotter than the surface of the Sun...

<comment><USER11> Don't confuse the temperature at the surface of the Sun (5000 C or so, which is quite cool) with the temperature in the interior of the Sun (15 000 000 C or so ... quite a bit hotter). Still, it pales in comparison with the temperatures achieved in that experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did they just totally ignore units in the whole article? (Yes, they did). Anyway, in the comments author said it's in degrees Celsius, if anyone was wondering (as at that scale the difference is quite big).

<comment><USER11> What did you expect: Farenheit?... Any scientific paper will refer to temperature either in Kelvin or Celsius ... and the difference between the two at that scale is _quite small_.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, K/°C difference is small, but I didn't expect Kelvin as it isn't a "degree". And I don't know that site/portal/.. If it were US newspaper, I would expect it to be in degrees F without mentioning it. It happens.

Also, any scientific paper should use units. But to be fair, even though the difference between Farenheit and Celsius is huge at this scale, I can't really imagine it or compare it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone know how this compares to the NIF in terms of temperature? They talk about terawatts and megajoules versus degrees, and as a non-physics geek I can't equate the two.

NIF press release, 522.6TW and 1.855MJ - <https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/project_status/index.php>

<comment><USER11> Nor should you (be able to equate the two). Very roughly speaking, temperature is akin to a measure of the average energy density. Joule is a measure of energy and watt is a measure of energy per unit time. So, they give you a measure of how fast they delivered the energy (in terawatts), how much energy was delivered (in megajoules) but this does not tell us anything about the temperature at which the sample was heated since we don't know the size of the target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Out of curiosity. How do they handle such heat? I mean won't it melt anything around it? Also, how did they measure it? [I am assuming it was measured using a sophisticated thermal imaging camera, though I would like to think that some brave soul stuck in a huge badass thermometer inside the cauldron =)]

<comment><USER6> They handle the heat by having an inconceivably small amount of matter at that "temperature". They measure it by looking at the resulting particles and working out how much energy the collision had, and converting between units of energy and temperature.

There are some problems with describing the energy of a particle accelerator as a "temperature", but it makes the article more accessible and understandable, which is surely a good thing.

<comment><USER15> I don't think there's much of a problem with calling it a temperature. They don't use that term when describing merely one particle scattering off another, they only use it when they are colliding whole nuclei and there are enough particles to observe a thermal distribution. The key part about having a temperature is to have a distribution of modes (e.g. free particle momentum states) and that there is enough mixing around between these modes to generate a thermal distribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in order to warn any non-westerners:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264>

about integrity:

<http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en>

<comment><USER17> From looking at the abstracts and your quote, I don't see anything particularly unreasonable. What exactly do you want to tell us? Capitalism is evil and public relations morally wrong?

<comment><USER16> Propaganda meets reality: none of the statements below are actually true:

"Message from the Director-General

CERN is an Equal Opportunities employer. Our Equal Opportunities policy is founded on four main pillars:

 _in recruitment and career development, the Organization will not discriminate against any applicant or employee on the grounds_ of sex, ethnic _origin_ , disability, sexual orientation, religion, _nationality_ or age; respect and dignity for all in the workplace; support for working parents; work-life balance." --

[http://equal-opportunities.web.cern.ch/equal- opportunities/W...](http://equal-opportunities.web.cern.ch/equal- opportunities/Welcome.php)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN Self-hosted file cloud - <AUTHOR> https://syncstuff.org/ <comment><USER2> Curious, why mono + .exe as a default, instead of .NET Core?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I know the .NET framework and its tooling very good, I still have to delve into .NET core.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Career Is Right? - <AUTHOR>
 I am 31. I have been working in a call center for over 5 years at the same position. My pay is not very good. From day one I never liked this job.
I just want to quit this job and start afresh.
I have no CS background. What career is right for me?
What should I learn to improve my life? <comment><USER2> > What career is right for me?

