OSX For Hackers - zackattack
https://gist.github.com/2260182
======
jamessb
This seems to be a copy of Mathias Bynen's Dotfiles
(<https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx>, 'sensible
hacker defaults for OS X'), with a few minor changes. Specifically, comments
explainung each line have been changed to echo statements, and the following
lines have been inserted:

      echo "Use current directory as default search scope in Finder"
      defaults write com.apple.finder FXDefaultSearchScope -string "SCcf"

      echo "Show Path bar in Finder"
      defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool true

      echo "Show Status bar in Finder"
      defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool true

      echo "Set a shorter Delay until key repeat"
      defaults write NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat -int 12

Also, some commands have been commented out:

      # Automatically hide and show the Dock
      # defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true

      # Show remaining battery time; hide percentage
      # defaults write com.apple.menuextra.battery ShowPercent -string "NO"
      # defaults write com.apple.menuextra.battery ShowTime -string "YES"

      # echo "Always show scrollbars"
      # defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Auto"

      # Disable window animations and Get Info animations in Finder
      # defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

      # Don’t animate opening applications from the Dock
      # defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool false

      # Disable opening and closing window animations
      # defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

      # Empty Trash securely by default
      # defaults write com.apple.finder EmptyTrashSecurely -bool true

      # Remove useless icons from Safari’s bookmarks bar
      # defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar "()"

      # Disable send and reply animations in Mail.app
      # defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool true
      # defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool true

      # Disable Resume system-wide
      # defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

      #Fix for the ancient UTF-8 bug in QuickLook (http://mths.be/bbo)
      # Commented out, as this is known to cause problems when saving files in Adobe Illustrator CS5 :(
      #echo "0x08000100:0" > ~/.CFUserTextEncoding

~~~
aes256
_# This is script with usefull tips taken from:

# <https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx> _

~~~
mathias
Yeah… But still it’s a bit confusing. It’s almost an exact copy, and no real
functionality has been added (except for the four commands jamessb mentioned).
I feel like I’m missing something — this is something you would expect to see
in a fork, rather than a separate gist.

Oh well, glad to see my dotfiles are of use!

~~~
richbradshaw
I reckon the original author didn't expect it to get any traffic, and just
made it for themselves. Thanks for collating all these anyway!

------
nikcub
If you are worried about some of these settings before running them, you can
backup your preference files

All that the 'defaults' command does is alter values stored in plist files,
which are located in /Library/Preferences (and for the user in
~/Library/Preferences).

You can add something like this to the top of the script:

        echo "Making a backup.."
        tar -pzcf ~/preferences-`date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S"`.tgz ~/Library/Preferences /Library/Preferences

You may need to sudo to read some of the machine plist files

~~~
NHQ
This is what I was looking for. Thanks!

------
mitsche
Before I saw this gist I had been completely unaware of the fact that Snow
Leopard disables subpixel font rendering on non-Apple displays. Font rendering
is something that drives me crazy if it's not done right. It's one of my main
gripes with Windows (YMMV).

Thanks to the respective hack my Samsung 24" has suddenly become acceptable to
work on again. Awesome.

~~~
jaylevitt
Don't you hate being a font-rendering snob and then realizing you've been
staring at something ugly for months without realizing it?

I'm not being snide; it's happened to me. I used to be a typesetter, and yet
when I had trouble using Inconsolata in Sublime Text, I reverted back to
Menlo, which I hated - and spent the next few months preaching about how hard
I'd worked to find the Perfect Programmer Font For Me, not realizing I wasn't
actually looking it in the editor. Worse, I _was_ seeing it in Terminal; I had
no excuse.

It's the visual equivalent of the classic audio production goof: You spend
hours tweaking a particular equalizer setting, everybody agrees that it sounds
perfect now, and then realize the EQ hasn't been patched in at all and you've
been changing nothing.

~~~
mitsche
I just stopped using the monitor after half an hour of using OS X on it and
gave it to my roommate, since I'm hardly ever home anyway. Now it's back on my
desk again.

It bugs me that I thought I needed a better screen instead of instantly seeing
what's the issue. Especially since I used to play around a lot with the
Freetype settings in Ubuntu and should have known what makes the fonts look
the way they do.

But then again I trusted Apple to not let this kind of stuff happen.

------
TamDenholm
This is totally awesome, however one of the biggest things for me since i've
recently bought a mac and coming from linux is the focus follows mouse issue,
which i know has been attempted to get working but failed.

Other things i miss are basics like double clicking the title bar to maximise,
right clicking to create a new file and a few other things i miss from linux.

~~~
pigs
I know OSX does a lot of things right, but focus follows mouse and copy-on-
select/paste-on-middle-click are two things that I can't live without.

~~~
gregwebs
You can have both of these in iterm2. There are also copy-on-select plugins
for browsers.

Just got my Mac. I am trying to figure out how to efficiently run a Linux
virtual machine.

~~~
xaritas
Take a look at Vagrant (<http://vagrantup.com>). It's a command line driver
and library manager for VirtualBox VMs. It's integrated with Chef and Puppet
if automated provisioning is your thing.

~~~
gregwebs
I am. It is ridiculously slow. But I realized it is just a networking issue
(hitting the host-only network from a browser on my Mac), so hopefully I can
fix it.

Edit: Figured it out, DNS issue: sudo apt-get remove libavahi-common3

~~~
X-Istence
edit /etc/nsswitch to remove mdns from the list... that takes care of the
issue and you can keep avahi for some of the other things it provides (such as
automatic discovery of printers, and the likes).

------
sofuture
"OSX for Hackers" would have a real tiling window manager.

~~~
cgag
It doesn't compare to using something like i3, but size up 2 makes it a little
less painful.

~~~
cbrinke1
Along the same lines I am enjoying <http://manytricks.com/moom/>

------
maxer
my biggest gripe with mac os having recently moved from windows is hitting the
maximise button on finder and it barely filling half the screen.

other well documented one is the ability to turn the laptop screen of when
using another screen but still the laptop keyboard

~~~
crb
Hold Shift while hitting the green plus ("resize window") button to make it
maximise the window.

~~~
vbo
Cheers for that, I've been mildly annoyed with the resize button for years but
never enough to look for a solution. This works great.

~~~
Vecrios
still, doesn't work for me! what version are you using?

~~~
vbo
Using Lion, but I recall doing this for some time (Tiger?); I may be wrong. Do
you have tap to click enabled?

------
johnpowell
I just use secrets. It was found here. <http://secrets.blacktree.com/>

I'm not sure why the site is down. But I mirrored it here.
<http://stfudamnit.com/ryan/Secrets.prefPane.zip>

~~~
mathias
Sadly, Secrets is a bit outdated. Lots of useful hidden tweaks aren’t listed
there.

------
gaving
Still waiting for a god damned "disable swoosh effect" defaults key for
switching between desktops as you could in snow leopard.

~~~
homebrewalright
If you mean how slow mission control is it's this one: defaults write
com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -int 0; killall Dock

~~~
gaving
Nah, not that one but that's good too.

------
miles_matthias
A 2D dock is what hackers need? Is this really for hackers or just someone's
personal preference?

~~~
uxp
I honestly don't have a preference on the eye candy present in most operating
systems, but I do know that I dislike the agonizing wait introduced to open a
new window, watching it's open animation progress frame by frame after I've
put my workstation under _Heavy_ load. Removing a lot of the visual fluff can
help keep someone productive, even when their machine isn't being the most
responsive.

It's entirely preference, dependent on the specs of the workstation and the
user's ability to open a couple hundred web browser tabs, 5 VMs, and 2
different O(log n) sorting operations on some database all at once while still
maintaing a Skype conversation with a co-worker.

------
Cyph0n
Great list of modifications. I believe Deeper for OS X has many of these
tweaks bundled into a nice interface.

<http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php>

------
astrange
Does changing every single default really make you feel better about yourself?

At least one of these changes (disabling local backups) doesn't even increase
performance. Unless you just like data loss.

------
trimbo
For me, the biggest problem with OS X is the command key / meta key situation.
I have an impossible time going between Linux, Windows and Mac because of
this. Any hacks people know of for this?

~~~
travisjeffery
Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... and configure them
however you want.

~~~
trimbo
Hm, I feel like I've tried this and couldn't get the behaviors I wanted. How
does this accomplish e.g. overloading control-C to copy across the system? You
wouldn't want to map command to control, since you still want control-C to be
control-C in a shell. Know what I mean?

~~~
packetslave
I use Keyboard Maestro to remap ctrl-X/C/V to copy/paste everywhere except
Terminal/iTerm. Same for Chrome so that the Ctrl shortcuts from Linux work on
OSX as well.

~~~
trimbo
Sweet! I'll give it a try.

------
dustingetz
and now my osx is like my emacs - nobody can use it except me, and i can't
even keep my configuration straight across all my machines.

~~~
emidln
Put your config files in your favorite online vcs (private repo or encrypted
if you must).

