Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy - <AUTHOR> http://ankisrs.net/ <comment><USER2> A friend and I decided to build an Anki replacement a few years ago, it's now located at [https://www.memorangapp.com](https://www.memorangapp.com) and has a loyal following of 10s of thousands of users. Anki is a great tool and has a wide variety of content on Ankiweb, however the ecosystem doesn't allow for any collaboration or the ability to keep content up to date (aside from manually editing decks, but where for example can you suggest a correction?).

Memorang was designed from the ground up to be the next generation adaptive learning platform. In fact many hard-core Anki users have switched over to our platform and love it! The main difference is in the ease of use of both creating and consuming content. Anki has the underpinnings of supermemo, which is designed for the ideal learner. In a couple of experiments that we've done partnered with large institutions, one still underway, we have shown that most students are not "ideal learners" in that most still cram right before big exams or deadlines. The original study focused on efficacy, you can find the slides we did for an NSF sponsored presentation here [http://www.slideshare.net/gjcourt/memorang-nsf- mooc-2014](http://www.slideshare.net/gjcourt/memorang-nsf-mooc-2014). The latest study is still in the works, but will involve significantly more data.

Anki is a fantastic program and many people love and use it everyday. If you have loved and used Anki as much as we have, then give Memorang a try and see what you think! (or come help us improve the future of learning [https://www.memorangapp.com/jobs](https://www.memorangapp.com/jobs))

Edit: Read about our data-model here [http://blog.memorangapp.com/post/108094496626/tags-more- how-...](http://blog.memorangapp.com/post/108094496626/tags-more-how-to-make- awesome-flashcards-on)

<comment><USER3> "A friend" reporting in...

While many people may love Anki, you can count me out. I used it extensively during my first 2 years of medical school along with trying physical cards, Quizlet, and even my own custom batch files and macros. I think that it works for a very particular use case, and you need to fully commit to it to get the intended benefits.

My personal belief is that an "adaptive" learning system doesn't just adapt to the spacing effect, but to your study habits, emotional state, learning style, and even the global activity linked to certain concepts. (e.g. If you have a centralized API, you can track which facts learners struggle with and use the algorithms weight those facts for first-time learners). Learning isn't just meant to be something you do in isolation - there is a community aspect and there are endless things you can with a big data approach.

Our goal is to take spaced repetition and this new concept of meta-adaptivity and apply it to the masses, not just the hardcore users. Yeah, it sounds like a fancy vision but we're further along than you'd think. Would love to start a discussion on this and possibly get more manpower on making this a reality. (I dropped my career as a surgeon to make this happen, so we're all-in at this point).

A few references:

1\. Dyrbye LN, Thomas MR, Shanafelt TD. Systematic review of depression, anxiety, and other indicators of psychological distress among U.S. and Canadian medical students. Acad Med. 2006 Apr;81(4):354-73. Review. PubMed PMID: 16565188.

2\. Beard C, Clegg S, Smith K. Acknowledging the affective in higher education. BRIT EDUC RES J. 2007; 33(2): 235–252

3\. Burleson W, Picard R. Affective Agents: Sustaining Motivation to Learn Through Failure and a State of "Stuck". Social and Emotional Intelligence in Learning Environments Workshop in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Maceio-Alagoas, Brasil. August 31, 2004. [http://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/04.burleson- picard.pdf](http://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/04.burleson-picard.pdf)

4\. Durlak JA, Weissberg RP, Dymnicki AB, Taylor RD, Schellinger KB. The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: a meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Dev. 2011 Jan-Feb;82(1):405-32. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x. PubMed PMID: 21291449.

<comment><USER4> After a career of being a chef with employees, I decided to return to school to learn how to write. There is one thing that struck me with the professors in college. While in the kitchen, if a cook made a mistake, the failure and responsibility fell on me whether I was a sous-chef or executive chef.

Earlier in my career I was a chef de partie in a two Michelin star restaurant with a team of 4 cooks under me. If a cook made a mistake, the chef didn't talk to him, the chef would literally scream at me. I asked one of the cooks who worked with the chef for many years why the chef was yelling at me instead of the cook and he said that I was responsible for everything that happens on my station.

