One year with the Truly Ergonomic keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thecybershadow.net/2015/05/25/one-year-with-the-truly-ergonomic-keyboard/ <comment><USER3> I've been using a TEK for a month but in the end I returned it.

I'm quite susceptible to RSI but it seems that, unlike others, my weak fingers are actually my thumbs instead of the pinkies, and this keyboard puts heavy emphasis to press modifier keys (enter, backspace - EDIT: ctrl, alt, etc were included in the list by accident) with the thumb. Within a couple of days I felt sore and could barely move my fingers. I then used the remapping software to move all modifiers to their usual places (as much as possible) and the situation did really improve.

However, I frequently switch between the desk and a laptop and always had to waste a couple of minutes to adjust to the different layout. The TEK _is_ slightly more comfortable but not enough to justify its high price for me, that's why I ended up returning it.

Additionally, the return process is long and tedious since they have a tendency to ignore the first few requests and they seem to respond only if put under pressure. I managed to ship back mine last week, after a monthlong attempt at gaining their attention.

I tried many keyboards during these years and in the end I think that switching to a mechanical keyboard (Unicomp EnduraPro) and from QWERTY to Colemak did 90% of the job for me. After that the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

<comment><USER4> Protip: get a keyboard with macro keys and set them up as modifiers or as modified keys. It helps.

<comment><USER5> Can you give an example? Are macro keys used for doing several keystrokes with one key?

<comment><USER4> Some razer keyboards and corsair keyboards have them. You program them using the software to whatever keystrokes you want. When pressed they do them. For example, I have one set to do $. Another to ctrl,alt,del.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is my current keyboard/trackball setup. I have been tweaking my configuration for a number of years and this is the most comfortable option I have found for my particular body ratios. I think the best layout may vary somewhat from person to person.

[https://plus.google.com/107061065248858824293/posts/S7X6x9kA...](https://plus.google.com/107061065248858824293/posts/S7X6x9kAuxH?pid=6153215542436554354&oid=107061065248858824293)

<comment><USER7> Geez you look close to launch. Taking preorders?

<comment><USER8> I read your comment before clicking the link. Cracked me up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best keyboard hack I will ever recommend is to remap:

        CapsLock+hjkl -> the arrows

        CapsLock+Spacebar -> Return

        CapsLock+ui -> PgUp and PgDn

        CapsLock+yo -> Backspace and Delete

That's the best way to reach control keys, imho.

<comment><USER10> No really obvious way to do that in OS X (Mountain Lion)

<comment><USER11> Try Karabiner: [https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/](https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/)

The amount of remapping options beats anything else I've tried on any operating system. I'm stuck on OS X for now because of this program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use the Microsoft Natural keyboard, and this is how I solve the mouse distance problem for myself:

[http://i.imgur.com/3OMpedd.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3OMpedd.jpg)

I just remove the numpad keys, and then tape my ergo trackball down to it. Works like a charm and allows me to keep my wrists in neutral position at all times.

I've definitely struggled off and on with RSI over the years and this book has been really helpful in keeping me limber:

[http://www.amazon.com/Conquering-Carpal-Syndrome- Repetitive-...](http://www.amazon.com/Conquering-Carpal-Syndrome-Repetitive- Injuries/dp/1572240393/)

The other thing that's helped me is going to the gym and doing light wrist curls (and reverse wrist curls) at least once a week.

<comment><USER13> Interesting solution, will give it a try.

Microsoft has two good keyboard without numpad: [http://www.cnet.com/products/microsoft-sculpt-ergonomic- desk...](http://www.cnet.com/products/microsoft-sculpt-ergonomic-desktop/) [http://www.trustedreviews.com/Microsoft-Arc-Keyboard- review](http://www.trustedreviews.com/Microsoft-Arc-Keyboard-review)

My plan is to invest some time into learning VIM keys and migrate to Arc.

<comment><USER12> Ya, vim bindings help a lot too. I even use VIM to do everything in the browser (vimium), and that helps cut down on mouse usage a ton.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A truly ergonomic keyboard, in my mind, would be one on which the palms are facing each other like holding a tree trunk. My hands were not meant to be lay flat on a surface. Also, smartphones should have physical keyboards on the the back- blindly operable.

<comment><USER15> Kinesis has an accessory[1] for their Freestyle keyboard that does just this.

[1]: [https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-ascent- accessor...](https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-ascent-accessory/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I switched from Cherry G80-3000 with Querty where I was very fast, to a Kinesis with Dvorak. I had some RSI problems so I made a very hard cut switching both keyboard and layout at the same time. The keys of the Kinesis (soft click) are not as good as the Cherry's (hard click), but, well, the world is not ideal.

Anyway, the effect was great! I was so slow for the first few weeks that I cursed at the long identifiers I had introduced in my C programs. :-) But even after some years, I never had any serious RSI since, and I am back to the speed of typing as before.

The funny thing is, I never stopped typing Querty. I use a normal Querty laptop at home and a Dvorak Kinesis at work. Keyboards+layouts are so different that I absolutely cannot type Dvorak on a laptop nor Querty on a Kinesis. They are different enough so I very rarely mistype the wrong layout. I switch without thinking, because they are so different. And maybe the constant switching keeps my hands busy in different ways, contributing to not having any problems with RSI since.

<comment><USER17> Confused because AFAIK "The top row of keys, including the escape key and function keys, are small soft-touch keys with membrane dome switches. The remaining keys are standard size and each has its own Cherry MX brown key switch, providing a tactile feel, but no click. "

Maybe you just like blues? I love my browns on the Filco and Leopold...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had severe right arm problems and in addition to getting treatment from doctors was looking for every way to relieve the issues in my workspace.

I had a friend let me borrow a [https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage- pro-for-pc-mac/](https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage-pro-for-pc-mac/) and it took a while to adapt to it but it ended up helping. I didn't want to keep it indefinitely so while I thought about buying one for myself I wanted to try something different. I did some research online and ended up buying a Truly Ergonomic 229. I liked the keyboard layout for the most part, especially the most used keys being on the central line, but there were a couple annoyances (top-left escape/tilde/1 order I never got used to and always typoed). The major problem to me was what seemed like a bonus at first: it's too compact. While it's easy to pack away in a laptop bag, it was impossible for me to get an ergonomic arm position. My forearms were always angled inwards with my hands and wrists angled out. This ended up exacerbating my right arm problem and I had to stop using it. Unfortunately I really wanted it to work and had kept at it past the refund period so it's just sitting in a drawer now waiting for me to throw it up on ebay.

If the [http://www.keyboard.io/](http://www.keyboard.io/) models were available I would have tried one of them next but I ended up going with a Microsoft Sculpt [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CYX26BC/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CYX26BC/) since the price was right after blowing the money on the TEK and I couldn't justify shelling out for the Kinesis now. I am still using the Sculpt and would definitely recommend it. I would also recommend the Kinesis if you're willing to spend the extra dough and don't mind (or appreciate) the archaic looks.

</comment><comment><USER19> I happily used a Microsoft Ergonomic for a long time, but started looking for something else a couple years ago so I didn't have to hold my mouse so far out. Basically I needed something without a numpad.

Truly Ergonomic was my first choice. I adapted to it easily enough, but pretty soon I started feeling pain in the backs of my hands---the same pain I feel after using a non-ergonomic keyboard for too long. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I do recall feeling that the TE was too "square" so that my wrists had to bend the same way they would for a regular keyboard.

The refund took a long time, and I had to follow up a couple times to finally get it.

After that I switched to a Kinesis Advantage, and the adjustment was a bit harder but still not too bad. I'm very happy with it and still using it now.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone else clicking on this because of their wrist/hand/arm pain, I would highly recommend

[http://www.amazon.com/Conquering-Carpal-Syndrome- Repetitive-...](http://www.amazon.com/Conquering-Carpal-Syndrome-Repetitive- Injuries/dp/1572240393/ref=pd_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0HGSA6YSAM1QQ7TZ1N8W)

which is a series of very simple exercises.

I have found more relief in daily stretches outlined in the above book then the keyboards I use: kinesis advantage, placed on my lap, at work (8 hours a day) and Truly Ergonomic at home on weekends

<comment><USER21> Paul Egoscue's books "Pain Free" and "Pain Free at your PC" are also very good. I'm really looking forward to Kelly Starrett's "Deskbound" to come out too.

<comment><USER6> It looks like the author's name is Pete Egoscue

<comment><USER21> You are correct sir!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use two apple bluetooth keyboards and some software called Karabiner that lets the keyboards share modifier keys like shift, option, control, and command. My hands tend to be 2 feet apart most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Been using Kinesis Freestyle 2 Mac[1] & bluetooth variant along with a Kensington Trackball[2] for just over 3 years and I'll never go back. I switched keyboards one week and then switched to the trackball and started using my left hand for the mouse the next.

Overall it took a week to feel comfortable with each and another week after that to be back up to my previous typing / mousing abilities (the week where both were new was particularly amusing - I could barely highlight text at first). Now I can switch between standard keyboards and right or left handed mousing / trackball / trackpads with ease.

Background: At my last job I developed tendonitis in my wrist after some particularly grueling work weeks using the Apple wireless keyboard and trackpad. I think the trackpad is what really did it - the flexed position it encourages your wrist to be in really couldn't be ergonomically worse.

