Ask HN: Why do we minify JavaScript, yet not HTML? - <AUTHOR> Sites heavy on JS often have minified, obfuscated (at least, the names are replaced) JS files. However, many sites have huge amounts of whitespace sticking around in their HTML. Why don't people "minify" their HTML? <comment><USER2> Because technically its not very sound. Examples of where "minifying" (removing whitespace) could go wrong if done across any served HTML document...

1) pre tags - being that pre tags take into account formatting, removing whitespace is going to alter how the content is rendered

2) any empty tags - its becoming a thing of the past but there are many instances where browsers will render a tag with a single space inside differently than a tag with nothing inside. In other words, space within a tag may be intentional by the developer.

3) spaces inside attributes may matter - you could have an attribute on an html tag that say is data-whatever="1 2\n 3" and potentially reducing those spaces could be bad - depends upon what the developer intended

Additionally there are some other things to consider...

1) GZIP if used will make the impact of scrubbing out whitespace almost nonexistent

2) Most HTML served is dynamic, meaning that the HTML compression will need to be run on every HTML response - this could have some performance negatives. (If your just compressing static HTML once it should be fine.)

<comment><USER3> None of your first three points are really a problem. No, you won't be able to do a simple regex based solution, but the rules for where whitespace matters in HTML are rigorously standardized. Obey them, and your minifier will work just fine.

>1) GZIP if used will make the impact of scrubbing out whitespace almost nonexistent

Maybe if you were just removing whitespace (although you still will see a difference). Removing comments and omitting optional closing tags will take you further. Minified JS compresses smaller than un-minified JS, so it's reasonable to think the same would be true of HTML.

>Most HTML served is dynamic, meaning that the HTML compression will need to be run on every HTML response - this could have some performance negatives. (If your just compressing static HTML once it should be fine.)

For templated HTML, the minification should be done on the template itself, not on the final output. You really do have to weigh the pros and cons of GZIPping dynamically generated HTML, so pre-minified HTML templates could be a pretty big win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GZIP will compress your html for the journey from server to browser if a) it is enabled on the server and b) the browser can handle it.

Almost any modern combination should work fine.

OK - there is a cpu overhead for the server but if bandwidth is the issue then it sure beats any attempt at minifying the HTML

<comment><USER3> That's all fine and dandy, but minify + gzip is usually significantly better than gzip alone (for javascript and css, at least).

<comment><USER5> Quantify "significantly". There's a gain, but whitespace compresses Really Damn Well.

<comment><USER3> Minifiers don't just remove whitespace. Eliminating comments, for example, can save a lot (although it seems that most HTML out there is poorly commented in the first place). A smart minifier can also drop optional closing tags like
 for a bit more gain (although I don't know of a minifier that does).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who uses a text editor that inserts whitespace into HTML? I am aware that some editors like to show indentation levels in HTML code, for various reasons, but for me HTML code is always more readable if it has no extra whitespace at all. Whitespace is not meaningful in HTML, and I always set my text editor (I have used various brands of text editor over the years) so that my HTML output has no extra whitespace. Why use an editor that adds whitespace in the first place?

AFTER EDIT: TazeTSchnitzel asks a fair question. I put each new major element on a new line. In general, I try to make paragraphs look like paragraphs, headings look like headings, and so on, with just newline whitespace but without leading whitespace before elements (which has annoyed me for the last few weeks in a website updating project I was working on). Thanks for asking the clarifying question.

FURTHER EDIT: Yes, thanks for the statement that indentation shows nested structure (which is what I guessed is the usual rationale for extra whitespace in HTML code). Despite that obviously sensible practice (which, after all, leads to the MEANINGFUL white space in Python code), I have seen plenty of examples of HTML pages that have unmatched tags even though they have so much whitespace that the "view source" view of the page is mostly off to the right of my screen. Agreeing that being able to view source code structure is important, may I suggest that as one reason to like Notepad++ as one of the many editor choices available to persons who write code? In the recent project I worked on updating, the original programmers had left many unmatched tags and inconsistent structures in the code, and I was able to strip out all the extraneous code AND fix the structure by using Notepad++ to find (for example) the beginning and ending div elements surrounding big, complicated blocks of code. Notepad++ shows code structure with structure lines overlaid on the raw source code view.

<comment><USER3> >Who uses a text editor that inserts whitespace into HTML?

I do as does anyone else who uses Zen Coding (or emmet).

>Why use an editor that adds whitespace in the first place?

Because it makes the code way, way more readable. Indentation allows you to easily see the structure of the HTML, so that you can see what is a descendant of what.

Look at this and tell me whether "Man Made" is part of "Debris" or if it's a separate sublist:

Debris:

Sand

Dirt

Man Made:

Broken glass

Pennies

Animals:

Cats

Dogs

Chimps

Now look at it with indentation:

Debris:

Sand

Dirt

Man Made:

Broken glass

Pennies

Animals:

Cats

Dogs

Chimps

<comment><USER7> Obviously (to me anyway) you're right, and I'm surprised there are people who don't indent their HTML like that. But a thought just occurred to me -- why don't editors do this automatically and without creating actual whitespace (tabs/spaces)? If you look at XML in your web browser it will automatically be formatted with indents based on tag hierarchy .

<comment><USER8> I see your point, but I think there are a few solid reasons it would be a bad idea.

The basic text file (at least in unix) is king, and the medium by which we transport all sorts of code around. Adding a layer of asbtraction to an editor like that, where it shows you one thing but saves the file differently, breaks this premise and means your new editor now doesn't play well with others.

\- Unless you source control is in on it, you are going to suddenly see a different file than you were working with before when resolving conflicts.

\- Your whole team is now forced to use _your_ editor to get the same view of the code as you are.

\- grepping, line counts, most third party text mapulation/wrangling services become moot unless savvy to the context of your editor

<comment><USER7> After I wrote that, I realized that all editors would need to have the same capability which is pretty much a non-starter (and whitespace is universal). Your other points are well taken too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With the majority of websites, the content is changing the majority of the time which means the HTML has to be compressed after each change & sure they're are scripts to do this but in comparison, CSS/JS files are rarely changed – they're generally changed when a new feature/design is implemented.

Another reason is because, websites are becoming more dynamic & it's not very cacheable – CSS/JS are extremely cacheable. Since on every request you have the extra task of running minimization on the complete HTML of a webpage (especially if your website is dynamic and you're using a script to do this) and this is time you could have used to transfer data.

Moreover, there are other low hanging fruit that most websites need to tackle first – minimizing HTTP request, removing unnecessary images, minifying images, minifying & combining CSS/JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> >extra task of running minimization on the complete HTML of a webpage

Of course that would be slow, but if you have compiled templates on a dynamic site, could you not strip out whitespace at compile-time?

<comment><USER9> Minifying dynamically generated files on the fly is harder than static ones (Its obviously possible but you have to take it into consideration) & there are some cases where it actually might decrease performance as, every page request requires minifying.

Personally, I think the benefits of minifying your HTML won't pay off until you're receiving a significant amount of traffic anyway. Which is why, for the large majority of sites they'll see better value through minifying/combining their CSS/JS and tackling the other low hanging fruit first.

<comment><USER3> I think you didn't understand the parent post. TazeTSchnitzel is saying that when the template is initially compiled, it can be minified. Then you'd get that minification for free forever after.

<comment><USER9> I understood the question which is why, I said there are still performance issues if you try to do this & its only beneficial to websites that receive a large volume of traffic as they are the ones who will see the benefits of doing this; there are other low hanging fruit that can improve performance before even looking minifying HTML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, I like to minify the HTML as well ... most template engines have an "omit whitespace" option or flag which lets you do this.

Every now and then whitespace turns out to be significant though ... so you need to be slightly intelligent about how you handle it.

It is probably less relevant in HTML5 times where you are most likely just using a small bit of HTML to act as a "loader" for your Javascript, which then takes over. The JS and CSS files are, in this case, way bigger than the HTML.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love optimizing front-end including HTML outputs, even prematurely so. My sites are low-traffic and lightweight anyway, but for me this is a form of zen.

<comment><USER12> Just curious: what do you use to minify? In an earlier comment, I said that most templating engines that I used don't minify. You'd have to write your own minifier. (I used Jinja, by the ways.)

<comment><USER13> It's pretty simple. Use a regex to eliminate whitespace and then gzip. Be sure to set the proper headers if you gzip.

I eliminate whitespace with the following PHP code:

        preg_replace(['/\t+/', '/>\s+</'], [' ', '><'], $html);

<comment><USER5> Hope you don't have any <textarea> or
 tags on the page.