Here is the striking contrast between learning in the real world and learning in a school. In the real world, the teacher is responsible for the failure of the person learning, while in the school the student is responsible of the failure to learn.

As a chef, I can break people's spirits day and night, I have a mouth like chef Ramsey and scars on my chin where I've been punched hard, but that doesn't serve me any purpose. People breaking emotionally happens a lot especially in kitchens. There is a reason there is a lot of drug use and alcohol abuse in restaurants.

If I opened a restaurant in the town I'm in now I would never find decent cooks. I would have to train them. Unlike a college professor I wouldn't succeed by giving out F's and pushing people to drop out. I'd have to know on a case by case basis how far I can push a person to learn; to know when to give a cook a hug and to know when to scream, "where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?"

Some people hear things like that and they change a behavior to end a chef being annoying while others see it as a threat to their employment. The same feedback is different with people. The ability to hire or fire someone gives an employer an enormous amount of power over that person.

Absolutely, adaptive learning must address the emotional state of the student. Not only does every student have a different rate of learning and different types of intelligence, for example, some people are much better with kinesthetic reasoning while other verbal reasoning, everybody has a different stress threshold before they break emotionally or give up.

<comment><USER5> > "where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?"

I'm stating the obvious here, but verbal abuse is not ok in a professional setting, never ever. There's nothing to justify it, not even "success" (a better cooked meal, more revenues coming in for the company etc).

<comment><USER6> How do you define verbal abuse? We all have different codes of morality. Is manipulating your employees verbal abuse to you? Is lying or placating things verbal abuse to you? What about going behind your back and telling another employee to talk to you instead of telling you face to face? Is that verbal abuse? Well it is to me. Whereas, I could care less if someone said "Where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?" I am extremely offended by the other examples. I think they are never ok in a professional setting, "never ever". Not even justified by success, revenue, or majority vote. Please realize that your morale code is not the only morale code, that your way of communicating, is not everyone's way of communicating. Trying to say that your rules, that your methods, are the ones that everyone needs to follow is childish.

<comment><USER7> I get where you're coming from, but am torn about agreeing. The problem is that your argument can be used, exactly as you made it, to defend physical abuse too -- or anything at all. Either you don't believe in _any_ universal human rights (in which case your argument is perfectly consistent) or you _do_ believe in some, and then your disagreement with the OP is just about where to draw the line (in which case accusing him of childishness for wanting to enforce rules of behavior seems hypocritical, since you do that too, just in different circumstances).

<comment><USER6> The argument I am supporting is that different things work for different people. So yes this applies to all human "rights". That said, if a population, say the state of Texas agrees that physical abuse in the workplace is wrong, then I think that it's perfectly reasonable for a rule to exist for that particular population.

The case that OP is making is that X is the only acceptable way to talk to people in the work place.

When it comes to violence, enough of us agree within our "populations" so to speak. When it comes to how people should communicate with their words, there is enough diversity to warrant freedom of choice. I think that it's important that OP be able to choose to not work in a place where their competency is questioned without regard to their feelings. However, it's completely unreasonable to tell everyone how their businesses should be ran, or how their bosses should talk to them. Not all of us enjoy being patronized, or are ok with being dishonest about how we really feel. Enough of us disagree on the best way to communicate in the workplace that there shouldn't be one right answer. OP presented their case without any regard for the other side, "never ever" as they put it. They didn't even consider the possibility that not all of us are so sensitive, that not all of us are helpless marshmallows squashed at the first f bomb, creamed by the first, second, or hundredth joke at our expense. That is the argument I'm making. Not that rules should not exist, but that rules need to address the fact that different things work for different people, and society cannot work if it is run under the assumption that what works for one person works for everyone.