------
dgallagher
I through together a (rough) Cocoa version: <https://github.com/dave-
gallagher/OSX-For-Cocoa-Hackers>

Binary: [https://github.com/downloads/dave-gallagher/OSX-For-Cocoa-
Ha...](https://github.com/downloads/dave-gallagher/OSX-For-Cocoa-
Hackers/OSX%20For%20Hackers.zip)

        git clone git@github.com:dave-gallagher/OSX-For-Cocoa-Hackers.git

It's not as robust as the script, but it lets you choose individually what
setting you want changed, and also added defaults.

------
pixelcort
It seems down right now, but there was a nice database of secret preferences
at <http://secrets.blacktree.com/> and included a Preference Pane to access
them.

------
jasonkester
I'm still waiting for the "Quit asking me to retype my password every time I
try to do anything" setting. You'd think that the fact I typed it in 30
seconds ago when I logged in would be sufficient proof that I'm me.

This is the type of security that actually leads to _less_ security.
Eventually I'll get so sick of not being able to hit the back button on my
browser (or whatever similarly impactful action that OSX decides is going to
destroy my machine) without special one-time-only admin privileges that I'll
just remove the password from my account altogether.

~~~
dakotasmith
Sounds like you need to fix some Keychain Access settings. Grasping at
Internet straws, but perhaps something like this will help?

[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2108355?start=0&tst...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2108355?start=0&tstart=0)

(Fair warning, I'm presuming the back button of which you speak is a Safari
back button. I have not experienced this problem myself and I have full-disk
encryption on, which requires you to enter a password for most anything.)

~~~
chc
This is quite possibly the case. OS X doesn't normally ask for your password
once you're logged in except when you're doing something that will affect
multiple users (e.g. updating the system). The big exception is when it has
somehow lost your keychain password, in which case it will ask for your
password every time it needs to look at the keychain.

------
jluxenberg
If you're looking for "Alt-Tab" style window switching on OS X, the best thing
I've found is Witch (<http://manytricks.com/witch/>)

"Alt-Tab" switches between windows in the order you last focused each window,
so it's ideally suited to a stack-based workflow where you may have many
windows open but are only using a few of them. OS X already has "Command-Tab",
but that switches between applications, not windows.

~~~
Schwolop
Try Cmd+Tilde.

------
ralfd
> MacBook:~ ralf$ defaults write enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items -bool
> true

Okay. Now just to check…

> MacBook:~ ralf$ defaults read com.apple.dock enable-spring-load-actions-on-
> all-items 2012-03-31 12:46:35.173 defaults[33945:707] The domain/default
> pair of (/Users/ralf/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, enable-
> spring-load-actions-on-all-items) does not exist

Hm?

~~~
moeffju
That should probably be

        defaults write com.apple.dock enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items -bool true

------
deepkut
Your changes to the dock are nothing short of spectacular. Thanks for this!
Simple, easy to install, and in accordance with the hacker ethic.

------
pkamb
Replace Snow Leopard Exposé (terrible) with old Leopard-style Exposé
(amazing).

[http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-
on-...](http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-snow-
leopard-for-mac)

Unfortunately it won't help those of you who have "upgraded" to Lion...

------
joedevon
OK, any of these "bad"?

~~~
lalc
They're largely harmless. Some of them seem pointless or purely resisting-
change, like disabling menu bar transparency. Subpixel font rendering could
look pretty bad on the wrong screen.

A lot of those Finder options are just going to increase noise on the screen.
It's rare that I ever need to know the full path of something in OS X. Either
I'm already on the command line, or I just use Spotlight.

Disabling the “Are you sure you want to open this application?” dialog seems
just wrong. Confirming once per program downloaded from the net seems like a
sane default.

Anyway these are pretty subjective things. Good thing they're so easy to pick
and choose from and revert.

~~~
doktrin
Subpixel font rendering being disabled by default caused text to appear
absolutely horrible on my brand new 23' IPS display.

Can you provide an example of an external display on which it's not necessary
or harmful?

~~~
astrange
A projector.

------
asmosoinio
Why would one disable Time Machine logal backups?

------
philip1209
Great tips. Thanks for sharing. I did everything except the track pad right
click hack and removing the top bar transparency.

------
billsix
I am surprised that this article made the front page.

~~~
mathias
Me too, given that the original (<http://mths.be/osx>) made the front page 200
days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974911>

------
ctingom
For OS X I love TotalFinder - better finder.

------
tamasss
thank you so much for sharing!

------
piger
for hackers? LOL.

------
wildtype
Ah, i don't have enough money to buy Apple stuffs, can't be hackeer :(


Rails vs. Django - kyro

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.<p>So, how about pros/cons of each.
======
SwellJoe
Deployment of Rails sucks.

Django is far better thought out, and can be deployed in a very sane manner. A
fleet of Mongrels is just an embarrassingly bad way to handle concurrency. "I
know, let's write a crappy barely functional web server, spawn a metric ass
ton of them, and then balance between them with a proxy. It'll be most leet
and super fast! We'll call it a Best Practice. It'll be awesome." In fact,
it's fragile, doesn't scale very well, and is complicated to configure. It's
also a huge distraction from solving the problem in a sane way--people seem to
think "deploying Rails" is solved by this and Capistrano, when really, it's
just a new stack of problems.

Otherwise Rails kicks ass, and I like Ruby better than Python (but I'm a perl
monger, so I might be brain-damaged into not seeing the beauty of Python). But
I do tend to feel like Django is being written by grownups who've got years of
development experience, while the Rails folks are making it up as they go
along...sometimes going down really poorly chosen paths (I believe Mongrel is
an example of this, but I'm no expert).

Then again, I think if I were starting an app from scratch I'd pick Catalyst.
But I haven't spent enough time with any of them to know which one is really
most productive for the way I work. I think you'll want to try them out, and
not take advice from random dudes at news.yc.

~~~
davidw
I went for rails myself, and agree about Mongrel. It seems like the Rails guys
are all anxious to throw the Apache baby out with the bathwater, and spend a
lot of time fooling around with dodgy ways of doing things.

For now, I use the mod_fcgid Apache module, and it seems to work ok for what I
need.

~~~
altay
i heard through the grapevine that zed shaw, the dude who wrote mongrel, is
down on it and isn't actively developing it anymore. hopefully someone else
will pick up the slack, but i'm afraid that 95% of the folks using ruby+rails
are know-nothing newbies (like me). =P

anyone have any experience with lighttpd + rails?

~~~
lojic
Oh really? Why don't you either stop spreading FUD, or back up that statement
with some reality. "heard through the grapevine" - give me a break.

------
hsiung
jesusphreak has a pretty good writeup that's worth reading on the pros of
using django: <http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_django>

Having come from a rails background and later switching to django I think it
comes down to a matter of preference. Django's ORM gets the job done but
leaves something to be desired (ugly syntax, no multiple database support,
also watch out for implicit cascading deletes!). Conversion to using
SQLAlchemy was supposed to address the gaps, but the branch for the upgrade
seems pretty dead... But overall I'm pretty happy due to the transparency of
django's framework code. I've implemented some customizations that would have
been a lot harder to pull off in rails.

If you had to choose a python web framework, I'd suggest taking a look at
pylons which is more flexible (also, by default it uses mako templating which
> django's templating and supports SQLAlchemy).

~~~
kashif
Actually SQL sucks and hence all wrappers suck too. The over-engineered
SQLAlchemy sucks most. If you are python user you should find SQLAlchemy ugly.

As far as frameworks goes, for most deployments(not for all) I would suggest
pylons over django.

Mako is very useful.

~~~
dood
I'm curious what you dislike about SQLAlchemy, the ORM, the SQL toolkit, or
both?

~~~
kashif
Both, but the ORM more. I am curious, why do you ask?

~~~
dood
I've been learning it recently and I'm not sure what to make of it,
specifically the ORM component. It certainly has a good reputation as far as
ORM's go, but I'm not sure if even a good ORM fits a large, popular, or
complex app, or is perhaps more suitable for protoyping and low-traffic uses.

But since SQL is pretty necessary for most web apps, it makes sense to pick
some abstraction layer, and as far as I can tell SQLA is best of breed for
scripting languages, so I'm trying to work out how to apply it most
effectively.

~~~
kashif
Things I learnt, that might help.

1\. You don't have to use SQL.

2\. If you are going to use SQL, Find a wrapper that is minimalistic for your
current needs. Work with lesser and you will work more but you will also work
with more freedom and sanity.

Best of luck friend. :)

~~~
dood
Thanks for your thought-provoking comments, actually I had quite forgotten
that I didn't necessarily need SQL (despite reading all the threads about that
here)!

Trouble is, I understand the theory of in-memory data logged to disk, but as
I'm just a humble hacker (self-taught amateur) there seem a lot of unknowns in
such an approach. SQL, though a pain, is at least familiar and abundantly
documented.

Guess I'll do a little more research, and a little more hacking, since I would
be quite happy to drop SQL entirely!