<comment><USER13> I don't, but unless you fill them full of whitespace and nothing else, they won't match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've overloaded some functions in javascript templating functions before to regex out whitespace between tags. Had some issues with cdata stuff, but it could be tweaked to perfection i'm sure.

<https://github.com/sechrist/ejs-shrink>

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know about static sites. I would imagine to be very beneficial, in terms of bandwidth, to minify HTML.

But I once worked on a Facebook-like SaaS, and minifying HTML had huge performance hit on the back-end, since we used templates, not a proprocessor language such as Jade or HAML.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't whitespace-stripping be done as a function of the templating language? I suppose spitting it out verbatim is cheaper, though.

EDIT: Wait, isn't that something the template compiler could do?

<comment><USER12> Not sure. We simply used a templating engine. Either a) we didn't take the time to read the documentation properly to find out if there is an efficient minifier, or b) there isn't an efficient templating engine that minifies.

I'm betting big on using preprocessor languages, such as HAML, or Jade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Making the HTML minimal but it can't be done automatically. It takes some HTML knowledge and most important a few thousand lines of code written to make it optimized if not minified. What I want to say is that trough time you learn how to write code in a way that it as optimized as it can be. At least I did. For example I never write table structure hierachically but I always leave the
 on top and then group together the

 and then each table cell in a new row. This way I still locate the start of a new row so it makes the table structure human readable and a bit optimized. There are a lot of these kind of tricks I use that I learned over time.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody believe Apple stock will hit $1000 in 2011? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious, I personally believe so, just because of their great products and cult of people following.<p>Would love to hear your opinions. <comment><USER2> Where did the $1000 figure come from? Currently, their stock is hovering around $324, so an increase of $676 would be extremely unusual. 2011 will probably see a MacBook Pro refresh, a new iPad, and possibly a new iPhone. There could also be a completely new product introduced. If their stock would hit $1000, they would need a proportional increase in revenue and profits.

Given how Apple is already breaking sales records every quarter and experiencing strong demand, their stock will undoubtably rise. An increase of >200% over the course of a year is, however, unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER3> So you're saying you think the stock will triple?

I'm generally a fan (but not fanboi) of Apple, and like the company and their products. But I don't see them tripling in a year from where they're at now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't see that. But, I do see $450 in 2011 if they announce a Verizon iPhone which I think is likely.</comment>


Ask HN: Query Best Practices for DuckDuckGo? - <AUTHOR>

I've recently made the switch to using DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons. Part of me misses the Google experience though, which to it's credit was actually really good. I know I've been trained over the years to search the "Google way," breaking up things into keywords, using quotes, etc.<p>That said, whats the best way to searching using DuckDuckGo. Is there a certain query format to get the best result? Am I over-thinking this? When searching for programming related questions, I find myself typing the same query I used in DuckDuckGo back into Google and finding the answer faster. <comment><USER2> I had switched to DDG for awhile a year or so ago, but found myself frustrated with the results. I, too would have to paste my query into Google & search again all too many times to find what I was looking for until I finally gave up & switched back to Google for good.

I really hated to, but it wasn't worth the hassle.

Maybe one day DDG's algorithms will work just as well as Google's & they'll be able to nail my searches the first time like Google does, but until then I guess I'll be being tracked.</comment>


The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin's $460M Disaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange/ <comment><USER2> This is the relevant paragraph for "our crowd:"

> Mt. Gox, he says, didn't use any type of version control software — a > standard tool in any professional software development environment. This > meant that any coder could accidentally overwrite a colleague's code if they > happened to be working on the same file. According to this developer, the > world's largest bitcoin exchange had only recently introduced a test > environment, meaning that, previously, untested software changes were pushed > out to the exchanges customers — not the kind of thing you'd see on a > professionally run financial services website. And, he says, there was only > one person who could approve changes to the site's source code: Mark > Karpeles. That meant that some bug fixes — even security fixes — could > languish for weeks, waiting for Karpeles to get to the code. "The source > code was a complete mess," says one insider.

<comment><USER3> I would only feel safe using a completely open source exchange to hold my money.

<comment><USER4> I guess you don't use any online banking services?

<comment><USER5> US banks have FDIC insurance to protect depositors against insolvency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing new here if you have been following the story. It is a glossy, quick summary of all the conjecture that has been posited thus far in many other places, not delving into really any detail or saying anything new.

I am sure this story is going to get much weirder before it sees any semblance of sunlight or truth. And it might take many years for that to happen.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, this was pretty far from the "inside story" of Mt. Gox and was more just about Karpeles incompetence and personality faults.

"seated, inexplicably, on top of a blue pilates ball" really irked me, because its not inexplicable. The guy probably has back or circulation problems, give him a break instead of giving him crap for every last detail of his life. There's more than enough to critique about the fact that he ran the largest bitcoin exchange into the ground.

<comment><USER8> I own a couple of those balls, and I still think it's inexplicable that he would sit for a Reuters TV interview on one. Watch the video here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLjlOw3TVc8#t=1m10s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLjlOw3TVc8#t=1m10s)

If you are trying to project that you are the CEO of a stable financial institution, having a lot of people say, "What the hell is he sitting on?" is not the best PR strategy.

<comment><USER9> Should I cancel my Google Wallet account?

[http://www.corechair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/google- ex...](http://www.corechair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/google-exercise- ball1-300x300.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Actually, that's a great example of how to use those well for PR. When's that photo from, something like 2005? Before?

Early on, Google did a great job of creating a young, hip, fun image. They wanted people to like them. Miracles and wonders, all from these slightly goofy Californian eggheads!

But that's not the kind of image you want to create for a financial trading platform on which you want people to deposit lots of money and feel safe. You could go brilliant and edgy or respectable and serious. But goofy? Nope. I can't imagine he had a PR person there for the interview. Just another sign that he wasn't qualified to run a billion-dollar business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's pretty clear from this story that the "CEO" had no business running a half billion dollar business, much less a lemonade stand. It seems he mostly lucked into the business and luck doesn't work as a business plan, especially in a financial business.

<comment><USER11> I had no idea lemonade stands were so complicated! :)

<comment><USER12> It might not be, but incompetence can lead to bad things, like people dying from accidentally being poisoned from lemonade purchased at a stand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is anything but the inside story. The only "insider" information is the one guy who interviewed at Gox and claimed they don't use any VCS (but he made this claim a while ago).

</comment><comment><USER14> When are we going to see a change in the rhetoric? This isn't _Bitcoin 's_ disaster, it's wholly Mt. Gox's.

<comment><USER15> Paraphrasing Clinton, that depends on what you mean by the suffix 's.

It is wholly Mt. Gox's disaster, in the sense that they alone caused it and are responsible for the consequences.

It is Bitcoin's disaster in the sense that these events impact the Bitcoin ecosystem, and are (could be) a disaster for Bitcoin adoption as a whole.

<comment><USER14> +1 purely for self-recognized Clinton-style grammar argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like Karpeles is a guy with a short attention span who looks for low- hanging fruit and ignores the big issues because he may not be able to solve them. I have this issue with projects too, but of course I never ran a 9-figure Bitcoin exchange.

<comment><USER17> Its not the role of the CEO to solve those issues, its his role to make sure he has people who DO know how to solve it working on it, and to make sure they have the resources they need to do it.

He seems better suited for a role as CTO, though even that may be a stretch...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How did Mark Karpeles afford to buy MtGox from McCaleb?

<comment><USER19> A fair amount of BTC and USD together with 12% on the company allied to the fact Jed was kind of expecting the difficulties ahead and wanted out. But I mean OUT, really OUT...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somewhere in an alternate universe, MtGox was run correctly, they brought on litecoin this week and lifted it into high double digits.

</comment><comment><USER21> The biggest red flag for me was Mt.Gox not declaring itself as money transmitter and being fined by the U.S Government as a result.

Knowing it would have a great deal of American users and that it would have to abide to rules, Mt.Gox overlooked this. Everything that followed only validated my decision to stay away.

<comment><USER22> US law is pretty clear on the fact that Mt. Gox is a money transmitter (you don't have to actually transmit money to be one, just things equivalent to money). Whether they are subject to US jurisdiction or not might be debatable (though not really as far as the feds are concerned if they have US customers).

<comment><USER23> Do you know if CCP Games is registered as a money transmitter? Eve ISK has value and is as equivalent to money as bitcoins so they should fall under that umbrella right?

<comment><USER24> ISK is not as equivalent to money as bitcoins. For one, there's no CCP- endorsed way to turn your ISK into money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Am not sure when mobile phone became a requirement- "Bitcoin promises to give a bank account to anyone with a mobile phone, no ID required."

