Catching a Cheater Online  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/catching-a-cheater-online/284461/ <comment><USER2> As stated in the article, cheating has mostly to do with the fact that what is being taught is a bunch of crap - and the final product (a college degree) is seen as a piece of paper that grants them access to the next level.

Cheating in academia is exactly the same as piracy: It is a service problem. If classes taught useful information/skills in a non-boring way, cheating would be significantly reduced.

It takes a special kind of myopic/arrogant person to find out that students are cheating on their exams and think that the problem has nothing to do with them.

<comment><USER3> What you're describing may be part of the issue, I can't argue with that, but come on. There are lots of reasons that people might cheat in classes that they enjoy or that they recognize is useful. I've been lucky enough to have very little cheating in my classes, but it's easy enough to imagine.

Let's say Johnny wants to be a doctor more than anything in the world. He knows that he needs two semesters of Organic Chemistry on his transcript to get in to med school, and that if his grades aren't top notch he won't be able to compete. Johnny likes his Chem prof (and the grading is fair), but he's only managing B-'s on his exams. He sees his dream fading away. Sure, he could say, "Huh. I guess I'm not cut out to be a doctor." But don't you think some students out there would consider cheating under those circumstances?

Or maybe Johnny consciously chose to go to a college that has a strong culture of giving students a "well-rounded" education (by whatever internal definition) and insists that students take a wide variety of classes from different disciplines. That's not Johnny's cup of tea: he just wants a computing degree. He could easily have chosen a different school, but he didn't. Now he just wants to focus on his CS classes, so when he's stuck with a course in English or History he decides to cheat so he doesn't have to think about it. Do you really want to say that's the _teacher 's_ fault?

<comment><USER4> You have a valid point in the first one but in the second case cheating is harmless.

He has no intention of applying the knowledge he would have attained in the classes he cheated on.

Every student should be allowed to choose his own classes with as little requirements imposed by the school as possible.

That's not to say there couldn't be a list of recommendations preferably with an explanation why for students that have no idea what to take but forcing them is a bad idea.

Stop wasting students time with useless classes just so you can have a standard set of classes for each field.

<comment><USER5> In both cases cheating is a sympthom of a larger issue: in case 1, requiring your doctor has an A grade to in organic chemistry is BS.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that expecting a doctor to do well in o-chem is a bad idea. Why? Organic chemistry is considered by many people to be extremely difficult because it forces those who are really skilled at it to have strong intuitive skills and to practice those skills. And that's definitely something that I want my doctor to be good at: diagnostic and intuition.

<comment><USER7> The hard work part of orgo is memorization.

<comment><USER6> The easy part of organic chemistry is taking the first course where you memorize a lot of stuff, but if you move forward to useful things then there's no way to memorize it all which is why you have to actually be intelligent, rather than simply being able to memorize and regurgitate.

<comment><USER7> My understanding was that Orgo I is often considered the "weeder course" for people on a path for med school. At my university, the last 3rd of the first course was pretty much all memorization that facilitated Orgo II (I know this because I wasn't planning on taking II and decided not to do a great job on the memorization but still did good enough in the class).

<comment><USER6> That's what I'm saying - memorization is useful enough for basic concepts but it won't help you pass the MCAT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The methods they're using to catch 'em are interesting:

From a Guardian article linked to in the OP: "Special software that recognises students' typing speeds and rhythms is used to verify identity, preventing somebody else from taking an assessment on their behalf."

Reminds me of a post I saw on HN a couple days ago about a company that used "stylometry" to reveal J.K. Rowling was the author of a book she'd written under a pen name and had applied the same techniques to determine Newsweek had the wrong Nakamoto.

Scary times when not only our browsing history and online activity is being tracked but also the very essence of our communication styles too.

And by "scary", I mean awesome :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never bothered cheating. If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took the hardest classes that I could, and was happy if I learned something even if the grade wasn't perfect.

That said, I do get why people do it. So much incentive is put on grades, rather than what you know. And it many cases, it is arbitrary. You get good grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they are no smarter than you. (There are great teachers out there, but the mean teacher's standardized test scores are less than the mean student entering college)

While I get it, it really pissed me off when I saw it in action. Especially in grad school. I wanted to say, "Come on, grades don't matter in grad school. Do you really need to cheat?" Sometimes it was telling someone "I'm just auditing the class, can I have your notes and homework answers from last year?" Other times it was sitting for the same exam twice in different sections. When I saw it happen, I could never trust the person again.

<comment><USER10> _" If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took the hardest classes that I could, and was happy if I learned something even if the grade wasn't perfect."_

Very much matches my experience, in school at the tail end of the first tech bubble. I'd say "I'm taking X, Y, and Z because they sound interesting," and others would say "but those sound hard, I'm taking A, B, and C, because I've heard they're an easy A." Always bothered me a bit.

 _" You get good grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they are no smarter than you."_

There are certainly bad teachers, and occasionally that's due to stupidity, but I object to the notion that "teacher being smarter than you" is important. Hopefully they know _more_ about the material, but even if they know less _but a substantially different set than you know_ you have plenty to learn from them, and if they are skilled _at teaching_ they might be quite useful even without that.

Having said that, I recall being quite annoyed when a teacher tested on the particular mnemonic devices she'd presented rather than the things they were supposed to help us remember...

<comment><USER9> It wasn't until I got to AP Computer Science in school that I had a teacher that knew the material. From 4th grade up until then the teachers were faking it. I guess that's why I am biased on this point. :-)

I hear you on the pneumonics. Better to learn the essence.

<comment><USER10> When I was high-school age, there wasn't any AP Computer Science, though I was taking intro CS courses at the local community college from someone who more or less got it. I hadn't suffered through tons of teachers trying to teach me CS without grokking it before that (though occasionally after...), but I can guess at the kind of sensitivity that might produce. I certainly don't claim that lack of deep familiarity is a virtue! I just claim that it's not _always_ as big a hindrance as one might think (depending...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning." \- Neil deGrasse Tyson</comment>


Standards for Scientific Graphic Presentation - <AUTHOR> http://www.juretriglav.si/standards-for-graphic-presentation/

<comment><USER2> My two go-to theorists for data presentation:

William Cleveland: [http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~wsc/](http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~wsc/)

Jacques Bertin: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bertin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bertin)

Blog post was cool, especially to hear about the systematization of subway graphics, but if you say "scientific graphic" you have to read those guys immediately. (And the person whose name begins with "T" is a bit overrated in my estimation).

<comment><USER3> My go-to practitioner: Jean-luc Doumont: [http://www.principiae.be/X0302.php](http://www.principiae.be/X0302.php) I highly recommend his talks (he tours universities in the US quite often) -- they are full of small practical nuggets on data presentation.

<comment><USER4> Wow! Great reference and lots of material to study. He too would be perfect on a new presentation standardization working group. I have to say that since this post has gone live, I've gotten so many great references, just shows a lot of very smart people thought about this problem - it would be fantastic to connect them all somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a really inspirational video to get you excited: [http://vimeo.com/73643542](http://vimeo.com/73643542)

I'm a big fan of showing Bret Victor's breakdown of a messy and wordy scientific article into an interactive and easy to understand version: [http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...](http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/)

It plays off his much larger notion of changing the way we present what we do. His collection of talks on vimeo do a great job at detailing things if you have the time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Since the author of the post is here, I'll note that I can see the missing references in the worldcat.org database - in book form. I think these links will work, though they might screen by IP:

[http://ucsb.worldcat.org/oclc/6441789](http://ucsb.worldcat.org/oclc/6441789)

[http://ucsb.worldcat.org/oclc/7164016](http://ucsb.worldcat.org/oclc/7164016)

[http://ucsb.worldcat.org/oclc/2270071](http://ucsb.worldcat.org/oclc/2270071)

Perhaps some colleagues at UCSF can help you get them with an inter-library loan? Thanks for the great post.

</comment><comment><USER7> Edward Tufte is considered the guru on the subject. His primary principle is to minimize the ratio of ink to data points. That doesnt preclude artistic creativity as long as it increases clarity.

<comment><USER8> Tufte's work, at least as he presents it in his books, is a bit extravagant. It is hard for me to extract practical advice and ideas for data visualization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So many things to fix in science this doesn't even make my top 5. Anyways, deciding how to show data is a great avenue for scientists to expose their inner artist. I wish more papers and presentation took pride in how well they read, how pretty the figures are, etc.

When we have finally made all public research freely accessible and reduced the perverse gaming incentives involved in publications and grants, then maybe we should tackle standardization of graphics.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely agree that many things are broken in science, but you do realize that progress can be asynchronous? Otherwise my top 1 problem to fix would be war.