~~~
kashif
Actually, I am self taught too and most hackers here are probably much better
than me. I use python, if you do the same then try out Zope DB and schevo.org.
These are Object based DBMS - non SQL. The problem like someone pointed out is
that such systems are not language agnostic.

------
dood
Pylons is deserving of attention. There is a small comparison of Django and
Pylons here
[[http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Concepts+of+...](http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Concepts+of+Pylons#ConceptsofPylons-
Arethereotherwebframeworks%3F)].

I'm playing around with Pylons and have been impressed so far. The whole
approach strikes me as more of a hackers framework; less magic, more flexible,
extensible. Though the docs need a little work, and the community isn't as big
as Django yet, Pylons seems to be blossoming into quite an excellent
framework.

~~~
kashif
You are on the money dude, I have been using pylons for a while and it is much
more usable than Django.

------
JMiao
What type of app are you looking to build? The scope of the project would
carry weight here.

~~~
andyn
That and whether you're more comfortable using Python or Ruby.

------
nanijoe
A search on amazon.com for 'ruby on rails' yielded 48 books, a search for
Django comes up wuth 3 unpublished books.

The stats above, made the decision for me.

------
hello_moto
kyro, why don't you do this instead:

1) Pick a very easy tutorial for both of them 2) Do them 3) Choose

Framework will only get better each day so if today Rails deployment sucks,
tomorrow it'll become better unless the growth is stagnant. Same case with
Pylons or Django or the 100000000000000001 python frameworks out there.

Now if you're looking for a job, Rails would be a better choice because the
hype marketing has converted a lot of people (they drink the kool-aid straight
from the hose).

~~~
dood
I don't think this is a good way to evaluate a framework; tutorials don't
necessarily bear much relation to the reality of using the tool.

~~~
cnu
Agreed. Most of the frameworks have the 20 minute tutorial which (most of the
time) is no way comparable to the type of work we will be doing with it.

~~~
hello_moto
That's right.. in a way.

You need to love the platform you're going to develop on top of. Guys like
him, that ask which one is better, needs to at least give both of them a try
and see which one he likes it the most.

Just like the most common comments from the Rails vs Django: it's up to which
one you're comfortable/love.

I tried Rails, Django, TurboGears and I ended up with ASP.NET.

------
kashif
What are you designing? One might be better suited.

------
yrashk
Rails looks to be more DRY than Django. Though I'm on Rails and don't really
use Django.

------
rms
What about Pylons?


I Tried to Train a RNN on Donald Trumps Tweets - wyattferguson
https://github.com/wyattferguson/trumpbot-rnn
======
p1esk
Fine tune gpt-2 instead, you’re likely to see much better results


In Recession, Japanese Lay Off Robots  - peter123
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/technology/13robot.html?_r=1
======
patio11
This is just a subset of "capital investment goes down in economic downturns,
and up in boom times". The local robot manufacturers are doing poorly because
the local automobile industry (which is the largest driver of _every_ industry
in central Japan) is doing poorly.

After the economy recovers and A Certain Automobile Manufacturer starts
selling its Ridiculously Popular Hybrid to Americans by the container ship
again, the factories around here will get spun back up again. Until then
everybody is just waiting it out, with a lot of belts being tightened and
budgets being squeezed. The companies who are in a position to concentrate on
things other than survival are doing R&D to have something to attract the
inevitable tidal wave of cash that will accompany a recovery.

~~~
tc
_After the economy recovers and [Toyota] starts selling its [Prius] to
Americans by the container ship again_

I would not so casually assume that this will happen. The current downturn is
in many respects unprecedented, and all of the long-term trend lines are bad.

People tend to look at a limited set of examples that show the US recovering
first and leading the world out of the bust. But this is a bit like flipping a
coin, seeing four heads in a row, and calling a 'trend.'

The government spending problems in the US are catastrophically bad, getting
worse, and there is zero political will to meaningfully address them at the
federal level. Demographics is working against us, and we no longer live in
that post-WWII world where the US wins by default -- that is to say, for at
least a couple of decades after 1950, much of the rest of the world was still
1) recovering from being bombed back into the stone age, 2) had never really
gotten out of the stone age to begin with, or 3) was crawling slowly back
towards the stone age by virtue of Soviet-style communism.

If the US is going to rise above this time, we're going to have to do it fair
and square. We'll need to actually work to be the best place in the world to
invest long-term capital.

(That is, unless the rest of the world decides it wants to continue shipping
us stuff for free indefinitely. If foreign governments double-down on America,
then all (short-term) bets are off.)

------
nostrademons
"At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of
Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots..."

The singularity has arrived!

------
mynameishere
As long as keepon keeps on keeping on

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPdP1jBfxzo>

~~~
dan_the_welder
I Love Keepon!

~~~
dan_the_welder
Twat a bunch of crabs.

Keepon is a sophisticated multi-axis robot that incorporates extremely complex
kinematics with pseudo-emotional responses and rhythm recognition all bundled
up in a painfully cute package.

FTW


Show HN: Jooseph – Playlists for Learning - firatcan
Hello HN,
Every time I tried to learn new subject through internet. I am confused by the resources.
- Which one will worth my time?
- which ones are reliable or relevant?
Eventually I open infinite amount of tabs and close them without browsing.
Finding right material and resource is hard in this era. Yet we believe lifelong learning is a meaningful way to live your life.
I'm Firat co-founder of Jooseph: https://www.jooseph.com/
Jooseph is basically playlist for learning.
You can follow modules curated from different resources. You can also your learning journey to guide other users. Curate list of resource and share on the relevant topic.
If you're an infinite learner, we would like to hear from you.
Thank you HN community.
======
hmlwilliams
Why not embed the videos into the site? It is a bit of a hassle having to
switch between tabs all the time.

~~~
firatcan
This is our MVP and we have only demo modules right now. We'll be launched in
2 weeks. There'll be embeded videos and more features such as goals and
progress bar.

If you leave your mail from site or send me a mail at firat@jooseph.com I
would be happy to reach you when we launch.

------
svsashank
This is interesting... How do you monetize this if all the playlists are
Youtube links? Also how is it different from Youtube playlists that many
educators have created?

~~~
urupvog
Can you guide me to one such playlists? Quite interested.

~~~
firatcan
Actually there are few demo playlist on Jooseph right now.

You can check from

[https://jooseph.com/modules](https://jooseph.com/modules)

I recommend

UI/UX Go-lang Simplicity

You can also contact me at firat@jooseph.com

If you have a topic in mind that you want to learn we try to create module for
that.


Hackers are breaking into websites and adding links to game Google - Lagogarda
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/hackers-website-links-backlinks-seo-spam
======
skilled
It's a fairly lucrative "business practice". Getting _juicy_ links from
authoritative websites can skyrocket your rankings within a few days, even if
that. Yet, this isn't a new thing or something that someone just came up with.

Such gamification has been going on since the early 2000s, it's just kept
lowkey enough that people don't see it as the biggest deal ever. However, it's
a big deal for people who pay for such services.

If you look at certain job advertising websites for bloggers/marketers, you'll
find plenty of job listings where the employer is looking for writers with
"access to high-authority editorials" \-- because naturally, they know that
those links are worth a hundredfold more than 50 links from an average blog.

Whether it's a problem on Google's side is up for discussion. Giving sites
high authority and then bumping up other sites who are linked from those
places is definitely a weird way to implement a ranking system. But rest
assured, it's there and it works.

And as for the title, it should read "bloggers are paying hackers to break
into websites", rather than blaming one side only.

A lot more could be said on this, especially from experience, but there's
really no point. Addressing an elephant this big would require Google to be
actively involved in the discussion. And that's unlikely to happen.

~~~
walshemj
Google does take action and completely drop hacked sites like this.

Happened to a client of mine back in 2008 ish hackers added thousands of links
to porn sites by creating thousands of pages

~~~
bredren
What did the client do? Were they able to recover the site's standing?

~~~
ehvatum
“We hacked thousands of porn sites and replaced their content with links to
our own commercial porno offerings, now that we’re in that business.”
-Blackhat Dominatrix CEO Chick

------
geekamongus
This has been going on for well over a decade. Not sure why it's news just
now.

~~~
colechristensen
Run _any_ website and your logs will eventually be full of hits to /wp-admin
/cgi-bin etc. from zombies scanning the net for known vulnerabilities. This
has been going on forever.

~~~
walshemj
And buzfeed could see this happening to them if they looked at their logfiles

------
systematical
Yes and sometimes you don't even need to break into the sites. When I was
doing some "blackhat seo" about ten years ago I discovered a high PR forum in
the same niche that allowed anchor links in the username field. This meant
that I could I put something like keyword as the
username and it would just appears as "mykeyword" on the forum index page.

Just one of the many ways I've learned to game Google. Social engineering also
works well for link building and plenty of other grayhat methods. While I had
considered the possibility of outright breaking into systems to place links, I
never believed it worth the risk. Not surprised others have started doing it
(or started getting caught doing it).