<comment><USER7> > OP presented their case without any regard for the other side, "never ever" > as they put it. They didn't even consider the possibility that not all of us > are so sensitive, that not all of us are helpless marshmallows squashed at > the first f bomb, creamed by the first, second, or hundredth joke at our > expense. That is the argument I'm making. Not that rules should not exist, > but that rules need to address the fact that different things work for > different people, and society cannot work if it is run under the assumption > that what works for one person works for everyone. reply

Fair enough, some people like a culture with directness, swearing, etc. Fwiw, though, you come across as equally sensitive and marshmallow-like as the OP, it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking behind your back, while for example I accept (and expect) that as the natural behavior of nearly all humans. If you're cool applying your logic to that, too, and just choose to opt out of being around people who aren't direct, then that's fair.

<comment><USER6> > it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking > behind your back

Exactly, everyone has their own values. I value honesty. OP values dishonesty.

<comment><USER8> Though you haven't yet been called out for it, in your posts you repeatedly create a false dichotomy: either the boss is honest and must say "fuck you, you are a stupid fucking chef" or the only other choice is to be dishonest and patronise. That is not true. In this post, I am providing you direct feedback about how you are wrong, without calling you an idiot or saying something like "what the fuck do you think this is, reddit?" despite your basic errors in argumentation. Speaking these words would not be verbal abuse.

I'm pretty sure verbal abuse has a specific definition (not related to morality), and is not the same thing as "offensive to me", so you can't just redefine it as you did above.

<comment><USER6> It's a range. The exaggerations are there to make you think about things differently. One man's answer to "verbal abuse" is another man's "patronizing dishonesty". You've taken my hyperbole too literally. Statements like, "I value honesty. OP values dishonesty." are meant as a playful jest to make you question the value of honesty in modern society. There is no one going out and complaining that patronizing employees is morally wrong, because the vocal majority on the matter does not represent these people. There is no voice in defense of brutal sincerity. The point of all of this is simply to shed light on different values as was stated in my original post. My thesis does not revolve around the existence of a dichotomy, it revolves around the fact there is more than just the one set of values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used Anki for 30 minutes to an hour each day for about a year to memorise around 1500 Japanese characters and their readings, with the aid of a mnemonic technique. So long as you have an hour a day to dedicate to the flashcards _without fail_ , you will retain the memorised information.

My problem was that a job and location change altered my daily routine entirely, so I stopped reviewing the cards. One year later, I have forgotten most of the characters I knew. However, the characters I learned while living in Japan, in context, are still fresh in my mind.

I think that spaced repetition isn't the memory panacea it's always touted to be. It's a great tool for cramming, but soon becomes a pain when you have hundreds of cards to review every day. I've heard good things about the goldlist method, a much more low-tech pen and paper approach. Does anyone have any experience with this technique? It claims to be better for long-term memory: [http://huliganov.tv/goldlist-eu/](http://huliganov.tv/goldlist-eu/)

<comment><USER10> SRS is best used to reinforce things you learned outside the flashcard environment. So put things into Anki that you have some real-world context to anchor that memory to, and use Anki to reinforce that memory, not to create new memories that lack any vivid context in your mind outside of the drab flashcard app window where you first discovered the term in isolation. Ideally you're consuming native media, talking with natives, etc. and drawing from that to create your flashcards, since you'll come across a lot of terms that you learn once and then have otherwise forgotten by the time you see them again in the wild; this is where SRS helps.

<comment><USER11> I make software to help language learners generate flashcards for SRS while reading or watching videos: [http://readlang.com](http://readlang.com)

It works as a browser extension for reading web-pages or you can upload texts and whole novels to read via the web-app. You can then click-to-translate words and phrases that you don't understand, and it generates cloze flashcards for use in it's own flashcards, or for export to apps like Anki.

Would love to hear feedback from anyone who tries it!

<comment><USER12> I glanced over the site, and was really taken by the simplicity of the approach! I've used Aki in the past, but resorted to scraping the sites I was learning from to create flash cards. This looks like it really takes the pain out of putting material in.

As a memory researcher, I'd love to see a good example of how you (or someone else) implemented readlang to learn a language. The site seems good at conveying how readlang can get flashcards cooking, but it would be interesting to hear how it was used as part of someone's language learning process (the big picture). I saw on the about page that you used it to learn Spanish, and there are a bunch of posts on the site, so it may be there and I missed it.

I'll definitely look more into it later this evening, but a few questions/thoughts I had were..