<comment><USER10> juretriglav, speaking of problems to fix, I've found at least one the missing books that you're looking for, but unfortunately, it's not a freely downloadable or online version. I have also found a lot of useful information, but I'm still sifting and organizing it.

To start off with, the "American Standards Association" otherwise known by the acronym "ASA" is the old name of the organization now known as "American National Standards Institute" ("ANSI"). They changed their name in 1966 (I think), but it's impossible to retroactively change every occurrence of the name, and some prefer one or the other, so let's just say standards are seldom standardized.

The "American Society of Mechanical Engineers" ("ASME") is just one of many organizations that have worked with ANSI/ASA. It was ASME which originally worked on the standards you mentioned.

The 1936 book you mentioned was tough to find since it does not have a standard number, and I think this indicates the time before ASA started creating and using standard numbers.

Title: "Code of Preferred Practice for Graphic Presentation: Time Series Charts"

[http://books.google.com/books/about/Code_of_Preferred_Practi...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Code_of_Preferred_Practice_for_Graphic_P.html?id=OZ3QHAAACAAJ)

Libraries [http://www.worldcat.org/title/code-of-preferred-practice- for...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/code-of-preferred-practice-for-graphic- presentation-time-series-charts/oclc/7164016)

I'm fairly sure that's the 1936 book you wanted due to the notes here:

[http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1850233](http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1850233)

      ASA, Z15.2--1938
      "This manual represents a rather comprehensive revision of the material
      issued in April, 1936, under the title, 'Code of preferred practice for
      graphic presentation--time-series charts'."--Foreword.

The above is, the 1938 version you already have. I'll post the other info as soon as I get it sorted.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the effort, jcr! I know about the evolution/history of ASME, ASA and ANSI, but like you, it hasn't helped me locate copies.

For the 1979 version, it's possible to purchase it online through the IHS.com store, [https://global.ihs.com/doc_detail.cfm?&item_s_key=00009858&i...](https://global.ihs.com/doc_detail.cfm?&item_s_key=00009858&item_key_date=131230&input_doc_number=y15%2E2m&input_doc_title=) and I was really close to purchasing it, but decided instead to give it a few more days, maybe someone has access to it in a library or something.

If we can't find it anywhere in the next week or so, I'll just order it (100 USD with shipping).

Again, thank you very much for your effort!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Improving Ruby Performance with Rust - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codeship.com/improving-ruby-performance-with-rust/ <comment><USER2> If one needs speed one does everything it takes. That said, I read the code of the example. It's short and even if I don't know Rust I've been paid to write C in the 90s. They look similar enough.

I see we're back to stuff like

        let ptr = path.as_ptr();

        let c = unsafe { *ptr.offset(i) };

        if c == SEP {
          return &path[(i + 1) as usize..end];
        };

It's as low level as it can get. I remember that I wrote a small web app in C in 1994 but I wrote the next one in Perl and never looked back. It was some hundreds lines, countless core dumps and many hours vs much less code and pain and time.

Again, Ruby and Python are all about connecting those small pieces of C code that implement their builtin and library methods / functions. Writing them in C or Rust makes no difference. I personally won't write code in those kind of languages again unless I find myself in a scenario where CPU time is worth more than my time. Maybe we'll be back to that with functions in the cloud billed by the millisecond. Programming is going to be a pain again. At least modern languages like Rust don't crash like C and have a better concurrency story. Meanwhile I'll keep using Ruby and Python with C or Rust extensions from GitHub written by somebody else (a big thank you!), and Elixir where concurrency matters.

<comment><USER3> Of course it looks like C, it's using a C interface to interface with Ruby. Normal Rust does not look like that. Your comment is quite frankly entirely pointless.

<comment><USER4> Your comment is misleading. The code in question is inside a function of the signature

        extract_last_path_segment(&str, &str)

This is pure Rust, no C interface involved.

<comment><USER5> Per my comment above linking the real implementation: the comment is perhaps misleading about the cause but its claim is largely true. Rust code tends not to look like this.

<comment><USER4> Well, unsafe Rust does tend to look like this. You were claiming that it is only for interfacing with C code, but unsafe is also used for performance, as in the snippet above. You were IMHO incorrectly dismissing the parent comment based on that. (On the other hand, the code in question could probably rewritten in safe Rust while still avoiding the bound checks. It would be less straight forward though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not just Ruby, Python too.

Was doing some work of converting [0,1] signals to 16-bit PCM data with 550Hz tone in numpy.

Python version took ~15 minutes to generate 5,000 4 second files. Broke out the inner loop into Rust with FFI via ctypes and cut that time to ~10 seconds with nearly identical code.

<comment><USER7> A 100x difference to native and having an inner loop in Python code sound exceptionally slow for a numpy app. I guess you could not leverage numpy array operations?

<comment><USER6> Nope, I agree that base numpy operations are snappy. However I needed to both multiply by a sin wave of 550hz(changing input) and taper the edges of the signal on the transition from 0->1 to not generate a ton of harmonics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If one is to write such simple code in unsafe mode, might as well just use C!

We have [https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/primitive.str.html#method.as_b...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/primitive.str.html#method.as_bytes) for accessing a str bytewise. No need for pointers and `unsafe`.

The whole point of Rust is being safer and higher-level than C, and if you don't want to use its features, there is no improvement over C.

<comment><USER9> There is plenty of improvement over C: generics, ADTs, type inference, and toolchain. Which you can combine with raw pointer hackery if you want.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I'm just nitpicking his example code. It might pass the wrong impression to people who never saw Rust before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry for my ignorance, but since you already doing Rust, why not just use Rust?

I mean, what's the benefit you could get from FFI Rust code into Ruby that you cannot get by directly writing Rust?

<comment><USER3> Rust is a fantastic C replacement. It is nowhere near being a replacement for higher level languages in terms of productivity and ease of use.

<comment><USER11> I think you might have that slightly incorrect. Rust is a high level language, capable of C and C++ speeds. As you get to know the language, I find it just as productive as Java, Ruby and Python. In some ways more so, because the compiler catches so many bugs before you even run (not to imply you won't have bugs, just different ones).

YMMV.

<comment><USER12> Rust as productive as Python lol ... things you read on HN. Even if the compiler catches more bugs it doesn't mean it's more productive, I give you a problem and you have to solve it in Python and Rust, Python problem will be solved much faster because the language has higher construct for day to day programming.

<comment><USER13> It depends on what you mean. You're optimizing for time to first solve; what about when you find bugs that would have been caught at compile-time in Rust? What about existing codebases, rather than writing new code? It's not that simple of a question.

I find personally that if there are libraries to help me out, I'm only slightly slower in Rust than I am in Ruby, but then there's no debugging time in Rust, and invariably, there will be tons of work I have to do later with the Ruby to shake out bugs.

YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In a similar vein: [https://github.com/phoffer/crystalized_ruby](https://github.com/phoffer/crystalized_ruby)

Write the speed-sensitive bits in Crystal. Aka 'Improving Ruby Performance with Almost-Ruby'.

(Unfortunately development seems to have stopped.)

<comment><USER15> Author here. Development is indeed on hold for now. However, Crystal core team has plans to build a DSL into Crystal to allow for creating Ruby native extensions.

There are some technical limitations with how I handled defining functions, which has also become obsolete with recent changes to Crystal. However, there is another approach (macro based) demonstrated at [https://github.com/spalladino/crystal- ruby_exts](https://github.com/spalladino/crystal-ruby_exts). The macro approach is what is needed.

At time of first development, this was just an experiment and I didn't feel like redo-ing it this way. Now that core team has plans for similar functionality, I'd rather not finish a half baked solution that distracts from what theirs will likely be.

<comment><USER14> Very intriguing. Look forward to seeing what the core team do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know of ruru's status? I've used it quite a bit and love it, but haven't seen any action in the repo in a while. I also pinged the Gitter channel a few weeks ago on the topic and got no response. Its a great tool; would hate to see it die.

<comment><USER13> The maintainer is in and out, life happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might have missed it but is there a particular advantage Rust has over C in this specific use case? Performance, ease of interoperability, etc. or is it preference for Rust over C?

<comment><USER18> Safety, I guess. A Ruby developer will likely to shoot themselves in the foot with C's freedom. They can use help from Rust's guidance system.