[1] - [https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-blue- mac/](https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-blue-mac/) [2] - [http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Orbit-Trackball-Mouse- Scrol...](http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Orbit-Trackball-Mouse- Scroll/dp/B002OOWB3O/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1432655792&sr=8-3&keywords=kensington+trackball)

<comment><USER24> I have used a Logitech Trackman Wheel for the past 15 years. My experience mirrors yours: I had to force myself to use it for the first two weeks. The following 178 weeks you would have had to pry it from my cold, dead, fingers.

It is however a thumb-ball, not a palm-ball like like Kensington, and the trick to efficient usage is to set the sensitity to maximum. Really, try it.

Logitech never understood the greatness of the device and they have slowly phased them out. They only sell the wireless version now. I bought a couple of the wired model on sale once and I am now down to my last two. The switches wear out, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been using an ErgoDox for 5 months and I regularly switch between it and a laptop. Switching isn't too bad, especially since I have ctrl bound to the caps lock key on both.

</comment><comment> rob-alarcon Does anyone has experience with the matias pro? [http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/](http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/)

<comment><USER26> What about the keys? I was thinking of getting a mechanical keyboard but with shared space the noise would be a problem. I have heard a lot about the cherry switches but not about matias, so wondering about that.

It seems that the ergonomics is a bit touch and go by person. Its difficult for me to get these keyboards so I want to make a safer choice. Anyone has a thought if I should try for a more ergonomic keyboard for comfort or getting a mechanical one should be first priority.

<comment><USER27> I don't have first-hand experience yet, but Matias claims to have "world's quietest mechanical keyswitches": [http://matias.ca/switches/quiet/](http://matias.ca/switches/quiet/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thanks to this article, I've become aware of both KeyMouse [0] and Keyboard.io [1]; The KeyMouse seems like it'd be something better for me - no need to move my hand away from keyboard to operate the mouse.

[0] [http://www.keymouse.com/](http://www.keymouse.com/) [1] [http://www.keyboard.io/](http://www.keyboard.io/)

</comment><comment><USER29> One way to minimize the distance between the keyboard and the mouse was to switch the mouse from the right side to the left. This, of course, means that I had to learn to use the left hand for mouse, but this actually helped more than anything else, since reaching for and moving it has been straining on my wrist. Another benefit is that it freed my right hand to occasionally write something on paper.

<comment><USER30> I've solved that problem by using a USB ThinkPad keyboard, so I have a mouse on home row and mouse buttons just under the spacebar.

That also puts all the usually distant keys much closer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I tried to like Truly, but the lack of nordic layout was too much and I essentially gave up using it. Also, its version on mechanic keys were pretty noisy and somewhat too resistant for me. Key layout felt great, but like with other too different layouts, it is hard to move between normal keyboards and this.

These days I alternate between Macbook internal keyboard, Topre Realforce 88 and Kinesis Freestyle. I have grown used to OS X touch gestures, so I have external magic trackad.

With freestyle, I can keep the pad between two halves within easy reach. For Topre, I'm thinking of bying one for each side, but I'm leaning on getting this instead: [http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard/uk-ergo-pro-quiet-pc- ergo...](http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard/uk-ergo-pro-quiet-pc-ergonomic- keyboard.asp)

This has mechanical keys (which I prefer now thanks to Topre, though not its variable force for weaker and stronger fingers) and Freestyle's split. Its maker is relatively unknown, but I've taken risks like this before ;)

</comment><comment><USER32> Articles like this validate my decision to just use a standard QWERTY keyboard. I learned to type at age 10 and type an average of 142 WPM with a max of 163 WPM.

OP doesn't say what kind of speed he is getting on these alternate keyboards with alternate layouts but I have to believe it is nowhere near justifying the hobbling you'll get when using a regular keyboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. keybr says that my speed is 97 on average and 150 max. IIRC my average was below 90 a year ago, but that was measured through some other method. I type a lot more code than English prose, though, and English is my third language.

That switching away from QWERTY will give you a massive speed boost is a myth. Although the world's fastest typists do not use QWERTY, the main benefit of alternate keyboard layouts is not speed, it's comfort (and, well, ergonomics).

The question is polarizing - you can find testimonials of people who tried Dvorak/Colemak/Workman/etc. and either liked or hated it (so be careful to not fall prey to confirmation bias). I don't mind the "hobbling" as I very rarely use others' computers.

<comment><USER33> As somebody who has typed in Dvorak continuously for the last 13 years, I agree one hundred percent with this post. I find that I type about the same (a little slower maybe) than in my QWERTY days, anywhere from 70-100 WPM on average. It's all about comfort, since my wrist pain basically went away for me (and my brother) since the switch.

It's not for everyone. But you can remap (and set a key to go back and forth) easily on most computers these days. I find myself mostly on my own devices too. Some people (myself included) can also switch back to QWERTY and be functional. It feels so wrong, though, that I avoid it whenever possible. Never felt hobbled after that first few weeks learning, which were terrible. That's where a natural curiosity for learning new things really helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8ql11qT...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8ql11qT1bKAJ:blog.thecybershadow.net/2015/05/25/one- year-with-the-truly-ergonomic-keyboard/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be up now. Had to do an emergency migration of my blog to a faster server.

<comment><USER35> 502 proxy error currently:

Reason: DNS lookup failure for: k3.1azy.net

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm typing on a TECK right now, and I've been doing so for over a year. I still hate it.

I use the Workman layout, and I like the layout... BUT THE CHATTER!!!

At first I had to get used to the layout, then supposedly wait for the keys to "break in", then clean the switches.

It's not so bad... just annoying enough to barely not buy another keyboard. It was only last week that I ordered [http://atreus.technomancy.us](http://atreus.technomancy.us)

If that one has chatter too, I don't know what I'll do. Go back to rubber dome maybe. Despite all the bad things people say about them, my old kb never missed a single press.

<comment><USER37> I love my Atreus keyboard w/the TMK-based Atreus firmware; I have not (yet) noticed that it misses keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> For it to be _truly_ ergonomic it should be split and chair mounted:

[http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1996/06/chair-mounted- split-...](http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1996/06/chair-mounted-split- keyboard-helps-reduce-typing-risks-study-shows)

I think that's something from StarTrek that has not caught up.

[http://www.cnet.com/news/mythbuster-adam-savage-builds- star-...](http://www.cnet.com/news/mythbuster-adam-savage-builds-star-trek- captains-chair/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting.

Most "ergonomic computer posture" pictures (such as this one[0]) show that apparently your elbows should be suspended in mid-air.

Personally, I found this to be terrible advice. Instead, I make sure to have at least two feet of desk space in front of the monitor, on which I rest my arms. This also makes palm rests unnecessary.

I think this approach shares many benefits with that in the article you posted.

[0]: [http://www.iogear.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/Ergono...](http://www.iogear.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/ErgonomicsPropper.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> There is one simple trick to avoiding RSI, and it works. It goes like this: change your keyboard every 3 - 6 months.

That's it! Its that simple! It doesn't matter if its an ergo keyboard or not. What matters is that you _change_ your keyboard and get your muscles moving in different directions.

Been doing this for 20+ years, after suffering RSI horrendously in the late 80's, and I'll never look back. Whenever I start to feel uncomfortable/pain while typing I just change keyboards to something else. Solution!

</comment><comment><USER34> I had a TEK for 2 months and ended up returning it. I loved the keyboard, but I use my laptop just often enough that switching back and forth was really annoying.

<comment><USER40> This is the biggest thing for me - I use so many different machines on a day to day basis that it just doesn't make sense to use anything other than US qwerty (in the same way that custom aliases on linux machines just isn't a thing when you do consulting.. You just need to learn the full command or flags and do that by default).

I used a dvorak layout for about 2+1/2 months, and while my speed was on par with normal qwerty, I just found going back and forth to be a nightmare. I had my work USB keyboard (for when my laptop was docked), the laptop keyboard itself, my desktop at home, my laptop at home, my ipad at home.. Not to mention server KVM keyboards and other co-workers' keyboards. Yuck.

I generally really struggle without a lot of the more unused function keys too, like the menu key, which I use ALL THE TIME so I don't have to resort to the mouse. When you make a typo, try moving the cursor into an incorrectly spelled word, then using <menu>, then finally the arrow keys and enter to make a correction in $word_processor next time, I guarantee you'll never look back. It very quickly becomes <back arrow x3-5><menu><down><enter><end> and you're back to typing in under a second.

Keyboards that remove this particular key, and replace it with function are a plague, especially in the mechanical keyboard world.. It's such a shame.

On the flip side, if you only ever interact with your own single keyboard (ie, your job is writing articles/novels/other full-bodied text) then I'd absolutely support a more personal solution such as this.

Me? I'll be sticking to my CODE keyboard and its delicious cherry clears.

<comment><USER41> Regarding Dvorak, I've had good success from only ever typing Dvorak on a split keyboard. To this day, 13 years on, I still can't type it on an ordinary keyboard. When I'm using my laptop away from a desk using its inbuilt keyboard - which I don't do much - I use it with the QWERTY layout.