1\. is there a good way to programmatically pull out flash card information (as say a JSON object)? Is the export to Anki as a csv/tsv?

2\. How fleshed out is support for Chinese? What should I expect from it being in beta?

3\. I was intrigued by the video player functionality, clicked the "Find something to watch now" on the features page. Clicked blindly. Arrived on a page of text in Spanish. Backed up. Realized that it was a mix of text articles and video articles. Scrolled down to a video article. Was very impressed with the player, but thought with a little less patience I may have missed it. This seems like an incredible feature (similar to fluentU's approach), and one that the link should take people to with as little friction as possible!

Sorry if any of this should have been clear from a more thorough read. I didn't have a lot of time to look, and was really impressed, so thought I would fire off my impressions before giving it a more thorough look :).

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the feedback!

I agree it would be nice to include examples of how Readlang fits into a different people's language learning process. Here are a couple of articles I found online:

\- [http://www.languagesurfer.com/2015/01/14/readlang-review- six...](http://www.languagesurfer.com/2015/01/14/readlang-review-six-ways-to- get-the-most-out-of-this-awesome-tool/)

\- [http://www.alexstrick.com/blog/2015/9/surviving- middlebury-h...](http://www.alexstrick.com/blog/2015/9/surviving-middlebury- how-to-get-the-most-out-of-an-arabic-summer-school)

To answer your questions...

| 1. is there a good way to programmatically pull out flash card information (as say a JSON object)? Is the export to Anki as a csv/tsv?

Export is by CSV (or you can specify your chosen delimiter) and you can choose from a number of different fields. You can't export data from the spaced repetition algorithm since I felt it would make the UI confusing. But you can access this data via the API: [https://github.com/SteveRidout/readlang- api](https://github.com/SteveRidout/readlang-api)

| 2. How fleshed out is support for Chinese? What should I expect from it being in beta?

Chinese, Japanese, and Thai aren't that well supported at the moment. The main omissions are:

\- Lack of "word" boundary detection (these languages don't use spaces to separate words) \- Lack of Pinyin translations \- Lack of word frequency lists to prioritize flashcards by usefulness.

| 3. I was intrigued by the video player functionality, clicked the "Find something to watch now" on the features page. Clicked blindly. Arrived on a page of text in Spanish. Backed up. Realized that it was a mix of text articles and video articles. Scrolled down to a video article. Was very impressed with the player, but thought with a little less patience I may have missed it. This seems like an incredible feature (similar to fluentU's approach), and one that the link should take people to with as little friction as possible!

Thanks, glad you like it! I agree these should be more discoverable. BTW: These videos are all added, sync'd, and shared by Readlang users using the web-app, here's a short guide: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szcvArpfxWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szcvArpfxWI)

<comment><USER13> Word boundary detection in Thai is indeed a thorny problem.

With Chinese, though, it should be simple. Just allow users to make flashcards of any number of contiguous characters. Unbound morphemes aren't something you need to worry about and even a single character part of a larger word could reasonably be a vocabulary item.

<comment><USER11> That is exactly how it works now - users drag to select a sequence of contiguous characters. I haven't tried learning Chinese myself so I don't have a good handle on how pleasant this is to use.

<comment><USER13> Chinese traditionally had no bound morphemes and even now tends not to. I think dragging a sequence of contiguous characters should be good. Most words are two characters, but some are one, three or four. Many four word characters contain words within them.

This system should work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >It's highly recommended that you install Anki from this package instead of relying on the version distributed with your OS, as the packages in the official repo are often very out of date.

Why is this _still_ a problem in Linux-land? Why can't we just make _some but not all_ packages rolling-release? Making Anki rolling-release won't make the distro unstable by any sensible meaning of the word.

<comment><USER15> _> Why can't we just make some but not all packages rolling-release?_

Does that include Anki's dependencies? And if it does, does it include all other packages that depend upon Anki's dependencies?

Also, does it include thousands of other packages similar to Anki that also "won't make the distro unstable by any sensible meaning of the word"?

Don't think you'll have a "just some rolling-release packages" distro by the end of that. Unless you think this specific package is somehow deserving of special treatment by Linux distributions (why?).

