Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity: Why didn't Letsencrypt applied for a trademark right at the start?

That this happens was quite foreseeable and occurs quite often if people forget to secure trademarks (I know this won't be a popular opinion because most as I like Letsencrypt and their outstanding service)

greenspoton Why Team Happiness Can Be the Wrong Thing to Aim for [video]

I saw the title and instantly clicked on it. It's a refreshing view on leadership. The best quote come right at the beginning: "We are chasing a mood and mood is not a realiable method of delivery". Very intriguing but frankly the rest of her talk is tedious and full of rambling without making more strong points. Would have preferred just a short blog post on her views. The things she said are valid and if you as a leader just rely on making the team happy you won't succeed. Still she doesn't provide any fool-proof solution except being more transparent. I didn't see the last third of the video, so maybe she provided more help then.

I think a big part of being a leader is to frame situtations always, really always in a positive way. Every event or incident can be seen in a negative, realistic but also in a positive way, eg seen as a new opportunity. Latter is much more motivating and eventually makes people happy. Also you as a leader want to be in a positive environment where people are happy, otherwise you end up just being a dull delegating robot degrading socially which is btw the biggest risk of being in executive positioms. So just ignoring this mood called happiness sounds a bit too simple for my taste. Leaderhship is way more complex. Especially in engineering where creatvity is the key you don't want people who just function you need people who can and want to go to the max--and this only works if they are motivated--or just call it--'happy'.

However, I still think she addressed an important point but I would tackle this from a different perspective: What you need as a leader are individuals which are happy by nature--or to be more precise who do not suffer of a severe depression. If you have depressive people on your team, you can't make them happy or motivated. They will always find something which doesn't work, which hinders them, which makes their entire life miserable. And not relying on making them happy, won't let them be productive neither. So, what's the point? Moreover, you risk that they infect the entire team with their negativity. How to identify or avoid having depressive people is a different question and even more challenging. And also important, you as a leader can trigger depression if you are not careful, so even if the claim 'team happiness can be the wrong thing to aim for' would be true, a leader should still aim for not making the team unhappy. And to go further the leader should aim for giving the team a perspective, a trending one. A persepctive which let them grow. Then they should be happy and again: maybe we still should aim for happiness and her talk title was just a click- or view-bait.

greenspoton Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

Site doesn't load. Does anyone have a tl;dr for the not so informed? What's DAO? Does Etherum have a weak spot?

greenspoton In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

on mobile, so i keep it short. re the fries you are misinformed, just google, either HN or Reddit, a guy there deconstructed the recipe, their way of preparing fries (they freeze them two times) is very sophistcated, better than frying fresh potatoes and not close to the cardboard fries McCain produces.

greenspoton Aldi's Barcode Strategy

Known as employing Germany's fastest typing cashiers Aldi introduced this quite late compared to other grocery stores. They experimented for many years to get the same speed and the result where these huge and multiple barcodes per package.

greenspoton In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

> with hamburgers from smaller, non-franchise restaurants

Sorry to disagree here. I think yes, there are definitely many non-franchise burger places doing fantastic burgers but I haven't seen any clearly superior. Yes different in taste but superior? No.

And very often, they lack the perfection level of McDonalds. You often get 'over-engineered' burgers, too thick, to much salad, too sticky whole grain non-typical burger bread, same frozen beef but from an unknown source, too much organic salad, too slow, too expensive, too much of being different. Too much of this attitude of not being McDonalds.

Maybe it's just a matter of taste but I prefer the plain vanilla type burgers McDonalds offers, I don't want the super organic rucola vegan burger with soybeans from your friend's burger in.

And again nobody matches their thin and ultra crisp fries.

greenspoton In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

Accusing McDonalds of Intense Animal Farming could be a bit overhasty. In Germany they clearly state being different, here is a report from 2014, check page 5, 'Best Beef' (English):

https://www.mcdonalds.de/documents/75202/2771485/CR_Report_2...

greenspoton In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

McDonalds is the master in orchestrating food. I love McDonalds and I think their hamburger is the best hamburger, their french fries are the best and all the other menu options have this typical McDonalds design--everything, every single piece and ingredient is meticulously thought through and the final dish has a perfect taste. The taste you get for the carb in-take is unmatched.

