TypeScript support for ES Next pipeline operator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/17718 <comment><USER2> Greenspuns tenth rule: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

I've always wanted a clojure style thread operator [1] in other languages :)

[1] [https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros](https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros)

<comment><USER3> It is interesting to note the overhead it has to define such simple construct in JavaScript. Pages and pages of a spec, all the work to herd ppl behind the proposal, etc.

In Clojure, the threading macros are awesome and they are not even a language construct, just some ~10 lines of code per macro! [1]

In ML, the pipe operator is even shorter:

        `let (|>) x f = f x`

1: [https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/4ef4b1ed7a2e8bb0aaaa...](https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/4ef4b1ed7a2e8bb0aaaacfb0942729252c2c3091/src/clj/clojure/core.clj#L1669-L1699)

<comment><USER4> I used to think the same, until it was pointed out to me that the semantics have to be nailed down exactly, so that conforming implementations (e.g. Chrome/FF) do the same thing. This includes figuring out how (if at all) it works with generators and async functions, if you want to support implicit lambdas, etc[1]. Clojure and ML (and related languages I imagine) have the advantages that it is expressible in code which at least makes the specification part simpler.

Fortunately the simple version is easily approximated, I have this sprinkled in various files where it's useful:

        const pipeline = (val, ...funcs) => funcs.reduce((a, b) => b(a), val);

[1] [https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/07/19/whats-happening-with- the-...](https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/07/19/whats-happening-with-the-pipeline- proposal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What happened to the bind operator (::)? I do miss threading macros from Clojure but I don't see them as solving a real problem in the javascript language. A shortcut for binding `this`, on the other hand, would have saved me a lot of time wondering why my React component methods weren't working correctly.

<comment><USER6> You can use the fat arrow syntax to implicitly bind a function to this:

        handleChange = e => this.setState({ value: e.currentTarget.value })

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't that be problematic if you're binding lots of handlers, though? It seems like the fat arrow syntax here is creating a new anonymous function for every instance of the handler.

And if you've got a list of tens or hundreds of items, and you want a click handler for each, you quickly get to the point where all the extra overhead matters.

Like, for instance, in a React render function you could have

      {things.map(thing => {
        return <Thing onClick={e => this.handleClick(thingId) } />
      })}

or

      {things.map(thing => {
        return <Thing onClick={this.handleClick.bind(this, thingId)} />
      })}

But option #1 would be a lot less efficient if you've got lots of things, since it's creating a new closure that calls the instance method instead of just pointing at the instance method like snipper #2 does.

I still see lots of people recommending #1 for this exact scenario, though. Maybe I'm just wrong, or maybe stuff like this is why I see so many SPAs consuming shocking amounts of memory.

I grant that using the fat arrow is probably fine for the scenario you mentioned though, with something like a text field. I don't think I've seen many pages with so many text fields that the extra overhead would even make a difference.

<comment><USER8> Having .bind inside a JSX prop also creates a new anonymous function on each render.

To avoid it, you can do (sorry for bad formatting):

      class Thing extends React.Component {
        handleClick = (thingId) => {
          this.setState(/*stuff*/);
        }
        render() {
          return <div>{things.map(thing => <Thing onClick=
       {this.handleClick} />)}</div>
        }
      }

You can also bind handleClick inside the constructor without the arrow.

      constructor(...args) {
        super(...args);
        this.handleClick = this._handleClick.bind(this);
      }
      _handleClick(thing) {
        // stuff
      }

<comment><USER9> The latter version seems to be the one I most commonly see, except _handleClick() is just handleClick() repeated. Am I correct in assuming this is considered idiomatic at this point?

<comment><USER10> Yes, I'd say so.

<comment><USER9> Is this better somehow? I feel like I should know this, but it's Friday night and I'm tired, but isn't the constructor fired on every instance of the component? And if so, is this a better approach for any particular reason other than clarity?

<comment><USER11> It is fired on every instance of the component. However, if you create the arrow function in the render function, it'll be created for every render. Since React keeps the component instances around between renders, it can be a lot better.

<comment><USER9> Ah, that makes sense. Do you by any chance know of any articles that go further into how this works?

<comment><USER12> [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZ-97vzW4AAbcZj.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZ-97vzW4AAbcZj.jpg:large)

<comment><USER9> Perfect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note that the proposal for a pipeline operator is still in its early day. In fact, there are two proposals ([https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/07/19/whats- happening-with-the-...](https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/07/19/whats-happening- with-the-pipeline-proposal)) and so far there's no clear winner. Seems like there's still a long way to go.

Anyway, which style do you prefer?

<comment><USER14> Neither. Just use a function. You don't need a dedicated operator in the language's syntax to composite functions.

        const foo = pipeline(
            bar,
            baz,
            x => x + 1,
        )
        foo(42)

<comment><USER15> Now try writing the type declaration for your pipeline function...

<comment><USER14>
        pipeline : (...fns : Function[]) => Function

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't they still have to wait for the spec to finalize / hit stage 3?

Don't get me wrong, I'm super excited for this functionality because I love it in languages like F# and Elixir, but it looks like the pipe proposal is still stage 1.

[https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER17> While I think this is a risky move, I had the impression that the ratification of new features was mainly based on the implementations.

So, first the runtimes/compilers implement it and _then_ it gets into the spec.

TypeScript sees itself as a superset of ECMAScript, so its ECMAScript parts are just another implementation of the spec, like Node, Babel and the browser engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems unfortunate that JavaScript is evolving so quickly these days. There is more syntax than anyone who isn't a full-time web developer will be able to remember.

<comment><USER19> There's been a lot of new features added in ES6+ but not a huge amount of new syntax overall (a lot of the new features are things like array and object methods, etc.)

All of the new syntax is technically optional, but at least some percentage of it just makes it easier for newer/less-experienced devs to write things: e.g. classes as simplified syntactic sugar around prototype-based inheritance models, or function parameter spread operators to make learning how to arguments.whatever unnecessary and generally make code for dynamic argument lengths easier to understand.

No matter when you started learning Javascript there would have been parts too complex or obscure to learn immediately (the prototype-based inheritance model is something I think a lot of full-time professional JS devs don't fully grok). There was always things you learn first and things you learn later. With the new syntax, I think now the things* you learn first are just more likely to be immediately useful.

* where "things" excludes learning how to master every trending new library—that is a part of Javascript that isn't improving unfortunately.

<comment><USER20> I find this to be a bit of a cop out, there's still less syntax than something like C# or Java, and plenty of developers are ok with those.. JavaScript went through years of nothing and then sudden change.. if you were only casually interested in it (say, a backend developer who just puts some js together) then criticizing seems unfair.. you can continue to write the exact same code, but expect those who write it as their primary language care a hell of a lot more about it being succinct and powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was hoping we'd get something like PowerShell pipelines, which work on iterators, passing each item through as it's generated.

Those are incredibly powerful, and as a lot to the language, whereas this just seems like fairly simple syntactic sugar.</comment>


Amazon Route 53 Announces Domain Name Registration - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/07/31/amazon-route-53-announces-domain-name-registration-geo-routing-and-lower-pricing/

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like an interesting (and obvious) move for Amazon to go into domain registration. Maybe they can up the standard a bit for this industry.</comment>


Can you get the ball to the top? - <AUTHOR> 4th example on https://popmotion.io, not affiliated, just bored <comment><USER2> no, and i have to close this immediately or no work will get done today

<comment><USER3> I feel you</comment></comment>


$560M Powerball Winner Can Keep Her Name Private, Judge Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner-privacy.html <comment><USER2> This is great for the winner, but how would you prevent collusion here? Suppose all winners of every lottery were anonymous -- how would you know the lotteries are even legit?

1\. You might argue that auditors and other government officials would enforce integrity. However, it would be trivial to bribe them. In addition, without total transparency you couldn't have confidence in what they're saying, anyway. It's _too_ easy for them to lie.

2\. Perhaps the real winners name would be in some book somewhere, e.g. a tax log, but the real name is out of public sight. This would also be easy to rig. If it's anonymous what's stopping the lottery commission and state government from creating a fake winner?

3\. Perhaps the biggest argument in favor of a pro-anonymous lottery is that you already can be anonymous by setting up a trust. This is true, but doesn't answer the question -- _how do you know it 's legit?_

Maybe we should just cap the winnings at 10K, an amount that people wouldn't bug you so much for and change the odds such that the revenue the state gets is the same.

Then everyone wins, no? So, in this case, instead of a single winner of 580M you could've had 60 thousand people win 10K instead. Sounds pretty good. An amount high enough that you'd give it a shot for a buck, but not so high that you'd annoy them if they won.

<comment><USER3> > 1\. You might argue that auditors and other government officials would > enforce integrity. However, it would be trivial to bribe them.

This seems like a very casual way to dismiss governmental integrity. Can't you apply this argument to any financial gain you could get from the government? e.g. "You might argue that auditors and other government officials would force people to pay taxes. However, it would be trivial to bribe them."

<comment><USER2> Apologies for my cynicism, but given that this happens pretty frequently [1] I can't ignore the incentives when dealing with such large amounts of money.