------
praptak
I see a distant analogy with something I got to know from a private
investigator. Burglars also changed their game in the similar spirit. Instead
of stealing your big TV, jewelry or other physical goods they try to escalate
the physical breach into digital one, e.g. installing spyware on your laptop
instead of stealing it. Wiping a bank account pays better than stealing
physical stuff.

~~~
smelendez
Do you know where this is happening and who exactly is doing it?

Most residential burglaries I hear of are disorganized smash and grab type
situations, with desperate people and drug addicts looking for cash, jewelry,
lightweight electronics and other things to easily liquidate.

~~~
praptak
The PI guy operates in Eastern Europe - mostly in Poland. He has not shared
any more details with me.

~~~
skocznymroczny
Sounds like an urban legend. I am Polish and have never heard of such
operations.

Also, why bother with breaking in, if you could just drop an infected USB
drive on their doormat.

------
partiallypro
Can I just say "duh?" This has been going on forever, and/or people will do
this to comments, or forums.

~~~
ozi
exactly.

------
kitsunesoba
Years ago (2006-2013) I ran a personal site that used Wordpress for its front
page/blog, with the remainder using very simple hand-rolled PHP templating and
text files. The front page was a constant source of trouble — if I didn’t stay
perfectly on top of keeping Wordpress up to date I’d get hit with the same
kind of hidden link stuff mentioned in the article. Crazy thing is that my
site barely even had an audience to speak of… can’t imagine what it must be
like for more popular blogs.

If I were to spin up a new personal site I think it’d be with something like
gohugo.io deployed on Netlify, making it as static as possible with no room
for exploits.

~~~
lunchables
I think security is one of the reason that static CMS have become so popular.
Also it lets you easily separate content from the CMS (in the form of
markdown, asciidoc, rst) and, maybe most importantly, it makes it very, very
fast and makes it easy (and cheap) to host almost anywhere.

I use hugo with aws s3 bucket static web hosting + cloudfront currently. Costs
me absolutely nothing with the AWS free tier (5GB of S3 and 50GB of cloudfront
free per month). Generate the site in hugo then use the aws cli tools to sync
to s3. Because it's almost entirely html with very few images I don't think I
could ever hit those AWS free tier limits.

edit: I actually just checked and the free tier is only 12 months. My last
months bill total was $0.01 for s3.

------
chatmasta
It's amusing to me that three of the four comments on the Buzzfeed article are
link spam.

------
fierarul
Gaming Google is an old sport. Long ago we had a company here give free
hosting for small sites. The catch was the their server inserted porn links
when Google Bot visited the page. So many people were merrily creating their
subdomains while secretly helping the porn rankings. It was infuriating and
amazing at the same time.

~~~
nkurz
Do you have more details? The twist of only serving the inserted links to the
Google Bot but not to normal users makes sense, but isn't an approach I've
seen before.

~~~
fierarul
I didn't look into it very much back then. They were giving free hosting and
subdomains back when such a thing was expensive and jumped on it for my
homepage. Somehow I saw the Google cache of my page and it was surrounded by
ads.

So they were serving different content to different clients based on user
agent and/or IP block.

When I found out I deleted my account.

I see the site still exists, they might do the same thing. It's 3x on the .ro
TLD.

------
ackbar03
Not exactly related but I realized quite often now that sometimes when I
search for very specific things, usually like some sort of coding bug or
error, Google returns some results that look seemingly legitimate with
sensible preview text and stuff but when I click on it it's a full on Japanese
porn site. Yummy. At first I thought it was some sort of malware in my
computer but then I realized it really was something wrong with google's
links. It's happened enough frequently to be noticeable now

------
topherPedersen
The whole backrub/pagerank/backlink thing was from the 90's. Don't you suppose
Google is weighting other things more highly in their search algorithm these
days?

~~~
tyingq
Seo contests are a fairly good way to see that backlinks still work well.

This one was able to rank a website written in Latin, where that makes no
sense, at the number 2 spot for a competitive local term:

[https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-
loophol...](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-
loopholes/278093/)

~~~
coder1001
Kyle did great there and got his sites banned because of it!

~~~
tyingq
And likely banned manually as a result of the publicity.

~~~
coder1001
It was insulting to Google really! Nice to see someone bold enough to compete
with lorem ipsum on the site. You are right most likely a manual penalty!

~~~
jacquesm
Missed opportunity to tweak the ranking algorithm to detect this sort of
trick.

------
ricardo81
The amusing thing I get from this is pleading ignorance to what's being sold
after being rumbled.

I've seen some of those 'vendors' lord it up about how great they are at SEO,
and when it comes to them getting limelight outside their own circle, they are
acting like they were born yesterday and had no idea.

Their service pillows the hacked links with other sources like SAPE to provide
volume.

All lucrative of course, but quite scummy IMO and SEOs should stick to legal
avenues of promotion.

------
8bitsrule
Re title: I think the phrase 'bad actors' in place of 'hackers' paints a less-
broad portrait of the a-holes that do that kind of stuff. Takes a real dope to
drop the kind of stuff that Molly found in her blog.

Of all the places to find the term 'hackers' abused ...

------
amelius
Doesn't Google check by now how prominently a link is visible on a website?

------
kemonocode
A strange emphasis in mentioning the "open-source version of Wordpress" is the
one being hacked into. I doubt a proprietary solution would be any less
vulnerable.

~~~
prostoalex
They probably meant to differentiate from the Wordpress.com managed hosting.

------
rootsudo
This is nothing new this is plain and simple backlinking.

------
asdf333
its kind of a stupid crime though since its obvious who paid for it :D

------
chrismmay
I posted this article 3 days ago.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858520)

~~~
jwilk
(0 comments)

------
qwerty456127
> There were [links] for, you know, anal bleaching, which is apparently a
> thing. I mean, just truly, incredibly inappropriate things. And there was
> even some links to Russian pornography sites. I mean, we're talking about
> horrible, horrible things.

Does she mean anal bleaching and porn to be "horrible, horrible things" or was
there something else, really horrible? Perhaps porn is something many old-
fashioned people still are uncomfortable of talking about but I wouldn't rate
it as horrible - most of the people watch it and are okay.

> runs on the open source version of WordPress

Everybody knows this: running WordPress without 24x7 professional support
means you are 100% guaranteed to get pwned.


NASA's Curiosity rover is now driving itself - diminish
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4667794/nasa-curiosity-rover-is-now-driving-itself

======
Fortaymedia
I was just about to post this myself. Damn you :) - Its amazing isn't it. If
I'm not mistaken didn't one of the photographic satellites do something
similar and it went all the way to Saturn and took some amazing pictures?


Top 5 Fascinating Books on Languages and Linguistics - yanis_t
https://medium.com/candl-blog/top-5-fascinating-books-on-languages-and-linguistics-9140ce2b5e79
======
DanParson
If you want to take your interest further, you can venture into the world of
constructed languages, which is basically applied linguistics. Arika Okrent's
_In the Land of Invented Languages_ is a great book about conlangs in general,
and David Peterson's _The Art of Invented Languages_ focuses on conlangs in
movies and TV.


bangin – a primitive, portable shell script which enables DuckDuckGo-like bangs - samhh
https://github.com/samhh/bangin
======
samhh
Hello, author here.

The idea came to me yesterday as I wanted to use a bang for ProtonDB. I didn't
fancy waiting around for it to be added to DDG following submission, and that
led me to ponder the other harms of this really useful feature being locked
behind DDG's service.

In theory, with the script being so simple and working on the basis of mere
input and output, it should be easy to write other tooling around it, which
I've briefly touched upon in the README.

The shell script is extremely simple, but anyone with experience in writing
them might be able to spot problems with it, please do let me know if you do.

I'm unsure about how best to package banglists. One option would be to provide
a config file with a list of lists, a bit like you do with some adblocking
software, but that'd presumably require some sort of intransience.

Anyway, feedback welcome!


Completed my SaaS project yesterday. Looking for the first thoughts - going_to_800
http://chatpage.co
======
going_to_800
Hey guys,

I've been working on my new SaaS for about 3 months now, yesterday I finished
testing it online. Now I'm looking for feedback and the first users.

It's a customer communication tool (chat) with nice features like sending
surveys/polls during conversation. It's perfect for gathering feedback, lead
generation, support etc so you don't have to waste time centralizing text
answers or use separate survey tools which break the conversation flow with
external links.

It's not a live-chat widget, instead you get a fully customizable page with a
chat panel inside. If you want to get feedback or other details(like address)
during conversation, you can easily send the form from the admin zone and your
customer will see the form on the left of the chat panel. You can see the
submission live and respond accordingly.

Some features it has * your own chatpage.co/your_business or custom domain *
get links that enable certain forms before the conversation, to include in
emails or other websites * easy-to-use form builder * export submitted data as
excel/pdf * view data as charts for analysis * email fallback when you are
offline * 8 themes, customize over 50 attributes(from background image to
fonts and colors)

At this stage, feedback is critical so I appreciate any thought you have about
this. It's free now so you can start using it right away to communicate with
your clients.

~~~
edgeman27
on your example page I can't see any text, only images and text boxes:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/8hgvdkk2blxbt7t/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/8hgvdkk2blxbt7t/Screenshot%202016-01-28%2012.45.22.png?dl=0)

Safari 9.0.3 (11601.4.4)

~~~
going_to_800
Thanks for the screenshot.