It's cool to hate McDonalds, I know and I don't care. All my friends would never take their kids to McDonalds. They even don't take their kids to the movies. This is our generation, all they want is 'organic', 'low fat' and 'please don't hurt' stickers on their overpriced crap food without having a clue how nutrition really works. Especially here in Europe, it's about positioning yourself as healthy and smart when educating others about McDonalds. All obesity in this world is caused by McDonalds, yes sure.

It's true that most of McDonalds' customers rather belong to the one end of the spectrum but who cares? I still think that it's in particular the lower middle class which hates McDonalds and which wants to put themselves above even lower classes. They cannot stop telling others that McDonalds is bad and they have to get now some authentic burger at an underground burger place or a healthy Bircher Muesli for their little ones. Btw, the same folks don't go to Starbucks for the same reasons--because they know a better non-franchise place for their ridiculous fair traded organic flat white.

Actually, it's not McDonalds those people don't like--it's their desperation and urge to be something better than they really are, the fear that people confuse them with being white trash instead of middle class. This is the main reason they buy overpriced organic food at 'upscale' locations. The upper classes do not care at all what others think and go from time to time to McDonalds. They don't need to pretend anything and are aware that going to McDonalds from time to time does not mean that's their daily diet. They understand that's about what you eat, that especially the total daily carb in-take and the right balance of carbs, protein and fat is crucial. McDonalds offers everything to eat well and balanced but it's often the lack of knowledge and education if people cannot manage this balance.

With kids it's even better, McDonalds is the rare example where kids are welcome and it's a pleasure with them. Kids hate long sessions in any restaurant and all money left there is wasted when all kids want is a bowl of fries with ketchup. At McDonalds they love every second and usually they eat more than just the fries. This make the total experience a good and healthy one.

For the record, I am super thin and live a healthy lifestyle as my kids do.

greenspoton Ruin My Search History

Great idea, I'll let this run all day long.

greenspoton Ask HN: How many hours do you sleep?

My schedule:

- 10pm to 6pm with 2 wakeups, the second one is usually longer

- so between 7 to 8h

- during the week less but minimum 6,5 hours and on the weekend longer, ~8h

greenspoton Flow vs. Typescript

Really wondering: who is developing Node/JS on Windows nowadays? Not that I don't like Windows (I like W10 + the new Ubuntu within efforts a lot), but the ecosystem around Node is so much tailored around Linux. Even with OSX where we have an excellent support, there's still some slight friction when deploying to Ubuntu.

Or is Windows 10 a viable alternative for Node devs?

greenspoton Flow vs. Typescript

I like very much the last slide and the author's recommendation. Helpful and better than the admonitory 'yes you should use typed JS':

- if your project does not live for long: no

- if your project is really simple: no

- if there is a chance you will need to refactor the thing: yes

- if your system is very important or even crucial for the success of your company: yes

- if people enter or leave your team frequently: yes

greenspoton Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

tl;dr:

Facebook ad's can have different display-URLs and target-URLs, even the domain can be different, e.g. ad shows cnn.com but leads to myshadysite.com

+ some subtle promotion for Hunchly (full-text search for your browser history)

greenspoton Show HN: Reactpack – one command to build your React front end

react router missing

greenspoton Nvidia CEO: We'll be solving VR immersion problems for the next 20 years

the piggy trough is so full of cash, cream and credit, that they ignore credible assessment(s)

about the VR industry from the top comment of that page

Edit: Thanks for the downvote

greenspoton I've Been Waiting For The Oculus Rift, But Now It's Sitting In My Closet

Not sure but the current and next VR gen might be the next smartwatch. Overhyped.

Why =>

1. You need an highres screen which must be pixel-free. Even if you throw Samsung's ppi front runners Note 5 or S7 into a Google cardboard you definitely see pixels; it's not crisp, it's not clear, it's just annoying and those monster phones have already 500-600ppi, more than any Oculus. So we need screens with 1000 ppi minimum because they sit so close in front of your eyes. We are used to crispy Retina noteboks and even higher res smartphone screens for years and shall now go back?

2. People are annoyed by Androids micro stuttering here and there, even the mainstream users and now we believe some milliseconds latency and stutter won't hurt VR? So here we need minimum 60 fps and even more since head movements can be quite quick and morever, even subtle movements which happen with your head all the time must be reflected with same sensivity. Didn't see this yet.