[1] [http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/02/tax_cre...](http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/02/tax_credit_bribery_scheme_deta.html)

[2] [http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/ph-a...](http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/ph- ag-army-contractor-indicted-0302-story.html)

[3] [http://www.wjcl.com/article/chatham-area-transit- contractor-...](http://www.wjcl.com/article/chatham-area-transit-contractor- convicted-of-bribery-fraud/19410216)

Transparency is a good way of preventing corruption. I don't have a citation off hand, but I'm pretty confident that this is true. I'll dig one up if you're curious.

<comment><USER3> I still am not sure that "trivial" is the right level to rate the ability to bribe government officials is at. After all, each of those links points to a person charged or convicted of bribery, meaning that the people privy to the situation raised it with the authorities deliberately or through incompetence.

Thinking about what the collusion would look like here, I think faking the drawing (which is a well-publicized event) is more difficult than having a ticket printed after the numbers are drawn. In the latter case, who has to be "in on it" for it to succeed? It seems like an audit trail on each ticket would be sufficient, proving the time that it was purchased. It seems like this would require a lot of forged evidence in order to successfully pull off that scheme, and it doesn't require that the audit log be publicly disclosed.

Or at least, who is the winner of the lottery hidden from? Is it hidden from the IRS? Is it hidden from the disbursement department at the lottery? Is it hidden from the issuer of the original lottery ticket? These all represent groups of people who you would have to buy out in order to successfully collude.

<comment><USER4> > After all, each of those links points to a person charged or convicted of > bribery, meaning that the people privy to the situation raised it with the > authorities deliberately or through incompetence.

This logic is flawed. Any time you hear about someone getting caught, there are additional instances in which someone got away with it. You don't read about a murderer getting caught and conclude that the problem of murder is not in effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And yet the comments from her lawyer detail reveal how much money she's donated to which charities. So much for anonymity! Between that, her gender, her home town, and even the name of her lawyer, there's WAY too much PII to pretend her identity is a mystery.

<comment><USER6> You can donate anonymously

<comment><USER7> irrelevant.

In fact, knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated.

[https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/with-a-few-bits- of...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/with-a-few-bits-of-data- researchers-identify-anonymous-people/)

<comment><USER8> I've done research on credit card data like that. I can tell you both experientially and mathematically that four bits of _random_ information is insufficient to identify people. The information was not anonymized and they were tracking people engaging in a common, narrow activity. Not only that, but they were only tracking 1.1 million individuals. They had a relatively small search space and significant non-random information with which to bootstrap the deanonymization. Calling that "four bits" is disingenuous.

Contrast this with trying to identify a single individual in a population with no other information about them. It would take about 33 bits if we knew absolutely nothing about her, given log_2(7,280,000,000) = 32.7. But we know she's American, so we can cut our search space down to 322,000,000. That leaves us with 28 bits. We also know she's a woman, so we can cut our search space down by 50%. Now we have 27 bits to go. I can virtually guarantee you an analysis of anonymous donation patterns will not meaningfully cut down the search space beyond a few more bits, and that's exceptionally _non-random_ data. The more useful information is knowing that she resides in New Hampshire, but that still only brings us down to approximately 20 bits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good. So many of these 'winners' lives are ruined almost purely from disclosure.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, $264M after taxes. What a disaster. I bet your life would be _ruined_ if you won the lottery.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, it probably would be. For many - most, even - their lives become a living hell.

<comment><USER12> Well, both of you are speculating. As some people's lives are ruined, there are people who won non-anonymously and are doing just fine.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but the sheer number of horror stories is pretty remarkable. As is the sheer stupidity of how they end. There's also varying degrees of ruined lives. You can avoid kidnapping by some random lunatic, getting killed off by a greedy sibling courtesy with a ridiculously _stupid_ scheme, burying your kid, spiraling into a life of crime, or any of the other examples and still wind up with a life in tatters.

Money can distort friendships and families. That's a given. But lottery money? It just seems like a ticket (ha!) to a world-class shit show. People hear the word jackpot, and act as though because you didn't earn the money--after all, it was just a moment of luck--that _they 're_ somehow entitled to it as well. Random people coming up to you at a restaurant, or harassing you by phone or knocking on your bloody door? It's the financial equivalent of the full moon. People take it as an excuse to act nuts, and they apparently get very, very angry when lottery winnings aren't shared with them.

Winning the lottery and avoiding that kind of nightmarish drama appears to require a constant vigilance for the rest of your life. Let it slip, and you're screwed. If you're lucky, you'll just get peppered with money requests that treat you if you're Santa Clause. Only real. Want to help people? You'll need to sort through the scams and the lies, first; honestly, you'd probably have more of an impact if you just cut annual checks to majority charities instead of trying to directly help people financially yourself. If you're unlucky, you get kidnapped and murdered as part of a harebrained scheme that never had a chance of actually succeeding. Which is just adding insult to injury.

There are lottery jackpot winners who avoid these kinds of twisted outcomes. But claiming your prize publicly is a great way to stack the deck against you, all but inviting the worst kind of human behavior to target you for the rest of your life. Ruthlessly maintaining your anonymity doesn't guarantee anything, but it would at least give you a decent start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What to do if you win: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/)

</comment><comment><USER15> In Austria, and Europe afaik, it is common practice not to disclose the name of the winner, only the location. It is done so for privacy reasons. I was always wondering why in the US this was different and always found it a bit strange. But I do understand now.

<comment><USER16> We Americans love the ol' "poor old man ascends from the ashes of the lower- middle class because he grabbed a PowerBall ticket with his sixer of Miller Lite" story. It sells more tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The state had argued that the names of lottery winners must be disclosed to ensure that prizes are distributed fairly and that winners are not related to lottery employees."

First, they know who they are writing the check to so the whole "not related to lottery employees" part seems rather bogus.

I thought the whole point of disclosure was publicity, but this got plenty and being able to gamble without telling the world you won probably will sell more tickets anyway which is the whole point of the publicity.

<comment><USER18> The point of disclosure isn't to get a first order effect of preventing corruption (I don't know of any sensical mechanism that means publishing a name ensures it's not on a certain list). Obviously the government (should) knows if a winner is related to a government employee, but the only way to enforce that is to allow the public to verify that (or so the argument goes).

<comment><USER19> This seems like a decent application of the Blockchain.

<comment><USER20> There is no "the Blockchain". Which properties of a blockchain do you think would help with this situation?

<comment><USER21> no, finally, for once, this is actually a real application of the blockchain!

specifically any that has support for zero-knowledge proofs so that transactions are actually anonymous.

you could have a bunch of people buy lottery tickets by sending currency to a smart contract, and then have it transfer the money to a random winner's address, and make the winner's address available only to the holder of the lottery contract's private key.

<comment><USER22> To an outsider this wouldn't look that different to money laundering or some sort of large drug deal or arms trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is something about lottery winning (easy money perhaps?) that attracts trouble. There are so many millionaires in tech world of acquisitions and IPOs that made so much more. Most never got into lottery winner kinds of trouble.

<comment><USER24> It's just more of the lower class preying upon itself. They understand the rules and stakes of the game within the scope of their own world.

Bubba Ray may be fooled by a slip-and-fall scam, but try that shit on Warren Buffet and you'll be dealing with his team of lawyers.

Bubba Ray opts for the lump sum instead of the annuity. Anybody with a gun knows he has easy access to it-- try that shit on Bill Gates and you'll be lucky if you can get more than $400 from his ATM card, what with his billions being tied up in various investment vehicles.

On rare occasion you end up with situations like the Getty fiasco but it's much easier (and draws less attention) if you stick to just ripping off the little people. The rules of the game change when you go big-league and you'll quickly find yourself in over your head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most likely, the disclosure would lose her a few friends and change everything in your current and future relationships. Very smart lady!

<comment><USER25> Probably more than that, lawsuits, assaults, roberry, death to name a few issues.

<comment><USER26> I keep seeing this same sentiment... Where on earth do you people live!?

<comment><USER27> [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/luck-gone-bad-lottery- winne...](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/luck-gone-bad-lottery-winners-who- lost-it-it-all/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone got a link to the decision? Why don't journalists tend to link to primary sources?

</comment><comment><USER29> How is it that people worth a lot more money manage to walk the earth among us mere mortals without being preyed upon like these lottery winners? 24x7 security detail? light sabers? both?

<comment><USER30> Invisible conceal carry light sabers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I bet this person's letter carrier and/or the post office where she resides will know or have a very high and good guess at who she is

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm mostly curious to see what the impact is of this is on future court cases. Presumably in New Hampshire winners won't need to create a trust in order to get the winnings anymore.

<comment><USER12> Is there anything stopping the lottery from creating rules to disqualify anyone who wants to collect anonymously? I feel there are some contracts you shouldn't be able to sue to get out of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Non-mobile link: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner- privacy...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner-privacy.html)

<comment><USER34> Good catch. Changed from [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery- winner-priv...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner- privacy.html?ribbon-ad- idx=14&rref=us&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&pgtype=article&referer=https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/83xzw5/winner_of_560_million_powerball_can_keep_her_name/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Blockchain technology, period.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is what blockchain technology would actually be perfect for.

</comment><comment><USER36> But not her gender, apparently.

<comment><USER37> How do we know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What if the woman is actually an employee of MUSL and faked a ticket, though? Would any of the public be able to find out?

</comment><comment><USER39> No person should have to pay $300 million in tax for any reason whatsoever.

<comment><USER40> They basically have to.