<comment><USER6> Rust also has a much nicer package ecosystem. It's pretty trivial to wrap existing C libraries as well so I find that I can get up and running much faster rather than messing around with makefiles.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, this is the killer feature. cmake is a nightmare. Cargo does what it needs to do and gets out of your way, and provides easy access to the whole ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> github code repo used in the article: [https://github.com/danielpclark/bench_ruby_ffi_example](https://github.com/danielpclark/bench_ruby_ffi_example)

</comment><comment><USER20> where is rust full implementation of ruby on this list? [https://github.com/cogitator/ruby- implementations/wiki/List-...](https://github.com/cogitator/ruby- implementations/wiki/List-of-Ruby-implementations) does such a thing just not exist yet? Let's built it tonight!

<comment><USER21> Rather than building from scratch, you'd probably just want to start by replacing bits of MRI with Rust one component at a time (assuming MRI is appropriately modularized) and see how far that takes you. :P

<comment><USER13> Hi [http://www.codemesh.io/codemesh2016/steve- klabnik](http://www.codemesh.io/codemesh2016/steve-klabnik) ;)

[https://github.com/steveklabnik/ruby/tree/rust](https://github.com/steveklabnik/ruby/tree/rust)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wrote a script in Go and used it in ruby with popen3.

</comment><comment><USER23> Am I really reading it right that he went to the trouble of doing all this to speed up the string parsing of file paths??? Talk about barking up the wrong tree.

I guess its cool to use something as hipster as Rust to speed up as something as hipster (albeit waning in popularity these days) as Ruby.

However, a better approach would be a straight forward implementation of caching (memcache/redis/static CDN) or to simply rewrite that part of the code to not rely on constantly parsing file paths? Or use something like [https://github.com/google/re2](https://github.com/google/re2), you probably won't be able to do any better than that when doing any kind of string matching and parsing.

If you're concerned at all about performance you shouldn't be doing anything with the file system period.</comment>


As cable companies lose customers, Missouri considers giving them a tax break - <AUTHOR> https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/as-cable-companies-lose-customers-missouri-lawmakers-consider-giving-them/article_5e4d7fb4-ccd7-5c2a-8906-35c699468c1e.html <comment><USER2> Ok, so they currently pay taxes and streaming services don't (or not all of them do). They are fighting this. Fair enough.

But that won't solve the problem. Everything cable offers is now offered by the internet and even much more. It might just very slightly slow down the decay. This is inevitable.

What's wrong with companies simply dying when they lose customers? What are we trying to solve?</comment>


While we are focusing on SOPA, we are being distracted from the Protect IP Act - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/np5ee/while_we_are_focusing_on_sopa_we_are_being/ <comment><USER2> Today I had an idea that's so simple it could be useful.

We can send a message to the US legislative that things like SOPA, PIPA and the more shady provisions of the NDAA are a step too far. While they will laugh at our numbers, we can promise to volunteer our technical skills and resources to the politicians who vote against laws like that and deny access to the same resources to those who vote for them.

Our community is not large and writing our representatives telling them they lost our vote does not carry enough weight (and it's probably the same everywhere) but we carry mighty claws and teeth in form of our skills and resources.

Any ideas on how to do it?

Note: I live in Brazil and one could say such things have no direct impact on my life, but bad ideas and bad legislation are contagious. The same lobbies that work in the US are busy at work everywhere. We cannot afford to concede them a victory like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get a dreadful sense that there's really no stopping this. The entertainment industry has been around longer than the tech industry, their claws more deeply embedded in our political system. They will not cease until they get the controls they want. They'll stop at nothing - they will use every tactic they can come up with to get their laws passed. Maybe SOPA won't pass, maybe Protect IP won't pass, but later on it will be something else. The public gets bored with issues as they drone on - can we maintain our vigilance forever?

<comment><USER4> Maintaining vigilance is one thing. Resisting a direct and perpetually sustained assault is another. In answer to that question, no, the public can't win. Like a body riddled with unchecked tumors, it will inevitably die - prematurely and horribly.

Make no mistake: private election finance is a cancer upon the Nation. We end it, or it ends us.

<comment><USER5> You believe in freedom of speech right? (lets ignore things like shouting fire in crowded theater right now).

So you agree that I have the right to say that the current president is an oath-breaker, a war monger and a criminal (these opinions are biased, clearly, but they are also not completely impossible to argue)?

So you agree that I have the right to tell that to somebody who wants to hear that, right?

So I also have the right to tell that to two people who wants to hear it right?

So what about 200? What if I convince somebody else to say that to ten people, 200 people? If I convince ten people to tell 2000, and pay them what they would have earned if they had worked a job that day, then I should also be allowed to do that, right?

Remember I could have hired them to paint my fence instead, which would have been allowed.

What if instead of sending people around, I started sending letters around? And to write them fast enough brought an expensive printer? And the advice from expensive (but) great ad men from Madison? And instead of using letters I brought time on the radio or the television or on various sites online?

If you allow me to do these things (and remember I could do it if, rather than getting some particular policy past the House, I wanted to sell blue cheese) then how will it matter whether I can give money to a particular candidate or not?

You can have either free speech or banned campaign founding but not both.

<comment><USER6> _> You can have either free speech or banned campaign founding but not both._

You could have something else: complete and total accountability, and full transparency of WHO is paying HOW MUCH to WHOM for WHAT purpose. Publicly available. In addition, we could require all politicians to wear their sponsors' logos (just like a motorsport driver) when they appear in public.

Representative democracy is an abstraction that tries to hide what's going on behind the scenes. Let's rip off the hood and make the abstraction leak wherever possible.

Also, I don't necessarily think spreading outright lies should be considered free speech, just as much as I don't consider propaganda or hate speech to be free speech. I don't think we should forbid it but I refuse to categorize it as "worthy of protection".

<comment><USER7> If you believe in free speech, except for the speech you don't agree with, you don't believe in free speech. "Propaganda" and "hate speech" are just ways of trying to avoid making it obvious you mean "speech I don't agree with", _especially_ the word "propaganda", which in practice simply straight-up means "speech I don't agree with".

<comment><USER6> _> If you believe in free speech, except for the speech you don't agree with, you don't believe in free speech._

Except that's not what I was saying. You have an opinion that differs from mine? You are free to state it and I will gladly fight for your right to say that. I just don't believe that outright lies (propaganda) and mere hate are a valid opinion.

I also said we shouldn't explicitly forbid it. It's just not worthy of extended protection and respect. I don't see how this means I don't believe in free speech.

<comment><USER7> The probability of at least one of your supposed "outright lies" being factually true approaches 1. Propaganda isn't a descriptive term, it's a slur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought these were essentially the same bill; killing it in one house killed it. The depth of the analysis of the two bills in Wikipedia is so different that I cant tell. It appears that whether Protect IP is voted on is up to Harry Reid, but I find Senate rules nearly impenetrable. Enlightenment would be welcome..

<comment><USER9> It seems they are variants of the same idea, which if passed separately would likely have their language reconciled in 'conference committee' (where members of the House and Senate merge the language). If both reach that point, passing the merged version is almost certain.

Right now neither has been 'killed'. They're due in January for more action: either continuing House hearings (SOPA) or a Senate floor vote (Protect-IP, if Harry Reid gets his way).

<comment><USER10> Ingenious tactic by the supporters of the bills, killing one might not kill both.

<comment><USER9> Nonsense. That's just how it works. Any final bill would still have to pass both (though there can sometimes be shananigans in the conference committee). And nothing is ever really 'killed' – any bill can be reintroduced at any time, the issue is whether the leaders who control the agenda want to give it time/votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PIPA is farther along than SOPA. It cleared its committe with no resistance in mere minutes and while Senator Wyden has apparently been delaying it through arcane Senate procedural rules I do not understand, there was news last week that it would be the first thing Reid brings before the Senate floor when they reconvene January 24. It has 40 co-sponsors (40% of the Senate!) so the odds are not good.

The general consensus I've seen on the net is that PIPA is less horrible than SOPA but still unacceptably bad. We've dealt the worse bill some serious blows in the last week, and now we need to turn out democratic/capitalist firepower on PIPA. Full blast.

<comment><USER12> Most things in the senate require a vote of 60 votes to accomplish, however, this usually doesn't happen and Harry Reid (or whoever is standing in for him on a given day) just asks for unanimous consent. If no one objects, then they proceed as if everyone voted for it. What Ron Wyden did was object to bringing the bill to the floor. Thus, it will require him to give consent or a vote of 60 Senators to bring the bill to the floor (which they wouldn't try to do unless they were sure it would work).