<comment><USER26> Is it possible for me to use my iPhone to make a payment with bitcoins? Does apple allow bitcoin wallets onto the Apple Store?

<comment><USER27> Short answer, no.

Long answer: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095060/apple-removes- blockch...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095060/apple-removes-blockchain- last-bitcoin-wallet-app-from-mobile-store.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even if Bitcoin balances can be made bullet proof, the Achilles heal is that it is not a legal tender, and that there are no market fundamentals to contribute to its exchange rate. My 660 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars, sitting here on the desk, are solidly in my possession. So what? P=0 means they have zero use value other than as a conservation piece. Interestingly, when I show them to people and they handle them (Produced by the British Bank Note Company that makes currency for a lot of countries) they frequently falsely conclude that the are phony. They have a hard time reconciling "real" with "worthless" Whether or not Gox slid into fractional reserve banking is interesting, since if they did (I doubt it) they were basically betting against their depositors. To do that they would have had to taken Bitcoin balances as they came in, sold them for hard currency, wanted for Bitcoin to fall, buy it back, and pocket the difference, at the same time being able to honor withdrawals so there was not a bank run. The way this ended suggests that either something else happened, or they "bet the farm" and shifted virtually all of the Bitcoin deposits at a hard currency Bitcoin price below what it is worth now. The got caught "short" bigtime like in a margin call for stock bought on the margin.</comment>


More than 250 million global events are now in the cloud for anyone to analyze - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/05/29/more-than-250-million-global-events-are-now-in-the-cloud-for-anyone-to-analyze/

<comment><USER2> The _E_ in _GDELT_ in quite misleading, since it's about the media footprint of events not about the magnitude or relevance of the events themselves.

Recommended reading in this context:

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/mapping-kidnappings-in- ni...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/mapping-kidnappings-in-nigeria/)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey- cage/wp/2014/05/2...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey- cage/wp/2014/05/27/covering-only-a-part-of-war/)

<comment><USER3> If anyone feels like playing Hari Seldon, media footprint is a decent first approximation of magnitude of relevance, once you strip media celebrities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great news! I actually worked with Kalev on this in 2007-2009 in collecting the event database at University of Illinois, and it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. Glad to see it finally opened up for general public/researchers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some innovative history teachers should start incorporating this dataset into curricula somehow.</comment>


The Oversimplification of Results and Hard Work - <AUTHOR> https://code.likeagirl.io/the-over-simplification-of-results-and-hard-work-48a78b0ed4a6 <comment><USER2> There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something. I read this and go "yep, luck is a huge factor in whether or not your hard work will pay off".

This doesn't mean you shouldn't work hard — you're essentially playing the lottery otherwise. You also have to decide how much of an asshole you're willing to be (hate to say it, but if you're willing to behave without morals, your chances of making money go up in the short term). I'm personally not wired to behave like an asshole, so it's been hard work and a few lucky breaks that could be parlayed into more opportunities that in turn paid off, sometimes handsomely.

Looking back over 25 years, I can point at exactly where and how I got lucky many times. I needed to be in position to take advantage of those lucky breaks, and I needed to make the most of them (I didn't always succeed at that!), but some essentially stochastic event has almost always been straight- line connected to an eventual outcome.

<comment><USER3> Sure. Luck plays a big part in this. But we also have to acknowledge that someone who carries less privilege than you do is going to have both less of those opportunities to get lucky, and less luck when those opportunities _do_ arrive.

After all, luck favors the privileged.

<comment><USER2> True in general. In my case I have the privilege of being white, male, and being born in the US. Pretty good stuff, but also: homeless, single mom without a high school education, living in crappy parts of the country for that kind of thing (Texas). There are (as the British would say) knock-on effects from that -- it took me a long time to learn effective spending habits. When you're poor, you spend money when you have it, because it will be going away somehow regardless of what you do. Also bad teeth, which, you know, I shouldn't be sensitive about, but I sometimes am. :)

Anyway, you're right, the privileges we're born into affect a lot of potential success. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm trying to give my children all the advantages I didn't have, and genetically they're picking up the ones I did. They'd better damn well solve hunger or figure out world peace! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "I said no because their new team lead said during the interview, "I know > Indians, I have worked with them. One thing I cannot take from Indians is > dishonesty. If you lie to me, I will not bear you. I am only taking you on > the team because the company says you did a very exceptional job!""

This is what people mean by intersectionality; despite having "a Masters in Power Engineering with an honors in Digital Technology Management from a very well known German university", being a woman and being an Indian immigrant means that the odds are stacked against her.

<comment><USER5> I am not sure where you pulled your definition of intersectionality, but doesn't sound like anything related. I am not sure neithee why you added the fact that she was a woman to the equation when the comment clearly was targeted at her race / culture. It's annoying cause it somewhat implies that the million of immigrant men don't go through so similar if not worst experiences

<comment><USER4> That's the opposite of what I was trying to say: that she gets comments targeted at race / culture, _and also_ the discrimination against women in engineering.

<comment><USER5> Again I am not sure that's how social intersectionality is supposed to work. You seems to see it as a relatively simple algebra : women have it worst than men , Immigrant worst than non immigrant so immigrant women have it "super worst". IMHO this is too simplistic, the way social identities blend together can't be predict thsst way. The authors decided to relate her experience as an immigrant, let's just respect that and not try to pull gender into when we d ont have enough information to have a meaningful conclusion

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "No matter how much you try, things will sometimes not work at all, and some other times, things will work with no effort."

If you keep flipping a coin, eventually you'll get 3 heads in a row. That particular instance will be luck. But if you don't flip the coin at all, 3 heads in a row will never happen.

"I got the job."

You also completely changed your attitude in the job interview. There are things in my life that I repeatedly and inexplicably (to me) failed at, and when I changed my attitude, suddenly it started working. Was it randomness, or was it my attitude change? Hard to say.

<comment><USER7> The ability to continue to flip the coin is generally it's own kind of luck, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article makes an extraordinarily valuable point: It's never going to be only about hard work. But as an outside observer I also look at what she's done and think "This is such a good example of perseverance and grit."

As Seneca supposedly said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity". Sometimes opportunity is shy and you have to look a lot longer than you'd prefer. But I fully believe that if someone keeps at it, they can find their luck.

<comment><USER6> > It's never going to be only about hard work.

The hard work idea is another manifestation of the Labor Theory of Value. Working hard at the wrong thing will get one absolutely nowhere. It's really about working smart, not necessarily hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > I am still here at this job, and I love it a lot. I love the people and the > work I do a lot. And my mom is fine. I still am in Germany, I have a > wonderful boyfriend and I live in a very cute house. All of this, despite my > effort, may have never happened, who knows?

So hard work did pay off...

</comment><comment><USER10> Completely relatable about going into interviews stone cold after having an emotional meltdown. I often wonder if this forced emotional distance is favorable to interviewers, and perhaps, the successful interviews i have in this mindset appear to be luck/chance _because_ of the distance itself.

The more emotionally detached i am from an opportunity, the less i am thinking about all the work ive done and the associated emotional/mental stress that surmounted to each moment. As a result i probably appear less desperate, less anxious, more confident, and more easygoing.

I also consider the fact that displaying less emotion is more relatable to men. It's a tough spot to be in, but very interesting to reflect on nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER11> I do believe that hard work is not always sufficient for professional success, but I think the author here actually makes a pretty good case for why hard work pays off. Yes, timing is so important, but being ready to take advantage of when the right time comes can be just as crucial as having "good luck".

The reality is there are always externalities that are not under one's control. That's a given. Being prepared, for the good and the bad, is all we can really do to increase our chances of succeeding.

</comment><comment><USER12> fortune favors the prepared mind. The converse is not guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Luck, privilege, talent[1], and hard work - all typically contribute to success. Any one alone is very unlikely (but not impossible) to lead to it.

Obviously you can only have direct impact on some of these, so it's worth concentrating effort there.

[1] "talent" here is somewhat hand-wavy mix of skill and experience

</comment><comment><USER14> One of things I feel which should be covered in colleges are interviewing skills. Lot of times I see people who have the right mindset but their answers doesn't reflect their abilities too well.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can attest to perseverance and luck having been crucial to my success as a developer. Getting in the door for an internship was a numbers game, as I was still in community college and most companies don't take candidates like that seriously.

After getting in though, personality and hard work factored more in carrying me through to better opportunities (luck was still involved though).

I suspect your journey will be the same from here on out, and you don't seem to lack perseverance and personality. So good luck!