That's hard for us to answer. What are your skills? Talents? Interests? Training?

> What should I learn to improve my life?

Learn to do something that you like better (and that pays better). That could be an enormous number of things. Without you telling us more, it's hard for us to say more.

You sound like you think CS might be the direction. You can start exploring that direction, to see if you have any talent and interest in that area. It might be a good second step. (I think the first step is to take an honest look at what you like, and what you're good at.)

<comment><AUTHOR> In past I have spent time learning coding, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, php. But I am not very much skilled in any one.

Currently priority is generating more income.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the point of the Apply HN posts? - <AUTHOR> From time to time, I see some posts with the Apply HN tag with a sales pitch of a startup. What's the point of those tags? Is it somehow related to applying to YCombinator? <comment><USER2> They are Y-Combinator companies looking to hire.

From the FAQ (link at the bottom of the page):

Can I post a job ad?

[...]

The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down, then fall steadily, and only one should be on the front page at a time.</comment>


Thunderbird's Future Home - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/ <comment><USER3> Last year when donating specifically to Thunderbird was made possible on mozilla.org, I donated to the project because it has provided a lot of value over the years.

Recently I started looking at the discussions on the tb-planning mailing list and it looks like we'll get a revamped (fully rewritten) Thunderbird. That sounds like a very long project to me - probably a few years just to bring it to what Thunderbird already provides today. Plus the extensions system needs to be revamped as well (similar to what's happening on the Firefox side with XUL ones going out). Getting Exchange calendaring done is also not a priority because of the complexity and the effort needed. So it looks like we will get a better maintainable product after some years. I'm not sure if that's going to appeal to many people to donate.

I'm happy with Thunderbird and some extensions that I use regularly, with the only exception being calendaring support for Exchange being very poor and unreliable (even with the Exchange EWS Provider extension or with external solutions like DavMail). Since I don't like taking risks with email client alpha or beta releases because of the fear of data loss (and with huge mailboxes, even detecting data loss would be a chore), I'll just stick with the current version and hope that the new revamped one comes in a stable form sooner (of course, I will donate periodically). I'm excited and afraid!

<comment><USER4> That fully rewritten Thunderbird will apparently be based on Electron, the Javascript GUI.

The CPU-thrashing, memory hungry, battery killer Electron. I do not want an email client, or any other software that is meant to run constantly in the background, to be written in Election.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why are you spreading this information, when you know no such thing has been decided?

<comment><USER4> The issue was discussed previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there has been lots of discussion, but no decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?"

I think that was almost 10 years ago.

<comment><USER6> I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client.

I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

<comment><USER7> What are you doing that's so complicated with email?

I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments.

What else is there that you need in a client?

<comment><USER8> Being able to search through old emails and conversations.

Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now.

Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

<comment><USER7> But searching seems like something that is definitely don't better as a web service with people like Google and their extremely sophisticated and proprietary searching and natural language analysis algorithms. That's a reason to use web services rather than local clients.

<comment><USER9> Google's biggest trick has been convincing people that "search" is something that is much too hard and sophisticated to do locally.

see [https://notmuchmail.org/](https://notmuchmail.org/) your email archive just isn't that big

as for natural language processing, I'm not aware that Gmail does this for user search? maybe it does, but I haven't noticed more than some basic stemming. and given the choice (is not hidden), even most basic users prefer exact/stemmed keyword search over "cleverly" second-guessing returning noise results you didn't ask for.

also there's many non-proprietary search result sorting and filtering techniques that do a great (and predictable!) job, locally, without having to go all deeplearning about it.

remember that a lot of the sophisticated NLP analysis stuff Gmail does, is for the benefit of targeted advertising first and user experience second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Day to day I use my email provider's regular web interface but I use Thunderbird every few months when I need to do a massive email cleanup - <USER2> is no other tool I'd rather use and it's indispensable to me for that purpose.