Most of the time, there are only a few people actually in the senate chamber. The person standing in for Reid, one Republican Senator, the person giving some sort of speech/statement into the record and for cspan, and whoever is next to do the same. Within each party, any Senator can (publicly or secretly) ask their representative in the chamber to object on their behalf. Ron Wyden did so publicly, in the past people have gotten riled up about "secret holds" where the leadership of the objecting side doesn't expose who objected. If Harry Reid really wanted to push for the bill, he could call a vote, which would put everyone on the record voting in favor or opposition on bringing it to the floor, but Senators hate being officially on one side or the other of a bill, so they usually wait until they can convince whoever has a hold to drop it (usually through giving them some sort of favor, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We are also being distracted from the NDAA.

<comment><USER14> Agree this needs more attention. Don't slacken on SOPA/Protect-IP pressure, though, just also think about how to support things like this:

[http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/10230-feinstei...](http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/10230-feinstein- introduces-due-process-guarantee-act)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think a bigger threat is that while every techie is sperging (rightfully) over SOPA/Protect, everyone is ignoring the NDAA sliding quietly through Congress.

I appreciate all the SOPA coverage and am glad to see people getting upset about it, but there are a lot of other issues that are just as scary which people are just glossing over.

<comment><USER16> It would help if you gave a short explanation of what the NDAA is. I realize it may be something I don't know about since I'm not American, but still, I'm interested.

<comment><USER15> Sorry about that. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a bill that is passed every year and appropriates funding for military expenditures.

This year, there are clauses that legislatively codify the President's authority to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects, including American citizens, without trial.

The govt. has been claiming that capability under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) already, but Congress has always been vague and handwavy about supporting it. This codifies and effectively rubber- stamps the process, saying "We approve"

You can read a sane and reasonable explanation without FUD here: [http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for- the-...](http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the- perplexed/)

<comment><USER17> It sounds clearly unconstitutional. How can it be taken to the supreme court to test that?

<comment><USER18> It would have to pass first. The supreme court is not going to hear arguments on something that _might_ become law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Contact information for all senators: <http://www.contactsenators.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Most of the organizations made sense on the list (in the sense that they think they have something to gain) but there were a few I just couldn't figure out:

-National Fraternal Order of Police

-National District Attorneys Association

-National Criminal Justice Association

Why would these 3 organizations be supporting this bill?

If anyone knows, I am curious.

</comment><comment><USER21> While we are focusing on SOPA and the Protect IP Act, we are being distracted from the social problems that lie at the cause of these kinds of bills even being able to see the light of day.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm so sick of this.

...I wish I could make everyone in congress get an education or something. Make them study some history before they're allowed to propose any more decisions.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like Microsoft is on the list of supporters of Protect IP. Didn't they come out against SOPA? Is SOPA slightly worse than Protect IP?

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought we just had to focus on one or the other to kill the bill? And if so, I think it'd be better to focus our efforts on the House.

</comment><comment><USER25> Last time I checked Protect IP didn't have nearly the same support as SOPA. I guess that's changed?

</comment><comment><USER26> OT, but amusing:

SOPA means "Shut up" in Greek (σώπα), while PIPA (πίπα) means "blow job".

Is the legislator telling us "shut up and blow me"?

<comment><USER27> Wouldn't it be better to leave these obscene comments for websites like reddit or slashdot? I come to HN to get away from the numerous attempts at humor. When everyone is doing it, it grows tiresome.

<comment><USER28> You might have observed that it wasn't all that funny or witty and I might have agreed with you.

But commenting on what you wrote: obscene doesn't mean what you want it to mean. Perhaps you should take your prudery, your censorship, your sense of entitlement and your geeky elitism elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, I think SOPA might be the decoy.</comment>


Show HN: Circular, an open source clone of Buffer - <AUTHOR> http://circular.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Circular developer here. Ok, so last month I launched an open source clone of Buffer, built on top of Backbone, Bootstrap and MongoDB, and named Tampon.

Many people hated the name... However, the app as well as the open source project have seen some nice early adoption, so I've gone ahead and chosen a less controversial one.

I've also implemented multi-account support, which was by far the #1 feature request from users (As suggested by 37Signals I've discarded every other feature request :)), as well as many many other improvements.

Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER2> Good on you for renaming the project... but why would you chose that name in the first place?

I'm not trying to start a flame war -- just curious because I've been in a similar situation.

After university I named the first C unit test framework I wrote the oh-so- obvious C*NT. At the time I thought I was being funny, but over a decade later and I can see that this is a symptom of the underlying misogyny/"boy's club" that is high tech.

<comment><USER3> Would you consider a project called DICK or COCK to be misogynistic too?

Without wanting to start an argument, your example doesn't strike me as misogynistic; it doesn't seem like it would be any more offputting to women than to men, if we're assuming the same baseline personality.

<comment><USER4> Second wave feminists decided that that word in particular was bad no matter the context.

<comment><USER5> And third-wave feminism flirted with post-structuralism..

<comment><USER6> You guys should stop poking fun at feminism and check your privilege m'kay?

<comment><USER5> no poking fun intended, merely a historical note that feminism (as a loosely- defined movement) had changing views about language and its use... if someone were to just hear about second-wave feminist stances on the language of oppression, they might have a hard time understanding things like the "slut walk" and other acts of linguistic reclamation.

<comment><USER6> Kinda glad that my sarcasm went mostly undetected, otherwise it would have been downvoted to oblivion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is great, outside of plastering Buffer's name all over the thing. Seems kinda shitty to do. Open source tweet scheduler? Awesome. Slapping Buffer all over the thing to shimmy into their Google juice (or whatever) to promote it? Not as awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get your point. It was actually more of a "nod of the head" to them, but I can see why it would look unelegant. I've actually started pitching it as open source tweet scheduler, actually.

<comment><USER8> I agree. If you truly want to pay homage, perhaps wording like "inspired by Buffer" would work a little better.

Nonetheless, congrats on shipping, can't wait to check it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> It actually says "Inspired by Buffer" on the homepage, with a link to Buffer :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious to see how Joel, Leo, and Tom perceive this open-source version effecting their business.

I'm a long time buffer user, and paying customer, and think that this would actually help the sales pipeline for them. The MVP of Circular is so narrow (given only 1 dev), that it would make me wish for more, and with the attribution Julien gave to Buffer hopefully users will click-through.

Since the Buffer guys have a referral system already in place, maybe you can use Circular to generate some lead gen/affiliate income for you Julien. I would suggest reaching out to them, they are all really cool guys!

Just an idea - best of luck!

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the kind words Roland, awesome to see you here.

Yep, you're right - I think what Julien is doing is really great. I've been in touch with him via email too, been great to talk a little and looking forward to more conversation :-)

I think it's great that there are multiple offerings out there, to raise awareness of this kind of service is really key right now as we gain traction and as more and more people find that something like Buffer can be super useful for them. We've had quite a few competitors come and go along our journey so far, and I expect to see more and more. I think it's only a good thing.

Good thinking on ways to work together, I think Julien and I will chat for sure :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am divided. As a developer, I think open source is great. As an entrepreneur, having more people release stuff for free devalues my work on the long term. I would say a good middle ground would be that open source should only be used to provide tools to developers, not to release production features.

A few years back, people would buy a software $25, now they complain when your app is over $1 (thanks Apple).

<comment><USER12> So open source should serve you as a developer, but not those others that are mere users?

<comment><USER13> If it serves developers it serves users as well. You can produce more, faster, cheaper which is good for users.

<comment><USER12> Sure, and open source products serve users even better (assuming a certain quality)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just as a fun comparison we currently have 235,600 updates in the queue at Buffer :-)

<comment><USER15> That sounds like not a great twitter/facebook feed you're managing with buffer, no? Do people care about the feed, if it's generic enough to warrant 200k+ queued posts?

<comment><USER16> He means across all accounts registered with Buffer, not one individual account.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for clarifying. Totally missed clicking his username :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A little suggestion for the homepage: Take away that circle and move up the feature boxes. That empty space in the middle adds absolutely nothing, and the queue number can be placed elsewhere.

<comment><USER18> I didn't remember what Buffer was, so for the first few moments I thought the circle _was_ the feature. _Show HN: a nice little CSS loopy thing for Bootstrap._

(Kudos to the team on the real project though - a lot more impressive!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is such a small nitpick, but the rotating circle is very confusing to me. The shadow and the highlight rotate too, suggesting that the "light" is rotating with it. Feels really out of place.

</comment><comment><USER20> My impression was "oh that's what buffer is for". I trust open source software a lot more than closed source. Also their landing page explain what it is better than Buffer.