I get the notion than it doesn't seem fair, that no person is using a $300m share of the state's resources. But math just doesn't back it up.

The US federal budget is somewhere around 4 trillion dollars. A quick google suggests income tax is 47% of federal revenue. The US has a population of about 323 million. Plugging these all together gives me a federal revenue of about $6k per person, per year.

The alternative to it being "fair" to ask a lottery winner for $300m tax, is for it to be "fair" to tax every man, woman and child that $6k per year.

That almost sounds doable, but that's $6k per retiree, $6k per one-year-old. $6k per unemployed or student. There's a lot of people you simply can't get that money from - so it has to come from somewhere else.

It isn't fair, it's reality.

(For the lottery in particular, there's a simple solution. Lottery winnings aren't taxed here, the ticket is. Not only does this mean no $300m tax bill on a $500m win, but it also means all those silly little wins are taxed fairly too.)

<comment><USER41> I don't understand what it would mean to tax the ticket. Could you elaborate on that?

<comment><USER40> We have a sales tax of 23%(!), so for each $1 ticket, 23 cents goes in the coffers and 77 cents goes into the lotto.

So a $500m prize would mean 650m $1 tickets were sold, and the state has already collected $150m. It sounds like the state loses out this way, but it also means all the smaller prizes were already taxed at the point of sale too. By taxing it as earnings, you're never going to collect tax on all those little $10 prizes. But by collecting at the point of sale, $2.98 was already collected that little $10 prize.

I guess it's "six 'n two threes" .. the state gets their money either way.

(Caveats; I'm not arguing this is actually better, just that there are alternatives to the winner's huge tax liability. %'s may be slightly fudged, ours isn't actually taxed as sales tax, but collected as a revenue from the state-owned lottery. And I totally realise this works much easier where the entire nation is a single tax jurisdiction, rather than your state/federal split.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> From what I understand about this case, she wrote her name on the ticket, and once you do that, the state is in charge of whether or not that name gets revealed because removing the name would invalidate the ticket, legally.

So a judge basically said, "Well, we can break the law here and force the state to keep your name private because I say so; I'm a judge."

All the arguments about privacy and stuff, were really about whether it would be fair to break the law or now, not necessarily because they had some sort of legal standing.

No wonder people don't have faith in the American legal system.

<comment><USER43> > _" Well, we can break the law here_

What law is being broken? The state not getting it's will doesn't mean a law has been broken.

<comment><USER42> Ticket invalidation.

<comment><USER43> The ticket isn't changed though (from the previous coverage, that was suggested and rejected as not being possible). The court just told the lottery that its procedure of handling tickets with a name on them isn't always legal.

Unless there is a specific piece of law that requires the winner being made public, and that hasn't been in any of the reporting I've seen (and would be odd given the trust-workaround), there is no law being broken by this.

Note how in the article it says _The state had argued that the names of lottery winners must be disclosed to ensure that prizes are distributed fairly and that winners are not related to lottery employees._ , not _The state argued it is legally required to disclose the names_. Even in your first comment, you say _the state is in charge of whether or not that name gets revealed_ , for which it just got a constraint imposed on how to make it's decision.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why no startups have copied IKEA's business model - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1138/are-there-any-startups-that-have-tried-to-copy-ike.html?src=hn-1-28-2019 <comment><USER2> I guess it's because they've been evolving for long time. My biggest take away would be them giving a day story to people (aka gamification) which also needs constant improvement.</comment>


Exposed: How FB, Twitter is Rigged in India - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-social-media-rigged-operation-blue-virus-297/

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it hard to believe that Facebook offered to put a man on the job for one of these companies.</comment>


Happy Anniversary, Amazon-Whole Foods. What's Changed? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-11/amazon-whole-foods-anniversary-walmart-kroger-lead-reaction <comment><USER2> It seems like the prices are lower so I go there more often now.</comment>


Show HN: An open source comparison of privacy extensions - <AUTHOR> http://www.areweprivateyet.com

<comment><AUTHOR> (OP here.) Disclosure: I work on Ghostery.

This is a study of privacy extensions conducted by a privacy extension, which extension happens to come out ahead in the study (at this point in time). Hmm ...

So this is why the project is open on GitHub: [https://github.com/ghostery/areweprivateyet](https://github.com/ghostery/areweprivateyet). Please fork, review, send suggestions/pull requests, ...

We get a lot of people asking which extension works better, and we see everyone (us included) make all sorts of claims about effectiveness.

This is a first step in getting some objectivity behind those claims, a resource to point people to, and a way to get all extensions to improve in effectiveness.</comment>


Opinion: U.S. Military Aircraft Fly Toward A Waterfall - <AUTHOR> http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_12_30_2013_p15-650072.xml <comment><USER2> Um...anyone ever heard of the term "military-industrial complex"[1]? I would opine that the decline of this is a good thing. You might be able to trace a bunch of evil things to it. For example, NSA spying and the invasion of Iraq.

I assure you that the chances of the defense industry running out of things to produce in the USA are wildly exaggerated. The article sounds like a shill piece for the defense industry.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex)

<comment><USER3> > You might be able to trace a bunch of evil things to it. For example, NSA > spying and the invasion of Iraq.

That is hand-waving. You might be able to. You also might be able to trace JFK's assasination to a jilted lover.

The problems you speak of are more likely ideological, although the NSA issue might just be pure careerism (as there is no modern ideology that claims that 1984 is a utopian book).

<comment><USER2> I think it's reasonable to assume that some of the political pressure to go to war or fund overreaching government programs is based on the corporate interests of government contractors.

I didn't think I needed to connect the dots between corporate interests, federally funded jobs in legislators home districts, and American policy. It should be obvious but that is just my opinion.

<comment><USER3> So you are saying that a majority of the legislators and the executive are all pursuing foreign wars... because some voters in their districts work for defense companies? I don't think that argument holds water because it's not true that defense employs an overwhelming number of people in the average legislative (Senate or Congress) district.

Or are you saying they are directly being bribed large sums of money to do it? If so, please provide evidence. That doesn't seem plausible in the US where direct bribes are rare and can be caught.

> It should be obvious but that is just my opinion.

Oh, right. The reason your argument is not specific and empirical is because you are appealing to the "obvious" i.e. "your opinion." And I must be stupid to not see that your opinion is just obvious.

<comment><USER2> That isn't what I'm saying but I'm not going to argue with you. It's my opinion. I don't understand why you seem so angry about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't buying things for the military out of concern for industrial needs rather than strategic need the definition of the military-industrial complex?

The sooner this 'post-Cold-War day of reckoning for military aircraft' happens, the better.

<comment><USER5> Having the ability to produce heavy machinery IS a strategic need.

The military will not let all those factories go under because it wants to ensure the domestic ability to produce military equipment.

It's expensive though, you either pay factories to exist but not do anything, or you build unneeded machines, or you figure out how to make a "modular" factory that can be converted in a time of need.

<comment><USER6> If the military needs some factories, why don't they buy some factories, and run them as profitably as they can? Buying stuff they don't need from contractors is a strange, inefficient way to keep industrial capacity if that's what they really want.

<comment><USER5> It's not strange at all. First the military is a military, it's not a contractor. It's just not what they do.

Additionally privatization is usually pretty efficient. Among other things it also lets the factory owners do other things with the factory which can bring cost savings.

And finally one of the unwritten goals of the military is the economy.

<comment><USER7> > Additionally privatization is usually pretty efficient.

By some measures of efficiency. It also means that the military _can 't_ do in-theater activities they used to do. They can barely cook their own meals anymore. That said, they have no real role in the manufacture of systems other than as customers and future maintainers, that's where the private industry belongs. State-side, many bases are guarded by private contractors who had (for a time, this changed) the physical fitness requirement of having a pulse. Aircraft maintenance is a combination of public (military run depots, mostly staffed by a combination of civil servants and contractors) and private (NG or Boeing or whoever run facilities). Both have issues, but the latter is quite effective at lobbying to continue to get their incentive pay even after destroying an aircraft [1]. I'll note, FOD damage occurs at military run depots as well. But they don't get their incentive pay for destroying an aircraft, they risk being put at the top of the next BRAC list.

[1] [http://defensetech.org/2012/01/27/a-basic-mistake-that- trash...](http://defensetech.org/2012/01/27/a-basic-mistake-that-trashed-a- jstars/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I worked for one of the big defense contractors until recently. One of the most enlightening things I got to see while there was a tour of the F-18 assembly line. While the fear about what would happen to the jobs and the facility after the end of production was palatable, it was amazing to see the facility.

The challenges faced by big assembly line manufacturing were so foreign to me coming from a computer programming background. For instance while as a programmer, my bugs might crash a computer, for them, an unused rivet hiding in the bottom of an engine might clog a fuel line and crash a plane. Made me appreciate the manufactured goods in my life more.

<comment><USER9> It's an educational experience for sure, and has some bearing on how we build software. Imagine using scrum to develop an F18. Or a heart monitor you strap to your wide to monitor your kid's heart beat during labour. How stable or even coherent would Excel be if it was built using eXtreme Programming?

<comment><USER10> What's interesting is that in the early days of the jet age, fast protyping and testing _was_ the norm when designing new aircraft.

The dozens of experimental planes from that age are fascinating stuff.