</comment><comment><USER16> The oversimplification of cancer and smoking:

Smoking has been overly simplified to "If you smoke hard, you will achieve cancer." But I've been smoking hard for 20 years and no cancer yet! My grandfather smoked his lungs till he was 82 and never had any cancer either. Whenever I hear that smoking kills I get triggered!

<comment><USER17> Well the P53 gene is kind of know, as long as all your lungs cells' chromosome 17 don't get hit you will be fine. Good luck with your habit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> __I am average at my studies, what seemed to be super easy to my peers seemed strenuous for me.__

This is probably going to controversial, but her core problem seems to be an insufficiently high g-factor. She could have contributed to a prominent open source project like the Linux kernel or the C++ compiler. The only barriers to entry are technical competency and ability to focus.

__Hard work has been overly simplified to "If you work hard, you will achieve your dreams."__

This is true assuming your dreams are calibrated to your capabilities. I presume the problem was her map was not in sync with the territory. Elon Musk can dream about going to Mars. I can't because I simply lack the willpower/drive/intelligence to achieve that.

We need to stop perpetuating the egalitarian fantasy. All men are not created equal.

<comment><USER19> So you think someone with Masters in Power Engineering and Digital Technology Management should contribute to the Linux kernel as a way to improve their chance for work?

Really?

<comment><USER18> No. I simply pointed out that someone with sufficiently high intellect would have found other ways to get a job. Unless she is a statistical anomaly people in her situation would have similar experiences. I see no evidence that she was particularly unlucky, and even if she was ― bad things happen to people all the time.

The central point I was trying to make was that hard work pays off, if you are smart enough.

For example, Jeff Dean currently heads Google Brain despite having not having a PhD in machine learning (his PhD was on whole program optimization of object oriented languages). Or John Carmack starting Armadillo Aerospace would be another example.

I expect to be downvoted again, but I stand by what I said.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Linux laptop distro of choice? - <AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I respect people of all distro beliefs, just looking for a hand finding my own.<p>Since Ubuntu seems to be devotedly jumping the Unity shark and has started releasing software a little closer to beta than I am comfortable with, I'm looking for a new daily-use distro. I have heard good things about Arch and Mint, but I am mostly looking for usable system which emphasizes stuff like having flash and wireless just work and has reasonably modern compiled versions of most packages (the reason debian has not been my default). Bonus if the community already tested this distro for MacBook Airs.<p>(Just running X11 on OSX Lion is not an acceptable solution for me, Lion broke a lot of my X11 stuff and it is very tedious to compile them anew for Lion) <comment><USER2> This is a bit of an unconventional approach, but here's my plan for when I buy a Macbook Air over the summer:

* Keep OS X / X11

* Install a command line Ubuntu VM in Parallels

* Set up the VM as an SSH server and configure public/private key authentication

* Configure any necessary filesystem sharing in Parallels

* Configure OS X to run your Ubuntu VM on startup in headless mode (background / non-graphical)

* Replace your OS X bashrc with 'ssh -Y localhost'; this will cause any terminal you open to run a Linux shell, with the capability to open graphical applications (I'll personally be using TotalTerminal; I'm a sucker for Quake-style terminals)

In the end, you pretty much have the best of both worlds. You get an Apple- polished day-to-day experience (with no hacking required for things like multitouch gestures), with all the power of Linux also at your fingertips.

\---

Though, if that doesn't sound like your thing (or you just really want to be rid of OS X), my original plan before I had that idea was just to go with my standard Kubuntu. Kubuntu is an incredibly polished KDE distro in my opinion (despite its naysayers), and from what I can tell KDE is the only desktop environment which really rivals OS X (except maybe Unity, which I haven't played much with). Given the latest release, now is a better time than ever to get rolling with a *buntu.

Also, no matter which distro you choose, if you're using an Air it seems you'll need this: <http://code.google.com/p/touchegg/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Please do write up how your Air holds up to that kind of abuse! If the system doesn't cry (Airs don't have a lot of hardware in them) this sounds quite excellent.

To be honest though, I don't totally understand how this headless Linux runs graphical Linux in your mac without going into the X11/Lion rage area.

<comment><USER2> Abuse? A headless vm running in the background is hardly a major drain on resources... You'll have to partition off a slice of RAM (half a gig to a gig should suffice), and the CPU will have _a little_ more work to do, but realistically there won't be a significant performance difference.

The magic here is SSH and X forwarding, which basically runs the non-graphical side of the application in the vm and the graphical side in the X client. Here's an example of X forwarding an application remotely: <http://buu700.com/xforward>

If you decide to use this approach, let me know if you need any help with anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, however, maybe this is just me, but Lion wrecked a lot of standard Linux stuff running in X11 (for example, the selector tool in GIMP, it just doesn't work) and under this setup I don't see how you are getting around those issues unless you plan to run OSX Snow Leopard...

<comment><USER2> The point is that it's all running in Linux, not OS X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm happy with Bodhi Linux on my netbook. The initial install is ascetic (which I guess is appropriate), but one can easily pull in other apps. E17 provides a beautiful desktop with low overhead, and Bodhi configures it so that things just work. It's based on Ubuntu LTS releases--a 12.04-based version isn't out yet, but when it is I guess you'll have to decide whether it exceeds your comfort level.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd recommend Slackware, OpenSuSE, or Linux Mint.

Slackware because it really just works perfectly. I mean seriously, it's very stable! I'm using it.

OpenSuSE, because they have been there for a very long time and still offer great support for newcomers and make hardware support easy.

Linux Mint, because it offers even better hardware support, but comes at the cost of stability. Heck it's at least dead easy. A zombie could install it.

If you've no problem with headache go Gentoo/Arch. Not sure if the work you invest is worth it, except you do it to just learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I do enjoy project computers like I do enjoy project cars, my main laptop needs to be a "daily commuter" vehicle: it can't be taxing to drive and it can't be taxing to maintain. I need to have it working in order to do work. What are your recommendations for that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm an Arch Linux user and love it.

<http://www.archlinux.org/> Installation is not for the feint of heart though.

<comment><USER6> I'm gonna add to that 'not for the feint of heart' line. Install a couple linux systems like Debian, Gentoo, or Arch, and it's like riding a bike. It just comes to you after that, so try out Archlinux. It's my personal favorite, and I'm running it just fine on my Macbook. Read the new user guide, and spend the time to experiment and make a system that just works for you. If you're worried about stability don't enable the testing repos. Flash is as simple as pacman -S flashplugin. Actually I think it's time to install Gentoo in VirtualBox and see if I want to switch back to my old love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am using Fedora on my laptop. XFCE desktop is a good environment. rpmfusion provides major "nonfree" packages.

For me everything has worked out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER8> Debian - runs rock solid and doesnt spring surprises with new releases. In the past I tried things like Ubuntu that look and work better out of the box but invariably a year or two later there is some change that left me cringing. Thing with debian is that you pay the upfront cost of customizing / installing codecs once and then from that point onwards things just work.

<comment><USER9> or Crunchbang, which is Debian configured for Openbox instead of Gnome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> After sincerely giving the latest Ubuntu a shot, I've gone back to Fedora (running a pre-release build of 17, KDE) on my Lenovo X220.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tried a few distros before. Each has their pros and cons of course. But settled on Fedora now. Using F16 KDE.

Most things work out of the box, except my Broadcom WIFI, which is solved by RPMFusion.

Running stable. Maybe switching to XFCE for lighter resources usage.

Mint looks really good too. Was using Mint 10 before and it looks really slick.

</comment><comment><USER12> Debian 6.0.4 on a Thinkpad T400. Everything is supported out of the box if you use the non-free installer. This is the first linux I have used where wifi/bluetooth/suspend & hibernate all worked without any problems. It's still running gnome 2.3x, which I don't really mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was really turned off to Debian when I hit "apt-get install firefox" and it gave me ice weasel :/ Computers and religious whackjobs don't get to second guess my command line :/

<comment><USER13> I understand that you feel somewhat violated but before you say anything else let me just put a few facts on the table for you to make a better judgment.

1\. Debian boasts of their totally free system and Debian users would feel equally violated if they think that they are using totally free software only to discover later that it was not the case. Disclaimer: The definition of "free software" is up for debate. I'm not condoning Debian's definition. Just informing.

2\. Every distribution has it's package managers that tweak the packages in the repositories in various ways. Iceweasel is just a slightly tweaked version of Firefox. It's not a completely different package. You have noticed this background play only because they changed the name but it's not in any way different from the way the package managers decide which version of Gimp they put in Stable and what features of such version are to be disabled by default for security reasons or otherwise.