Most of the times I need to type on somebody else's computer, they've got a non-split keyboard, so no problem there. And if they do have a split keyboard, I can just look at the keys. I can also do that if I need to use Remote Desktop and it pops up with QWERTY (as sometimes happens).

I've certainly found this to work for me, though of course if we were all the same you'd be doing this already and I wouldn't have had to mention it. I suspect it's part of the reason why my QWERTY speed is still OK, on non-split keyboard at least. Most people who see me type on a QWERTY keyboard are very surprised to find out that it's not what I'm used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> my biggest problem with keyboard layouts always was, that with a german QWERTZ layout it was pretty much impossible to use (){}[]<> efficiently.

i tried NEO and DVORAK but somehow the english layout worked best.i still need to type umlauts (äöü) and ß, so i made a custom layout.

you can find it on github: [https://github.com/bmaeser/coDE](https://github.com/bmaeser/coDE) (osx only, sorry)

<comment><USER43> MacOS should come with a layout that's the same as the AltGr-international on linux - normal QWERTY, but AltGr(right alt) is used to type "international" letters, i.e. RAlt+y = ü, RAlt+q = ä, RAlt+p = ö, RAlt+s = ß and more (using RAlt+vowel gives you the accented variant).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I really like the build quality of the keyboard, but two things kill it for me (and I cannot, in good conscience recommend it to anyone):

1\. I get a high number of missed or repeated keys, even after the keyboard is broken in

2\. The customer service is _atrocious_ , as in "absolutely no response - <USER2> even an auto-responder - atrocious"

Given that keyboards and their consistent performance are integral to our job, I'd recommend going with another product.

</comment><comment><USER45> After years of wearing a wrist brace to alleviate repetitive-stress pain, I switched to a standing desk.

That was 4 years ago, and I haven't had wrist pain since.

</comment><comment><USER46> How disappointing - the blank key model shown is discontinued - [https://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/truly-ergonomic- mechani...](https://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/truly-ergonomic-mechanical- keyboard-soft-tactile-cherry-mx-brown-keyswitches-209-blank-keys)

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone else seeing this error:

502 Proxy Error

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /2015/05/25/one-year-with-the- truly-ergonomic-keyboard/.

Reason: DNS lookup failure for: k3.1azy.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, server went under again, had to do some emergency maneuvering. Should be up now.

<comment><USER30> No problem. Out of curiosity, what's the setup there? Reverse proxy to another system?

<comment><AUTHOR> I moved it to a more powerful server because Wordpress was overloading the old one. Because there was no time to let DNS propagate, I configured the old server as a reverse proxy to the new one. That lasted for a while, but wasn't enough and it went under again. Hopefully there will be no more hickups now (at least I had the DNS TTL set to 1 hour).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The ergodox was mentioned in the article as an alternative to this keyboard.

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

It's a fun (very) entry level hardware project, with a good product at the end.

</comment><comment><USER48> The part at the end amused me, so quick poll:

How many people thought the Better Business Bureau was an _actual_ (that is, governmental) bureau until I asked this question?

How many people were unaware that the BBB sold good ratings until I asked this question?

<comment><USER49> I did NOT think that BBB was a governmental bureau.

I was NOT aware that the BBB sells good ratings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I use the TECK and I love it. One suggestion for buyers: put Ctrl on the right space and Enter on the right Ctrl. And if you're an Emacs user, Alt or Escape on the Enter in the middle.</comment>


Ask HN: Rejected from FB, what was your experience like? - <AUTHOR> Two weeks ago I was rejected from FB. It was for a management position.
I am very open to the fact that I am just not what they are looking for but I kind of had a poor experience.
The initial interview was pretty much:
1) This is a little about me 2) Tell me about you
and the rest was reading what felt like a checklist of questions. There wasn't really anything specific, just kind of generalizations like "Give me an example of how you dealt with situation X"
I guess its fair but I was expecting a lot more back and forth or to be challenged with some scenario where I could demonstrate how I would resolve, etc..
I hate not being humble but I have been pretty successful at my current employer and over the years worked/mentored with a lot of different people/teams and seen a wide range of skillsets. Quite a few who I know are now at FB were not really who I would call cream of the crop (I am just giving context, I would never belittle another dev)
Anyway, I read some people say it depends on the interviewer etc.. I dont want to blame the interviewer, I am just curious if this is a typical interview for first round? <comment><USER2> Many of those questions about past situations are illuminating for interviewers about the kind of manager you are / how you think about enabling teams, though they can certainly seem odd if you are not sure what they are trying to evaluate. (Often that is intentional, as it's a lot easier to, say, pretend to have empathy if you know that's exactly what they're looking for.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like something better discussed on [https://www.teamblind.com/](https://www.teamblind.com/)

<comment><USER4> There's probably a big non-overlap of users between the two sites

<comment><USER3> Comment said nothing about overlap. Blind was quite literally created for that type of thing (quite literally). OP will get more answers there as opposed to using a burner on HN (as evidenced by the stat of this thread)

<comment><USER4> The comment said nothing about the comment saying anything about overlap. The OP may be looking at both sites already. There might be value from posting here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pastebin the way god intended it be - <AUTHOR> http://sprunge.us/ <comment><USER2> Indeed, this is good. However, it's sometimes _also_ good to be able to actually paste data. Must we be denied both?

<comment><USER3> Here's the HTML code you need for that:

<http://sprunge.us/KUEY?html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, now it's extra useful:

        paste () {
                (pbpaste | curl -s -F "sprunge=<-" http://sprunge.us | xargs echo -n && echo -n "?"$1) | pbcopy;
        }

Usage: `paste <lang>`

        fpaste () {
            (cat $1 | curl -s -F "sprunge=<-" http://sprunge.us | xargs echo -n && echo -n "?"$2) | pbcopy;
        }

Usage: `fpaste <file> <lang>`

Pardon the lack of bash skills.

</comment><comment><USER5> genius stuff. just needs a little aliasing.

alias pastebin="curl -F 'sprunge=<-' <http://sprunge.us>"

cat <file> | pastebin

now that's very usable

</comment><comment><USER6> The domain name is a nice Futurama reference.

</comment><comment><USER7> Should URL be case-sensitive?</comment>


Open Sourcing of Webcodesk – A Rapid Development Tool for React Web Applications - <AUTHOR> I'm excited to announce that I'm open sourcing stable version of Webcodesk on GitHub under the MIT License. It includes the source code for the cross-platform desktop application and the source code for the Web application framework.<p>Find all links related to Webcodesk here: https://github.com/webcodesk/webcodesk <comment><USER2> Looks great. Any plan to expand to react native?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I've never worked with React Native. However, everything is possible.</comment></comment>


High radiation levels found in giant clams near Marshall Islands nuclear dump - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/science/environment/la-me-marshall-islands-dome-is-leaking-radiation-20190528-story.html <comment><USER2> If it's indeed leftovers from the tests, not leaks in containment, this is a good thing. Let the clams collect the waste, harvest and dispose of them safely, and replace them with seed stock farmed elsewhere.

Obviously not having done the damage in the first place would be better, but that ship sailed in the 50s.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it possible the damage caused by these animals being irradiated is less impactful than the damage caused by over harvesting? That is, if the radiation is scary enough to prevent people from harvesting them.

<comment><USER4> c.f. Cherbobyl, which far from being a post-apocalyptic wasteland is thriving with fauna and flora alike away from the curse that is human presence.

<comment><USER5> Gives one ideas about a novel with a plot based on an insane ecoterrorist group that poisons huge stretches of the earth with radioactive isotopes in a bet it causes less damage than the humans would have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Giant clams have an average lifespan of 100 years. They are filter feeders. The nuclear testing was done in the 50s and 60s. They were sucking up the fallout for decades.

</comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr: no information whatsoever on what was measured, nor what the result was.</comment>


Is India's computer-services industry heading for a fall? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10286436 <comment><USER2> The article doesn't mention the biggest problem with this industry: it's built on a mistake. Software development isn't manufacturing and programmers are not factory workers. The "hire hundreds of cheap programmers" story was good for a first round of sales, but it doesn't work, and that's not good for long-term business.

I've talked to people involved in half a dozen such projects and they all said the same thing: the overhead of coordination was greater than the cost savings, and the quality of the work was low.

The point is that this approach doesn't do any better there than it does here. The grass just seemed greener on the other side of the fence. As one executive put it, "Why should I pay $20 million for nothing here when I can buy it from India for 15?"

</comment><comment><USER3> "Today more Indian than American firms meet _the highest internationally recognised standards_ for software development."

Is this in reference to the CMM model?

I'm not sure exactly what the economist is referring to by the "highest internationally recognized standards for software development." Sounds impressive, which probably means it's a lot of complete bull$%&#.</comment>


The History of Board Games - <AUTHOR> https://diceygoblin.com/blog/the-full-history-of-board-games/

<comment><USER2> Pretty good article. I think it should have been split in two. Ancient games and modern games (possibly even three with the current age of KS/youtube gamsessions etc.). It's really hard to compress the history of board games into such a short post. Germany is often credited as "the board game country" (somewhat unfairly in my opinion there's other countries with very strong board gaming traditions) but I've always wondered why games are so popular here. My working hypothesis is that it is somewhat related to the post WW2 social climate (escapism?). I'm also curious if a widespread "gaming tradition" has positive effects on other areas of life. Games tend to require critical thinking, creativity and most importantly create interesting social situations.