</comment><comment><USER21> Congrats on the re-launch (and re-name ;) Looks promising!

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't think this is a threat to buffer. There are two components to the buffer business:

1) the software: this can be copied or re-implemented fairly easily (see this new project). Happens all the time. Almost every product has an open source clone.

2) the schlep: doing marketing, building a business, keep the servers humming, pay the bills, be available and respond to customers...

The second part cannot be copied easily and takes a lot more effort and commitment than the first. This is what makes a business defensible and viable. And this is what separates companies like Github, Heroku, etc. from "Look-what-I-built-over-the-weekend" projects.

<comment><USER23> There's also the Buffer ecosystem; they have an iPhone app and they're already built-in as a sharing feature on many iOS & Android apps. It will take a while for Circular to match that. The more I look at what Buffer is doing, the more impressed I am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I could never figure out how this Buffer thing works. Why is there a multiple time slots and why does it say Posting Schedule "every day"? Does this mean the app will send the same tweet repeatedly on the same time every day? Or how does the app choose which tweet to send at which time?

This may sound like a support question but given that you have cloned a service hence buffer is probably popular already, but I believe there is already a schedule feature in tweetdeck, so why should anyone use these services just to schedule a tweet?

<comment><USER25> I fill up my buffer with things I want to tweet, then every day at the specified times, it tweets the top item from that list. It doesn't send twice, and it's easier for me than scheduling every tweet.

<comment><USER24> So is it a one-to-one tweet/time-slot match? I can see a usefulness of filling up the stream and letting the schedule do its work. But this must be a feature most suitable for marketers etc, no? As a casual sharing, I don't tweet a lot anyway so I guess I have no need for scheduling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can't figure out what your site does (beyond "sharing tweets") by looking at it. I assume that information is hidden behind the login? I'm not going to sign in to a site just to figure out what it does, much less authenticate via another service.

Is this so I can tweet a bunch in a short period, and the service will spread them out over the day? I seriously have no idea.

Sorry if this comes across as rude, I don't intend it to be. I just cannot figure out what the service actually does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been using it, and though this is a very simple MVP, the value is very clear and there are some very nice product touches.

All in all, very promising app!

</comment><comment><USER28> Buffer does the stuff very good actually, I use its free tier and I couldn't even approach to its limit, personally. But having alternatives is always very good and apparently you spent really good time on this project. I'd love to hear a blog address where we can follow your stories about your development of Circular.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, one limit you can reach quickly with Buffer's free tier is if you want to use it with multiple accounts on the same platform (say, multiple Twitter accounts).

Thanks for the kind words, I'll think about writing something about the app's dev!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just to hop in on the discussion, I have just launched a similar (hosted!) service similar to circular(/tampon)/buffer/hootsuite except it's completely white label and self brandable: <http://sashboard.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting, though it's probably more relevant for Facebook posting than for Twitter, as Twitter doesn't display the app name anymore (and it's a shame!).

<comment><USER29> True, but it's still in the meta and many 3rd party apps and services still display it, it's even shown in tweetdeck for example (I tried to swap the twitter picture for a tweetdeck screen shot but tweetdeck just keeps crashing (maybe not that many people see it after all ;)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why does it have to be such a blatant steal of the Buffer design?

Being 'inspired' to produce a similar (but open) service is a fairly noble goal, but slavishly imitating the UI is bad form, surely? You should have called it 'Blue Buffer'.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to use Timely, does this replace that service? Seems to...

My main concern is that if this is free as in both speech _and_ beer, how will the service be supported? I don't want to allow access to YATC and see it die.

<comment><USER10> Hey. I definitely encourage you to try Circular. If you want to try Buffer too, then if it helps then I'm happy to let you know we're funded and profitable, 7 in the team. Let me know if you have any other questions! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congrats.

I missed your first show HN so I'm going to give it a go now.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks great, you could add an animated logo, on mouse hover... something that will make it spin ;) here's the CSS

<http://pastie.org/5143946>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Wrong direction though, right?

<comment><USER33> yep, you got it right now. looks nice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At least it's not Tampon anymore. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484526>

</comment><comment><USER35> Cool side project. I wish there was a features page listing exactly what's included in the app and what it looks like once setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can check out the screenshots in the Chrome Web app's listing: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/circular/kagidkiei...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/circular/kagidkieilpkdijgchiegjbienmojffk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Needs more info for people who don't twitter. Perhaps a ussage case that is phrased without reference to twitter.

<comment><USER37> It's a tool to schedule tweets and easily view your tweet analytics, this app doesn't exist without Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great!!! I really like it... Only thing I need now is to easily do this via Android.

</comment><comment><USER39> You should auto shorten urls

<comment><USER40> +1 if connected to one's Bitly account/vanity URL

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Awesome app I like the way you show real-time stat on the homepage

<comment><USER41> oh, and the new color for the navigation bar is great, too

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Fantastic new UI. The service is still as useful as it was!

</comment><comment><USER43> Love the UI and the auto-quotes on empty posts :)

</comment><comment><USER44> What was the old domain when it was still tampon?

<comment><AUTHOR> tamponapp.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't have a twitter account to log in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then the app would probably be of little use to you anyways :)

<comment><USER45> True I signed up for Buffer but never used as I am not into social networking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Any plans for mobile apps in the pipes?

</comment><comment><USER47> Better name!

</comment><comment><USER48> Shame it's written in PHP

<comment><USER49> Why is it a shame?

<comment><USER50> Because it's not what the cool kids are using.

I was at a conference where pud spoke. As for using a "startup" worthy language versus what you feel most comfortable in, he said (more or less a quote), "98% of all web sites fail, and yours probably will too, so might as use the language you want and are most productive in"

<comment><USER51> Indeed. You wouldn't want to risk compromising your fractal of failure by throwing a successful technical decision into the mix.

[http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

I'm sorry... it was just too, too easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle language communication problems? - <AUTHOR>

A large portion (majority) of programmers I've worked with are immigrants and don't speak English as a first language.  I have no problem with that whatsoever.  Recently though, I've experienced situations where communication issues have led to  significant company losses.  Further, I'm trying to improve our technical documentation and commit message quality which unfortunately requires better English[1]. How do you deal with this situation?<p>[1] This is certainly not to suggest all English-speaking programmers have better documentation or commit messages. <comment><USER2> With regard to the documentation and commit situation have you considered looking into Plain English? [1]

As for interpersonal communication, perhaps doubly clarifying meaning, preferably in writing. This would force thoughts to be better articulated than a throwaway spoken comment.

Alternatively, how about flipping it and learning your colleagues' languages, or at least the key vocabulary you might need to communicate?

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_english](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_english)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions. I had never heard of Plain English, will be making an effort to use it going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, the main thing I can think of is: patience. I don't think there is a quick solution.</comment>


Touchable holography - <AUTHOR> http://video.golem.de/player/videoplayer.swf?id=2263&autoPl=false <comment><USER2> Does anyone here have experience with the concave mirror holographic display mentioned offhand in that video? Is something like that difficult and/or expensive to build?</comment>


StandupMail – Simple email-based productivity logging - <AUTHOR> http://standupmail.com/?h

<comment><USER2> This is the same as [https://idonethis.com](https://idonethis.com), no?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, we rather focus on teams than on "self-tracking".

<comment><USER3> iDoneThis is for teams as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, I really like this idea. It's similar to [https://www.workingon.co](https://www.workingon.co)

I like the idea of an e-mail based solution, but with such a simple concept I don't want to be tied to e-mail. I want it to be web based, I want it to be email based, command line, and I want to use hubot in campfire.

At the end of the day this gets rid of the daily standup, which I personally find tedious. I typically get little to no value from them, and feel they are more of a management tool. This sort of thing gets me out of meetings, which I'm all for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your great feedback! Some of the major problems we were facing with standup meetings were, that in "the real world" team member come late, work remotely etc... So the email-based solution always works for everyone (who has an email address...) without interrupting them from what they're currently working on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a way to tweak the frequency of the digest ? We're currently working on a weekly report basis with my team, and I'd definitely try the solution if we can keep it weekly

<comment><AUTHOR> yes! You'll be able to individually setup when the digest (and reminder emails) will get send out. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or just on choosen days like every Tuesday etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like something that should be an open-source self-hostable mail bot :). Does anyone know any such project?

<comment><USER7> Agree. And its been done before too. [https://idonethis.com/](https://idonethis.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> almost everything's been done before :)

<comment><USER7> true and don't take my comment as discouraging. More like trying to find the difference.

I encourage people to reinvent the wheel but only if they can do better or think they can atleast.