<comment><USER9> Prototyping is a technique that addresses some of the shortfalls in waterfall. Amusingly, other than names for things there is nothing new in agile methodologies like scrum and XP. They've been around since the early '80s.

If you're into process, try and get your hands on a copy of (it's a mouthful) -

Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions: A Catolog of Modern Engineering Paradigms: A Catalogue of Modern Software Engineering Paradigms (Yourdon Press Computing), by Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/013590126X](http://www.amazon.com/dp/013590126X).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From a strategic sense, we would want to have (at least) 2 competing aircraft makers so that they compete against each other and innovations continue to be made. However, the cost of new aircraft is absurdly high, to the point where this might be unsustainable as a nation.

In a way, we have become victims of our own success. During the 1st and 2nd Gulf Wars, we lost very few aircraft. Mostly because of their superior technology and design, and ability to counter the threat of Iraqi defenses. In the future, we might face a more challenging opponent - either because they produced better air defense systems, or because we allow our aircraft to become obsolete.

Because our aircraft have been so good, it's tempting to mission-overload them. Build fewer, more-capable aircraft (or now, drones). But that increases the percentage loss of capability for each aircraft that is destroyed. Lose one plane out of two hundred, that's 0.5%. Lose one plane out of 50, that's a 2% reduction in airpower.

So it might make sense to build more planes/drones, each of which costs less (and is individually less capable), and run the assembly lines at a slower pace. The cost then becomes more predictable and more even over the years (no huge expenditures in one year, and nothing the next). It'd take longer to fully staff a squadron, but would also ensure that new aircraft enter service each year so that the entire force would be, on the average, fairly new.

</comment><comment><USER12> I seem to recall an adage about "you don't get to fight a war with the army you want; you fight a war with the army your predecessor wanted", probably to fight the previous war.

The next war the United States gets into (and I mean "war", not "trivial intervention into some random third-world country") is going to be a lulu. Someone ought to hope that it lasts long enough to build up the army that is actually needed.

Unfortunately, any solution that starts with "prioritizing industrial-base concerns" is unlikely to improve the situation.

</comment><comment><USER13> If the US would just stop procuring "perfect" aircraft that are all things to all men, the aircraft might just be cheap enough that we could afford to buy them. As it is we end up in a cycle of funding too-expensive aircraft with never-before combined features, fail expensively and require an even more ambitious program to fill the gap. A great recipe for the industrial complex that feeds off this cycle, but not so great for our defensive capabilities or our budget.

To be honest, right now, I couldn't give a damn if we didn't buy any more toys for the damn armed forces to play with. We already nearly outspend the rest of the world combined and it isn't enough? Give me a break.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Yet the past few months have seen stark harbingers of looming pain._

Strange notion of "pain", there. Coming from an industry whose main purpose, basically, is to drop fire on people.

<comment><USER5> No, that's not the main purpose. It's the stated ability, but the main purpose is to scare others into not even thinking of attacking, and the secondary purpose is to provide jobs.

<comment><USER14> Well, its real, main purpose is to provide a gravy train to its various first- tier stakeholders (elected representatives, and white collar defense contractors). As a side effect, it creates a lot of blue collar jobs, also -- but these are of secondary importance (i.e. they don't wag the hound nearly as much as the first tier).

After that its purpose seems to be to make Americans _feel_ "awesome" and "safe", in approximately equal measures. In that sense "kicking ass" (i.e. dropping fire on people for no good reason) seems to be about as important as making "feel safe."

Whether the industry actually _keeps_ us safe from external violence to any appreciable degree (i.e. that would be anywhere near worth the expenditure of blood and treasure devoted to that industry) seems to be highly debatable (and as a benefit, of at most tertiary significance, in this scheme).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best part is how, after the production runs are terminated, all of the specialized equipment needed to build those aircraft are also destroyed, so the lines can never be resurrected. This results in a new competitive bid for an all new aircraft design when the existing aircraft get too old. It takes a couple decades to bring a new modern aircraft from blueprint to regular production run. The F-22 program, started in a competitive process in _1981_. It's literally the very best of late '70's mature technology with some very early 1980's hi-tech tossed in.

Another point, the South Korean acquisition of the F-35 (called the F-X 3 in the article) may be one of the dirtiest acquisitions that's ever been publicly reported. _Before_ the competition was even let, Lockheed had greased enough palms and secured a sure "win". Unfortunately, South Korea put in place an independent agency (DAPA) and legal framework to control defense acquisitions and the Lockheed bid lost badly (overbudget, not enough extras to juice it, they were sure of the win why not gouge the customer a bit?).

The award went to Boeing and an all new custom variant of the F-15 that offered greater mission capability at a lower price, and involved significant technology transfer to South Korean industry (the aircraft would be majority built _in_ Korea ramping up domestic expertise for future home-grown aircraft design). It was underbudget, more mature and featured several nice extras in the purchase package. There were so many positive points in favor of the F-15 acquisition that only an idiot would have turned it down and it would still be generations ahead of anything North Korea or China could throw at it. I believe they met every single one of the RFP requirements to the letter or better. I think they would have even gotten 20 more aircraft under the Boeing deal!

The original officials who were bribed for their approval of the f-35 created all kinds of chaos and essentially overwrote the acquisition agency's legal award. They then setup a new "competition" and of course the award went to Lockheed.

I've been following the story for a while and it's interesting that now that Lockheed won the final contract, the previous dirtiness of it all is barely reported.

[http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News- Wires/2013/092...](http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News- Wires/2013/0924/F-15-Silent-Eagle-Why-South-Korea-rejected-this-jet)

 _Boeing 's F-15 Silent Eagle had been in the box seat to win the 8.3 trillion won ($7.7 billion) tender - as the only bid to fall within budget - but former military top brass and even the ruling party's lawmakers had criticized the plane as it lacked crucial stealth capabilities._

<comment><USER15> "The original officials who were bribed"

There is just no end to the things US does abroad. It is a shame. American people believe in freedom and honor while their officials will just do anything even for simple commercial interests.

Here is an example from Turkey. There is this cult called "Fethullah". They infiltrate to police and courts to advance their cause in the state. Their goal is to bring an Islamic state to Turkey. Ironically, the cult works with CIA on many levels to help each other.

In the last decade, Turkish navy started making their own ships and equipment, changing a hundred year of tradition of buying from US. The result? The cult put all of the generals, officials, and engineers who worked on the new ships and equipments behind bars.

Everybody knows that CIA is behind this since the cult have no reason to do this on their own. Nobody knows what they've got from CIA in exchange though.

<comment><USER16> Keep in mind that this is _two different_ US companies fighting against each other (Boeing and Lockheed).

With regards to the 'cult' \-- there are plenty of reasons that cults put thinkers and doers behind bars. They don't like all that messy fact-based thinking, and they don't like competition for hearts and minds.

I can reuse your argument. The CIA has no reason to bring an Islamic state to Turkey. That means the cult made these arrests on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These companies can re-purpose themselves to fill other needs.

For example, Boeing lost an important military contract to build a heavy transport plane. Looking for another source of revenue, they ended up building the Boeing 747 - one of the most popular airplanes on the planet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747)

<comment><USER18> Modern fighter aircraft need large single piece titanium parts, and this is essentially the only demand for the pressing facilities. If you don't support the presses somehow, the capacity goes away. This is just an example of how military industrial needs are specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this why Skunk Works announced they're 5 years away from practical fusion? Is Lockheed Martin looking to make up their revenue shortages by switching from the DoD to the DOE?

</comment><comment><USER20> "... Rather than procuring 48 planes per year for 10 years, why not 36 per year for 13 years? .."

Or how about forcing military aircraft producers to use smaller domestic partners to do subassembly, thereby "unbundling" the purchase? This would also create higher unit costs, but would also create an ecosystem of small manufacturers.

I agree there is a strategic problem at play here, but the answer is forcing more competition instead of paying more to huge conglomerates. Manufacturing is set to take off over the next decade or two, and it's not going to be BigCo manufacturing. If we wish to address this strategic problem, we need more emphasis on mom and pop manufacturing.

<comment><AUTHOR> "use smaller domestic partners to do subassembly"

That's actually a problem with government projects. Every congressional district needs to supply a part it seems. Unbundling is basically a bribe and corruption in our system.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a service offering serverless functions with access to GPU? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> On a similar note - is there a service offering serverless functions where you can precisely specify the CPU?

<comment><USER3> GCloud has the most configurability, pick CPU, platform, accelerator, etc.

Not sure of serverless applies here, but you could setup something on a VM that makes it "serverless"</comment></comment>


Standing Desks Are Mostly Bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/standing-desks-are-mostly-bullshit-1736571972 <comment><USER2> I wasn't aware that avoiding death was the main impetus for a standing desk. I thought staying mostly awake for the entire work day was a primary motivator.

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep in mind that this is a Gawker-produced article ;-)</comment></comment>


Why Indian Startups need to get off their asses and learn to program - <AUTHOR> http://indianstartupgyaan.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/why-indian-startups-need-to-get-off-their-asses-and-learn-to-program/

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is limited to India, we have had plenty of offers of "partnerships" etc from people with ideas. Our response has been to quote a minimum viable product cost and tell them to go find funding.

Some have come back to us with a budget and things have been built. But without a dedicated tech team studying the product they have a really tough time.