Disclaimer: I'm a very avid board gamer (collection stands at around 210 games and 75 expansions). I guess that was inevitable since I'm German and a graduate of the University of Essen (Duisburg-Essen these days) with an AI focus in my degree. We always skipped classes to attend the Spiel :D

Oh yeah and just in case someone doesn't know it, the leading board game site is [https://boardgamegeek.com](https://boardgamegeek.com) (their UI is pretty "interesting")

<comment><USER3> _I 'm also curious if a widespread "gaming tradition" has positive effects on other areas of life. Games tend to require critical thinking, creativity and most importantly create interesting social situations._

TED Radio Hour podcast just had an interesting episode about the benefits of play, check it out: [http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio- hour/390249044](http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/390249044)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting history but incomplete without mentioning the mid 70's to early 80's Avalon Hill/Yaquinto/TSR/metagaming era. I think an argument could be made that the modern euro board game movement would not have happened without that era preceding it...

<comment><USER5> Yeah; it skipped the most important 100 years by skipping from Monopoly to Catan. People like Sid Sackson, Phil Orbanes, Richard Hamblen, Francis Tresham and others created the modern era - and amazing, modern-feeling games such as Square Mile[1962] would sometimes appear out of nowhere.

edit: Seriously - German Family games don't even exist without Kohle, Kie$ & Knete and Acquire. Lastly, the influence of Gary Gygax on the landscape can't be overestimated. This is really not useful for understanding modern gaming.

edit2: I want to add so much more to this that it's better to just stop now - but a history of board games that reduces Parker Brothers to Monopoly (which they stole), Risk (which is French), Sorry (which is Parcheesi), and Trivial Pursuit but gives a paragraph to the Conan Board Game is not a good history.

<comment><USER6> Tom Vasel called Sid Sackson "the Jules Verne of modern board gaming", which is so right.

Focus is just an amazing lightweight abstract strategy. [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/789/focus](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/789/focus)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Incredible article! I would not have expected that a 4 sided was an early die with it so uncommon today. I'm going to introduce my kids to The Royal Game of Ur.

I was distracted by an early sentence. Does the "That's higher than Google, which sees about 20% growth year over year." lead resonate? Does it help others relate to the growth? I found myself having to restart my enjoyment engine after that line. Did the hook work on you?

What are related term for this pattern, so I can do further reading on it?

Thinking further on this. I'm trying to picture the relative growth between gaming and google and haven't figured out a way to stack Google logos and board games such that I think it would impress. What type of Google growth am I representing? For board games is it revenue?

For my own purposes I'm going to test if I can sketch such a comparison before I use it.

/me well down the rabbit hole

<comment><USER8> Not sure where they're getting 25-40%. The North American numbers have been closer to 10-15% year-over-year for the past 6 years.

[http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/30959/six-straight- growth...](http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/30959/six-straight-growth-years- hobby-games)

<comment><USER9> I found this part hard to believe too. After quick googling found this article, though it doesn't state how it came up with these numbers, so I'm still sceptical:

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/25/board- game...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/25/board-games- internet-playstation-xbox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wil Wheaton's TableTop show has gone a long ways towards introducing people to what board games are capable of. For the longest time I thought that Monopoly and Risk were the gold standard, that everything else would be gimmicky and boring, but then I saw the episode for Elder Sign and my whole perspective was changed.

Now I've got dozens of board games lining my shelves and not nearly enough opportunity to play them all.

</comment><comment><USER11> This history misses many important board games. If this topic interests you check out Tom Vasel's board gaming channel on YouTube.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/thedicetower/search?query=best+...](https://www.youtube.com/user/thedicetower/search?query=best++games+ever)

These guys seem to know more about board gaming then anyone I've ever encountered. And I've been playing board games for ~30 years.

</comment><comment><USER6> The idea that chatauranga evolved from tafl, rather than tafl being loosely inspired by chess, seems pretty speculative to me.

Kind of weird to skip straight from mancala to The Landlord's Game to the Spiel des Jahres. The games of the 19th century were generally pretty bad, from a contemporary perspective, but there was a lot of important development that led up to 20th century designs.

George Parker founded his game company in the 1880s and started publishing games like Chivalry (1887) and Rook (1906) that have continued to be played since then (Camelot at least sees play despite being out of print for decades). The Landlord's Game is nice, but it's a footnote to Monopoly (1933). [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/117864/chivalry](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/117864/chivalry)

</comment><comment><USER12> > The game gets it's name from it's founding within the Royal Tombs of Ur in > Iraq.

A very good article, but boy do I find these typos grating in an otherwise well-written article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the "It's" typos, please do let me know if you see anymore :)

<comment><USER13> > [Table Top] garnishes several hundred thousand views per video.

It should be 'garners'. Garnish means to put something ornamental on.</comment></comment></comment>


Social blogging platform - <AUTHOR>

Would you use social blogging platform based on wordpress and buddypress, which is focused on grouping people by their trade/craft? The point is to get people of the same trade to know each other and let them share their experiences. <comment><AUTHOR> the link is <http://blographi.es></comment>


Microsoft determined that we are all linked by 6.6 degrees of separation - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/04/are-we-really-s.html

<comment><USER2> More like, Microsoft determined that people who chat actively on MSN messenger are linked by 6.6 degrees of separation. It's just not as interesting a story with those pesky details added in, is it?

<comment><USER3> You're leaving out the pesky detail that an entirely different experiment with an entirely different sample using an entirely different communication method yielded a very similar result. This is damn interesting. Not conclusive by any means, but interesting.

<comment><USER4> A sample of people from Nebraska and Boston. Hardly any better from a global perspective (indeed, probably worse, since MSN is fairly universal). What about the 80% of people living in the developing world?

<comment><USER5> Consider that they're linked through people like me. I'm personally currently linked to people born in ten countries off the top of my head, and have previous links (former coworkers and acquaintances) to at least ten more. I am two links away to someone in every middle eastern country, nearly every other Asian country, a few South American countries, and a smattering of Caribbean, African and European countries.

(I am American, but have a few friends who came to the US to study and work.)

I'm not even particularly well connected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reference for the article gives 404 and physorg doesn't seem to have an article covering the subject. Heres the original paper: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/horvitz/leskov...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/horvitz/leskovec_horvitz_www2008.pdf)</comment>


Rethinking SSL for Mobile Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.belshe.com/2012/02/04/rethinking-ssl-for-mobile-apps/

<comment><USER2> The OCSP (certificate revocation check) doesn't have to be done on every SSL setup - the results can be cached for a while.

What is most strange about this article is the assumption that the backend connectivity is coupled to UI interactivity. That is the single worst thing you can do in a mobile app. They should be decoupled as much as possible. In general the user shouldn't even be able to figure out or care that there is latency in the underlying networking.

Of course the one time is when they search for something, but local caching and prediction plus heuristics should help a lot of the time for that. (Of the billions of items on the server, the user is only going to access a tiny subset.)

For the developer types this is a nice presentation (with a nervous presenter?) showing best practises for writing a REST Android app. Pretty much all of the principles apply to iOS and other mobile platforms too where you decouple the user interface from the underlying networking.

Google I/O 2010 - Android REST client applications <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXn3Kg2IQE>

</comment><comment><USER3> The OCSP is used to ensure that in case of security breach the certificate can be revoked dynamically. If you don't care about the "dynamic" part then you can skip the whole OCSP process all together. Now you are in the same state as you will be with embedding your server cert in the app without the need to "hack" the system.

BTW, nothing prevents you from using your own certs. Just make yourself a CA, add root cert to the app, and implement OCSP on your server (if you care about OCSP). Again, no need to hack it and invent new security protocol. Everything you need is already there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would baking your own SSL stuff into the app instead of just running with the system URL stuff cause more paperwork regarding Apple and the crypto export control stuff?

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't think so, as long as you describe what you're doing and describe it as SSL (honestly, of course... I would strongly discourage claiming that it's SSL unless it's really a fully-compatible implementation, with no additional encryption mechanisms, etc.)

There's really very little paperwork required these days, and the process is quite streamlined -- I got approved (fully online) about 20 minutes after submitting the form. I have a hunch that they're getting tired of processing forms that just involve SSL and are more or less rubberstamping 'em. That makes perfect sense -- SSL is a standard technology, they've granted the same export permission a zillion times in the past, etc. I'm not trying to suggest that they're not doing their duty, just that SSL is routine.

However, there's only one way to find out for sure. :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What will be the legacy of Google? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> That's a bit of a difficult question to answer. Who in 1920 could have predicted General Motors' legacy would include lead poisoning, the impoverishment of Detroit, the rise of suburbia and the exurbs, a large US military presence in the Middle East, etc? And they're not done yet.

<comment><USER3> You seem to have an extraordinarily comprehensive definition of "legacy".

<comment><USER2> Your question seemed future oriented --- "will be" rather than "is".

Google is a rather broad company --- they do search and web advertising of course, but also blogging, e-mail, video hosting, money transference, operating systems, etc.

Who knows what products they'll come up with next year?