3\. Iceweasel is fundamentally the same as Firefox. Except it's usually a bit older and more stable and goes through more rigorous security testing and maintenance. It also has all trademarks removed, hence the name change.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a very legit counterpoint, but I think both sides could have been made happy if a little prompt had popped up saying "this is non-free software, press Y to get the debian free fork, F to get the non-free Firefox, and n to quit"

<comment><USER12> They actually have the non-free software like dropbox and some firmware. So all you have to do is nano /etc/apt/sources.list and append "contrib non-free" to everything and then apt-get update && apt-get install whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Xubuntu is great, requires low resoucres and all the debian packages you coul ever want!!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm personally quite happy with Fedora on my laptop (2012 Samsung Series 9 15".)

Straight up Gnome 3.X

</comment><comment><USER16> Ubuntu 12.04 LTS seems to install and work on MacBook air</comment>


Slow repairs in Norway hint at troubles as Telsa grows - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-24/norwegians-quietly-revolt-against-tesla <comment><USER2> "But as Norway aims to make all new cars sold in the country battery-powered by 2025—a target it will reach only with lavish subsidies paid for by sales of oil"

Comments like this are unnecessary and continue to perpetuate a false stereotype of Norway as some sort of naive smurf-land where everything is paid for by oil.

In reality electric cars have taken off in Norway due to well coordinated social policy, and a lack of undue corporate influence on government.

Electric vehicles such as Teslas are not in fact subsidised in Norway- however they are exempt from the high taxation levied on fossil driven vehicles.

Norway has high EV ownership due to punitive taxation, not subsidy. You can argue about whether or not this is a good thing.

<comment><USER3> What's the difference functionally between a tax on your competition (all except you) and a subsidy for yourself?

<comment><USER4> For one, in the first case the government revenue should grow rather than decrease.

For two, the taxes on one type of product may be justified by the societal costs of using that product. Compare for example cigarettes and chewing gum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keeping your customers happy is a problem a lot of startups are really bad at. The products may be great, but problems are inevitable. Sucky support might be okay for lifestyle products, but you can't get away with it if your customers really depend on it (cars, bank accounts, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER6> While I've heard that Tesla is a responsible open source software contributor, their service manuals are the most hidden in the auto industry. This problem could be fixed without cost.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my site - Did They Play - <AUTHOR> http://didtheyplay.com/

<comment><USER2> Rather than focusing on the negative aspect of the game (are you an addict? is someone you know lying?), focus on selling it as a meeting tool to know when/where your friends have logged on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this idea. Thanks. I think I'd still keep some of that in there, but more as an aside and not the main focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is actually pretty neat.

Your textboxes on the home page are practically invisible though.

If I don't enter my email address (I shouldn't have to by the way) then I get an error saying that the person wasn't found. The error should say I have to enter my email address, instead it tells me to try again and recheck my spelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'll make the text boxes more visible and work on error handling for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, but I'm guessing a lot of WoW players are going to hate you for it. "My parents found out I play 10 hours a day and now I'm banned from using the computer."</comment>


Munsell Color Space data files - <AUTHOR> http://www.cis.rit.edu/mcsl/online/munsell.php

<comment><USER2> Anyone looking to understand color science should track down Mark Fairchild's book _Color Appearance Models_ , <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470012161/>

The best color science resource I know of online is Bruce MacEvoy's website, <http://handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html> and those interested in the Munsell system in particular should see this page: <http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color7.html>

I've been meaning to finish writing the Wikipedia page about the Munsell system, especially the woefully inadequate history section, for more than two years now, but never get around to it; in any case, feel free to leave feedback about its current state.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Munsell color space is apparently more intuitive than even HSV (Hue is always intuitive but I'm having a hard time predicting the effect of changing Saturation and Value sometimes). It relates strongly to the way we actually perceive color because it's defined in those terms.

I've been meaning to use it for some time but last I checked, it seemed encumbered by patents and that the only way was to use some proprietary programs you have to pay for... I didn't know these data mapping files were available!

<comment><USER2> HSV is not very "intuitive" at all, being an RGB cube, turned on one corner and then squished a bit into a cylinder. It's still dependent on the mostly arbitrary (with respect to human perception) geometry of whatever RGB input/output device is being used.

In HSV, colors of the same "hue" generally have slightly different apparent hues (and the particular difference depends on the RGB space chosen), and worse, difference in hue angle has little correspondence to perceptual difference between hues, so that if you try to "rotate" the hue of an image you distort all of the hue relationships therein.

But you're right that it doesn't butcher hue as badly as the other color attributes, which are not remotely close to perceptually uniform.

* * *

As for Munsell, it's basically just a big look-up table, rather than being defined by formulas (as, e.g., CIELAB or CIECAM02 are). So if you have the OSA renotation data from this link, you pretty much have just as much to go on as anyone does. Figuring out how to interpolate that look-up table isn't totally obvious, I suppose, but it's not the hardest thing in the world either.

If you want to use your computer's existing color space conversion stack with the Munsell data, Bruce Lindbloom made a look-up-table-based ICC profile that will round trip CIELAB to what he calls "UP Lab": <http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?UPLab.html>

<comment><USER3> If you call HSV "not very 'intuitive' at all", I'm curious how you'd call RGB! (For colors other than gray shades and pure red, green or blue)

<comment><USER4> RGB isn't meant to be intuitive, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those asking "What on earth is Munsell Color Space?": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell>

<comment><AUTHOR> I discovered Munsell color space yesterday. It would seem to have amazing applications in graphic design, cartography, etc. I'm surprised it's not more widely recognized.</comment></comment>


File IO in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2014/01/23/file-io-rust/

<comment><USER2> Rust user here, and I'm actually slightly embarrassed by those code examples because I think that our I/O APIs are far too unpolished at the moment. It's long been one of the weakest areas of our stdlib, and though I'm glad that we've finished the enormously-important Runtime-agnostic abstraction mentioned in the article, we still have to put in the legwork to make the lib nice to use.

For example, as shown in the article, the File::open function takes a Path type. The purpose of the Path type is for safe and platform-agnostic path manipulation... but that's really not necessary here. Say you provide a string containing an invalid filepath to the constructor to Path: you're gonna get a runtime failure. This is the same failure mode that you'd get just by providing the string to File::open directly. So ideally the open function would allow you to provide either a Path or a string directly, without forcing you to jump through the hoop. These are the little things that I mean when I say that our I/O APIs haven't yet had the polish they need.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, does Rust have an ability to provide a C++-like implicit conversion from string to Path, so you would only need to write the Path function? Is that kind of thing consistent with Rust's philosophy?

<comment><USER2> Implicit conversions aren't really part of Rust's philosophy, but writing things once is.

At the end of the day any file-opening function is gonna be reduced to passing a string. Currently, to open a file, we take the path that you give us and call .to_c_str() on it, but that method also exists on strings. With Rust's trait system, we could tell the file-opening function to become generic over any type that implements .to_c_str(), and bam: now it works on both Paths and strings.

In practice it might be a bit of work because I don't know if we actually have a trait for the .to_c_str() method, or if it's currently just implemented in an ad-hoc way on types that need it. Also if you think it would be wrong to allow one to attempt to open a file using any type that can be transformed to a C string, then you might want to think about having a tiny wrapper trait with a more semantic name, like .to_path_str(), which would be generic over .to_c_str() and simply call that method on itself. Lots of little details.

<comment><USER4> > Also if you think it would be wrong to allow one to attempt to open a file > using any type that can be transformed to a C string, then you might want to > think about having a tiny wrapper trait with a more semantic name, like > .to_path_str(), which would be generic over .to_c_str() and simply call that > method on itself.

Certainly, and for two reasons. First off, it's weakly typed. If, say, an integer type has a to_c_str() method, it does not mean that it should be possible to use it in File::open(). Secondly, the reliance of File::open() on to_c_str() is an implementation detail. At the end of the day, I can't say that having to write File::open(Path::new("foo.txt")) instead of File::open("foo.txt") is a huge burden. Actually, I'd even go the other way and distinguish between absolute (AbsPath) and relative (RelPath) versions of Path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a follow-up article by the same author on Network Communication and Serialization in Rust: [http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2014/01/28/network- communi...](http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2014/01/28/network- communication-serialization-rust/)</comment>


Tweet my Foursquare check-in, and I'll change your relationship status - <AUTHOR> http://stritar.net/Post/Tweet-my-Foursquare-check-in-and-I-will-change-your-relationship-status.aspx

<comment><USER2> Cool kids are on FourSquare?</comment>


Ask HN: Can Facebook lead to a Minority Report like computer system? - <AUTHOR>

I was reading this article on wired
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/insider-threat/
Since Facebook is about "What's on your mind". A computer system can surely be created to identify sudden behavioral patterns towards violence. Government must be having feed from many other sources to make this more accurate.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> My understanding is that research into this kind of thing has been in the works before Facebook even existed. I can't remember where I read this, but I think it was an article on Wired a year or two ago about the government possessing this kind of technology.