The reason we don't partner is non technical people _always_ underestimate the work required to build, maintain and grow a product. The equity share on offer is simply not worth the risk but the people with the idea don't see it like that.

We've had some great ideas pitched to us too, it has been sad to see the ideas attached to people we didn't want to work with.

<comment><USER4> Its the age old ideas are easy, execution is hard because there are just so many faucets to the process.

<comment><USER5> spoken like a true plumber

<comment><USER6> You're not a true plumber until mushrooms make you grow to twice normal size and shoot fireballs

<comment><USER7> Actually it's the flowers that make you shoot fireballs.

<comment><USER8> Please don't forget that certain type of leaves will give you raccoon-like tail and ears and, somehow, the ability to fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm floored by the irony of Indian startups outsourcing their software development.

<comment><USER10> Good. Cheap. Pick one.

In a previous life we outsourced to Indian companies because it saved a lot of money (on paper)[1]. The good ones seemed competent, but they weren't cheap so we didn't use them. The cheap ones we _did_ use (disclaimer: limited experience and observations) were staffed by young, inexperienced engineers. The code I worked with, I would put at second year CompSci level.

Incidentally, coding standards are quite limited in their ability to raise the competence level of software.

One example was the coding standard requirement that the number of global variables was to be minimized. In this particular application, there was only one global variable. Minimized pretty well... until I saw it was a typedefed struct, the struct was _huge_ and had several nested structs in it. Abort Retry [FAIL].

Another example in the same application, there were several (not one, not two, but _several_ ) funny looking loops that called a function, passing a _bunch_ of parameters. After puzzling through the code, I realized that the code had failed the McCabe complexity measurement, so they had simply _cut out the guts of the loop and made it a called function._ That wasn't the worst of it... the icing was that they _passed the loop counter as a pointer and side-effect modified it in the called function._ Owwwwwwwwww!

[1] My gross observation was that it took 3x longer to get a job done, but we paid the outsource company 1/2 as much as the internal engineers. The way accountants run numbers, the longer it took an outsource company to get the job done, the more they thought the company saved.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it:

        Quality, price, speed pick any two.

<comment><USER9> I don't think quality and cheap are compatible. I can't envision a scenario whereby a project taking a long time will allow it to be done cheaply and well.

<comment><USER11> Breed monkeys, give them keyboards, wait a million years.

<comment><USER9> Even then, you'd still only get Perl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ordinarily, I wouldnt reply to this - but this potentially affects my business, so here goes:

You dont need to be a good programmer to build a great software business. There are innumerable instances of non-programmers building great business. And especially while churning out your MVP, you could do much worse than outsourcing your product and instead, driving sales. There is a bloated sense of elitism in writing your own code - while I certainly subscribe to "once a geek, always a geek" personality, the insistence that the CEO/CFO/CXO should be a coder is not entirely healthy.

I run an outsourcing business and our first few (and currently one) customer are Silicon Valley startups, some of which got acquired in the course of time. And we are not expensive - the lowest we have gone is 1/3rd the silicon valley salary rate for a 10 year experienced engineer (this was when the project was large enough).

As far as India is concerned, I have had an interesting discussion with @plinkplonk over here - India has orders of magnitude more people and engineers than most other countries. So yes, there is a high signal-to-noise ratio to finding people... not unusual in any large economy. When comparing skill levels to countries like Eastern Europe, I will admit you have a better chance of finding good engineers there, just because you need to be very good to be able to make money like that. [[ Read what I just wrote AGAIN - I didnt say europeans are better than indians in general. I said YOU would have a better chance at finding them in a smaller place.]]

I wouldnt presume to go and tell you how to go and find your employees/outsourcing partners, but remember this: At the end of the day, India has a huge talent pool - in this day of an overheated Silicon Valley/NY job market, how do you go about leveraging this talent pool ? Use the fact that a good Indian salary is a fraction of American salary - these are the same people who migrate to silicon valley and pull a Vinod Khosla or Ram Shriram. There is no real truth to the fact that cheap==poor when exchange rates play to your advantage.

<comment><USER13> Just to clarify, the article didn't indicate that the CEO/CFO/COO needs to learn programming to get off the ground. The non-technical founder can at the least onboard a technical co-founder or build an internal tech. team. If a non-tech. person outsources the product, how will he/she be able to figure out if the outsourcing firm is bluffing or creating bad products?

<comment><USER12> good question - and the answer to that is the way we got our first customers. We used to do two weeks of work free and if they still wanted to work with us, the 2 weeks get retroactively billed. These days, we have a sufficiently low walk-away penalty for the initial weeks.

We never lost a customer.. and we did work with non-technical, although smart, people.

<comment><USER13> A two week trial is fine, but that still doesn't let non-technical people discover flaws in design/architecture/code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am i the only one here who finds this post a bit immature?

Any fairly serious startup needs a good business culture for it to grow and mature, and not just a reliance on technology alone. There have been a lot of tech organizations which crash and burn not because they don't have a good tech team, but because of their lack of business acumen. A look at the US DotCom Bubble should help in this regard.

1\. When the author starts off with "Indian Startups need to get off their asses and learn to program" he indirectly implies that they don't - <USER2> providing any real evidence to back up his assertion.

2\. The author of the post just bases his generalizations on getting a lot of emails from potential entrepreneurs. Hell, he should just check out craigslist to find a lot of folks with get-rich quick schemes with little to no technical background. The phenomenon of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs in not unique to any one culture.

If the author and his team does not want to be shocked by such emails, they should investigate something called a spam filter. It might reduce their shock reactions.

3\. He draws conclusions like "these folks have no tech capability whatsoever and feel that technology is trivial and can be outsourced."

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. One cannot generalize an entire country's tech culture based on a few half-assed emails. I don't consider every nigerian i meet as a scammer.

4\. If he has just resorted to gross exaggerations, that would be OK. It's his opinion, and he has every right to it. When he starts by condescendingly suggesting that potential entrepreneurs learn programming and being lazy and wondering why such folks get VC-funding, he seems to come across arrogantly.

5\. Outsourcing is a part of the global IT landscape, and India, more than any other nation, has benefited enormously from it. Every major IT vendor, from Microsoft to Oracle to Sun to Google has opened indian operations and has hired programmers by the thousands. Does the author imply that these organizations lack a tech culture, since they take advantage of indian outsourcing in a big way? His suggestions seem to suggest that the article's focus is on internet startups, but he does not mention that. He also seems to lump product development with internet-based services.

The irony is that the few valid points he makes regarding usability, Simplicity and performance is completely masked by his condescending tone.

</comment><comment><USER15> I feel problem in India(not sure about other regions) is that more people get into Software/IT for money than for the love of technology. We will be better off leaving technology to people who get it or love doing it. Convincing/asking people to learn to program will hardly produce stellar startups.

Then, I think there is no harm for non tech people who see technology more as an enabler than end goal seeking technical expertise outside.

<comment><USER16> This is very true. In India IT is seen as a good career - it's something parents encourage their kids to go in to. There are very very few people who do it because they love technology. It's not common for grade school/high school kids to go about hacking. If it were, you would see more viruses originating from India - but they never do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Humans love things that are attractive and shiny_

Offline, some people do, online - it's hard to say. I used to perfect the look and feel of everything, paying designers and wasting hours adjusting color schemes. What I learned hard way is people do not care about the design much. I don't have statistics and numbers, but I am sure the majority of people online do not care much about many fancy things designers like to implement. The ideal solution is the one that looks and feels STANDARD to anyone who knows how to use ms office or excel. That's not good news for someone (like me) who likes to put in crazy hours changing fonts, sizes and colors. However, it looks like that's what it is. Attractive and shiny goes to the intranet. Of course, there is a niche for them (hardcore/online games), but not in mainstream products.

<comment><USER18> You're absolutely right. People don't care how something looks. They care how it works... but a designer's job isn't to make something pretty; it's to make something useful and easy. Being pretty should be derived by osmosis -- a designer or team of designers working hard to improve accessibility, usability and the experience will usually (but not always) result in something that is pretty. Or at least appreciably elegant.

Too often designers are relegated to gussying up an already finished product. That's unfortunate and can be jarring to the user: The designer should help design the product, and then define how people use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Most startups in India worth the moniker of "tech-startup" do know how to program. I have visited (as a potential employee) or talked to many founders (as a potential partner) most major revenue earning tech startups in India and I'd say everyone of them had strong programming founders.

Yes many startups-founders are clueless and have a world changing the-next- facebook-idea but that happens everywhere, not just in India.

I was part of a non-tech startup once and web was just marketing tool for us, we did not want to do the website and its UX ourselves, that would be a waste of our precious time (although we ended up doing it too cos' we were techies at heart). I think we did a mistake by doing it ourselves.

So no, all Indian startups do not need to learn how to program and most tech- startups do know how to program.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is it just me or you also think that the fact that he mentioned and linked to his company 3-4 times in the article shows that the article was written to advertise his infinite beta shop?

<comment><USER21> Marketing, for lack of a better word, is good. Marketing is right. Marketing works. Marketing clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Marketing, in all of its forms; marketing of oneself, of your business, of your community, has marked the upward surge of mankind and marketing, you mark my words, will not only save Hacker News, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

<comment><USER22> Marketing marketing marketing, is what I say. Marketing.