No point if your aim is to build the exact same thing at same price point and is a copy.

Well if you market it better, it will not be a copy in my book.

I concur with the idea, it is a good open source project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a replacement for the agile standup meeting every morning. I prefer to talk to my team in person.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. But, that's not the goal. It's rather an extension to the _physical_ meeting if you're product team... But marketing, hr etc. teams shall use it as well for keeping their teams/departments up-to-date... and those guys never heard about "SCRUM", "agile" and "Standup Meetings" :)

<comment><USER8> IC, that makes sense. Keep explaining on the website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice and exactly latched on to the users who hesitate to use scrum/agile process. Good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> thx :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to know the pricing. Did I miss it on the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Before answering that question... how much would you pay per team member per month?

<comment><USER11> I understand costs and competition prices, but honestly a free version for 2-3 people wouldn't be bad.

Similarly as saying that in a bigger team of 10 ppl one could implement it in house, in 2-3 there's no actual need (and setting up a reminder is trivial).

I'm also thinking to people that aren't working full-time (for whom a 3-day/weekly report would also be a nice feature).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> not a bad idea! "keep it simple, stupid"

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, thanks :)</comment></comment>


How to generate and host your API documentation for free with open-source tools - <AUTHOR> https://dbader.org/blog/open-source-tools-to-generate-and-host-your-api-documentation-for-freehttps://dbader.org/blog/open-source-tools-to-generate-and-host-your-api-documentation-for-free <comment><USER2> Link is wrong.</comment>


A president who promised to put 'America First' instead turned us into this - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/15/president-who-promised-put-america-first-instead-turned-us-into-this/ <comment><USER2> Neocons of bush dynasties and the neolibs of clinton-obama era created the ambient conditions for reactionary nationalism. The battle of the elite schools and the shared subservience to business as hypercapital expands was obviously going to make this. Perhaps this is not abberation at all but a clash of programmes.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Yahoo Mail service so slow? Slower than turtle  - <AUTHOR>

I have stopped using Yahoo Mail since long. But was forced by circumstances to use it twice ! Once when my uncle was out of town and wanted to forward some email in his account to someone. I did that. What happened was once I clicked on forward it took 5 minutes to open the To box and after that when I entered the email ID and clicked on send. It took 30 minutes to complete the operation till then it just showed me the circular loading icon.
Second time: I had to check one of my old godaddy account information. I opened yahoo.com, logged in mail. It took 15 minutes to load. Then i clicked on mail to read it did not respond. I reloaded thrice and it responded after 15 minutes again.
I am using Gmail, Facebook, etc. None of them are so slow at my place.
Why does Yahoo Mail service is slow like turtle ? I think even turtle's are more faster than it.
My system configuration : Processor : Intel i3 processor, 6 GB RAM, Latest version of Chrome and 0.5 Mbps Internet connection <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6902641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6902641)</comment>


Show HN: WatchCoins - Cryptocurrency's prices from exchanges around the world - <AUTHOR> https://watchcoins.net <comment><USER2> It defaulted to Portuguese for me, and was generally not as intuitive on how to use vs say coinmarketcap

</comment><comment><USER3> I think most people are looking to see average crypto price first a la coinmarketcap, not which exchange is cheapest. Perhaps have the home screen default to the Marketcap page? Also, maybe default to US country/English or guess based on location

</comment><comment><USER4> Needs some work...

[https://imgur.com/a/Nt23F](https://imgur.com/a/Nt23F)

</comment><comment><USER5> FYI You've got a bug with scrollwheels where all the headers duplicate.

</comment><comment><USER6> All exchanges and cryptocoins in same place!</comment>


Tesla Model Y Owners Find Cooling System Made with Home Depot-Grade Fake Wood - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/tech/36274/tesla-model-y-owners-find-cooling-system-cobbled-together-with-home-depot-grade-fake-wood <comment><USER2> Stories like this are a Rorschach test for how one views Tesla. This can be a lazy and dangerous design process that shows the company's unprofessionalism or it can be a smart hack to get the job done while minimizing costs and supply chain restraints.

<comment><USER3> Where's the evidence of danger?

<comment><USER4> Surely the burden of proof is opposite for manufacturers of big consumer machines? I'm not sure how regulation works here.

<comment><USER5> This seems like a perfectly good solution to me. You're trying to stabilize the cooler, spread the clamping force, and avoid sharp edges and wear. The part chosen seems perfectly suitable for that, albeit slightly unconventional looking.

(I say this as someone who is short $TSLA right now [and a non-practicing Mech E]; this looks perfectly reasonable to me.)

<comment><USER6> I agree that if you dug into the engineering the math probably works[1]. It's just a weird culture to be out on the floor substituting random materials in a load-bearing, if perhaps not life-safety-critical, part.

1: Compressive strength of wood perpendicular to the grain varies but you can estimate with a healthy safety margin about 200 PSI. 100x - 1000x weaker than metals, but still not zero.

<comment><USER7> "Compressive strength of wood . . ."

I guarantee you that the materiel is not "wood" and is indeed much weaker in all relevant parameters. And I suspect that no one at TESLA has any real handle on the compressive strength of this material.

<comment><USER6> You think so? MDF is stronger than wood in compression and isotropic which is nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is cool! It reminds me of how Ferrari did a very similar thing with the dabs of yellow paint they used to mark bolts that had to withstand intense vibration:

[http://www.tomyang.net/cars/story1.htm](http://www.tomyang.net/cars/story1.htm)

<comment><USER9> Ferraris aren't mass produced though.

<comment><USER10> It could be argued that neither are Teslas...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> so it's possible that the part is simply cheap and is working for the job

Well, yah. Is it that big of an ego-blemish to have "something so cheap" in your space-chariot?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rarely do you see such a literal take on cutting corners.

<comment><USER13> Hold my beer [https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/evlkdv/shrin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/evlkdv/shrinkflation_used_by_cadbury_to_literally_cut/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sometimes parts from China get stuck in customs or are otherwise delayed, and this affects Tesla as much as the rest of us.

Here's an interview Elon did with Sal Khan back in 2013. He literally had employees running around to buy as many USB cables as he could.

[https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=31](https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=31)

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a lot of room for cutting corner in manufacturing and it all translates to quality and consistency.

My brother in law has a law firm and he happen to work with two different car manufacturing brands. He was explaining how two brands choose the glue differently to build the same part of their products. While for the Chinese brand it was only important that the glue has the minimum standard to be used in their production line, the Japanese brand was very specific about which exact glue from two particular brands can be used there. Which both happen to be more expensive than similar products with same standard on paper. But Japanese would only use that particular product because they did all their quality and durability tests with that.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is something you saw all the time back in the day from normal car manufacturers (heck, some GM cars were famous for coming off of the production lines with bottles and trash inside of panels).

This only seems so chintzy to us today because of how much we take for granted from manufacturing today. Modern automakers are running lean operations that are insanely optimized (being able to keep consistent production with barely any inventory). Tesla has famously had problems achieving lean production (keeping huge inventories of other parts, and consistently running out of others).

This wouldn't be so embarrassing if Musk had not spent so much time throwing shade on other car manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER17> These can be from the same Chinese supplier that supplies home depot and Tesla: "Ok send the fake wood ones instead."

Or it can be sign that Tesla still runs their supply chain management in a style that works for small volume luxury sports cars.

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks and sounds bad, but is it actually bad? Regardless, beyond the simple perception of "cheapness", the humor value lent by the specific choice of material certainly doesn't help the optics.

<comment><USER18> Besides looking like a kid's go-cart, I think it's bad in the sense that cars go through safety testing and are governed by a ton of rules and regulations, and it's unlikely they've tested the cars with parts scrounged from Home Depot.

Assuming it's safe, then the worst part, for Tesla, is probably just the terrible optics. It's one thing for a do-it-yourselfer to hack their own car, but I suspect nobody really wants to drop $60k on a new car that's hacked together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was on a call with Tesla salesperson to purchase a Model Y. After watching a few Youtube videos on quality and now this I'm 100% backing off from it. A BMW is cheaper and much better built

<comment><USER19> What comparable BMW is cheaper?

<comment><USER13> Model Y vs. X1

<comment><USER20> Depending on options etc, you could go up to X5...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This title is so bad. 'Home Depot-Grade' is just editorializing to make it more clickbaity.

</comment><comment><USER22> Imagine if GM did this...

Anyway it looks like poor supply chain management. They ran out of the plastic corner pieces.

</comment><comment><USER23> His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.

"You're going to have to shim those out," I said.