That's very strange...probably is something with the font not being loaded.
I'll debug this.

Thanks again

------
brudgers
This might make a good "Show HN."

I like that there is a demo to play with that does not require logging in or
giving up anonymity.

Good luck.

~~~
going_to_800
Thanks.

I'm still working on it so I'll make one when it will be ready.

~~~
brudgers
Show HN is intended for projects in process. Product announcements are fine,
but I don't think it's meant as a Demo Day.

Guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

------
punee
Why/when should I use it over Intercom?

~~~
going_to_800
1.It's a separate page instead of widget which allows the user to engage more
in the conversations, no distractions.

2.It has the liveforms(survey/polls) during conversation to get better/faster
feedback or include the link to chat + form into emails


Tesla Motors wants another $250 million (IPO) - transburgh
http://valleywag.com/357770/tesla-motors-wants-another-250-million
======
dkokelley
Tesla has a great idea and product. What they lack is a solid mass-
production/distribution system.

As much as I'd hate to see it, I think Tesla needs to be acquired by GM or
some other American brand and then use their technology with their new owner's
production and funding capacities to get the car to market. Current 2008
models have sold out, and they haven't produced any yet! to get one, you have
to get on the 2009 waiting list, which should ship sometime in 2010, at this
rate (Tesla is silent on anticipated delivery dates, I'm only speculating 2010
delivery). They're already producing and selling their battery system to
Toyota I believe.

A Tesla - GM/Ford combo I believe would be what it takes to effectively
compete against Toyota and Honda, who both already have the production
capacity and electric cars in the works.

They could always partner with upscale car makers like BMW, too.

------
jdueck
I hope Tesla succeeds, but I wonder whether it's even possible for a new North
American car company to succeed, regardless of their technology. With the
falling dollar, maybe their odds have increased. And yeah, a Democrat
president will likely make it easier for electric car companies. But we're
only a couple of years away from Tata Motors cars, air cars, mass-produced DIY
electric kits, etc. And in the midst of a recession, Tesla's cars are
especially expensive! Brave souls, they are.


How can I fix a computer that is literally too slow to do anything? - nemoto
http://superuser.com/a/511024

======
unfamiliar
> a program called 'Optimizer Pro' is demanding money to 'remove 5102 files
> slowing down my computer'

Have the malware applications that do this sort of pitch have the ability to
"slow down" the computer without anything strange showing up in the task
manager? If so, how do they accomplish this and how to fix the problem?


Ask HN: Review my startup, bakeoff.co - Drei01Matt
http://www.bakeoff.co/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=click&utm_campaign=hackernews
Hi HN. I've love some feedback on my new app BakeOff. Good and bad, everything helps.<p>www.bakeoff.co
======
Drei01Matt
This is my first submission, would love to know what HN thinks!


[Ask HN]How many of you still uses SKYPE? - neoyagami

Im just wondering (with a friend) if all this surveillance over calls and Skype are just method to get stats on "how many people we piss off" if whe tell that we are spying on them. just to end passing a law to make it legal because "not to many people protest on this"<p>im not from EEUU but this clearly affect me because i sed skype some time ago and now im afraid of just starting it
======
pearjuice
It is non-freedom respecting software so I see no reason why anyone would
volunteer to use it.


Marathon Business - Jaggu
http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/operations/article185854.html

======
myoung8
Am I missing something or does this seem like a very profitable business?

~~~
run4yourlives
Screaming for a web 2.0 ish management tool as well... think google map route
management with mashed-in plots for aid stations etc...

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about setting up a marathon...


MS unveils Digits wrist mounted hand-gesture sensor, for phones, games and more - evo_9
http://www.edge-online.com/news/microsoft-unveils-digits-wrist-mounted-hand-gesture-sensor-for-phones-games-and-more/
======
annymsMthd
I bet Gary inspired this one.


Untrusted – A Code-Based Adventure - rosstex
http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/
======
Kiro
Previous discussion (when it was posted as a Show HN):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547942)


Instagram sued over contract changes - gasull
http://www.france24.com/en/20121224-instagram-sued-over-contract-changes?ns_campaign=editorial&ns_source=twitter&ns_mchannel=reseaux_sociaux&ns_fee=0&ns_linkname=20121224_instagram_sued_over_contract_changes
======
BrianPetro
Yet another repeat of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963838>


How to convert any 3D printer or CNC router into cutting or engraving machine? - reangeorge

Introducing Endurance L-CHEAPO diode laser
Endurance L-CHEAPO is a 445 nanometer diode laser which easily mounts on your 3D printer or CNC mill
No additional power supply is necessary, and it will not interfere with normal use of your hardware
You can readily switch from laser to print/mill mode, use your existing software (Slic3r, Skeinforge, etc), and with no tools the laser can be removed in about 2 minutes
Endurance L-CHEAPO can cut paper and wood up to 3/16ths of an inch, and can engrave most non-metallic materials
Easy to Use and Open Source
No special software or hardware required – not even a power supply! All you need is to mount the laser, create a special extrusion profile on your standard software and
get to work. Video in action available here: http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-accessory/video-in-action/
Engraving samples: http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-accessory/laser-cutter-accessory-engraving-samples/
Low-cost, High-yield
Laser cutting requires a significant initial investment, but opens up a lot of making possibilities — laser-cut parts are tougher than 3D printer parts. With Endurance L-
CHEAPO, the initial dollar investment goes from thousands to hundreds, and the module requires very little space.
We hope this product will allow high school shop classes, small universities and local hackerspaces to be able to work with a wider variety of materials and techniques
without breaking the bank.
If you are ready here is a quick start link: http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-accessory/quick-start/
======
gus_massa
Clicky: [http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-
accessory/...](http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-
accessory/video-in-action/)

In the video, it looks like the laser passed trough the target. Is that safe
for the building bed? Is that safe for the floor? Is that safe for your foots?

From the other thread:

> _Would you like to write a review about our laser? We can send you one for
> test or we can give any answers as you need to write a review._

Is that still available? (Not for me, I don't have the necessary equipment at
home or at work.)

~~~
detritus
I run a 40W laser which wouldn't cut through the building bed (although if
left running in place would make it quite hot).

~~~
reangeorge
do you want to try ours?


Cython 0.23 released - Yakulu
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cython-users/lfq9CtqGdzY
======
grinalope
Cython is amazingly productive for me. I am so happy to write typed pythonic
code.

If there's one thing missing it's more people showing off their Cython style
and tricks, like how they do macros (since it's not supported in the
language), when to turn off safeties, and balancing pure python with typed.

For instance, I like C macros in header files, but I've played around with
using a jinja2 pipeline in my setup.py to write cleaner looking pythonic code,
and have done generics this way.

more posts like the one using cymem would be welcome.

~~~
syllogism
Using Jinja2 for macros is an interesting idea. You could try cog instead?
[https://www.python.org/about/success/cog/](https://www.python.org/about/success/cog/)

Currently I don't do any macros at all, although the temptation is definitely
strong. I have some code that could otherwise be more generic than it is.

I guess a quick tip/pattern would be to use structs as data containers, with a
cdef class defined as a "shell", to provide access, but not actually hold the
data.

Advantages of this over standard cdef class: Data is contiguous in memory;
Data can be stack allocated; Data can be stored in C arrays or C++ containers;
Data can be created without GIL.

Advantages of this over numpy array: More Pythonic syntax (i.e. data.attr,
instead of data[column]; No fussing with memorybuffers, compiler declarations
etc; Data can be created without GIL

Disadvantages: More code

(I wrote that cymem blog post -- I'll write up this pattern as a post when I
get a chance.)

------
PythonicAlpha
To answer the question, that came up:

Yes, the 0.x number also put me down at first. But I am using this tool now
several years, since 0.13 or maybe earlier and did never find a bug or
problem.

Cython is great, in-spite of its version number!

I also inspected the generated code several times and it looks rock-solid.
Also one big advantage (for me): It can produce code that runs equally on 2.x
and 3.x versions (there are some limitations, though, like several really
outdated versions are not supported any more).

------
stesch
People should really think about the message a 0.x version number is sending.
This project is 8 years old. Why is this still 0.x?