You seem to have been expecting us to focus on something more specific.</comment></comment></comment>


Setting up Mail Server using Postfix + SFP + OpenDkim (Ubuntu) - <AUTHOR> http://www.timothydavidellis.com/blog/postfix-sfp-opendkim-ubuntu/

<comment><USER2> How did a wall of text get to the first page? Some ones managed to create a HN bot.

<comment><USER3> Brutal site "design"</comment></comment>


Banjo CEO resigns after revealing his past KKK in a blogpost - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/11/banjos-ceo-resigns-cto/ <comment><AUTHOR> And so the next chapter was fully expected here [0]. But even after not trying to hide himself and coming out in the open, it backfired and he still got himself shot down by everyone for his honesty. What a way to get completely destroyed by the whole world.

Looks like after 13 days, it was Option 2: Trial by Twitter, guilty as charged and CEO resigns over his past and everyone's happy [0].

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007900)</comment>


This Retro Electric Moped Is Taking Over Europe - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/meijs-motorman/?mbid=synd_slate <comment><USER2> I thought electric bicycles were limited to 250W by a (stupid) european law... or maybe you need a driving licence, licence plates and insurance for these?</comment>


Lufthansa wants to make their customers' data to money - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.finanzen.net%2Fnachricht%2Faktien%2FLufthansa-will-Daten-ihrer-Kunden-zu-Geld-machen-4383746

<comment><AUTHOR> and

 _Last week, Lufthansa took an even more extreme step when it announced that starting in September it would charge passengers roughly $18 for the option of booking plane tickets through third-party sites. To avoid the fee, passengers must book the ticket through Lufthansa-owned channels._

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/business/pulling-fare- data...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/business/pulling-fare-data-from- travel-sites-some-airlines-seek-to-book-more-flights.html?_r=0)

and

 _German air carrier Lufthansa 's new project "Eurowings" will incorporate "Germanwings" brand, and is expected to become third largest carrier in Europe and Asia. On March 24, the Germanwings Airbus A320 flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf crashed in a remote area of the French Alps killing all 150 people on board. According to the information from the plane's black boxes, copilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed the plane after locking the pilot out of the cockpit._

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/lufthansa-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/lufthansa- ceo-targets-service-savings-in-germanwings-crash-wake) , [http://sputniknews.com/business/20150608/1023069809.html](http://sputniknews.com/business/20150608/1023069809.html)</comment>


Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman – Talks at Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjVQJdIrDJ0 <comment><USER2> While I love reading about insights from behavioral economics I don't completely understand the internet obsession over psychological biases, mental models and other related topics in this cluster.

I'm often trying to understand how to actually apply this kind of knowledge into my daily life. I think Kahneman has himself said you can't protect yourself from it even if you are aware of the biases.

A lot of the interest in these topics seems disproportionate relative to their applicability.

<comment><USER3> You might not be able to protect yourself from biases because that is just the way we are wired but you might be able to protect yourself from acting on the bias.

Example: You read a study and think: "Ah, this is not surprising. It is exactly what I have expected". You can catch this thought and identify it as hindsight bias. And then think more deeply about the results without the bias.

Similar about mental models. They can guide your thinking about a specific problem. But this takes time and mental energy. So you will only apply them when it is worth the effort.

<comment><USER4> > So you will only apply them when it is worth the effort.

This judgment is subject to bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The video is from 2011, so don't forget this:

"This result confirms Kahneman's prediction that priming research is a train wreck and readers of his book "Thinking Fast and Slow" should not consider the presented studies as scientific evidence that subtle cues in their environment can have strong effects on their behavior outside their awareness."

[https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction- of-a-...](https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train- wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/)

[https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith- und...](https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered- studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030791)</comment>


Possible Mistake in Schneier's Cryptography Engineering? - <AUTHOR> http://mackrory.posterous.com/reseeding-the-fortuna-rng-from-cryptography-e

<comment><AUTHOR> As I stated in the blog post, I'm sharing this here in the hopes that someone can point out where I'm going wrong. I emailed the author's, but I'm not sure how busy they are, and if they would consider a question like this significant. If anyone has a copy of the book, would you mind taking a second to see if what I'm describing makes sense?</comment>


The open plan fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.jefclaes.be/2012/05/open-plan-fallacy.html

<comment><USER2> _What I suggest, is installing each team in their own fully isolated area, free from distractions caused by other teams._

This is actually very common in academia, from what I've seen.

<comment><USER3> However, this doesn't omit the need to have a place where teams encounter each other, mingle and have serendipitous conversations. This is the reason why Pixar has bathrooms and other common spaces in the middle of the office.</comment></comment>


Basic Jobs Are Better Than Basic Incomes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/guaranteed-minimum-agriculture-f93a5aa38c97 <comment><USER2> UBI hasn't been about supplemental welfare for decades now. Most UBI proponents back it out of practical reality vs desire to aide the poor.

In 40-50, 100, 250, etc years, more jobs will be automated. The population will have grown, especially in the undeveloped and developing nations. And resource scarcity will have increased. UBI is simply being recognized as a tool to be utilized in managing that reality. At least, if and until we can become a spacefaring species not locked into a closed economic system with extremely finite resources.

</comment><comment><USER3> I want a basic job.</comment>


New algorithm for learning languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8802

<comment><USER2> Total pricktease. This paper was published in 2005. It is indeed an interesting paper, but this blog post is lame. This is not news. Although, you could have guessed from the overhyped language.</comment>


'Pac-Man' in Saturn moon Tethys is a repeat performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510109

<comment><USER2> _A report in Icarus suggests the effect is due to high-energy electrons bombarding the sides of the moons that face their direction of orbital travel._

It's so cool to see macroeffects of subatomic particles.</comment>


Ask PG: Firefox addon - Search HN? - <AUTHOR> Someone posted a link last week about asking PG to add Search to HN. I was thinking it would incredibly more helpful to have a YC search available in firefox search engines, easier also to integrate. <comment><USER2> Just created one via the search capability at searchyc.com and the plugin builder utility at searchplugins.net. See:

[http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=news.yc&m...](http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=news.yc&mode=tag)

Click the little 'I' to the left of the listing to install. (I have no affiliation with either site.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Greaseemonkey with YCFix installed (<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8242>). There's an option that allows you to add a search bar along the top.

</comment><comment><USER4> check it out here, it's great <http://plugin.searchyc.com/>

<comment><USER5> That looks cool. You should definitely try that out!</comment></comment>


Fermat's Last Theorem Earns Andrew Wiles the Abel Prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/fermat-s-last-theorem-earns-andrew-wiles-the-abel-prize-1.19552 <comment><USER2> There's a really nice documentary on Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem

[https://vimeo.com/18216532](https://vimeo.com/18216532)

It even gives a high level description of the methods used for those who are interested.

<comment><USER3> "He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I've realized that it's very difficult to make good mistakes."

\- Goro Shimura's profound description of how Yutaka Taniyama approached mathematics.

I never understood the amount of creativity and ingenuity that goes into good math until I learned some number theory and abstract algebra back in my college days, and read about the many math greats throughout history.

Thanks for the link to the documentary. This was well worth the time.

<comment><USER4> David Hilbert agreed:

"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician".

— Hilbert's response upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry.[11]

source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know he has other sources of income but the fact that this extremely smart and dedicated person, in an age of professional lifestyle bloggers, "travellers" and other celebrities, is rewarded for his efforts and can just go out and buy himself a brand new Ferrari with the prize money makes me smile.

<comment><USER6> > the fact that this extremely smart and dedicated person [...] is rewarded > for his efforts

Yeah, all he had to do was prove Fermat's Last Theorem.

<comment><USER7> And then wait 22 years.

<comment><USER8> The note to pay him should have been in the margins but there wasn't enough room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If interested there is a very good book about this subject: [http://www.amazon.com/Fermats-Enigma-Greatest- Mathematical-P...](http://www.amazon.com/Fermats-Enigma-Greatest-Mathematical- Problem/dp/0385493622/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

<comment><USER10> Ha. I've read it as "Fermat's Last Theorem" \- guess that's the UK name.

For anyone who hasn't read them Simon Singh's books are great introductions to subjects by tracking their history. In this case mathematics, but he also has one about cryptography [1] and another on the space and the universe [2].

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy- Cryptograp...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy- Cryptography/dp/1857028791/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

[2] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bang-Important-Scientific- Discov...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bang-Important-Scientific- Discovery/dp/0007152523/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a question about these hundreds-of-pages long proofs. Who can check such long proofs and be confident about it? To study a document of this size and advanced content rigorously, you would need years - and even then, it is not certain that you didn't overlook something. How can I ever be confident in such proofs until they are checked in, say, Coq or something?

<comment><USER12> Huh, I thought I had read somewhere that a machine checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem had already been created. I must have mixed it up with something else.

<comment><USER13> Are you thinking of Fermat's Little Theorem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, the margin of _Arithmetica_ is certainly too narrow to contain it. Can any mathematicians confirm that it is truly marvellous? Or is there another proof out there?