<comment><USER23> Marketing! Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. I even love saying the word 'Marketing'. You probably think this is a picture of my family? No! It's a picture of The Marketing-Team. Bodie, Doyle, Tiger, the Jewellery Man.

[answers phone] Hello? What? Well if you can't work as a Marketing you're all fired. That's it, you heard me, fired! Get your things and go.

[redials phone] Hello, security? Everyone on floor 4 is fired. Escort them from the premises. And do it as a Marketing team. Remember, you're a Marketing team and if you can't act as a Marketing team, you're fired too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is really no blanket rule that will tell you whether it is good to code it all up by yourself or get it outsourced. Depends really on what is your shortest route to market at a reasonable cost. Trying to second-guess it from the outside is a good, but pointless, exercise.

Try the flip side of the question - how many Indian start-ups would have failed or succeeded if they all built and deployed their stacks on their own?

<comment><USER25> Hey shyam - while there are no blanket rules about anything in life other than the prevailing law in any country there is always examples that people can draw from and people always draw from the best examples. Can you give me a few examples of great companies that outsource their development???

<comment><USER24> Companies that outsource development. Indiatimes and Zimbra? NDTV and Tekriti?

But, I had asked a question in the parent comment - can it be shown that any of the start ups who failed or the ones who have done well can do even better if they did the stack internally?

<comment><USER25> Zimbra was a packaged product that they bought - so this example does not work. NDTV and Tekriti - oh well! Great Online company???? Do they even qualify?? There is enough empirical evidence from startups that have done well that they are all built by great technologists and have not outsourced that core capability. As for failed startups, you will never know as a lot of those stories just die with the companies.

<comment><USER24> Abinash,

What will qualify as a great company? Is the deciding factor that it does decent revenue or that it uses a pretty nifty technology stack or is it that it does decent revenue in which the technology stack is an enabler?

Zimbra - Well, the point is that Indiatimes did outsource it. Guess I gave you an example that you asked for there. Same is the case with NDTV and Tekriti. They may not be to your liking, nor am I sitting in judgement whether they are 'great' or not, but the fact is that you can build good companies and businesses either way - build or buy/lease.

Coming to what you have said, " As for failed startups, you will never know as a lot of those stories just die with the companies," this is precisely what I am trying to address. That, you just don't know what their reasons are. Just like I would not be able to tell you what is best for Infinitely Beta.

<comment><USER26> I find it really strange that the comments made here by Abinash, and those which he deleted from his blog, have a very different tone. You should have read the arrogant and immature comments that he made on his blog post. He just can't delete comments here..

I agree with a poster above, that the blog linked here is written by an immature person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is wrong with "outsourcing" things that don't fall into your area of expertise? As far as I'm concerned, a biz savvy guy "outsourcing" his tech job for a fee is not very different from buying toothpaste from the market because I don't know how to make a good one myself ... or like consulting a dentist to figure out which toothpaste is good for me.

<comment><USER28> It's fine as long as what you're outsourcing is not _core_ to your business model.

If you're running a software company (and the startups referred to in the article are software startups I believe) then outsourcing the _core_ product you want to make money off of is a poor strategy.

If you're doing a restaurant startup, then by all means, outsource the software that runs your place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Startups can't program.</comment>


Seth's Blog - Warning: The internet is almost full - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/warning-the-int.html

<comment> old-gregg Last August I took a very long (2.5 weeks is long in my book) vacation. Part of it was living in a small hotel in Jamaica without a phone, TV or even an Internet access. Just books on a beach, plus a few pinacalladas of course.

After less than a week I stopped by the lobby to check my email and see "what's going on out there". They had just one lonely iMac sitting abandoned and no customers (Gustav was about to hit the island, so there were only 3 couples left in the entire hotel).

I checked the email, hopped on 2-3 news websites on top of my head, including news.yc, reading every article that seemed interesting and that was it... Took me about 15 minutes. So I left wondering how come I had managed to waste hours surfing every day.

Internet isn't changing: the web (even FIDO before WWW) has always been full of digital noise. But the amount of time you stare at your browser slowly and quietly brings your standards for quality signal lower.

Good reading material isn't growing as rapidly: not every day brings memorable/important events and the number of smart writers with something to say isn't growing as fast.

But on any given day there will always be CNN and their "breaking news", reddit with upvoted articles, startups announcing ground-breaking products that "change the way we live". And most of the time the "news" are exaggerated, articles are boring rants or pictures of fat cats, and "ground- breaking software" is probably another seven HTML-ized MySQL tables or just a web-wrapper around some open source product that would better work on a desktop, but being online allows founders to escape GPL obligation for sharing.

I guess I don't have much of a "positive attitude" today, heh? :)

</comment><comment><USER3> "No one goes there any more, it's too crowded" - Yogi Berra

</comment><comment><USER4> As Clay Shirky would point out, the issue here is filter failure. 15 years ago, you might have been able to understand the stuff on the internet - <USER2> what about all the newspapers and books written? Or music made?

I doubt it. This problem isn't new. You're always at the knee of the curve as you go up an exponential.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like an opportunity for a bunch of startups.

<comment><USER4> There are already a bunch of startups. Facebook and FriendFeed are basically both information filters. So are Tipjoy, Reddit, Digg, SU and HN.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. The areas of email, movies, books, ecommerce are wide open. Even news filtering could use improvements.

<comment><USER4> I didn't say there was no opportunity - just a lot of people trying to solve problems in the space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Full of pithy and sensationalist blog posts? Most certainly.

</comment><comment><USER7> The libraries have been full with more content than any single human could digest long before the internet.

For some reason it seems unlikely that a few major "content providers" will emerge that monopolize new content. We had that already, it was called TV. Does anybody really want to go back to that?

</comment><comment> puzzle-out This may be considered off topic, but I visited the major London datacentre last month and perhaps there is also an argument that the growth in the internet is becoming a major hardware (and resultant energy) problem. [http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2232079/hp-warns- datace...](http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2232079/hp-warns-datacentre- information-4378731) Do we keep our faith in Moore's law, or make a concentrated effort at slicker programming?

</comment><comment><USER8> But the number of people with access to the internet keeps growing, and filtering tools keep improving... I might not be able to view everything cool online, but I can still view more of the things I'm really interested in.

My attention span has always been filled - more content on the internet just means I can be more selective when picking what to fill it with.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Its not information overload, its filter failure"

</comment><comment><USER10> One huge factor he omits is the additional overhead of all the surveillance installed by the telcos at the request of the federal government.

<comment><USER11> What additional overhead? You seem to not understand how such things work, which is odd given your apparent concern.

Please do familiarize yourself with the subject, and please don't post off- topic comments.

<http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf> <http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_marcus_decl.pdf></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened to the monthly "Best Laptop" threads - <AUTHOR> Is everyone satisfied with what they have? Is most of the computing being done in the cloud and the computer is just a portal? <comment><USER2> It stopped around the same time, someone created the Used Thinkpad Guide: [http://ktgee.net/post/49423737148/thinkpad- guide](http://ktgee.net/post/49423737148/thinkpad-guide)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link above. It actually helps me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It stopped when every reply was either about macbooks or thinkpads.

<comment><USER5> Nowadays it will be between MacBooks and SurfaceBooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everyone gave up after they realized the inherent superiority of ThinkPads.

<comment><USER7> I was a Thinkpad guy for about a decade. However, this time around, I went with a refurbished Dell Precision M4800 instead. This is mostly due to the numerous articles I've read bemoaning Lenovo for crappy 'modern' designs, pre- installed malware, etc.

I'd love to see this question answered again every few months.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget the stupid new keyboard :(</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Compare Two Samples - <AUTHOR> http://www.twosamples.com <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: I created a simple tool to compare two samples inside the browser.

The tool was created with Angular 4 and uses Universal. Currently I am thinking about creating a service that allows developers to compare software metrics of different versions of their software to detect performance regressions. But I am not sure yet how to package that as a SaaS service.

I'd be grateful for any feedback about the site (especially about how to make the whole page load faster).</comment>


Services you should be using: CloudSponge contacts importer - <AUTHOR>

http://www.cloudsponge.com/
Previously I've used OpenInviter to import user contacts, but it tends to break and remains broken for months. I've switched to CloudSponge and now everyone's happy.
- Works with the 4 major webmail services plus Outlook and Mac Address Book
- Very simple to integrate
- Looks good out of the box, but can be customized
- You can choose to use their API directly for full control
Pricing is $25 per month (first month is free).
Disclaimer: I'm not associated with CloudSponge in any way, just a fan. <comment><USER2> Thanks for the shout out ishi.

I'm the Founder of CloudSponge, if any HN people have questions just drop me a line.</comment>


Libs for Accessible React Applications - <AUTHOR> https://rafaelquintanilha.com/the-5-best-libs-for-accessible-react-applications/ <comment><USER2> I have checked the accessibility for 20+ UI frameworks (not just React)[1]. I defenitely recommend Reakit[2], which is an accessibility-first React UI library. I should also check and include Reach UI from your list.

[1] [https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui- frameworks/](https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui-frameworks/)

[2] [https://reakit.io/](https://reakit.io/)</comment>


Show HN: Encrypt text into url using Javascript on browser - <AUTHOR> http://boxuptext.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've just created a web app for encrypting data into url. The intent is to encrypt data at the client side without leaking the plain data to any server. The encrypted data are packed into a url for easy sharing. Decryption is done on the browser with a password. SJCL is used as the workhorse for encryption.