Also the article states, "In many ways, there is more need for independent and secure email than ever" and I agree 100%. Thank you to everyone who works on this project!

<comment><USER10> Also for travel purposes, being able to "do" email offline with Thunderbird is very nice as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job.

I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

I use lots of plugins with Thunderbird (Copy Sent to Currrent, Enigmail, External Editor, Nostalgy, QuickFolders, Identity Chooser, Mail Redirect, ...) to try to bring back some of the functionality I'm used to with mutt and it works quite well now.

In recent months I find Thunderbird needs restarting once a day which is frustrating. It goes into some kind of internal loop processing an email and never returns. Probably a consequence of too many plugins!

<comment><USER12> _> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent._

Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway.

Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file:

        text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to use another html-to-text converter than the text browser w3m.

<comment><USER13> It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support.

I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.

<comment><USER14> > unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world

Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam.

Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.

<comment><USER13> Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario? Essentially the main email clients people use, Outlook etc, all default to HTML emails these days. Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff. Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form. Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.

<comment><USER14> > Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario?

Yeah, sort of, an academic/hospital setting. Actually, I combined my academic and personal e-mail addresses into one at a custom domain, and forward other accounts to it, which annoys some colleagues.

Most people here use Outlook. Sometimes people might have a mailto: link in sig (which gives me a chuckle as it's pointless), but I don't ever remember encountering embedded images.

The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

> Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML > form.

Same, because I haven't bothered to set up spam filtering. But of the e-mails I actually want to read, well below 5% do.

> Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems > that email me.

Fascinating. For me it is just the opposite. People don't usually seem to bother using HTML, consciously at least. But automated systems use it quite liberally.

<comment><USER15> > The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university- > wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what > useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

If only! My alma mater always uses the subject "Important message from <University>". It never is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see this:

>But there are still pain points – build/release, localization, and divergent plans with respect to add-ons, to name a few. These are pain points for both Thunderbird and Firefox, and we obviously want them resolved. However, the Council feels these pain points would not be addressed by moving to TDF or SFC.

and then this

> We have come to the conclusion that a move to a non-Mozilla organization > will be a major distraction to addressing technical issues and building a > strong Thunderbird team. Also, while we hope to be independent from Gecko in > the long term, it is in Thunderbird's interest to remain as close to Mozilla > as possible to in the hope that it gives use better access to people who can > help us plan for and sort through Gecko-driven incompatibilities.

So I'm not sure I fully understand their direction. Are they simply less focused on solving those issues right now?

I use Thunderbird but don't really have a horse in the race, I get what I need out of it and I support them, I'm just curious.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't use Thunderbird, but I like that it exists and I hope they survive. Perhaps because it's my life boat if I need to abandon spying web hosted clients (gmail etc).

<comment><USER18> These days the word 'spying' is used frequently but somehow ironically (?) Why not be honest to you and say that your laziness is more worth for you than your privacy?

'spying' is perceived as boring or 'it happens anyway' or 'we cannot do something about it'. Of course you can. You have the choice to be slightly less lazy and actually use the alternatives where you can&want, maybe even if they are worse! I'm not implying here that Thunderbird is worse than gmail ;)

Furthermore 'spying' should not have the personal touch (only). Instead companies should take this issue really serious to reduce the possibilities of econmic spying. I know companies fighting hard against Google with their products, having strict NDAs but then yes, they use non-encrypted gmail accounts for everything.

Thunderbird is important like all of these alternatives (be it open source or not like DuckDuckGo) to reduce influence of monopolies. As monopolies are bad for users&customers. Always.

BTW: you can donate here: [https://donate.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/)

<comment><USER17> Personally, my choice of words would be 'convenience' rather than 'lazyness'. It's a 100% conscious decision on my part to abandon an unknown degree of privacy for the convenience of free online (ex. google) products. I would expect this to be true for a significant proportion of the technical readers you get here on HN.