~~~
williamstein
I'm the guy who started the Cython project and made up the name, so here are
some random remarks that don't answer your question. Not only is Cython about
8 years old, it started as a fork of Pyrex
([http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex/](http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex/)),
which is itself over 11 years old, since I remember using it in 2004 when
evaluating languages in which to implement
[http://sagemath.org](http://sagemath.org). The people who did the most work
on Cython on probably Stefan Behnel and Robert Bradshaw (who was my Ph.D.
student). I had to sort of twist their arms to get them to be involved in the
project, and they both still only do it in their spare time basically for fun.
Despite Cython being an incredibly useful and powerful tool for certain
specific problem domains (e.g., for SageMath it is critical), and being very
heavily used in some scientific python applications, there's no company behind
Cython and few people involved in the project are interested in publicity.
Cython is an open source labor of love and an extremely useful tool. People
that know Cython very well, know how amazingly powerful it is, and have
watched many other attempts to solve similar problems come and go over the
years.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
I agree, that it is extremely useful, since before I knew Cython, I
implemented some Python C extension modules by hand. That can become rather
ugly and costs much sweat.

Today, I can use Cython. Or when I need even more speed, than I use Cython as
wrapper-generator for a pure C module, that is still much, much easier to
implement, as when I would have to do the wrapping work myself.

Cython is really enormous useful and precious to me!

Thank you for it!

------
ketralnis
If you use Python for anything remotely performance sensitive, I highly
recommend giving Cython a shot. The trick is to find your computation-
intensive inner loop stuff, move it off to its own module, add types, and go.
It makes your build a little more complicated (i.e. most Python projects have
no build process at all) but if you're in the niche where it's useful, it's
damned useful.

Here what it does. Take a look at this Python code:

        import math
        def distance(x1, y1, x2, y2):
            return math.sqrt((y2-y1)**2+(x2-x1)**2)

It looks simple, but it's doing a lot behind the scenes. It respects
__sub__/__add__ metamethods, respects and promotes between floats/longs/ints
and even Bignums, it has to do a __getattr__ on the `math` object to find the
sqrt function in the first place, etc (and can't cache that because this is
Python so you may have changed it in between calls). After every one of these
calls, a Python exception is checked for, and many reference counts are
incremented and decremented. Every now and then, the interpreter checks to see
if it's time to release/reacquire the GIL and if any OS signals have come in.
And it does all of this by compiling Python to bytecode and running that
through its interpreter.

Here's the same code in Cython:

        from libc.math cimport sqrt
        cdef double distance(double x1, double y1, double x2, double y2):
            return sqrt((y2-y1)**2+(x2-x1)**2)

Cython takes that code and compiles it to this C code (a bit simplified):

        #include <math.h>
        double distance(double x1, double y1, double x2, double y2) {
            double a = y2-y1;
            double b = x2-x1;
            return sqrt(a*a+b*b)
        }

So now instead of running through dozens of intermediate internal Python
functions, you're just loading the numbers into your FPU and doing the
computation there.

Of course, you've given up all of your Python dynamicness. Now this won't work
with Bignums, it can't be monkey patched, and now you have a compiling step to
running your Python code. You can do this to your existing code one function
at a time, so you don't have to give those things up for your entire project,
just where it matters. And where performance matters, it's a godsend

I ported a small number of pieces of reddit to Cython. Here are some simple
examples:

* [https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx)

* [https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/utils...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/utils/_utils.pyx)

* [https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/mr_to...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/mr_tools/_mr_tools.pyx)

* [https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/wrapp...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/wrapped.pyx)

As the underscore naming implies, these are only selected performance or
compute sensitive functions factored out of their normal non-underscore Python
modules which generally wrap them. These functions were coming up
disproportionately in profiling because they're called very often and/or do a
lot of arithmetic, and afterwards they are entirely nonissues. Often something
like a _sorts.pyx:_confidence call got over 25 times faster.

I've also talked about the downsides in a thread here[1]. Go in knowing that
stuff too, but after my excellent experience with Cython I'm a True Believer.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/2xlya2/anyone_willi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/2xlya2/anyone_willing_to_share_experiences_of_cython/cp1ct6a?context=3)

~~~
hakanderyal
It's also provides great benefits for quick scripts.

I had to write a one-off parser for a big csv file, that needed to be parsed
lots of times, and fast. Pure python solution was taking a few minutes, so I
decided to give Cython a try. Installed, read the docs for a few minutes,
converted my parser's inner loop to cython, and the duration went down to a
few seconds.

~~~
ngoldbaum
The "%%cython" magic for the IPython notebook is great for quickly prototyping
cython code in the context of a larger Python workflow. You can also view a
nice annotated HTML performance report with "%%cython -a".

------
mixmastamyk
Does it support/is-compatible with the new python type hints?

------
raymondh
I'm glad to see that this import project continues to get updates.


Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college - Alex3917
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/why-downloading.html

======
Alex3917
I don't understand why Seth is pro-college on the blog all of the sudden.
Every single one of his books takes at least a few passing swipes at college,
and some of them downright trash the institution in general. I understand that
this is about the social signaling value of school, not the pedagogical
function. However, this is what is said in The Big Moo about the social
signaling value of school only three years ago:

“The new secret of success is that winning the game has absolutely nothing to
do with hard work and paying your dues. In the old days stable industries
offered young workers a pyramid structure. If you did the work and stuck it
out you’d move up.”

“In our fast-moving media crazed culture, the opposite is now true. Those who
fit in now won’t stand out later. Those who follow the rules are never noticed
- because the system has broken their spirit. There’s plenty work for the
undifferentiated masses, so you can have as much as you are willing to handle.
The fast-rising stars are those that question authority and refuse to do
what’s done before.”

~~~
h34t
This article is not pro-college. He's talking about correlation != causation.
ie. going to college doesn't necessarily _teach_ you anything you wouldn't get
elsewhere -- rather, it is an indication of what kind of person you are (the
kind of person who goes to college... who is more likely to be smart than the
kind of person who _doesn't_.)

Hence the relation to Firefox: just like college, using Firefox doesn't
actually make you smarter (though an ignorant view of the statistics might
make you think so) -- but the fact that you are using it in the first place,
says something about the kind of person you are.

~~~
Alex3917
I did edit my post to make it clear that I was referring to the social
signaling value of colleges, not the pedagogical value, but you may have
pulled up my comment before this.

------
wallflower
Seth must be starting to run out of things to talk about. If he had simply
stated the fact that 50% of Squidoo users who make pages on Squidoo use
Firefox to do so that would have been fine, Equating going to college with
downloading and installing Firefox is a weak reference.

~~~
Alex3917
I think the idea of treating Firefox users differently is interesting.

~~~
phaedrus
Well we already get treated differently (badly) by IE-only sites! It would be
nice to see the tables turned.

~~~
brk
(honest question)

What IE-only sites are actually worth visiting?

I've been using Firefox forever, and Netscape before that, it's been more than
5 years (maybe even more) since I found a browser-specific site that had any
value.

My wife and I both use Mac's (hers at home, mine for home/work), so I can be
pretty sure that I haven't had to resort to IE for some odd site.

~~~
Harkins
Utilities (my gas company) and some banks with good interest rates.

------
brk
I agree with the spirit of his post. The college reference seems a bit off,
and I'm not a big fan of college == success/smart. This is both because I
couldn't bring myself to pay others to teach me things I mostly already knew
(or could figure out for myself), and because most of the worlds top richest
people are all non-college educated (most have some college, but no degree,
not sure about Slim off the top of my head, but I doubt he has any).

------
chengmi
_The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to
download and use a browser that wasn't the default when you first turned on
your computer._

Firefox is standard on Ubuntu. If I download and install a new OS, does that
make me a super power user? Don't some Dells come with Ubuntu pre-installed?

~~~
pchristensen
Very few, and you'd still have to be a bit of a ballsy user to buy an Ubuntu
dell instead of a Windows (unless it's significantly cheaper).

------
noonespecial
Hmmm by observing people's behavior, you can estimate what kinds of people
they are. There's a shocker. I'm still not quite sure what college had to do
with it all. Another observed behavior I think was his thought.

------
xlnt
so, how do safari users stack up?


MIT undergrad's reactions to working at a startup - adamsmith
http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/
======
ced
He claims that algorithms are not so important, but they are what propelled
Google above Yahoo and co. Reddit today is very much in the vulnerable
position that Yahoo was in. Someone with a recommendation engine that works
well could pull the rug from under their feet.

------
scylla
Hmmm ... the author has nothing but praise for PG, but one of the main thrusts
of his article was that college students should learn more Java and C#.

Isn't that derided as blub programing languages around here?

~~~
mrgordon
You make a good point, although it is my experience that MIT does not echo
Paul's feelings with regards to programming languages. There is obviously the
group of hackers at CSAIL (Sussman et al.) that swear by LISP and the
functional paradigms in general, but almost every class that involves a large
amount of programming is in Java. Even 6.001 is being phased out for courses
taught in Python.

As a current undergrad at MIT, I find myself sometimes struggling to determine
whether I agree with Kevin or not. It does seem that my greatest selling point
is my knowledge and experience with specific programming languages like Java
and not any background I have in algorithms, discrete mathematics, etc. I feel
that these other tools will prove more useful over the long term, but it's
sometimes hard to continue to feel that way when the need for a summer job
forces one to put away the common lisp book to read javadocs.