I know there's a prevalent view against doing crypto stuff in Javascript so extra precautions are taken to minimize the security risks.

\- All web content (html, css, js, images) come from the same server.

\- No download from any 3rd party websites or CDN.

\- Use SSL certificate for all content to prevent code injection along the way.

\- Encryption and decryption are done on the browser.

\- Nothing is submitted to the server and no input shown to avoid XSS.

\- Url fragment is used for encrypted data which stays on browser.

\- Server doesn't do any encryption work besides serving the web content.

\- The web pages can be downloaded and run off from the local file system.

\- Have as few dependencies as possible, just: SJCL, Bootstrap (css), and html5.js.

\- Keep things simple for verification.

Please review the app and code to see if there are any security concerns. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> As far as I can see, minus it being in JS, it's pretty secure, so good job! My only suggestion is to put this on Github, so any changes made to it can be publicly seen and referenced.

<comment><AUTHOR> The use of JS is unfortunate. I view it as a tradeoff for convenience and interop between platforms. It's easy to encrypt a tidbit as a link, send it to others, and have them simply clicked on it to decrypt it.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would it be possible to get the browser to generate a random key, use the current mechanism to encrypt that key and then upload a file, that has been encrypted with the original key, to a third party?

The reason I ask is that something like that could be used to build a file sharing service where the content is only known to those people with the correct links (with the # anchor information).

This would be super useful for distributing private data.

</comment><comment><USER4> Suggestion: make the "!" under "4. Shorten the URL" heading link directly to the FAQ entry that its tooltip mentions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Changes made. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> The link works great, thanks. But now the "!" is colored orange. It's hard to identify the "!" symbol in dark orange on gray. I think it should be white again or light gray.

Also, it would help to temporarily highlight the exact linked question on the page when you visit the link, so we can easily spot it among the other questions on that part of the page. I'm thinking of something like Stack Overflow's anchor link highlighting, seen on links like [http://stackoverflow.com/q/10720420/578288#comment13941533_1...](http://stackoverflow.com/q/10720420/578288#comment13941533_10720420). But this is not that important, and perhaps one day browsers will do this highlighting for us - I think Opera already does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha. I never notice that's how SO does its fading. Learn something everyday. Anyway, I put something in to do the highlight and fading on the FAQ. Also changed the ! from dark orange to gray.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Django and Python 3 - <AUTHOR> http://lazypython.blogspot.com/2009/11/django-and-python-3.html?

<comment><USER2> Anyone else confused by this opening statement: "Python 3 has been out for about a year at this point, and so far Django hasn't really started to move towards it (at least at a first glance). However, Django has already begun the long process towards moving to Python 3[...]"?

<comment><USER3> FWIW, he didn't seem to link to my django-dev post despite mentioning it; you can find it here:

[http://groups.google.com/group/django- developers/msg/0888b1c...](http://groups.google.com/group/django- developers/msg/0888b1c8f2518059)

<comment><USER4> Sorry, this is what I get for posting while tired :(</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can we add collapsing boxes to comments? - <AUTHOR> The top of this thread devolved into an off-topic discussion of the Month Hall problem [1].  I'm often on my phone and don't have the ability to use the browser extension that adds collapsing boxes on a desktop.  Plus I think this would be a feature that could allow everyone to more easily locate interesting discussion.<p>My favorite discussions on HN are the ones where comments are primarily on topic and substantive.  How can we get more of this?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11389370 <comment><USER2> I agree, having a collapse button would help cut down on the tendency of the early top comment to co-opt the original topic.

</comment><comment><USER3> While we're thinking about mobile CSS enhancements, what about a proper quoting mechanism? Using code-formatting makes wide text impossible to read on narrow screens. I totally agree that thread-collapsing would be a useful enhancement, and I have a browser extension that does it for me on desktop, but the quoting problem is a) really noticeable in every thread and b) probably easy to fix (not sure exactly how the HN text parser works). I'd be happy to donate some time to adding the functionality if you're interested, just shoot me an email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I think of this as a desktop _and_ mobile change. Something to make it easier for everyone to skip past off-topic conversation like yours (haha, only kidding!!!!). :-D -OP

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd prefer to see a higher quality of conversation and fewer pointless comments. The longest comment threads on HN are often the least interesting. The type of thread that comes to mind is one that starts with a comment that's not quite flamebait, but a strong opinion that's just wrong enough that lots of people feel forced to reply to correct a fallacy, and trigger an ensuing argument. [1]

How about putting a lower score weighting on comments with lots of replies?

[1] This thread from yesterday illustrates this perfectly, in my opinion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374839)

<comment><USER5> What about shading the top-level comments with a different background color so that it's easier to scroll past the long comment threads?

<comment><USER6> I would _really_ love a collapse button that floats down the screen as I scroll, so I can hide an entire reply chain after I'm deep into it already.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea but how would you recall which one you are collapsing? Color code them? Hover over the button to show the original comment as a tooltip?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use React HN [1] for this. It does not allow you to vote or make a comment, but it allows you to collapse comments and updates real time without having to refresh (which is sometimes a pain when you are reading a comment and suddenly new comment appears on the top and pushes down the comment you were reading).

[1] [http://insin.github.io/react-hn](http://insin.github.io/react-hn)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great tool but I doubt everyone will use it. To get better quality discussion, everyone should have access to the same basic toolset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see no way in which this would discourage good conversation and information sharing. And it would encourage the better comments to float to the top.

However, I put a low bet on it actually happening.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, same here. It's probably been requested before. I thought it could not hurt to float the idea again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those on Safari, I managed to find this extension which also does does collapsable comments

[https://hckrnews.com/about.html](https://hckrnews.com/about.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned extensions in my original comment.

The point stands that everyone should have access to the same basic tools. If some people do not use an extension, they will not be able to browse topics as quickly. This hurts discussion quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hear, hear! This would be a valuable function for the second piece of JavaScript on HN.

<comment><USER11> My vote is for pure CSS. It's definitely possible, reasonably supported, and has 0% chance of doing something nefarious/malicious or introducing security issues.

<comment><USER12> How would you do that? Is that one of those weird things were you exploit toggle button behaviour, or is there some way to actually do onclick toggles in pure CSS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This thread appears to have been moderated off the front page and off the "ask" section. 3 hours in, 40 comments and 127 points.

Thanks for the discussion! I guess we won't see this feature in the near term.

<comment><USER13> Generally, meta-discussions are considered off topic on HN. Probably because they tend to generate dull comments such as mine here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed yours is dull ;-)

I wouldn't call this topic meta. I'd call it a critique of HN itself.

This thread contains many interesting comments. The topic was up voted quickly by the HN community. If the thread really was manually removed, I'd like to hear directly from the mods about why. Where in the HN guidelines does it state you cannot critique HN? It doesn't. The only thing it says that is similar is this,

> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us > questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If > you want to say something to us, please send it to email@example.com.

However, this post was a question to the community asking for ideas on how to improve comment navigation and thus discussion quality.

So I think maybe something else happened and I'm just curious what triggered the topic's removal.

<comment><USER13> I suspect that people flagged the submission [story] because they found it did not rise to the level considered intellectually interesting enough for Hacker News. Flagging increases gravity and pulls submissions down.

Why would people do that? I suspect because for many people talking about Hacker News is not the reason that they come to Hacker News. I suspect that many people, like me, classify talking about Hacker News rather than hacker news to fall into the category of meta-discussion much in the same way that talking about StackOverflow is considered meta-discussion and lives on a separate site...if site management seems like an interesting topic, listening to Spolsky and Atwood discusss the building of StackOverflow is a good listen, they made podcasts all the way back to the first weeks of building it.

Don't get me wrong, I think a critique of HN could be interesting. I just think a blog post or essay would probably be more intellectually interesting than a quickly written call to arms...in that vein I suppose an actual implementation would be still more intellectually interesting particularly one of those proposals based on pure CSS. Given the organization of Hacker News markup, pure CSS recursing on .athing would probably be a duct tape (in the highest sense of duct tape) grade hack.

That leaves the question of why some meaningful fraction of the Hacker News community didn't find the question particularly interesting. There I think it bumps up against a bit of tEndless September. Here's a more popular and but no more interesting thread from a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038) Though in fairness proposing turning HN into Reddit probably gets some extra points for turning the "HN is turning into Reddit" meme on its head.

Anyway, people who follow all this stuff are aware that the moderator, dang, has said that collapsible comments are on the feature backlog. My take is that the feature backlog is filled with items that make the site better but that users don't see [e.g. don't see spammers].

The other problem with meta discussions besides dullness is that trying to be polite and thoughtful and helpful sucks up an asymmetric amount of effort, as this post demonstrates.

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked via email and it turns out it was modded off as a duplicate of a recent post a week ago [1], which I see you cited too

I didn't realize the topic was a dupe, oops! Anyway now we know.

I was told they're considering the feature and will probably implement something. Fingers crossed!

> trying to be polite and thoughtful and helpful sucks up an asymmetric amount > of effort, as this post demonstrates.