<comment><USER15> It's obviously impossible to know what Fermat actually had, but consensus has always been that Fermat may have had a proof in mind, but almost certainly not a correct one.</comment></comment>


MileWise Launches Search Engine for Frequent Fliers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/17/milewise-launches-search-engine-for-frequent-fliers/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the feedback from our dev post on the blog guys. TechCrunch picked us up a couple days later!</comment>


Show HN: I will (re)design your app for $1k - <AUTHOR> I'm a Senior UI Designer and I recently left my old job and now I'm looking to start building my portfolio again. (Previous designs are here: behance.net/nico_garcia)
I'm looking for small startups or independent devs to work with them to help them design or redesign their mobile apps. The $1k includes a week of work  -plenty of time to finish a normal-size app or mvp-imo. Work will be presented in a PSD or Sketch file.
Feel free to contact me anytime. Contact is in my profile <comment><USER2> Don't delete and resubmit HN submissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, when I first posted I was like "eh, nobody will write. This is dumb" and I deleted it, but shortly after I got 2 people interested. So I guess its not a bad idea after all :)</comment></comment>


Show HN:The cheapest & smartest way to withdraw Bitcoin from Binance(70%cheaper) - <AUTHOR> https://www.muvwise.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, my name is Shilpa. My co-founder and I started trading cryptocurrencies, more specifically Bitcoin, back in 2016. We had started our first cryptocurrency startup back in 2018 which is also related to cryptocurrency trading and got it funded through an accelerator. During this time of our involvement in the crypto world, one thing that has constantly remained a pain-point is the high withdrawal fees of cryptocurrency exchanges. We make several withdrawals from exchanges like Binance on a daily basis and pay hefty fees every time (sometimes the fee accounts for 20% of the withdrawal).

After months of brainstorming and losing out a lot of money to paying expensive fees, we figured out a way of making the withdrawal fees cheaper and decided to work on it as a side project. We thought of providing it as a platform after having spoken with several traders and almost all of them echoing the same concern. Since then we have been able to reduce the withdrawal fees by 70%. Any feedback on the product would be very much appreciated.</comment>


Pivotal launches serverless framework that works across clouds and on-prem - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/pivotal-announces-new-serverless-framework/ <comment><USER2> Pivotal Cloud Foundry is terrible. I am having a terrible time working with PAS.

The use case of PCF is weak especially when Kubernetes does everything it can do. It just sells enterprise fluff to "architects" in suits who haven't touched code in years and are so far from the reality of Devs working day to day.

The time it took me to migrate a Java spring boot service from AWS to GCP was around a day. Getting it to work with Pivotals way of doing things was more like a week.

We are now starting to do some of our infrastructure on Kubernetes, much less headache.

If anyone wants more info feel free to ask. My post might seem angry but as a developer I know better than the execs.

<comment><USER3> i work on pcf at pivotal. i'd love to hear how we can improve. spring boot should work great with "cf push" and when it doesn't we would love to know why and make it better. while pks and k8s are able to run stateless workloads, if pas isn't offering a lot of additional productivity with routing, logging, and multi-tenancy features then we've missed the mark. pivotal-cf-feedback at pivotal dot io will reach the product managers that work on different parts. i saw your note further below about having to login, the "email" prompt instead of username, you had to ask to get the redis tile, and that you find the cf cli confusing compared to other platform clis you are familiar with. we definitely want to know let us know if there are other major issues.

<comment><USER4> I work in a big corp myself. If you worked on cloud foundry you probably worked with some of my colleagues. ;-) Please don't mention the name though, so I can speak openly.

I see this in my corp every day. Very smart people, super interested in actual feedback, and super interested in really providing great software. But in the end they still fail. I'm not 100% sure about the reasons, but I have a guess.

Usually people who move up the ranks and get into positions where they can make decisions, tend to build relationships with other such people. So more and more they change from "why the hack is dns not working on server-13 anymore?" to "this is the big problem the market has, let's attack that". And slowly that thought croaches in that you should only think about the big picture problems and not worry about the nitty-gritty details of every day getting-things-to-run.

And that's probably the problem. While it's clear that you can't solve all the details and work on big picture problems at the same time, you should not devaluate the details. Great solutions solve big picture problems BY SOLVING THE DETAILS.

That's why K8S for instance is a mediocre solution. Sure they have great big picture ideas, but usually people spend their time with having DNS not working, having servers hanging, having etcd nodes not talking to each other without explaining why, having deployments say "SUCCESS" while actually not running. K8S provides a standardized API for every detail and every use-case, cool. But in the end you need to be an expert in everything to make it run around 50% of the time (outside of AWS and GCP). Nobody really wants to develop on k8s when the underlying platform is only available 50% of the time. And that's the current experience.

So please, if you are one of these people who is really interested in creating great software, consider finding solutions to the detailed low-level problems an important part of the goals and tasks you define. Usually the core low- level problems are not a big amount. For instance with k8s it usually is networking, dynamic storage or security related. Have one person in your team really become an expert in one of these areas (by checking out problems and solutions that exist, not just by making up ppt slides with plans that have nothing to do with the real world) and allow them to influence your task planning.

<comment><USER5> _> And that's the current experience._

Maybe that's your experience? I haven't had any of those problems in moderately sized on-prem k8s clusters.

<comment><USER6> I think I've had that experience. I wouldn't generalize and say it's "the current experience," and certainly not 50% of the time, but I can say I have had this experience at least once on every cloud provider that I've used Kubernetes with to any degree of depth. Something goes wrong, and it's outside of your control, you just have to wait for them to fix it (or sometimes I guess, you can just pick a different AZ and try again.)

It's almost just enough to make you wish for a Hybrid cloud. If you don't have Kubernetes experts on staff, you shouldn't be trying to manage your own Kubernetes on-prem. It won't be surprising that this is the experience 50% of the time – honestly that has to be why managed services for Kubernetes are evidently becoming so popular.

Managed services have these issues some of the time too, and if your managed service has those issues often enough that you'd want to talk about them, you better find a different managed service. I think AKS and GKE have had those issues, but they are rare. Don't know personally about EKS.

I think some people interpret the promise of managed K8s services to be that you don't need to have someone anymore on-staff who is the expert in how things might go sideways on Kubernetes.

On the contrary, you still need that person to be able to take advantage of Kubernetes with confidence, but maybe now thanks to (whatever vendor you chose for Kubernetes) you simply don't need to have an actual department of 6-12 of those experts focused on only doing that (managing Kubernetes.)

A result of using a real, stable managed K8s service should be that on a day- to-day basis, those people won't actually need to run around with their hair on fire doing ops things just to keep the business going. Automation.

With on-prem, maybe just don't expect it to come like that out-of-the-box; if your whole team is still new at this they're going to need training and planning and ramp-up to get it to that stage. This is exactly how you get "it might be better for us to start with a managed k8s service."

<comment><USER5> I was replying to a specific list of problems:

 _> usually people spend their time with having DNS not working, having servers hanging, having etcd nodes not talking to each other without explaining why, having deployments say "SUCCESS" while actually not running_

I'm not saying k8s is free of problems.

<comment><USER6> Not disagreeing with you, and those are all "noob problems" from my perspective as I've done all of those things wrong before myself, and I myself am a noob. But they are some actually very complex problems (and you can even have them on your managed platforms once in a while, too.)

Self-healing is great when it works, and those items you listed are all real problems. But they are not problems that you should expect to encounter on a managed service, at least hopefully not more than once. (YMMV, amiright?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pivotal haven't launched a serverless framework, they've launched a FaaS(ish) framework.

Serverless implies that the management of the underlying infrastructure is owned wholy by a third party, and the only exposure to you is the higher order abstractions, leaving you to only worry about the business logic.

This is not that.

You still need to water and feed a Pivotal/K8s platform, and those things are awful to run.

"What's interesting about Pivotal's flavor of serverless, besides the fact that it's based on open source, is that it has been designed to work both on- prem and in the cloud in a cloud native fashion, hence the Kubernetes-based aspect of it. This is unusual to say the least."

This isn't unusual. Every software house seems to be building a dream of hybrid cloud on-top of Kubernetes. Rightscale, Openwhisk, Cisco Cloud Centre, IBM Cloud Private, ServiceNow and others build their sales strategy across cloud mobility.

 _This dream of cross cloud portability needs to die._ You either end up:

Option A

\- Leveraging the cloud native logging, storage, networking, database and analytics services, leaving behind only the container layer which is portable. By this stage, you end up having to re-write those parts of the json/yaml/terraform to handle deployments into other clouds ANYWAY. So what's the benefit again?

It also encourages you to do stupid things like single account deployments in AWS since federation for these abstraction layers are still very much a pipe dream, significantly increasing the blast radius concern.

Option B

\- You run your own logging, storage, networking, database and analytics services inside the K8s which defeats the entire point of being in the cloud in the first place.

Being cloud agnostic is a great pipe dream, but the economics of running an abstraction layer (Pivotal / Openshift / Mesos) vs cost of exit just doesn't add up for 99% of companies. Just use the native FaaS/Data/Analytics.

<comment><USER8> It's even worse than that.

Knative is really an alpha piece of software at version 0.2.2 for the serving component. Riff is also at 0.2.0. What do Pivotal plan to do if both implement breaking changes (extremely likely), maintain a fork?

The other issue is what value is this all really providing? Kubernetes provides a standard API that abstracts infrastructure and deployments.