Isn't there a company that has something similar that analyses CTV footage and can detect and react to violent behavior? And another company built technology that can detect gunshots so that police can be deployed to an area quickly.

The future is right under our noses.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am correlating it to Facebook specially because of "What's on your mind?" question that they pose. Psychics are about this only right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think Google might be in the better position. Not only can they see what people search for, they have access to more emails than anyone else. Anyone who gets an email from facebook that includes the text of a facebook post or message could be read by Google.</comment>


Show HN: findthin.gs - Find where to watch tv series & movies (RailsRumble) - <AUTHOR> http://findthin.gs

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys - Our team made findthin.gs in 48 hours last weekend for this years Rails Rumble (<http://railsrumble.com/>). We built it because we're from Australia and sick of finding online services that are region restricted or don't carry what we want.

Thus, we wanted to make it super simple to find where you can legitimately watch tv series and movies online by taking the hard work out of finding where it's viewable.

Our current version only searches Hulu, Netflix (in the US - If anyone has advice on international API's for them, I'd love to know) as well as iTunes. We're planning to support a bunch more services (in the US, Canada, Great Britain and Australia) in the next few weeks.

Also, it's a bit buggy (due to time constraints) and I'm not sure how well it works in non-WebKit browsers, but we'd love to know what you think.

<comment><USER2> You may want to draw inspiration from <http://www.sidereel.com/>. Their interface is not that great. If you guys could improve on that, you may be on to something. Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that is a beautiful design :)

I wrote something similar for <http://giby.tv>, though it's not really a core feature for me and it doesn't recognize geographical restrictions, which seems to be a primary motivation for you guys.

You guys make it look easy, but I think there are a lot of subtle gotchas that others might not realize about this sort of TV data, for example:

Different sources of data (Netflix, Wikipedia, Network sites, iTunes, etc) often disagree about what's correct, and there isn't really an easily accessible canonical source. Sometimes an episode will release weeks earlier in one country than another (e.x. Fox recently delayed a new episode of House, despite it airing weeks earlier on another network in another country). Sometimes iTunes will just give completely incorrect information about dates.

Lots of series names are reused by remakes. String matching by series name will often lead to mismatching, for example, the 1961 series of 'The Defenders' with the 2010 series of the same name. Or the US version of The Office with the UK. Sometimes sources will disambiguate for you and append something like (US) or (UK) at the end. Sometimes they only carry one version and don't bother.

Sometimes a series will rename itself after airing a few episodes/seasons, like 'Gold Rush Alaska' -> 'Gold Rush' after the first season. Not all content providers will have the new name.

And episode titles are even worse. If you thought an episode had a single name that everyone always agreed on, you would be sorely mistaken.

Anyway, if you're interested in this sort of thing you might also be interested in tracking new episodes of tv shows at <http://giby.tv>, or finding links for specific episodes i.e. <http://giby.tv/series/House> or <http://giby.tv/series/The%20Office%20(US)> :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks gibybo - Our motivation for region issues is mostly due to being Australia based and constantly hitting issues with finding content (Our TV networks have a pretty bad rep, to the point where we're often one of the top pirating nations for shows - e.g. [http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/22/australia-top-game-of- thr...](http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/22/australia-top-game-of-thrones- pirating-nation/)). giby.tv looks very cool by the way.

It's indeed quiet a hard problem to solve - and I think it's going to be one of the biggest issues going forward for exactly the reasons you mention. Another one on top of that (another fun one: different punctuation in names, inc. in the year and region suffixes).

There are a bunch of data sources we tap into / plan on tapping into the near future that we hope will help solve these issues even more.

(The two of us developers work on music stuff which face very similar issues - the annoyance of dealing with album, track and artist names across services is a constant frustration).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking about trying to make a similar tool. I got the idea when I was trying to decide in which format I wanted to buy the complete series of The Wire. I found it too hard to compare prices between all the different sources, including DVD. Google's Shopping results are only for the DVD format. I would incorporate prices to make it more useful. Moki.tv was a good app that was pretty similar. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/moki-tv-is-the-ultimate- per...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/moki-tv-is-the-ultimate-personalized- guide-to-whats-streaming-on-the-web/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm from germany so i cant say nothing about the service itself, but i love the coverimage-animation. It works great in this context!

Also you have a small code-glitch above the logo? or is it intentional? you never know these days

<comment><AUTHOR> If it's an ruby hash, that's unintentional. I changed one of the I18n paths in the app at 5am (the competition finished at 8am for us) and changed it in most places around the site. I missed the home page (since it uses image replacement) but in some configurations (e.g. I think Retina MBPs in Chrome) it shows up still.

We can't modify code until post-judging, so it has to wait until then to be fixed. And thanks, the cover animation was the work of our wonderful designer, @levibuzolic on twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't see the highlight on the dropdown when trying to change where I'm from - it flickers very fast and then just looks like white on white. (Chrome 21/linux/crappy ATI card, could easily be their drivers).

<comment><USER7> Ah I didn't have a chance to test the site on Linux -- once the Rails Rumble comp is over I'll be sure to see what I can do to fix it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the design. Did you guys use any framework for the design, or is it all you guys?

<comment><USER7> No framework. As Sutto said, we used SASS and Compass to make cross browser attributes faster to write, but that's about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Check out <http://theat.me/>. Something very similar and 'designy'. And they also index movies on crackle etc. A lot of free to watch sources. (usually only if you are in the US though ...)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is that 3d scrolling thing WebGL?

<comment><USER7> Just CSS3 3d transforms. Should be hardware accelerated on most browsers / platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is that only me that felt bad when i see that i have to pay to watch?</comment>


Show HN: An Icon placeholder service - <AUTHOR> http://icon.now.sh <comment><USER2> An http request for every icon???</comment>


Fedora 15 KDE: When New Old Is Better Than New New. - <AUTHOR> http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/05/fedora-15-kde-when-new-old-is-better.html <comment><USER2> Title is link bait.

While it's a decent review of Fedora KDE, every comparison to newer distros is bad... It takes more memory, etc etc, with the possible exception of copying Win7 on how it handles icons for programs that aren't running. (And if I'm understanding it right, didn't OSX do that first with 'keep in dock'?)

<comment><AUTHOR> @wccrawford: "New Old" means KDE 4.6 on Fedora, compared to "New New" of GNOME 3. Will you disagree that KDE version is slightly better than GNOME 3, for example because it is more polished? I am not aware about OSX, never worked with it. Maybe they have this feature for longer than Win7.

<comment><USER2> I haven't used Gnome 3, so I can't comment on that.

I'd hardly call KDE4 old, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> KDE4 is relatively old compared to GNOME 3. At least, Fedora has several versions with KDE4 already. And only very fresh one with GNOME 3.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


5 Things You Might Not Know About IntelliJ - <AUTHOR> http://nightlight.conductor.com/5-things-you-might-not-know-about-intellij/

<comment><USER2> The HTML one was a revelation to me.</comment>


Facebook co-founder Saverin: I don't resent Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/29/tech/social-media/facebook-saverin-zuckerberg/ <comment><USER2> Of course he doesn't. His "ex-friend" made him filthy reach by betting his father's pocket change!</comment>


Instagram's Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/technology/instagram-cofounders-resign.html <comment><USER2> Posting anon.

In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.

To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.

Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.

As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.

That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.

<comment><USER3> A lot of commenters seem to be bemoaning this poster as missing out on endless riches. Why? we already know that being super rich doesn't really make you all that much happier compared to being rich (and if you are a programmer in work in then you are pretty rich).

I feel that they missed out more on the rocketship journey of being on a startup. And even then that's not everyone's cup of tea.

<comment><USER4> "and if you are a programmer in work in then you are pretty rich"

Incidentally, I'm not sure if this statement has any validity outside US. I wonder why that is.