Not sure what you mean here. Whose time, commenter or HN staff? Either can choose to ignore the topic, whether by closing the tab or through modding. As you said, meta discussions are modded off, but allowed from time to time because, according to the response I got in email, "they get people's juices flowing". I'm fine with that though I do think it'd be more clear if that were noted in the guidelines.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Check out this firefox addon that I made for this purpose, HN Collapse.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hn- collapse/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hn-collapse/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm a fan of linear conversations on internet communities. I think the time that a message was posted is important, so the first message I want to look at is the most recent.

Although, adding this feature doesn't really make it better or worse for that goal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that's separate. A few people are using this thread to request other features.

Traditionally, HN staff have been very reluctant to make changes to the UI for fear it may hurt quality of discussion or promote the number of deep comments where people are talking past each other.

I think there is a strong argument to be made that collapsing boxes will _increase_ quality of discussion by allowing everyone to navigate topics more quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> OP, if you are on an android phone the Hacker News 2 app has this feature. I've often wished for it in the browser. I'll check out that chrome extension in the mean time

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestion.

I just tried it. The collapsing is great and easy to use. Clicking anywhere in a comment to collapse makes sense. Then again, that removes your ability to copy/paste, quote someone, etc.

Also, everyone will not use this or the browser extensions. We all need access to the same basic tools in order for the overall quality of discussion to go up.

Thanks again though, I didn't know about this one. I'd consider using it if it were not so slow and didn't just crash on my N4, doh! =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> +1 from me. My favorite feature for browsing Reddit is the RES collapsing button.

If HN declines to add it, maybe someone can make an `HNES'?

<comment><USER18> I use this chrome extension ->

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an- addi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an-addition- to/cchaceegbflphbdpfocjalgjhjoahiia?hl=en-US)

You have to disable their hideous theme, but it adds collapsible comments and infinite scroll on the home page which is pretty neat.

<comment><USER19> I like HN Enhancement Suite:

[http://i.imgur.com/XJOS9oz.png](http://i.imgur.com/XJOS9oz.png)

<comment><USER20> I use HackerNew. I'm not sure how the features compare, but I like it overall.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlndihpmbbgmbpjohilcphbfhddd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's a vote for less use of javascript, not more.

I use w3m under emacs, and that does not work with Javascript. So HN would break if it required it. Using a Javascript-aware browser would also expose me to a host of Javascript vulnerabilities.

Anyway, I'd be much more interested in comments and articles getting tags, rather than collapsing comments.

Even better would be ditching primitive web browsers for a return to Usenet, which would allow the use of sophisticated news clients with features like kill files, properly threaded and sorted conversations, advanced filtering, and, yes, collapsible comments.

<comment><USER11> It should be possible to do all the collapsing and whatnot in pure CSS, which would leave your setup un-affected :)

<comment><USER22> It doesn't even have to be hover. You can do click-based stuff using hidden check-boxes. CSS3.</comment></comment></comment>


How the Government Shutdown Is Affecting Spam Robocalls - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/heres-how-the-government-shutdown-is-affecting-spam-rob-1831815996 <comment><USER2> [" go to the FTC's National Do Not Call Registry site, you'll see it simply says, "Due to the government shutdown, we are unable to offer this website service at this time." This of course means it's impossible to add a new number to the list.

But that's a list that legitimate operations respect. The type of spammers that have been ramping up over the last couple years generally disregard that list. "]

this list is also used by spammers to create a list of valid phone numbers and they ignore the do not call part and robocall the list anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's time for us to fight back against these robocalls. I have just read an article about this topic at [https://www.whycall.me/news/consumer- wins-massive-229500-rob...](https://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins- massive-229500-robocall-lawsuit-against-time-warner-cable/). People who have similar problems with robocalls (especially the ones which come from legit companies) might find this information useful.</comment>


Show HN: Sync GitHub Gists to Local Git Repo - <AUTHOR> https://aaron-hoffman.blogspot.com/2018/04/sync-github-gists-with-git-repo.html <comment><USER2> I dont understand. Gists are just flies in a git repo.

Goto your gist, click the arrow next to the 'embed' button, and pick one of the clone options.

<comment><USER3> And this appears to do this for all gists a user has, instead of manually one- by-one, but doesn't keep the histories.</comment></comment>


Vacuum Burglars: sucking 500,000 euros straight out of a supermarket - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3149962/Robbers-clean-up-with-vacuum.html <comment><USER2> all you'd need to add was a one-way valve type thing on the end of that tube inside the safe... not exactly rocket science. 4 years is a long time to leave something like that unaddressed...

<comment><USER3> Could easily be an inside job. Stew Leonard was put in jail for stealing money from his own pneumatic tubes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be taken like that once, I can see that but multiple times is a bit stupid.

<comment><USER5> If it's a real story, maybe. It's the Sun, after all - for it and the Daily Mail, I'd want independent corroboration if they said the sun rose in the East that morning.

For this story covering a remarkable string of thefts over four years? This Sun article is the _only_ source being repeated by others in a few quick searches.

<comment><USER6> There are a few newspapers in French mentioning the story:

[http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/le-gang-a-l- aspirateur...](http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/le-gang-a-l-aspirateur- devalise-les-monoprix-22-09-2010-1078047.php) [http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash- actu/2010/09/22/97001-20100922F...](http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash- actu/2010/09/22/97001-20100922FILWWW00577-un-mysterieux-gang-des- aspirateurs.php)

<comment><USER5> Huh! Well, that upgrades it to "it may have been bright looking eastward this morning" at the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some people spend years figuring how to make money, others spend years figuring how to take it from you.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm suddenly remembering an old Judge Dredd comic with a vacuum gang emptying out a bank vault.

<comment><USER8> Sure it wasn't a Beagle Boys/Scrooge McDuck comic?

<comment><USER5> Could be that, too. :)

(This one has Dredd coming back to Earth after spending six months of storylines serving as head judge of a moon colony, and suddenly acting ridiculously laid-back and mellow...and walking right by criminals engaging in crime. This includes an armed gang vacuuming out the contents of a bank vault. The lame gag turns out to be the reveal at the end that for some reason he has to be sworn back in again as a judge on Earth, and vigilantism...is a crime.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> sucks for the store

</comment><comment><USER10> Note to self: it's probably not worth reading a site that disables context menus for no good reason.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your blogging workflowithtools? - <AUTHOR> Hi folks, what's your blogging workflow? I'm thinking tools (Jekyll, Gatsby, Wordpress), deployment (gh-pages, Netlify, AWS?), commenting (Disqus/own?), feedback forms (Formspree?), etc. What do you use?<p>(Used to do Jekyll, currently using Hugo on Github pages, but I'm thinking of switching to Gatsby since I know more React than Go, so it's harder for me to make changes). <comment><USER2> For commenting, I actually built a Disqus alternative: [https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments)

It's hosted serverless + open source too like Isso.

But maybe doesn't matter much what commenting system one uses — because almost no blogs nowadays seem to get any comments, anyway :- / It's all Facebook and Reddit etc instead, right.

I have a blog with just 1 blog post, and it uses Gatsby. I'm thinking about switching to Hugo though because Gatsby feels a bit complicated, whilst Hugo seems to have "everything" built-in (like tags. I want tags). It's funny that you're using Hugo and thinking about switching to Gatsby :-) Like you, I know React well (that's why I went with Gatsby). And nothing about Go. Hmm I'll probably stick with Gatsby for the nearest future then.

Netlify right now. I had a look at your blog b.t.w., via your profile. Why shall each post be exactly 10 sentences :- )

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a constraint so I force myself to do this, I'm barely pushing through day 6 hehe. Then I can go back next month and redo all the articles, hehe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried hugo and jekyll, but pages produced were still too heavy, so I built my own simple, stupid page generator which uses pandoc(1) [0]. With the little bit of trafic I get, and the tons of means to get in touch, I didn't subscribe to disqus or the like. And deployment is scp(1)-ing to my server, and a cron(1) job that copies said scp-ed directory to /usr/local/www .

[0] [https://try.popho.be/pandoc.html](https://try.popho.be/pandoc.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> > _currently using Hugo on Github pages, but I 'm thinking of switching to > Gatsby since I know more React than Go, so it's harder for me to make > changes_

As far as I know, Hugo requires very little knowledge of Go to use — going so far as to implement their own DSL of sorts.

What kind of features are you trying to implement that would require knowledge of Go?

</comment><comment><USER5> We use Hugo + Algolia (search) + Formspree + AWS. We disabled commenting (but used to use Disqus).

You can read about our set up here [https://gohugo.io/showcase/forestry/](https://gohugo.io/showcase/forestry/)

<comment><USER2> Interesting writeup. What's the reason you disabled commenting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Svbtle with no comments nor feedback forms - all pages include a "mailto" link in the footer if anyone needs to provide feedback or correct anything.</comment>


Peer-proxy - Local HTTP webservice proxy behind NAT/FW - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/InstantWebP2P/peer-proxy Proxy web service or website from peer.
Features

    Support proxy to local/home http server, behind firewall/nat
    Partial support proxy to remote website, behind firewall/nat
    Support Websocket
    Secure end-to-end connections
    Token-based authentication for user's ip
    Support rewrite location header in 301/302 redirection response
    Support rewrite href in text/html response
 <comment><USER2> Actually it sounds a lot like Microsoft IAS. It also sounds like something having the right router and configuration would make unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it like <http://progrium.com/localtunnel/> ?

<comment><USER4> or like <https://github.com/ciju/gotunnel>?</comment></comment>