The benefit that Lambda brings is very simply connecting together cloud services. None of these FaaS on Kubernetes products do that. For anyone interested I looked into the current landscape on Kubernetes and gave up since it's all pretty worthless. [https://kubedex.com/serverless/](https://kubedex.com/serverless/)

<comment><USER9> _" The other issue is what value is this all really providing? Kubernetes provides a standard API that abstracts infrastructure and deployments.

The benefit that Lambda brings is very simply connecting together cloud services."_

Generally, the benefits of a function service are:

\- scale to zero: when a function is not active it won't use any resources and create costs.

\- higher level of abstraction: if a piece of software fits well into the FaaS abstraction, it should be more productive to implement and operate it on the FaaS level over lower levels (PaaS, container, IaaS, etc.) K8s in particular is quite a complicated system to target by an app, which is why Knative was started.

If Lambda makes it easy to call other cloud services, I'd say that's a side- effect of a good FaaS implementation. Bringing this benefit to other function services should be a matter of using the right libraries.

(I work at Pivotal, but not on Riff or Knative)

<comment><USER10> > If Lambda makes it easy to call other cloud services ... Bringing this > benefit to other function services should be a matter of using the right > libraries.

You are correct in that the calling out to other things is just a concern of the function itself, but the value in the 'connecting' that Lambda does is from being _invoked_ by other Cloud services by way of integration to their event systems. e.g. Object storage file creation event X triggers Lambda function Y to update resource Z (resource Z isn't necessarily a Cloud service, it could be a database).

This is why I'm skeptical of on-prem FaaS. It's an easy value proposition to sell when you can use Lambda as an example. But Enterprises have heterogeneous environments so Lambda-like integration into other services is far from a given, and 'scaling to zero' is a little disingenuous because there always needs to be underlying infrastructure (k8s in the case of PFS) running to handle function invocation.

<comment><USER11> > _But Enterprises have heterogeneous environments so Lambda-like integration > into other services is far from a given_

Because it's not a walled garden. As the ecosystem grows that pain (and it's real) will ease.

> _' scaling to zero' is a little disingenuous because there always needs to > be underlying infrastructure_

The point is to use it more efficiently. Mixed workloads with scale-to-zero help achieve that end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's exciting to see ecosystem build commercial products using Knative ([https://github.com/knative](https://github.com/knative)). The developers on those platforms benefit from increased portability. Congratulations to the riff team behind the new Pivotal Function Service offering

</comment><comment><USER13> From an economic perspective, using a service like Pivotal feels like placing a bet that the pricing difference between cloud providers will be higher that the cost of paying for Pivotal's support plan (I know, open source, but if you reach a scale where these things matter enough that you care about the cost to switch clouds you are probably at the scale where you find yourself paying for Redhat and etc support plans).

As cool as "cloud agnostic" sounds, paying any real tax to achieve it probably exceeds the long term price differential between major cloud providers. The major clouds sell commodities, recognize that they sell commodities, and they operate as low margin large scale providers. Over time the pricing differences have to average out to about zero, otherwise the market would abandon the always-more-TCO-costly provider (which would cause them to lower their margins to recapture the higher total earnings).

<comment><USER14> Honestly, this rarely seems to come down to cloud pricing considerations. Rather, the goal for most shops who choose something like PCF is to (a) simplify onboarding and ongoing work of devs since they don't need to learn the nuances of each cloud IaaS, (b) stripe a single ops model across each infrastructure pool, which matters since no enterprise of size is using only one. People buy because they struggle to ship, and PCF helps these big companies put their focus back onto shipping software, not where or how it runs.

Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the reasons I prefer function as a service "FaaS" over "serverless" is because of how useful on demand ephemeral functions can be on premises.

The term serverless implies that the main benefit is not having to deal with infrastructure. While that is helpful, setting up a "standard" means of event driven and stateless business logic is useful in its own right.

Can you accomplish that with long running processes? Sure, as long as you are disciplined enough to do so.

</comment><comment><USER16> Azure functions is also a serverless framework that works across clouds and on-prem.

<comment><USER17> I seem to recall Microsoft actually open sourced it

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> On-prem serverless? Stone cold classic.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how does Pivotal new framework compare to OpenWhisk? [https://openwhisk.apache.org/](https://openwhisk.apache.org/)

<comment><USER11> Project riff most closely compares to OpenWhisk and in fact both riff and OpenWhisk contributors work together on Knative. Of the two, riff has the advantage that it came along at the right time to be based directly on Knative without to be "ported", so to speak.

PFS might be more fairly to commercial plans announced by other vendors to repackage OpenWhisk.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, though not directly on PFS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My take.

These kind of things face the problem that they pump entropy out of one part of the system but risk creating more overall. In fact, unless you get _all_ the details right you will end up worse than you started. The "minimal viable product" is not minimal at all if it is going to be viable.

For instance I was using Vagrant years ago and realized eventually that I didn't need 80% of what it did and that I hated the DSL. (eg. if it has to support five different ways to build your image, maybe that's a "bad smell" that none of them are good enough)

Even though I was using it locally to start, I wound up using it only in AWS and I also used it to stack up systems that I put in front of the public.

I wrote my own Java program that would set up a virtual server, networking, all that and write a bash cloud-init script that would run on the machine to set it up, then send a message via SQS when it was ready. If it passed tests, the system could then switch over the elastic IP to the new instance.

I looked at the problem of getting it to run on other clouds and it wasn't that bad but it wasn't that good either. In AWS you have to choose a region, availability zone, VPC, subnet, disk types, and a number of details.

In some cases those choices could be arbitrary but sometimes you have infrastructure that you have to hook into and you have to match that.

In GCS or Azure it's basically the same but it is different, and if you want to support those platforms you have to also embody the differences in the platforms and also the differences between customer's environment.

\----

Being involved with software vendors, "hybrid cloud" has a special meaning. My biz dev guy and I picked it up as part of our pitch a few years ago because _we_ needed it. We knew we needed to support customers wherever they were, but of all the messages we tried that was the one that confused customers the most and resonated the least.

"On premise" is a special case BTW, because there are many customers who have issues with privacy, security, etc. and they don't have a choice or perceive they have a choice to use public clouds. (eg. Bridgewater thinks that it is better to safer to desktop virtualize into AWS then risk people walking out with laptops, physical destruction of their HQ, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER21> My issue with Spring is it became what it was supposed to replace. Originally, we flocked to Spring because IBM WebSphere and WebLogic were slow and bloated. Now Spring has classes that are 72+ characters long and an inconsistent programming model.

I really like CDI, which grew from ideas hatched in Spring and Guice. Microprofile is built on top of it as offers standardized, mutiple competing implementations, modular, interoperable specs.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's (the idea to manage on prem K8S from the cloud) a reaction to

1) Hyperscalers doing hybrid cloud

2) VMware's growingly independent approach to K8S (which I believe will ultimately result in VMware offering "generic" Kubernetes)

3) IBM Redhat becoming more aggressive with their on-prem approach (let's not forget SoftLayer and Redhat OCP can do hybrid K8S on bare metal, without VMware)

4) On-prem-focused vendors like NetApp having announced similar service (NetApp Kubernetes Service, which already works in all hyperscalers and on- Prem NetApp HCI is next) in recent months.

Pivotal's on-prem problem (compared to IBM Redhat, NetApp) is problem is they have little on-prem presence, sell no hardware or storage, and need to rely on DellEMC and VMware (which have been great for Pivotal but that was when Pivotal played nice and wasn't helping VMware (and Dell) customers escape to non-VMware based clouds.)</comment>


Ask HN: What framework/libs are you using for building RESTish APIs in Node.js? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I'm looking for a suitable framework for building medium-sized* Node.js APIs and I want to know what you are using or would recommend.
Ideally, it should:
* automatically build RESTful routes based on models (incl. relations), if not, make it easy for the developer to implement that
* use MVC concepts like controllers, filters and such
* support simple authorization/authentication (i.e. acl, bearer)
* be flexible/customizable (e.g. don't force me to use Whatever_Case on my database tables and such)
---
Currently, I'm using the following, hacked together: express.js, bookshelf.js/knex.js (models), passport.js and acl (auth). These are fine if your project is small, but when it grows, it gets messy.
So, what frameworks are you using?
---
*by medium-sized, I mean something like an invoice creating API <comment><USER2> Don't use it (I'm not exactly a developer) but I've heard good things about Hapi ([http://hapijs.com/](http://hapijs.com/)) may be worth checking out, I think it has most of the stuff you're looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's one of the frameworks I haven't tried yet. Will try it, thx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> loopback io</comment>


Canvas is Easy and Fun - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/10/16/Canvas-is-Easy-and-Fun <comment><USER2> its fun but not that easy

the draw api is too weak</comment>


Ethereum Universal Logins: update and demo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@avsa/universal-logins-update-new-live-demo-b3d5dcbec681 <comment><USER2> Any documentation for this demo?

[https://example.universallogin.io/](https://example.universallogin.io/)</comment>


Ask HN: Chess - <AUTHOR>

Anyone know of good tactics to win at chess? I want to beat a friend and want to learn moves to get better. <comment><USER2> Towards the beginning of the game, I like to try to control the center of the board. I use pawns and knights to make sure I control the middle four squares. Meanwhile, I'm looking for moves that will let me get a material gain on the opponent. Be aggressive in making them react to you. If I'm not forcing him/her react to my moves, I'm losing. And if he/she should be reacting, and doesn't, then I look to see if I missed something, and if not, then I gain the advantage.