Lyft says drivers tampering with surge pricing could be booted - bruceb
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/lyft-drivers-tampering-surge-pricing-booted/story?id=63101962
======
yhoneycomb
I mean, they're literally gaming the system. I don't see anything wrong with
punishing them for that.


Being a Professional - sgdesign
http://blog.folyo.me/being-a-professional/

======
pefavre
Always good to remember, as these rules of thumb apply to any kind of
professional relation.

------
ryoma0421
Very thoughtful post as always :)

------
sidcool
Well written.


Modern C++ for C Programmers – Part 3 - signa11
https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/cpp-3/
======
signa11
previous versions are available here (part-1):
[https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/c++-1/](https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/c++-1/)
and here (part-2)
[https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/cpp-2/](https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/cpp-2/)


Any startups with "splash pages" announcing a future launch date? - streo

I wanted to know if anybody is willing to share strategies for their "coming soon..." pages for their startups.  I have read Tony Wright's awesome blog entry regarding this subject here
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2007/07/05/web-biz-how-to-have-4000-users-waiting-when-you-launch/
I wanted to know if anybody else here has other strategies that they are willing to share.
Btw, I will also add that this place is awesome.  Thank you all in advance!
======
nextmoveone
This company doesn't have a product yet: smoothstart.com

You can check out their strategy, which is very similar to tony's for getting
users before having a product.

Welcome to News.yc, I think you'll gain alot of valuable insight here.

~~~
streo
I have gained more within the last 2 days than I could have imagined!! Thanks
for the insight.


What to expect when dealing with potential investors - Ztrain
http://www.antiventurecapital.com/valuations.html
Brace yourselves.
======
shogunmike
The article emphasises the importance of equity (for a founder) but I'd be
happy with 10% of $100 million as opposed to 90% of $10,000.

Surely a more important (but perhaps slightly more subtle) point is that VCs
will perhaps impose additional constraints on the company. A good example is
bringing in a new "business savvy" CEO (and/or board of directors) to
potentially replace you.

Are there any legal tools that allow a founder to maintain control of the
company (in a voting sense) even if the VC firm wants 50% or more equity?

If Sequoia invested in your startup and asked for 50% would YOU complain?


How to access a PayPal business account from any country - p17b
https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/how-to-access-a-paypal-business-account-from-any-country-f5360419fed8
======
jaclaz
The point of the article is about how to access anything _from Estonia_ ,
after having accessed Estonia "from any country".

TL;DR:

Once you become an Estonian e-resident, and have registered a company in
Estonia, you can use Paypal but also forget about it and choose instead any
different payment provider such as "this" (but mentioning Paypal business
account in the title gets more views/reads than mentioning "this").

------
jfries
PayPal are notorious for semi-randomly closing accounts, especially when the
usage deviates a little bit from the norm. I wouldn't go the route described
in the article if I depended on this income, even if it seems innocent.


How do you make important decisions quickly? - mikeypuff

Or, in general, what's a good method for decision making?
======
matryoshka
I gather facts and listen to my gut feeling. If my gut feeling tells me
something is off, it overrides the facts and I go with my gut feeling.


Liquid hydrogen UAV flew for two days straight - wslh
http://gizmodo.com/this-liquid-hydrogen-uav-just-flew-for-two-days-straigh-504876691

======
wslh
Can I put those batteries in my mobile phone? ;-)


Scientists discover new magnetic element - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-scientists-magnetic-element.html
======
masonic
Clickbait title.

They discovered previously unknown magnetic _properties_ of an _existing_
element. They aren't alchemists.

~~~
dozzie
From the title alone I was expecting something with a half-life measured in
seconds.


The data is in – stop the panic and end the total isolation - mrfusion
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation
======
ecpottinger
I just noticed, your number one point boils down to who cares about the old
folks, they are going to die soon anyway. Tells us a lot about you.

~~~
quickthrower2
I notice this HN habit of reading something until you find something
disagreeable and then presumably stop reading (which is the most generous
assumption) and then post a negative comment.

The writer could have done better in the ordering of the article to avoid this
reaction in general, but at least HN should give it a fair chance by reading
to the end. Otherwise its like taking a sentence out of context.

He also said:

> Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

> The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence
> already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined
> in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the
> mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent
> large-group precautions.

~~~
robocat
It’s wishful thinking that we can somehow protect the elderly from getting
infected while the rest of the population is getting infected. Possibly for
individuals at home, but surely not for anyone in a home or hospital who needs
nursing. Assuming that very few people remain infectious after catching Covid
(jury is still out: there are cases of relapse and continual low level
infection - we don’t know how common either is yet).

The writer mentions the problem, but lacks suggestions for how we can prevent
the infirm from getting infected over the long term. Perhaps in a world with
unlimited PPE?

~~~
mrfusion
That’s a good point. There would still be an element of risk but that’s true
for any plan. The lockdowns certainly aren’t without risks of their own. I
guess it comes down to which option is least bad.

------
ecpottinger
Really?
[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries)
says you are full of it if you don't think the virus is serious.

~~~
quickthrower2
He didn't say the virus is not serious


What if apple tv partners with a Cable Company - ptjackson
http://ptjacksonok.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-finally-cracked-it.html

======
zmonkeyz
I'm thinking they'll create a software platform for their tv so that if you
have a cable provider they will install their "app". Not only that but it'd be
really crazy if other cable companies could install their own apps with their
own "on-demand" services. If they can't get you to buy their service the old
fashion way why not ride someone else's line.


Rover, A "Dogbnb" Site, Raises $3.5M And Nabs Commercial Promotion From Petco - philipkimmey
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/30/rover-a-dogbnb-site-raises-3-5m-and-nabs-commercial-promotion-from-petco/

======
adambard
Dogbnb in more ways than one: You can choose to pay a sitter to put up your
dog for x nights, or you can pay someone to LIVE IN YOUR HOUSE and take care
of your dog. It makes sense, of course, but sounds a bit odd.

~~~
philipkimmey
Indeed - I've talked a sitter on Rover who was planning on listing their
profile in NYC as a traveling sitter as a way to get a free stay in the city,
while also watching someone's home & dog.

------
ante_annum
I honestly never thought "It's like [x], for dogs" would be a real thing. That
this is even getting off the ground amazes me.


Show HN: Commandline Passphrase Generator Using EFF Wordlists - yarwelp
https://asciinema.org/a/2znuSiyoonwpDB7QriovrrC0V
======
yarwelp
Impatient? (Aka. tl;dr)

        mkdir -p ~/src/github.com/yarwelp
        cd !$
        git clone git@github.com:yarwelp/pgen.git
        cd pgen
        cargo build --release
        ./target/release/pgen

\---

Slightly more patient but still don't want to watch the 10 minute screen
recording?

Read the README at
[https://github.com/yarwelp/pgen](https://github.com/yarwelp/pgen)

\---

I prefer passphrases to passwords. Previously I was using a function I wrote
which makes use of seq and head and tail and reads its words from
/usr/share/dict/words. That had two main problems:

1\. It was slow even for a small amount of words.

2\. The words in that wordlist were not great for typing, because there were a
lot of weird and obscure words in the list.

Recently there was an article posted here on HN where someone from the EFF
told about a set of optimized wordlists they'd made.

I decided right then and there to implement a program to make use of these
lists that would solve both of the two problems mentioned above.

I chose to write this program in Rust, and the result is excellent. Fast,
secure and user friendly :)

And you can have it for free!

[https://github.com/yarwelp/pgen](https://github.com/yarwelp/pgen)

------
yarwelp
I have now published pgen on crates.io [1], and you can install it simply by
running

        cargo install pgen

No need to clone the repo manually or anything.

[1]: [https://crates.io/crates/pgen](https://crates.io/crates/pgen)


Is the Solar System Really a Vortex? - swamp40
http://www.universetoday.com/107322/is-the-solar-system-really-a-vortex/

======
swamp40
It's not often you get to hear an astrophysicist say "...then we’re all
buggered."


In-App Purchase Scams in the App Store - okket
https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/in-app_purchase_scams_in_the_app_store
======
fred256
See also the discussion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156)

I just can't fathom why any $5k/year in-app subscription should be legitimate.

~~~
kranner
You think an app can't provide more than $5000 in value to a customer in a
year? Under any circumstances? Any kind of app?

~~~
danielhooper
It should be enough to raise a flag for someone at Apple to thoroughly review
the app before approving it for release. Not to mention that software worth
$5,000/yr isn't often, if ever, paid for through an app store.

------
dkarapetyan
Isn't it in Apple's financial interest to look the other way? The scam
generates money for Apple so the incentives here are misaligned.

~~~
UnfalseDesign
I highly doubt that these apps are generating such a significant amount of
income for Apple (when taking into account their entire income from the App
Store) that they would consider looking the other way.