<comment><USER5> DELETED For asking a question but getting too many downvotes

<comment><USER6> In many cases it's because that's what we demand of them. The "you get what you pay for" line works well here, we demand low cost so they have low time to build anything right. Long term impact is that they never fully developed into seasoned and deeply skilled staff. Then we complain about quality, its kind of funny in a sad way...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First official statement:

[https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement- from-k...](https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-from-kevin- systrom-instagram-co-founder-and-ceo/)

> _We're planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and > creativity again. Building new things requires that we step back, understand > what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that's what we > plan to do._

h/t to Bloomberg's @sarahfrier, who also says this:

[https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1044419256383729664](https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1044419256383729664)

> _My sources say the Instagram founders are leaving after increased tension > with Mark Zuckerberg over the direction of the product. IG culture > /priorities very different from FB. See my April story for background_

<comment><USER8> From later on in the Twitter thread:

> _Without the founders around, Instagram is likely to become more tightly > integrated with Facebook, making it more of a product division than a > company within Facebook, sources say_

Given the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current climate, I really hope they avoid this for their own sake.

<comment><USER9> Curious as to what you mean by 'the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current climate.'

<comment><USER10> Not OP, but I interpret "brand tax" as the opposite of the halo effect. FB's brand is tarnished, and arguably hinders rather than helps w/ IG brand perception.

<comment><USER11> I'm somewhat guilty of this. I really love whatsapp even though it's owned by Facebook. I loathe Facebook.com

I left hipstagram a long time ago, it made me feel anxious and addicted.

Network effects though. As long as people aren't quitting as villages, Facebook network effects will keep them alive for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, there's more than a 50% probability that they're leaving because of conflicts with Facebook, the privacy issues and the push to add more and more ads everywhere. If this were the case, I hope they'd speak up sooner than later. We need voices from within FB and its acquisitions to tell everyone how messed up things are behind the scenes.

But you have to give credit to how the company started and how it's been running all these years. Instagram is still flourishing (and grew in the face of competition from Snapchat, even by copying its features and making it better) and seems like a nicer group of communities with a lot less of the nastiness that's seen on Facebook (I don't have much first hand experience, but do see some feeds on the web). That's not easy to cultivate, and for reasons I haven't read about or examined, the Instagram users have self- selected such a group to be in.*

Here's hoping the founders start something new and fresh, far from privacy invasive platforms.

*: I'd be interested in any writings about how these communities developed to be what they are.

<comment><USER13> lolwut?

Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the same. It doesn't even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved. It may very well be the most toxic property out there. It's hard to imagine something more phony, optimized soley as a way to waste your time tapping away giving "likes". Watching somone use Instagram is one of the most depressing things I can imagine in terms of human social interaction.

IG was an app designed to share photos in the moment. It was a digital Polaroid. That was a pretty cool idea. That core feature is essentially gone and so is the community around it.

IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image macro hybrid abominations designed to get likes. I don't even really know what you call them. They aren't videos, or flops or even memes. The best phrase I can think of is digital media noise. IG is like some kind of weird digital static. If you wanted to broadcast incompressible nonsense into outspace the best way to do it would be broadcast the explore tab on IG.

<comment><USER14> > 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace > hybrid abominations designed to get likes.

IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.

<comment><USER15> My instagram feed is filled almost exclusively with cat photos, its a good time kill...

<comment><USER16> "Cat photos"? Right...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's an offtopic observation. This article (from the _New York Times_ ) denoted the names of the Instagram founders as "Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger..."

The _Wall Street Journal_ has a corresponding article about this story. In that article, the Instagram founders' names are written, "Messrs. Systrom and Krieger..."

Despite frequently reading both papers, I can't recall ever seeing "Messrs" before. I thought it was a typo at first; turns out it's a formal way to refer to two or more men instead of saying Mr. several times. This isn't germane to the story at hand at all, but I found it to be an interesting and educational part of reading both articles about the same story.

<comment><USER18> Specifically, it's an abbreviation of the French _messieurs_ , which is just multiple misters. Maybe it's more formal now, but it was ordinary and frequently used in the past in both French and English writing. (Obviously, still quite commonly used in, um, French today.)

E.g., English [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BMessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMESSRS%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmessrs%3B%2Cc0)

French [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=19&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BMessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMESSRS%3B%2Cc0)

<comment><USER19> As a French, it feels weird to learn something about my language on an English site :|. I don't remember seeing it written in French. Or I saw it, understood the meaning and forgot.

<comment><USER20> That's because it's largely unused nowadays, the current abbreviation being MM. (which doubles the M. – not Mr! – abbreviation for _monsieur_ ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd venture that they're extremely wealthy, still friends, and decided it's time to go have fun rather than prescribe this to Facebook's ethical challenges like the article would have you believe.

<comment><USER7> Why would you guess that when a FB spokesperson doesn't have a prepared comment about this massive change in leadership?

<comment><USER22> How many pre-announcements must a person make before they are sufficiently prepared for an actual announcement? This is already a pre-announcement of the announcement of the resignation, because this info is leaked from within Instagram

<comment><USER7> According to the article, this info was leaked to the reporters from several people who knew about it, and the co-founders have already notified Instagram's leadership team. It's not just anyone, but two co-founders of one of the world's most prominent tech companies. If they are indeed leaving "just for fun", presumably they care enough about their company and their colleagues to have given an explanation for their unexpected, simultaneous departure. I would also assume they aren't naive enough to think this wouldn't be leaked before an official press release.

<comment><USER22> I don't understand, what could the founders have done differently? At some point they must make the initial step to notify leadership that they are leaving. This the step that was leaked. Were they supposed to write their own press releases before they even told anybody that they were resigning?

<comment><USER7> You don't think the co-founders of a company, who are leaving for purportedly benign/positive reasons, owe it to their company to have a prepared explanation? Given that the sudden resignation of a founder -- nevermind _both co-founders at the same time_ \-- is generally seen as worrying news?

edit: fixed punctuation. By "prepared explanation" I don't mean a formal press release, but a reason (even if vague) that can be publicly disclosed, even before the official announcement, so it doesn't look like the founders are jumping ship for bad/antagonistic reasons.

<comment><USER23> why on earth would they owe anything to the company?

<comment><USER24> Jesus Christ.

Because people worked under and followed the for the better years of their life to make them rich?

Because the people you work with are more important than the work you do?

Because when you form a relationship with someone, contractually, business, or otherwise, you do, in fact owe them something, be it money, respect, or even some simple common decency.

<comment><USER23> if you work for someone, do you owe them anything? beyond a customary standard of duty and notice of departure from employment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what's Facebook's move after Instagram becomes stale and no longer "cool". It seems to me that the popularity of social networks are cyclical, and there's very little that a company can do to satiate a user's appetite for something new. That's before we discuss future regulatory troubles Facebook might face.

What future revenue streams does Facebook have? Are they even capable of creating something new that users love? As far as I can tell, they haven't created any popular products outside of Facebook version 1.0.

Out of all the major tech companies, Facebook's position seems the least stable IMO.

<comment><USER26> They have over 2 billion monthly active users. This is a global penetration rate that is the best in the world. They have done something that no other company in the world has done. They are relevant to basically the vast majority of all Internet users in the world. To say they are the least stable or that their power over most humans is waning is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

To put it in perspective, they would need to lose 3/4 of their users to reach Twitter levels. Sure, Hacker News has loads of people that hate Facebook, but don't be fooled by the HN bias here. Also, all the armchair CEOs here would do anything to get even 1% of Zuckerberg's success. I don't think Facebook is going anywhere soon.

<comment><USER27> Windows has seen an officially reported install base as high as 1.5B. This was a few years ago; their numbers have taken a hit recently.

Considering the average annual revenue per U.S. Facebook user is ~$20, startlingly less in other countries, arguably Microsoft, not Facebook, is the more interesting company. Nearly as many active users as Facebook, but _substantially_ more revenue per user (~$50-$150 for an OEM key? Add in office subscriptions, enterprise users, oh my) and substantially more "eye-time" (monthly active? once per month? ha. you used Windows the entire time you were on the PC). Arguably. I don't want to argue it. It's just a thought and it's not the point.

No one looks at Microsoft and thinks "they're going to absolutely dominate the home computing OS market in 2030." They owned the _planet_ and they threw it away. At best they'll remain a second-rate player in the cloud market, riding the ripples of their 90s enterprise clients until those die out as well.

Meanwhile Apple and Google ate their cake. No one saw that coming in 2001. Wait, the company that nearly went bankrupt and now makes that really bad MP3 player, and... Google who? Hold on let me AltaVista that. The companies that are, today, worth almost nothing are worth a combined $2T in just 17 years? What the hell happens to the US Dollar in the next decade?!

Shit changes, and it changes overnight. Sometimes literally, most of the time just "faster than you expect". The only thing you can bet on is that "active users" means about as much as the moon landing conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER28> > Considering the average annual revenue per U.S. Facebook user is ~$20, > startlingly less in other countries, arguably Microsoft, not Facebook, is > the more interesting company.