"What's shim?"

"It's a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."

"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"

"I've got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.

He didn't understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"

"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn't see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.

You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.

I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn't oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.

In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.

That Krupp's-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I've talked about before, a feeling that there's something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John's view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That's how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it's depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?

\-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

</comment><comment><USER24> From Jalopnik, Munro is quoted as saying: "The metal bad routes through the Plastic housing for the Thermal system and the band cracked a portion of it."

[https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home- de...](https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-depot-shit- used-to-1844999285)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm still kind of in shock that Tesla still sells software upgrades for things like disabling traction control "Drift Mode" or for turning on the rear seat heaters. Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but if I'm purchasing a vehicle I can be allowed to wrench on it without being banned from supercharger stations

</comment><comment><USER26> I would expext this on Yugo. I dont mind the fix if it works, but I would expect this from someone doing it at home not from a $50k car. If I would find this in my car I would just return it to the factory and the linked article is right. What else can be found?

</comment><comment><USER27> >ROB STUMPF: so it's possible that the part is simply cheap and is working for the job.

Rob, I hope you never look at the welds on Ferrari Testarossa, F40, Dino, or any Maserati from the <=80s for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER28> That looks like real wood to me, not just the grain but the way it flaked from sawing. Who would use fake wood for trimmings anyway?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not a car person, but doesn't a car get hot enough to burn wood?

<comment><USER30> Electrics don't.. all of the intense heat from an internal combustion car comes from the combustion process itself. There's probably some heat built up in the drive components on the Tesla and surely by the wheels from the braking, but not in the 'engine bay'/frunk.

<comment><USER16> This is literally attached to a cooling system.

<comment><USER30> Right.. but the liquid cooled condenser that the wood is attached to isn't going to approach anything close to the ignition temperature of wood... whereas the temp inside the cylinder of an ICE car can reach 2,500ºC. I think the Tesla hack in the article is ridiculous but 100x safer than a similar hack in an ICE engine bay would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If safety and longevity weren't concerns I would say: If it's stupid and works it's not stupid. There's a difference between quality, and the perception of quality.

<comment><USER4> How do you know it works? If it is indeed a cut corner that has a negative impact, it wouldn't present itself immediately or in all cases. I couldn't even begin to guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What's interesting is going to be just how polarizing the discussion below plays out. Discussing Tesla has become so Balkanized that it quickly moves beyond rational. Musk/Tesla is either a low quality sham of a company with inflated stock price or a genius undervalued company sticking it to big oil and stodgy old car companies.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can understand the perception that this is an unreasonable cut corner with potential consequences, or that it's unknowable if it's reasonable or not without knowing more, but it's hard to wrap my mind around the 3rd option I keep seeing: That this is obviously a harmless example of scrappy ingenuity. Where do people get that kind of confidence in something with so many variables, both physical and financial?

<comment><USER28> In what scenario wouldn't you just 3d-print it instead?

<comment><USER12> You can buy a bazillion feet of this trim in the time it takes to print like a 1000 of these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "The original poster of the thread had reportedly spent more than ten hours disassembling their Model Y to correct poor panel fitment when they came across a large chunk of metal secured with green tape and a small strap."

Bad quality followed up by bad quality.

When I benchmarked Tesla years ago, the exterior(and interior) panels were awful in their Autoshow build. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't fixed it yet.

I gave them a pass at the time because everything was new and in low runs. Now with 500k/yr, there's really no excuse.

Tesla is the Apple of Automotive.</comment>


Flexibility Is Bad Design - <AUTHOR> http://phillarson.blogspot.com/2008/06/flexibility-is-bad-design.html

<comment><USER3> Nice. I guess the author never experienced the joy of having this lovely conversation with his users:

 _Programmer:_ That feature you asked for two weeks ago? It's done. Take a look. What do you think?

 _User:_ Oh... hmmm... yeah, that's kinda wrong... See, I know I said I wanted X, but I just realized I actually wanted Y. But Y is very similar to X, can't you just tweak it and I'll come back to take a look after lunch?

 _Programmer:_ Well, actually, yeah, Y is a lot like X, but I tried to just "start shipping great software," so I didn't take the extra day which will make X->Y only take an hour or two. I'll have to start from scratch. See you in another two weeks.

 _User (two weeks later):_ Actually, Y isn't quite right. Can you do Z?

I'll go so far as to claim that code which can't adapt to changing requirements is either (1) pure genius because it just works and does exactly what users want, and therefore rare, or (2) unused, or (3) thrown away. Obviously it shouldn't be overdone, but the ability to balance between flexibility and delivering working applications is precisely what defines people who, as the author puts it, "ship great software."

<comment><USER4> This is where you see a strong advantage in a language like Ruby over Java.

The less code you have to write initially, the less you'll have to scrap when the rewrite comes. And the rewrite always comes. The question is when.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It isn't that simple. Excessive generality is one problem. Insufficient generality is another. Some things are easy to change later. Others aren't. It's part of being a good programmer to make good judgments about these things.

What people usually do (and this author, in my opinion, is doing) is observe one unhelpful behavior and conclude that the opposite behavior must be "correct". I think this is because building software is a complex activity, so we seek invariant principles to simplify it. Then we view the complex activity through the filter of our "correct" model (which we've identified with it) and get a feeling that we know what we're doing. In the end this causes a lot of problems.

</comment><comment><USER6> I understand the author's motivations, but I disagree with the conclusion.

The simplest solution is often also the most flexible. I don't think you can argue that simple is bad design.

During requirements and feature planning, I have often found that features get more and more complicated until - guess what - things click, similarities become obvious, and you end up with a solution that's a lot more simple - <USER2> more flexible - than you expected. You don't always get that "aha!" moment, and you can't spend your entire development cycle chasing it, but it is often there.

</comment><comment><USER7> In the name of attacking goldplating and useless makework design fetishism, he seems to be opposed to basic principles like separation of concerns.

Talking about getting things done in the least amount of time and then bringing up the retarded old "it's all Turing complete" argument shows that he has some more thinking to do on this subject.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that anyone with even a little bit of real world experience would realize that the spec is rarely ever set in stone. You don't know what you want in a car until you've driven a few. The same is with software; Users don't know what they want until they've tried it out themselves.

This is part of what the big deal about 'agile' methodologies is: People remaining flexible about requirements because they don't really know what will be needed in the future. Specs change and grow and the more flexible your code base is, the easier it is to make changes and maintain.

Granted it can be overdone, (some of the worst WTFs come from overly flexible code,) Ideally, a program should be flexible enough to allow for any reasonable change or extension.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I think you're putting your finger on a certain tension here (I won't say contradiction) in the agile principles. On the one hand, develop incrementally and adapt to change; on the other hand, build the simplest thing that meets the requirements now (and resist the temptation to avoid generalizing up front). The trouble is that code that does X in a direct, concrete way can't always be easily changed to meet the new requirements when X changes to X'.

The typical agile answer is, "We'll just refactor to allow the necessary changes as we go along." This is an oversimplification, because the cost of such refactoring isn't always low. Sometimes it's no less than the cost of rewriting the system. Other times the refactoring leads to suboptimal solutions for X', compared with what you would have if you designed for X' originally. I've seen agile projects get into trouble this way.

There's no question that up-front generality is often misplaced (since you can't know for sure what you'll need in the future) and can cause a lot of complexity damage. But the answer doesn't lie in making a "process" out of a half-dozen or dozen principles and pretending you've solved the problem.

<comment><USER8> Oh, I understand. My current job is an agile shop and I've seen firsthand how dealing with poorly thought out legacy design can be a pain. We take a lot of pains these days to make sure decisions today don't get in the way of plans tomorrow.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of agile but it does hit on a few things right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 2-word summary:

YAGNI principle

</comment><comment><USER10> _These guys have written code that allows you to make operating systems, databases, windowing toolkits, financial software, even the software that you are working on write now._

Grammar error or Freudian slip?

</comment><comment><USER11> so i guess the master plan is preferable?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're writing software without any kind of plan I feel sorry for you.</comment></comment>


None - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I wish I could upvote this more than once. Damn! Bliss.</comment>


Kippt (YC S12) Launches Bookmarking App To Become The GitHub For Links - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/yc-backed-kippt-goes-collaborative/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who doesn't use bookmarks?

99% of the time, if I need to find something I've read before, I'll just search for it & find it.

The exception to this is when I was working support and had several product spec sheets & other reference pages bookmarked for quick access to email links to customers. Even while I was at Uni, I'd download articles to PDF.