But the trust can be broken. Which was my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So for the moment, at least, Thunderbird stays with Mozilla. That's good.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hope Thunderbird lives on for a long time, but in the FOSS world, one should never depend on a single piece of software for their day-to-day functionality, thus here are some alternatives:

[https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla- thunderbird/?lice...](https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla- thunderbird/?license=opensource&platform=linux)

You must also keep in mind that desktop mail-clients make the (otherwise) complicated PGP-encryption of emails a bit more user-friendly.

<comment><USER21> I keep forgetting that I intend to give Geary a try.

<comment><USER22> Geary hasn't been very reliable for me and I have been keeping up to date with the latest versions. I mostly just use it for retrieving attachments and stick to mutt and k9mail the rest of the time. I think it is sad than an android mail program works more reliably and faster than most established desktop mail clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _A Bright Future

The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies_

Mozilla dumps XUL tech from gecko left and right, removed proper "classic" mod support from Firefox... how is this a bright future. Thunderbird as a big XUL app is stuck with an soon to be not supported old gecko. And how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable? Replication of the dated UI with HTML5 will be an even bigger clusterfxxk.

We need a proper open source offline client. And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail. Wasn't there a HTML5 based email client in FirefoxOS. Start with that code and set up a new Mozilla foundation funded offline email client, and keep security support for Thunderbird until the new email app is ready.

<comment><USER24> IDK, I like that Thunderbird sorts without conversation. It is the primary feature I look for in a MUA.

The only feature I find annoying is the search feature, which seems to be a universally accepted weakness of Thunderbird.

<comment><USER25> I'm confused by its two search bars. It doesn't make sense to have two.

<comment><USER26> One is a global search, the other is a simple filter for the currently opened mail folder. I use both for their respective use cases all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Frankly, I think it would be easier to write a GUI over mutt than to rewrite Thunderbird.

I was a heavy user of Thunderbird, but after migrating to mutt, it's basically obsolete. The only pain point is really HTML, but converting it to text is Good Enough most of the time. Outlook-produced emails still look like crap, but I can click a button and open it on Firefox.

Mutt is not only alive and kicking, there's the new NeoMutt project that is the NeoVim for Mutt. We have initial Lua scripting capabilities now.

[http://neomutt.org/](http://neomutt.org/)

</comment><comment><USER28> In my mind, there are a handful of things that are essential to getting Thunderbird back to a usable state... some of these could be plugins...

First, the exchange/calendar integration options clearly suck... establishing a clear calendar interface as a built-in with extensible points for plugins for authentication/sync of calendars would be a good start.

Second, likewise with calendar auth/sync would be an extensible interface for folder sync and authentication, so that a cleaner integration for common providers based on an underlying IMAP can be used... this way the conventional "junk, spam, inbox, sent" folders could be presented the correct way as well as the underlying storage for a given provider.

Also, along with calendar/email would be more extension points for scheduling, contacts, etc...

As it stands, even if there were different plugins for a google calendar and an exchange/o365 calendar, contacts, etc... if the underlying pieces can be shared, it would be a better user experience.

Moreover would be some serious reconsideration regarding the UI/UX... I'm a big fan of material design, but some variation on that coming a lot closer to a Gmail app for desktop would be a really nice start... but getting a calendar/task/contacts integration points and primitives for extension would go a long way here. Having the core UI going the same direction as Servo, and having most of the UI/Extensions being HTML/JS based would be nice.

Likewise, NPM compatibility for extensions' modules would be nice as well.

<comment><USER29> Regarding NPM compatibility: I'd be worried about potential security issues with something like npm. I recognize that one must already put a lot of trust on developers when using extensions, but I'd worry NPM would make it a lot easier for a nefarious developer to add malicious code to a really deeply buried dependency.

<comment><USER28> Maybe it's just a matter of using node/npm tooling to develop/package an extension... using a bundler.