Sometimes, I go with another tactic, or blend it with controlling the center - attacking the king's bishop's square. Learn the Scholar's Mate, which involves attacking that square with the queen and bishop, and work that into your game. You can pile on pieces to making that work, and it'll frustrate some opponents into making mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tactics training helps a lot. I like echess[1], it has a good selection of tactical puzzles. Try to solve one a day and you should see significant improvement in your game within a month.

For a game against an advanced player you must master the openings which can be hard (I always make mistakes in the opening stages).

[1][http://en.lichess.org/training/17424](http://en.lichess.org/training/17424)

</comment><comment><USER4> I visualize what advertising people call a "heat map". That is I look at the board as a whole then imagine where all the pieces can move to.

Write down at least some of your games then have them critiqued later, or critique them yourself - but not immediately after a game; I once dropped in on a chess club that has heavily into post-game critiques and found it so unpleasant that I never attended again.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, I developed got a secret trap maneuver that works from any board position, it's an insta-win or at least a stalemate every single time. Unfortunately my memory of it was hypnotically suppressed in order to keep myself safe from the Mechanics' Institute -- I'd need two of three friends of mine to say certain codewords to unlock it.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Learn opening principles. 2\. Practice tactics. 3\. Play more. 4\. Go to step 2.

<comment><USER7> Also learn the basic endings: KRRvK, KQvK, KRvK, KPvK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/user/thechesswebsite](https://www.youtube.com/user/thechesswebsite) and chess.com</comment>


Ask HN: How do I focus on building my startup on the sides? - <AUTHOR> I have an idea that I think is a great fix to a gaping gap that exists in the market today. I also have a full time job as a developer .
1 - I want to devote more time to my own startup which is eventually what I want to do.
2 - there are interesting problems at work that I keep running across and can't help but get involved and solve. My team is also quite fun, so it's addictive at times to build things together.
3 - I can't seem to get off hacker news and keep reading random pieces of knowledge on a regular basis .
I am doing way more 2 and 3 than I do 1, probably because 2 and 3 give some immidiete satisfaction whereas I'm a lone wolf on 1. But I know that 1 is more important.
How do you keep being focussed and make more time for 1. How does one prevent himself from falling prey to these other distractions ? <comment><USER2> 1\. time budget. allocate time to each bucket and don't go over.

2\. try to find a way to get feedback on 1 as early as possible.

3\. find a list of small things that your project needs. focus on getting that done. usually once your started it's easier to keep working on it.</comment>


Data for the Boston Marathon Investigation Will Be Crowdsourced  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/boston-crowdsourced/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't the FBI always ask for people to submit relevant info? The only difference I see here is that a lot more people were filming because of the race and the use of a buzzword.

</comment><comment><USER3> Imagine the evidence collected in 5 years if Google Glass is successful. You could probably recreate the entire crime scene in 3D using tech like Photosynth.

<comment><USER4> As I was watching videos and looking at all the pictures yesterday I felt like I was starting to do that in my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> «Davis requested that any spectator providing media showing the attacks indicate the time they collected the data so police "don't need to go through the electronic signature."»

Wouldn't this be more costly and less accurate than scanning EXIF and other metadata, dumping it all into a database, and sorting and scanning through it temporally?

I'd hope that the majority of the images and videos they'll receive directly from citizens will still have this information intact.

Edit: I see that austenallred already pointed to a thread that describes such a methodology. I just find it concerning that those who are tasked with investigation seem to be ignorant (perhaps not willfully) of the other side of how technology can assist with investigations of this sort.

<comment><USER6> They'd need both, the human saying "I took this here at this time," and the EXIF data. Just because the camera says the photo was taken at 3:15pm doesn't meant the photo was taken at 3:15pm.

Although they could probably substitute some human-in-the-loop with analysis (or verify a human time/place statement), comparing non-time-and-place- established photos with more reliably known-data photos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And future events might just get preemptive eye-in-the-sky venue monitoring, via a system like...

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel- dro...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-drone- surveillance-camera-revealed)

...that makes post hoc tracing of proximate suspects more amenable to computer-vision-automation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, there is the answer to this thread <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5560247>

</comment><comment><USER9> What website will be used to do this crowdsourcing?</comment>


Ask HN: Couch Surfing - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about going to Hamburg, Germany and I will probably use couch surfing as a cheaper way to get hosted, as well as a way to meet new people.<p>I've never experienced couch surfing, so are there any advices from whom already tried it on how to choose a good host and being a good guest? <comment><USER3> AirBnB has some good high level thoughts on the topic, for example - [https://www.airbnb.com/support/article/695?topic=229](https://www.airbnb.com/support/article/695?topic=229)

Couch Surfing (as distinct from renting someone else's space entirely for yourself) probably warrants some additional investment in the relationship and ensuring all expectations are clear.

I've also heard of many guests who budget for some kind of thank you gift - <USER2> Australian friends usually take a pack of clip-on-Koalas to hand around, and a bottle of wine or flowers are usually safe bets. You'll be saving more than the E10-20 they cost you, so it's a good investment in being awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was also thinking about taking something from my country. I guess it empowers the goal of couch surfing :)</comment></comment>


3 Ways to Outsource Development Successfully - <AUTHOR> http://royaljay.com/development/outsource-development-successfully/

<comment><USER2> Interesting take on this. Outsourcing has always been a struggle for me, but every once in awhile you get a good contract going that makes life easier rather than harder.</comment>


Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 <comment> r-w Technology wins when it's "good enough" in the eyes of its users. Things like online shopping and online discussion forums have won out because they've improved enough to be chosen by some over the real thing, even if there's still a market for the in-person service.

Meanwhile, Twitter has failed for the exact reasons the author states: disorganization and volatility. Virtual contracts are also rarely used (I assume this is a network effect at play).

However, the way I see it, each of these categories of virtual replacements supersedes the original to some degree, if not entirely; whether it goes 'mainstream' is merely a public perception that varies between circles.</comment>


Facebook Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools <comment><USER2> This whole "us vs them" war-like posture from Facebook will make things worst in the long run. Public trust in Facebook is just going down the drain.</comment>


A Shocking Way (Really) to Break Bad Habits - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/a-shocking-way-really-to-break-bad-habits/?_r=0&register=facebook <comment><AUTHOR> This article is from earlier this year, but admin @dang mentioned that I should repost it, with a link to the comment thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266386)

I'm the founder of Pavlok, and we've helped thousands of people quit their bad habits and wake up earlier. Our company has a strict metric of 'habits over money' \--- so I'm happy to help anyone with their behavior change goals. Hacker News has been a big part of my life, so I would be honored to help anyone here with their goals in habit change.

What are your goals / New Year's Resolutions?

<comment><USER2> It would be great if you didn't post this with a click bait title. It might be stupid, but on principle I'm not going to read it.

<comment><USER3> He used the published title and, given the content, it isn't as clickbaity as it appears (electric shock is the mechanism discussed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "Every time I took a bite, I zapped myself," she said. "I did it five times > on the first night, two times on the second night, and by the third day I > didn't have any cravings anymore."

Really? Why is this better than inflicting other kinds of pain on yourself like flicking a rubber band, or pricking your finger? Where do you get motivation to even zap yourself at all?

<comment><USER5> If you ever have tried to quit smoking, there is a strong motivation. That being said I found this archaic technique useless. My brain realized it could "buy" the smokes for pain, and just factored in the cost along with the other costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Im interested in forming a good habit instead (remembering to log all my meals on my fitness pal). There isn't a "bad" behavior to trigger one of these zaps, unless you count hitting the end of the day without meals logged or something like that, but that feels too far removed to have the necessary subliminal effect.

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe I remember a similar product on Shark Tank. From memory, I believe it was an unfortunate pitch. What differentiates this product?

<comment><USER8> It's the same product: [https://buy.pavlok.com/pages/saw-us-on-shark- tank](https://buy.pavlok.com/pages/saw-us-on-shark-tank)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> He hired a woman to smack him? I would've done it for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll hire you!</comment></comment>


Everything You Need To Know About Meta Descriptions Tags - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchenabler.com/blog/meta-description-tags-complete-guide/

<comment><USER2> I have always wondered if a reasonable search engine could be made that just indexed meta descriptions and very aggressive spa, removal. With all the work people put into useful ones without keyword stuffing these days it might be slightly viable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriously, that would bounce back the reputation of the site and gives a relative traffic to it.</comment></comment>


ProtonMail is Open Source [webmail front-end] - <AUTHOR> https://blog.protonmail.ch/protonmail-open-source/

<comment><AUTHOR> Stil waiting for a full stack -- still I think this is great news. Having a look at their github page, it's also nice to see Free software working across "competing" companies, their html-editor si Squire, originally by Fastmail.

I'm a little concerned with this comment on the post, though, in response to open sourcing the back-end:

"The security risks of open sourcing the back-end code is too high. It would let an attacker know how our infrastructure is set up or let spammers get insight into how to circumvent our anti-spam measures."

Right. Which is why exim, postfix, spam assasin, AVG, ssh etc is insecure? Snark aside, more open, free code is always good!</comment>