Your points are all valid. However, you're comparing Apples to Oranges. MSFT makes a large chunk of their revenue from Enterprise customers. I don't think it's fair to put the two companies in the same category.

Your larger point however, I def agree. Microsoft diversified itself, and Facebook will eventually too.

As the saying goes "This too shall pass".

<comment><USER29> > MSFT makes a large chunk of their revenue from Enterprise customers

Now they do. Got out of the consumer business like a scalded cat, because consumers are fickle and quick to anger.

Now, perhaps we could have a word from HiSpace's Tom, or whatever his Ozymandias was ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> According to WSJ's report:

Facebook's Chris Cox has been put in charge of all the company's apps now.

When Ms. Sandberg went unmentioned in a major reshuffling of Mr. Zuckerberg's top product executives in May, the moves caused former employees and executives to speculate that she had been displaced as the second-most- powerful figure by Chris Cox, a close friend of Mr. Zuckerberg, who had been elevated to a new role in charge of all the company's apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

link: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a- ga...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-gale-of-bad- news-at-facebook-1536085230)

</comment><comment><USER31> As a non VC, non founder, the only surprise to me is that anyone stays beyond contracted minima. The first, assuming you had taken a role as a VC, you'd want out to go do the VC thing somewhere else. The second, you would be watching your baby pimped out and sold for drugs on the streets, as things you had no desire to see were done, in the name of profit.

<comment><USER32> Or #3, they saw their baby get better and better, while remaining independent and equipped with 1000x more resources to do what they want, on top of getting a nice job and being paid.

<comment><USER31> Yes. The "I'm happy, this isn't a crisis" outcome is always possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Instagram often seemed to have its own way of doing things and its own aesthetic within Facebook, one that the founders championed. Recently, however, the winning strategy for Instagram seems to be copying features from Snapchat, and abandoning the style that got it to its first 100 million users. I can imagine that being frustrating.

<comment><USER34> Instagram hasn't copied from Snapchat in a very long time. Have you used Snapchat recently? The UX is completely different and awful now.

Instagram is innovating with new features like Video Calling and Live Video that Snapchat lacks.

<comment><USER35> Instagram Stories felt like a very obvious copy of Snapchat, and it wasn't that long ago.

<comment><USER36> They may have initially copied Snapchat, but they've built on the feature and made it much more engaging to use than the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Without being too careless[1] I think it is plausible to assume they and their children will not "have" to work again. The "have" is in scare quotes because, in my experience with tech people I know who have 'banked out' of the workforce, working on something is often more rewarding, over a longer term, than sitting around consuming entertainment while eating and drinking. So nearly everyone I know who became multi-millionaires or beyond have ended up still doing something interesting with their lives.

So stepping down from FB is kind of a no brainer, especially if it becomes less "fun" due to issues raised by other people. Building stuff is fun, cleaning up a mess, is not fun. Trying to do stuff while the mess is getting worse and worse around you, that is pure torture in my opinion.

[1] There is a sad track of people who have made millions and then lost it all due to poor choices.

[2] Billionaires actually -- [https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin- systrom/#3b19b6447396](https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin- systrom/#3b19b6447396) \-- or not -- [https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity- business/...](https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity- business/tech-millionaire/mike-krieger-net-worth/)

</comment><comment><USER38> My first reaction was the parallel to Jan Koum's unexpected exit over Facebook's ethics; good to see the article ends with that story.

After Google's recent Dragonfly resignations, this might be the new standard for tech companies.

<comment><USER39> > this might be the new standard for tech companies.

Unfortunately, I believe this is just hopeful ambition that won't become a reality. The majority of folks I meet in tech tend to be a paycheck or two away from financial catastrophe and generally shy away from rocking the boat. A small percentage have their house in order, and those are the folks that have the luxury to resign so quickly when they have moral/ethical objections.

<comment><USER40> I was shocked to discover that many people making salaries amongst the highest percentile in the world are indeed a few months without paychecks away from being in an unpleasant financial situation.

I'm not too sure what the overarching reasons for that are, but my guess is that lifestyle inflation is very real, financial education isn't very common, and many people focus on the wrong abstractions (ie decision making starting with "I make $200k a year, I can afford this!" rather than "what's my burn rate?")

<comment><USER41> That, and rent that's well over 50% of your monthly income, to have a 1 bedroom apartment miles from anything.

<comment><USER42> No programmer working at A-list Bay Area companies should be earning so little that a 1 bedroom anywhere needs to be 50% of their gross income.

1 bedrooms in Mountain View are going for 3-4K/month. No programmers at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook are making less than $100k. Starting salaries (not counting bonuses and RSUs) are between $120k and $150k.

NIMBY-ism shovels money towards landlords, no doubt, but Bay Area programmers are still very rich.

<comment><USER41> Gross pay is almost totally irrelevant, as are RSUs prior to IPO, but to use those numbers:

Your _top_ number, 150k, at 30% taxes (roughly expected in this area) gives you 105k. That's 8.75k/month, which is pretty darn close to half of your listed Mountain View price... and Mountain View isn't even the most expensive.

<comment><USER42> You said "well over 50% of monthly income", which, in the US, is generally taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing costs, because of the FHA's ancient "spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, or you're considered cost burdened" rule of thumb.

If you had said "nearly 50% of post-tax salary", I wouldn't have quibbled. My point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conveniently located 1 bedroom is likely to be what the FHA would consider cost burdened, unless they're working for well below market rate at a startup (and thus are, in my opinion, being exploited by their employer).

Every company I mentioned is public, and RSUs are extremely relevant for total compensation analysis at these companies.

<comment><USER41> You can't pay rent with pre-tax money, so I don't see how that can in any way be assumed to be related to "% of monthly income" that comes out of net pay.

Maybe it's common in financial circles? But most people I know balance their books based on their take-home, not gross.

<comment><USER42> If I tell you "I make $100,000/year", do you interpret that statement as "my after tax income is $100k"? Most Americans don't.

Americans generally talk about income in terms of gross. This is very disorienting for people from cultures where "income" as a solitary noun generally refers to post-tax income, but arguing with culture isn't likely to be very fruitful.

It is absolutely true that this is rarely useful for making budgeting decisions, because you have to come up with some inaccurate assessment of after tax net, which is especially tricky with simultaneously progressive and regressive income tax regimes like the US system for high earners.

The cultural variation around internalizing taxes is even more obvious for transactional taxes, where most of Europe lists prices inclusive of VAT but the US lists prices before sales tax; the US affection for communicating costs while ignoring tax and then expressing distress when they finally appear is widespread.

It doesn't sound like we really disagree on much at the object level, here, we're disagreeing on semantics (and, I suspect, on tone).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I know i'm wrong, and doing a misjudgement here but the fact is "Companies like facebook don't need founders, they will eventually make the product that people might use in everyday life, they will do it anyhow; by either copying that product or to buy it. Remember that the 'poke your friend' feature is only unique from facebook everything else is someone else's things"

this evil face of facebook will hurt more and more companies day after day and in a result a chain reaction that will affect the life of general people.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's time to relisten ALL past podcast interviews of kevin systrom [https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP](https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP) and mike krieger [https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv](https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv) :)

</comment><comment><USER45> I find Instagram fascinating, because on the one hand it's one of my favourite social network apps, but on the other hand I kind of feel like they don't know what people like about it and are trying to kill it... Perhaps I'm just weird though and other people like the direction they're going in?.

A good example of what I'm talking about is the whole recent _you 've seen all the posts you care about, keep scrolling for things you're not interested in from people you don't care about_ "feature" that popped up a few weeks ago. They just seem to be incredibly determined to push the content of users I don't care about on me, when what I think made Instagram so great was that I could carefully curate what I follow to only see stuff by profiles I'm interested in... And what's the deal with not having a native iPad app? That's just insane!

I wonder how much of this is pushed on them by Facebook, and whether that had something to do with them leaving?

</comment><comment><USER46> WSJ source: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with- instagra...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-instagram- prompted-co-founders-departure-1537905005) .

</comment><comment><USER47> Is there any open-source, federated alternative to Instagram? Could Mastodon be used the same way?

</comment><comment><USER48> Whatsapp first, then Instagram, something is going over there, who is next and why?

</comment><comment><USER49> rest and vest!

non-story

</comment><comment><USER50> This is interesting, considering Snapchat teams up with Amazon to Offer Image- Based-Shopping today. [https://www.snap.com/en- US/news/](https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/)

<comment><USER51> How is this related?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Kevin and Mike have my utmost respect for everything they have done for the world. Thank you so much for truly believing in something and giving it all up for that.</comment>