On the rare occasion that I like or am interested in something enough to want to bookmark it, I find I rarely actually come back to it. Just looking now, in my Bookmarks menu I have a couple of folders — apparently the result of me saying "save all open tabs as bookmarks" in the hope of coming back to it later — but never having done so.

Long-form articles I come across while I should be doing something else go to Instapaper to be read later (is this what people use bookmarks for?). Even then realistically I only actually read 20% of them.

Anything I _really_ think a friend of mine should read, I email a link there & then. This is a 1- or 2- click operation.

Anything that I think is just too interesting/funny/important to keep to one or two friends, I put on Twitter, or here on HN. (I guess that ends up being a kind of bookmark service; I have scoured my submitted stories (and upvoted stories) to find them again.)

For my frequently visited sites without RSS, the browser URL bar is my friend - just start typing & it autocompletes. The only bookmark in my bookmark bar is the "Instapaper: Read Later" bookmarklet.

What does everyone else use bookmarks for? Is there some awesome use case I've been ignorant to since 1996? Am I just a freak for never wanting to revisit things?

<comment><USER3> I use Pinboard.in a lot. I do _not_ use it for "frequently visited sites"; I can type the URL faster than clicking, especially with autocompletion.

For me, bookmarks are mainly for 1) things I may want again and only vaguely remember 2) articles I'd like to read when I have time.

Examples of stuff I've recently pinned:

\- An article that has a quote from Linus Torvalds that I'd like to use in a blog post I may write someday \- The best Inkscape tutorial I found in maybe 10 minutes of searching \- An HN article comparing A/B testing with multi- armed bandit, which is irrelevant to me right now but maybe someday I'll want to read

In each case, I pin that thing, give it whatever tags make sense to me, and possibly write a quick description.

There are 51,200,000 search results in Google for "Linus." In my personal pinboard, there are 2. Guess which I'm going to try first if I vaguely remember something I once saw about him?

Probably 80% of my bookmarks are never used, which is another reason why the "tag now, search later" approach is so nice to me; those neglected ones aren't cluttering up a GUI, making it hard for me to find what I want right now; searching cuts right to what I want.

Pinboard.in is fast, simple, super-effective, cheap (but not free, so I'm the customer), and cross-browser (since it's a bookmarklet).

It also lets you mark everything private by default, which I like. Too many things are social these days. I don't want to broadcast my opinions about sites; I just want to find things again later.

It's one of my favorite tools.

<comment><USER4> Dittpo. Pinboard.in rocks. It's like what bookmarks should be - cloud based, taggable, and easily searchable. Also it allows you to just shove URLs into a read later category. I do find myself going back to it - something will come up at work and I'll remember, oh i read something about that approach that was very insightful, and just quickly grab it to share with others or refresh my memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The UI is very very slick, saw them a few weeks back featured as one of the twitter bootstrap example apps. Reminds me of the warm fuzzy feeling I got when I first used Path.

I especially like the introduction flow for connecting accounts (fb, twitter) and the call to action to install the browser extension in the end.

kudos.

<comment><USER6> Yup this is a really good example. Only thing I didn't understand was I signed up with FB so I had a verified e-mail address, yet they asked me to put one in - the default of my FB one would have been a little bit better

<comment><USER7> I found that annoying too when signing up with Twitter, if I knew I would still have to create a username and provide an email address I would have skipped signing in with Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe techcrunch isn't doing this app justice, but I'm at a loss why we are re-doing bookmarks... again. Maybe its just me, maybe I'm so well organized that I only need a place to jot down notes on paper - but I honestly do not see that many people having so much pain for freaking bookmarks that we need another social X for Y start-up that ultimately won't be compelling enough to change users behavior.

I imagine there are users out there that would benefit from this, but is it enough to run a business? I agree with another commentor that this seems more like a talent acquisition play than an actually viable business.

As I said I'm probably not the target market, but the tech crunch article made me cringe a little bit. When I see stuff like this I wonder if there is a funding bubble.

Kudos definitely to the engineers that put this together. Clearly a lot of thought went into the product. For me though, it left a "why are they solving _this_ problem, AGAIN" taste in my mouth.

</comment><comment><USER9> This could be popular with readers of text erotica. See, for example, the Pinboard spikes when delicious changed.

(<http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/the_fans_are_all_right/>)

I think it's a cool idea. It could be really useful for some things I do. I'm glad to know about it.

I have no freaking idea what you mean when you say "The github for links" - and the people I'd want to use this with will never have heard of github.

<comment><USER2> That blog post was fascinating — I had no idea the Fan community was so mobilised (nor that they were even a community cohesive enough to have a name, nor that the name was Fans).

I wonder how many other comprehensive communities exist like this, somewhat under the radar, serving themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You need to improve your onboarding process.

The sign up process is slick but way too long. Need to provide some instant gratification.

Just because I like to check out new products, I was patient and did all the steps properly. But, in the end I just got a blank screen saying "this list is empty". That was pretty disappointing. Then I imported my Instapaper articles and still the list is empty.

If speed is an issue, why don't you just show me "today's popular articles" or just fetch the last 10 links I shared on twitter? Show me _something_ or I might never come back. This is not exactly a space without competition.

Edit: I'd like to be able to save articles with a single click. The 2-click save thing is what everyone gets wrong and why I end up using Instapaper for all my bookmarking.

<comment><USER11> There are one-click bookmark lets for each list you create, as well as your inbox and read later list, on the tools page[1], under Quick Bookmarklets

[1]:<https://kippt.com/tools/>

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I didn't see that. Clicking on a list-specific bookmarklet didn't seem to work. So, I clicked a few times and then found that article saved multiple times. You need to provide some visual feedback while saving the article, otherwise it looks like it's not doing anything. Also, de-duplication would be nice.

Generally, I don't like managing bookmarks. I think that's what search is for. I should just be able to save pages with one click and then find them easily with search later on.

Bookmarklets for each list seem way too complicated. I don't want to have more than one kippt bookmarklet on my toolbar. So, I'll end up using your app just with one list bookmarklet.

If you find this is common among your users, then this could be the basis of a freemium model. Users like me with simple needs can use it for free. People who want multiple lists can pay a small fee.

If you're aiming the product only at power users who don't mind lots of complex options, then you can probably ignore my comments.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the feedback. It's really helpful.

Generally we try to make the service as simple and effortless to use as possible. You shouldn't need to manage your bookmarks (if you don't want to, that what the search is for). The visual feedback has been long time on my to- do list, hopefully I get to it soon :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the UI and everything about this, however it's another free service I won't be using - no revenue therefore highly likely these guys will get acquired as a talent acqusition and then the service will be shut down.

<comment><USER3> Pinboard.in is similar but has a one-time fee. I use and love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really love the interface. Congrats!

Any idea about mobile integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> We know about few third party clients that are build on top of our API. Hopefully they will be released soon as we would also like to use them (still quite busy with the site).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The best bookmarking experience I've had was with PowerMarks (commercial product by Kaylon, long discontinued).

Anyone doing bookmarking would serve themselves by having a look at it -- even though today everything seeks to be "as a service" as opposed to a local application.

</comment><comment><USER15> I see there's a wide range of import options, is or will there be a way to export bookmarks too?

<comment><USER16> import isn't instantaneous - I uploaded my delicious links, and was promised an email when import finished.

Still no email (an hour or so later) :) - tbf, there's about 3000 links

<comment><AUTHOR> Shouldn't take that long. Could you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com with your username and I'll take a look?

<comment><USER16> mail sent, thanks for taking a look. Same username as here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good job so far, I really like it. May I ask what is the business model behind it?

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice use of bootstrap, but modifying it on the homepage as well. Great design.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! Bootstrap has been a big help for us

<comment><USER19> I discovered Kippt through the front page of Bootstrap (it's one of the main thumbnails - I would say the best looking thumbnail - under "Built With Bootstrap"). Has that been a good source of users for you guys? Or not at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lot of negativity in the comments. Maybe power users don't use bookmarks as much. But I have seen people using browser auto-complete with a mouse. There is a lot that can be done when it comes to empowering the regular user to use web better.

</comment><comment><USER21> OMFG Kippt just tweeted my bookmarks :O</comment>


China tells Trump climate change is not a Chinese hoax - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/17/china-tells-trump-climate-change-is-not-a-chinese-hoax/ <comment><USER2> 103bn is lot to spend on a hoax.

[http://www.publicfinanceinternational.org/news/2016/03/china...](http://www.publicfinanceinternational.org/news/2016/03/china- worlds-largest-investor-renewable-energy)</comment>