3. 1000ppi at 60fps? Ok, let's try to get hardware for this; you need hardware with the best avail GPUs, coolers, heatpipes, and fat cables to your lovely headset since batteries won't help. So we talk about a non-mobile product, something with cables keeping you at one position. And a price tag far away for the mainstream user.

Once this thing can be sold next to the Playstation for few hundred bucks at the quality mentioned in 1 and 2 + killer apps we are ready to go and we can talk again about mainstream adoption. To get there I assume that we need min. 10 years if not more.

And even then, if we are there and have 1+2+3 fulfilled I come up with my 4th point:

4. Great about games is that I sit on my sofa and can conquer the world without moving at all. All is done with my fingertips on my controller. Moving is exhausting--and thats the point of video games: to not run yourself and climb mountains like you do in Uncharted 4 for days--even moving my head can get exhausting after a while and anyway head movements are also much faster done with my controller's right analogue stick. So, what's the point? Why do I need an headset when a large screen and my proven Playstation controller can do the same? Better immersion?

greenspoton Affiliate links on Reddit

Just a feeling. It's really very hard to get major brands like Nike as advertisers on board. Why: they want a perfect environment. A positive one and a premium brand which fits to them and a great audience. And not to forget a HUGE reach. Once you have all of these PLUS contacts to the right media agencies then you get good deals based on CPM. The less you as a publisher can offer the more you end with CPC or even crappy CPA deals where you never know if the intermediate evades your commissions.

Just look around, usually advertisers pair themselves with publishers with a similar brand awareness and quality. Eg Nike or BMW won't advertise on Reddit or Facebbok because there would be a too strong asymmetry between advertisers' and publishers' brands. Nike and BMW would rather place and position themselves to eg the next James Bond movie from Sony (=> similar brand perception).

Reddit is the typical publisher that is avoided by a lot of major advertisers. The brand and the audience is maybe too heterogenous and inconsistent. While a sub like Photshopbattles might be positive and funny many other subs like Gonewild (which is huge btw) give Reddit a mixed perception. However, doing a deal with Viglink shows that they must have tried everything before (to get deals with major brands) but finally resigned and go now the affiliate path.

There is one good thing about affiliate marketing though: ad blockers do not harm your business.

greenspoton Affiliate links on Reddit

Every consumer site wants user generated content for free but is not willing to share a tiny bit of the revs.

This signals desperation than proper business development. Reddit should look at Snapchat: today they have a Nike filter live. This is smart monetization and gives more bucks than this affiliate hack. Besides, Reddit should have done this affiliate thing themselves and not employed Viglink. Any intermediate will not just take their cut, they take more and send lower reports in general (if a CPA deal).

greenspoton Crying

Disney movies.

Literally every single Disney movie gets me to cry. Usually towards the end, around the climax when the soundtrack let the harps and violins kick in.

Not sure if it's me or Disney has some special Crying Department which meticulously orchestrates a crying storyboard.

greenspoton React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

Well said.

I like programming, I like different languages. Just few days ago I was once again lurking on other languages' sites and forums just to find something new. I realized when looking at other languages that JS has come a far way and now offers so much that I really like JS. I got spoiled and the urge to try, find and need something better has faded.

The language itself made huge leaps with ES6 and the ecosystem is just incredible. I see that fast pace as something positive and the 'JS churn' is relative or rather exaggerated. Node itself is very stable and new versions do not break old stuff in general. Grunt and Gulp got replaced by Webpack, React + Redux redefine UI. That's it, these are the typical examples in mind when people talk about 'churn', not really a lot to be worried about. And these changes didn't happen over night but over years, e.g. the first React version was introduced two or three years ago.

A counter example to churn: Express is still the to-go web app server for many years (5?), it's doesn't have the most modern foundation and other stuff (e.g. http2 is problematic) . I wish that new web app servers like Koa, Express' successor, would gain more traction but that happens only slowly.

greenspoton CryEngine out on GitHub

What I like and what I'd like to understand better from a price economics view is their "Pay what you want" model; on the following link you see the page where the user can decide which amount he likes to pay (€0, €10, €25, ...):

https://www.cryengine.com/get-cryengine

I am just wondering how the distribution is, so how many pay 0, how many 10 etc.?