Of course, at this point, it might be worth re-doing the whole thing using electron as a base.. the more I use VS Code, the more inclined I am to feel that it may be good enough, and if it's a react app, maybe target react-native for phone/tablet platforms, and electron for desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > A Bright Future

> The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies

<comment><USER31> What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services: accessible from nearly any device, access to your data with minimal complication wherever you happen to sign in from, and a lightweight, instant- response, zero-install interaction model. If we value "native clients", we need to address the things that make web clients more convenient.

<comment><USER32> > What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were > web services

I think the closest thing we have is the remote desktop protocol. I have used Thunderbird on my desktop via the rdp client I have installed on my phone (though with some degree of difficulty due to the interface and input limitations).

I think something like that could work if rdp clients provided a better interface for clients not using a desktop computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's a proposal on how the move to a new Thunderbird based on web technologies could be handled: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb- planning/SPs8gzO5...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb- planning/SPs8gzO5Wy0)

</comment><comment><USER34> I've gone from using Sparrow to Mailbox and now to Spark on macOS and iOS. Every time a good email client comes around, someones seems to kill it.

</comment><comment><USER35> I hope The Document Foundation gets it to add to Lubreoffice to be a foss alternative to Outlook.

I get thousands of emails a day. I have several email accounts as I switch to a new one because the old one got a lot of spam. I email my friends and family my new email but they keep writing to my old emails. Message filter helps me sort stuff into different folders to find important emails and attachments.

</comment><comment><USER36> I use thunderbird because my work uses gmail. I guess (maybe) I could add the secondary work gmail account to my regular gmail. Not sure, the other alternative is to keep a separate incognito window or keep work email open in a separate browser.

I just use Thunderbird instead.

<comment><USER37> You can log into multiple Google accounts at the same time. You then get a user switcher in the top left, which as far as I know does not invalidate existing sessions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like to read about these open source organizations apparently very well administrated. It's a very interesting business model to me.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure this is a textbook example of open source leading to a well administrated organization. I realize these decisions are complex, but the people who work on Thunderbird have been talking about the inevitability of this move for years at this point. Those are years that a more nimble (and profit motivated) organization could have been spent actually moving to a new technology instead of endlessly debating what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Have mozilla considered Tracy Island?

</comment><comment><USER41> tl;dr Thunderbird will remain independent, but legally and fiscally be part of Mozilla (rather than e.g. The Document Foundation (of LibreOffice) or the SFC).

Also of note: apparently Thunderbird is receiving enough donations, and has been for a while, to give faith that it will be able to manage just fine independently. Good news IMHO.

<comment><USER42> I wonder if email providers would pay for to be included as an easy setup/signups in Thunderbird? Sort of like search engines pay to be the default in Firefox

<comment><USER43> The short answer: not really.

About a decade ago, Mozilla decided that Thunderbird should be making a bigger effort to pay for its own funding. The two business opportunities that were implemented were paid email accounts (driven by a survey that found that a substantial portion of new users expected they were getting an email address when they downloaded Thunderbird), and paid support for the large-attachment uploads. Some of the companies involved have since withdrawn the contracts.

In any case, the money being involved (I'm told) isn't stellar--on the order of $10s of K per annum in total.</comment></comment></comment>


Opera 11 Alpha is out, brings plugin support - <AUTHOR> http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

<comment><USER2> "An option has now been added to have plug-ins such as Flash content load only when clicked on.."

nice feature there!. no more of pretty-woman-greeting me on page load.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if they will ever make their Mac version more native (e.g. standard OSX shortcuts would work in text fields). It's really strange that having a lot of stuff well polished, and releasing a lot of new features, simple things like that are forgotten about. Kind of like OSX not letting you select an _arbitrary_ solid color as your background (that may be intentional though).

<comment><USER4> Well Opera has gone Cocoa since 10.5 and feels much more native than it used to.

Still, I wish it had the same level of polish as Chrome does on OS X.