Breaking Smart - lukasLansky
http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/
======
antisugar
I wrote up a very rough summary/set of notes. Please excuse all the errors in
punctuation, spelling, and formatting. Thought it might be helpful for people
who want to skim, as the whole thing is more-or-less a book.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_IwAfXh4U6ZUlAxK5XYA/pub)

------
vezzy-fnord
This is a very syncretic fusion between computing, dialectical materialism,
entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism and a bombastic techno-optimism.

Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.

"Towards a Mass Flourishing" makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos
is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached
from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker
culture that is markedly distinct.

The "Purists versus Pragmatists" essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and
gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson's ideas, who is shoved aside as a
purist crank. It's a false dichotomy through and through.

"Agility and Illegibility" again romanticizes widespread access to personal
computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates
specifically.

The "Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness" essay misquotes Knuth and
incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic
binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the "direction of maximal
interestingness" and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact
systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as
recent as the 90s.

"Running Code and Perpetual Beta" presents the dogmas of "release early,
release often" and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of
great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit
teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned
_once_.

"Software as Subversion" equivocates "forking" as being a Git terminology that
somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub
redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also
a misrepresentation of OS/2's mismanagement to argue in favor of "worse is
better" (ignoring all other great systems besides OS/2) and babble about how
blockchains are pixie dust.

"The Principle of Generative Pluralism" sets up the false dichotomies of
hardware-centric/software-centric and car-centric/smartphone-centric. I
suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer's
understanding of hardware.

"A Tale of Two Computers" prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared
to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the
error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant
abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has
enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.

"The Immortality of Bits" is one of the worst, and makes this claim:
"Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry
itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution.
Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all
largely hardware-agnostic today." This reeks of an ignorant programmer,
oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and
shape their view. In fact, this is a very _dangerous_ view to propagate. Our
hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like
capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over
instruction-level parallelism. This stupid "hardware doesn't matter" thinking
will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of
hardware virtualization. It further says the "sharing economy" will usurp
everything, which is ridiculous.

"Tinkering versus Goals" again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading
to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.

The "Free as in Beer, and as in Speech" essay clumsily and classically gets
the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover,
the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the "open source" ideal of
pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist
technical arguments for OSS like the "many eyes make all bugs shallow"
argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of
technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less
popular case.

\----

Overall, I do not recommend this.

~~~
enraged_camel
There's something about the HN users that makes them enjoy taking a shit on
other people's work without including positive or at least constructive
feedback.

I've been a member for almost four years and I still haven't figured out what
it is, but it makes me shake my head every time.

~~~
mwcampbell
What would constructive feedback look like in this case? Padding the comment
with something like "While I understand that the author put a lot of work into
these essays..." would merely lower the signal to noise ratio. The way I see
it, HN commenters who don't mince words are merely doing the same as HN's
founder, Paul Graham. To quote from his talk "Great Hackers"
([http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)):

"I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it
efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they
already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose
that's bound to yield an alarming book."

Also, comments that amount to "I like this" can be compressed to an upvote. So
we don't see many of those.

------
phaemon
The first essay on that list starts talking about "soft technologies" without
defining what they are.

They don't match other definitions of "soft technologies" and I'm having
difficulty figuring out what the definition is here that only includes
writing, money and software (frankly, I suspect if anyone other than an
American had written this, money wouldn't be on the list).

~~~
petejansson
I was comfortable with the notion. It seems to me that "soft technologies" are
the ones that cause ideas and thoughts to be materialized in the world. The
other technologies seem to be physical transformations of matter and energy.

What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a
mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in
Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already.

~~~
danprisk
"What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a
mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in
Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already."

It was a little laborious, but I went through each essay and used dotEPUB
([http://dotepub.com/](http://dotepub.com/)) to convert it to epub, then
transferred to my ereader manually.

I considered looking for a more automated solution, before realising that it
would take more time looking for a solution than just manually doing it.

Similarly for pocket I imagine with the frequency these are coming out it
would be easiest to simply manually add each essay to pocket.

~~~
ilzmastr
here is the script that I use for doing this:
[https://gist.github.com/ilyakava/47aedca7bc39483d7a94](https://gist.github.com/ilyakava/47aedca7bc39483d7a94)

All you have to do is input a txt file of links, in this case:
[http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4](http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4)

Here is the output epub for all to enjoy:
[http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24](http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24)

In cases when I care about formatting/metadata, I might use pandoc to merge
all the \d+.html files, regex or edit, and then use pandoc to output *epub

~~~
firun
I've deleted some "Share this" and such stuff if epub and it's available here
–
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ws3xakwcd6dqbss/Breaking%20Smart%2...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ws3xakwcd6dqbss/Breaking%20Smart%20-%20Venkatesh%20Rao.epub?dl=0)

------
jordanpg
Umm, who is Venkatesh Rao and why should I read _30_ essays by him?

~~~
zvikara
I read some very good posts he wrote and would highly recommend reading this
one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296)

~~~
to3m
Here's another good one:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs-
are-the-new-labor-part-i/)

------
j_lev
TIL "polyannish" [sic] is a word.

Agree Ribbonfam peaked with the Gervais Principle essay. Agree with some of
the criticisms here. Will add my own: the first three essays are somewhat
accessible but after that the author is talking to the echo chamber which is
his regular blog audience.

------
andrewtbham
I sense this may coin several new phrases, much like "software is eating the
world." breaking smart, Promethean mindset /pastoralist mindsets.

Also lots of references to previous great insights: Alan Kay, Carlota Perez,
Jeff Bezos,

~~~
kzhahou
Coining a phrase is every tech pundit's ultimate dream.

I refer to this as "cementing the drive."

------
vonklaus
So this is a blog that will write 1 article every 5 weeks and batch release
them in 2017? I am all for thoughtful content, but binging isn't a concept
that can be applied to blogs. This makes no sense.

Edit: i get what turned me off by this. It was the positioning as a radical
new media concept and the convoluted and confusing explanation.

What do you call the development and research of a text based narrative which
is catalogued for direct and total consumption online?

> an e-book. Got it now guys.

~~~
javajosh
It's a valid thing to do because the ideas are all interrelated in complex
ways. Releasing them all at once allows you to read a little, get inspired,
jump around, check another intriguing title, and then come back tomorrow to
read a little more (if you are inspired).

A somewhat darker view (from a certain perspective) is that he wanted to say
his piece without being contradicted or argued with. To write a series of
essays that don't have to respond to "the community" and get weighed down by
reaction. One could even say that it's an expression of a pastoral utopia of
pedagogy! :P

------
bluishgreen
Holy negativity batman!

This is a great collections of essays, I'd say bed time reading for the
budding entrepreneur and/or VC.

Ignore (or misunderstand) at your own peril.

------
alexashka
Can somebody provide cliff notes? This is too long and I strongly dislike what
has been written in the first few essays. Maybe somebody can sum this up in
shorter form.

~~~
curiousjorge
"I'm too lazy to eat this steak because I have to chew, can somebody please
turn it into liquid so I can drink it?"

~~~
meritt
[https://www.soylent.com/](https://www.soylent.com/)

------
PuffinBlue
The text on the site is too small and too wide to read comfortably on a
screen.

The lines are over 120 characters long at 16px. On a 1080p screen this is just
to small and wide to follow properly.

This sort of thing is bearable here on HN when skimming comments but for
reading over '30,000 words' it's just too off putting to even start reading.

~~~
npizzolato
You realize you can shrink your browser window width and increase the text
size to make the layout how you want?

For some reason there's always some highly-rated complaint on HN comments
about the website layout, and I do not understand why. They are honestly the
most boring comments to read.

~~~
mercer
Perhaps dang should answer this, but is flagging these kinds of comments a
good use of flagging? I generally find the rules governing flagging a bit
murky (even after searching around HN for dang's posts on this).

I would much appreciate an answer as I've tried taking up the responsibility
of doing my part in keeping HN a great place with valuable comments and
insights!

~~~
PuffinBlue
I commented in this case because of what the website is 'providing'. It's a
30,000 word collection of essays, of READING material. It greatly bothers me
that such effort is put into the content but such lip service has been paid to
the presentation.

To divorce the content and the presentation is simply not feasible and pretty
insulting to the good work of designers/typesetters and indeed readers.

I suspect the frequency of this sort of comment is due to the frequency of bad
design.

Perhaps in other cases this sort of comment isn't relevant, I can accept that
argument. I argue that here it is relevant because the entire premise of the
material is that it's for reading and the presentation makes that unviable.

Do we also stop positive comments like this[0] one?

Perhaps what I should have done is make a more detailed post outlining the
issues with the content and perhaps linked to well accepted design practices
that help improve the reading experience. But to suggest 'these types of
comments' are without relevance (*and deserving of flagging) is to deny
conversation about an important part of the submission content.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990140)

~~~
mercer
That's a fair point, and there's definitely a difference between being
pedantic about design details and commenting on a relevant design-related
issue.

I definitely would not flag _every_ design-related comment, but I was mostly
wondering if it is _ever_ justified to do so.

(and just to be clear, I had no particular opinion on your comment - it just
reminded me to ask about flagging etiquette)