Could imagine that this pricing could lead to higher total revenues than the classical three-prices-page.

greenspoton China Fakes 488M Social Media Posts a Year: Study

Agree. One thing Amazon improved on: the rating is now based on the reviews only from verified buys. Latter ones are a bit harder to fake since you need to buy the product before your review. Not the perfect solution but already miles better than most other review systems.

greenspoton China Fakes 488M Social Media Posts a Year: Study

Bad reviews on Amazon lead to faked good ones.

Bad reviews on Glassdoor lead to faked good ones.

Bad reviews on Yelp lead to faked good ones.

Sometimes bad reviews are not fair or heavily exaggerated, sometimes bad reviews are from competitors. Bad reviews cannot be removed. Sometimes, faked good reviews is the only way to bring back a balanced view.

So, this seems to happen everywhere and to be the natural response of a self-regulating market. Means that we should be careful with user generated content in general, also users might have an hidden agenda.

Edit: Why the downvote? I am not saying that I like this, I just tried to find an explanation for a market behavior.

greenspoton Ask HN: Who productively writes code on their smartphone? How?

I never used Prompt on an iPad just on a iPhone.

greenspoton Ask HN: Who productively writes code on their smartphone? How?

Good question but most note taking software on iOS doesn't have Vim bindings, so I take Vim on a server for note taking already. Then I can also get right into the actual code anyway.

greenspoton Ask HN: Who productively writes code on their smartphone? How?

I mapped jj to Esc in my .vimrc but Prompt has also Esc as an extra key. But jj is faster.

So with jj you get from Insert to Normal mode and from there just : either from the keyboard or from Prompt's extra keys.

All like on a normal notebook.

greenspoton Ask HN: Who productively writes code on their smartphone? How?

I do.

iPhone 6 + Prompt (a SSH client) + tmux + Neovim/Vim + a remote dev server

for Android phones use JuiceSHH instead Prompt

Usually I use a notebook sshing to my dev server but when I am on the go and get good ideas I immediately try them on mobile before getting home. With tmux I am still in the same session having easy access to all windows and panes. Vim's key bindings are the best way to use an editor on a phone anyway. All very satisfying and not much slower. Sometimes when I need to go to bed and still want to play around with the code the same: I tinker a bit more till I fall asleep.

Or today: I read about a new JS NLP library on my phone I want to quickly test: I just start Prompt and type "npm i nlp_compromise", fire up Vim and play around.

I am quite fast with the iPhone keyboard and I think the reason is that I use the keyboard in general without any assistance, so no spellchecking, prediction, etc. Just the plain keyboard and after a while using it like this you get super good and fast (it took some weeks though). The keyboard of the iPhone is also one of its features I like most: it's extremely responsive and never lagging.

Prompt extends the iPhone keyboard well: you get Ctrl, Alt, Tab and more keys nearby and aesthetically very similar which I like. Prompt is quite slick and iPhone's iTerm.

So, it's not about doing entire projects from A to Z on your phone but it can get ultra productive when your are away from your computer and get those 'shower thoughts' you haven't gotten for three hours sitting in front of the screen. Then a phone as a devkit comes quite handy.

greenspoton Designing a New Look for Instagram, Inspired by the Community

I just wanted to compare Instagram vs Snapchat and got this (I know Google Trends cannot be used for popularity because of mobile apps but just to get some vague tendency):

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=snapchat%2C%20instag...

So, Instagram is still way bigger but we some slow down when it comes to growth but everything is still good.

Then, I just added Facebook to the game and look what I got:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=snapchat%2C%20instag...

Facebook is huge but I guess it's primarily because people search for it on desktop instead of typing the .com-domain. But what hit me more and it's OT here: how Facebook is dropping, this doesn't look good.

greenspoton Electron 1.0 is here

My biggest gripe with Qt is HiDPI support which was introduced just 6 months ago, so quite late. It feels cumbersome compared to HTML/CSS which have native HiDPI support built-in for years. Also the implementation in HTML/CSS is straightforward. You don't need to think about it a second, it just works. Actually this is my number one feature of web tech, it's HiDPI ready and websites and apps like Slack look always slick, crisp and clear, on any platform.

With Qt, just watch this 30 minutes presentation about Qt and HiDPI, while ok there are some parts which unnecessarily complicate matters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XPpp4yD_M4

greenspoton “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

I have just have one 'why':

Why is Japan's GDP growth looking like this: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp

Not that I don't like posts about management techniques but from Toyota (their best years are also some time ago) from Japan... I don't know.