<comment><USER5> They've been more focused on 'Macification' since 10.50 apparently. There's some discussion of this over on the Opera engineer AMA Reddit thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dtbcz/hey_reddit_join_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dtbcz/hey_reddit_join_the_opera_browser_team_for_an/c12qxqo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Extension support is nice, but I'm disappointed by lack of CSS Flexible Box Model[1] support in this release. It is available in WebKit and Gecko for over a year. Only if Opera supports it…

[1]: [http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box- mode...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box-model/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Going to give this a whirl. Heard about extensions support when they were chatting with Reddit users the other day.

</comment><comment><USER8> The thing I liked about Opera was the lack of plugins.

No waiting for 10 add0-ins you've never heard of to update themsleves and ask you to restart your computer.

No having to search the net for add-ins to do things like toggle image loading or prevent popups.

<comment><USER9> These aren't Firefox add-ins. These are small pieces of JavaScript and HTML/CSS. Probably won't bog down your browser any more than UserJS scripts.

<comment><USER10> According to them, these new extensions will also have [more?] control over tabs and windows, which plain JS (like their existing Widgets) cannot do.

[http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/getting-started-with- oper...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/getting-started-with-opera- extensions/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm very glad opera will finally support extensions. Hopefully it will provide a better interface for tackling ad blocking than the built in blacklist feature or doing it elsewhere(proxy,dns,etc.).

<comment><USER10> Personally, I've never found the built in ad blocking lacking. Where it missed anything (which is rare), blocking a specific ad is two clicks or so away. In what ways would you like things improved?

<comment><USER3> For me most useful would be subscription to some EasyList or whatever it's called to block 90% of the ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alpha feels quite stable. Stumbleupon-Addon works great.

Whished the would made the addon-system compatible to Chrome's

<comment><USER9> Technically, it should be. They're using W3C Widget specifications, an open standard, to do extensions.

EDIT: But I don't think they're compatible out of the box, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Gave it a try on Ubuntu. Extensions are very alpha but nevertheless a welcome move.

</comment><comment><USER14> Honestly, does anyone use Opera?

<comment><USER3> Something like 20% of Russia (yeah, I know, we're kind of an exception :)

<comment><USER15> Do you have any explanation for this? Thanks.

<comment><USER3> There are several components:

1\. Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines. I mean faster in application tasks (launch/switch tabs/go back/etc.), not executing JS.

2\. Opera is easy for normal people – it has a ton of features like built in mail reader, etc. but they don't get in your way, it is easy to ignore them if you don't need them. Also, you can't accidentally download a ton of useless Opera toolbars.

3\. Opera is free, independent, standards-compliant, secure, etc. - a lot of things that we geeks love.

4\. A lot of normal people ask some geek they know to set up their new computer - and we remove the bloat that comes with it and install the basic apps (often including Opera, Avast, ImgBurn, 7zip, etc.). Surprisingly I often hear these normal people saying they actually like Opera way more than IE. I thought they would not care.

<comment><USER16> _Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines._

I strongly second this. I recently tried Opera for the first time in ages on an old ThinkPad ca. 2001 and it's astonishing what it can do with as little as 128MB of RAM and a Pentium 3. Where Firefox and Chrome struggle with even one tab and no extensions, I routinely find myself with a dozen or more open in Opera without it becoming even slightly sluggish. Whatever its faults, I'm extremely impressed.

<comment><USER15> > Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines.

Just tried it. Indeed it does!

So sad it allows for very little customization and has different shortcuts than other browsers, otherwise I would have jumped on it right away. Hopefully, the next version will fix this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hoppy Doge, a voice controlled browser game - <AUTHOR> http://ss14-team-157.divshot.io/ A such amaze voice controlled browser game that is not so 2010. Please make doge happy by a simple wow tweet. Thx much. Works best in Chrome, microphone access dependent. <comment><USER2> Awesome game! Hope to play this on mobile</comment>