<comment><USER14> If the new version of Anki needs a new version of a dependency, just install the new version alongside the old one. Whatever happened when I installed this deb may also be an option.

If handling this is a huge problem, why not have all the rolling-release programs include their own dependencies. Most of us have so much storage space that, without films/games/music, _we couldn 't fill it even if we tried_. It's cool to use minimal amounts of storage when you're on a virtualized machine on Azure/AWS, but those machines aren't used to run Anki anyway. Storage for executable usage is effectively infinite nowadays on consumer devices.

<comment><USER15> >If the new version of Anki needs a new version of a dependency, just install the new version alongside the old one.

Yes, and do that with every other package as well.

Are you even considering the implications of what you're saying? The next-to- latest version of Anki is for example in the repos of the most popular distribution. The latest version of Anki is _not_ in the repos, and its dependencies break something in that distro.

You're free to install Anki's latest version, but there are reasons why stable distributions will not just jump on the latest version of a fairly unknown package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anki is great - the original Supermemo algorithm on which Anki is based[2], makes for fascinating reading [1]

However, I daresay that this is a usecase that is tailormade for the mobile rather than the desktop in any which way.

I wonder why the core team is spending effort behind a desktop app, rather than go full mobile.

[1] [https://archive.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_w...](https://archive.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

[2] [https://www.supermemo.com/help/smalg.htm#Anki_will_work_grea...](https://www.supermemo.com/help/smalg.htm#Anki_will_work_great_with_SM-2.2C_but_SM-5_is_superior)

<comment><USER17> It is much easier to create large numbers of cards on desktop than mobile. There are also a large number of third party add-ons available for desktop [https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/](https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/)

<comment><USER16> It is actually much easier to use a desktop browser as well. Yet, most traffic now is mobile. Flashcards are a mobile usecase, I actually think a desktop version is actually limiting for them...maybe that's why Supermemo never became a roaring success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anki is great. I've used it to learn the 100 most common Clojure expressions. You can get the Anki file by signing up for the newsletter at [http://www.lispcast.com/100-most-used-clojure- expressions](http://www.lispcast.com/100-most-used-clojure-expressions)

<comment><USER19> There's also a great org-mode extension that implements most SRS algorithms, including Anki's:

[http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org- drill.html](http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html)

<comment><USER20> I second org-drill. Org-mode is my whole personal information manager including information learning w/ org-drill.

<comment><USER21> Any tips for how to implement that? I've tried org-mode for personal- information-management and I just get lost in all of the subtrees.

<comment><USER19> I was in that kind of situation too.

The problem is that org-mode is too flexible. I use it as a flattened kanban board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would like to recommend Memrise [1] as alternative to Anki.

[1] [http://www.memrise.com/](http://www.memrise.com/)

<comment><USER23> Memrise is fun, and certainly much better designed than Anki, but at the end of the day it's just another startup that will either fail or get acquired and shut down. All your content will be destroyed, or maybe, if they're generous, given to you in some crappy export format that won't be interoperable with anything else.

I use Memrise, but Anki is my extended memory. Anything I want to actually remember is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anki is great. I have been using it to prepare for my exams. Creating flashcards on my laptop and learning with them on my Android phone / tablet works like a charm. Also, the Android app just got updated. The only limitation I've found is that there is currently no way to self-host flashcards which can be accessed by the mobile app. If you're only using the desktop version you might want to look at [https://github.com/dsnopek/anki- sync-server](https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server) in order to self- host your flashcards.

</comment><comment><USER25> I use Anki as a part of my college strategy ([http://markbao.com/notes/college- strategies](http://markbao.com/notes/college-strategies)) by using the Cornell notetaking method to write up questions and answers for my notes and piping those 'cues' into Anki. Turns out self-testing is one of the best ways to learn, so this combination is surprisingly effective.

It's no replacement for actually learning the concepts, but they help in drilling down the foundational knowledge that helps me understand the bigger- picture concepts better.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm surprised there's no mention of Super Memo and P. Woźniak's studies on spaced repetition in this thread:

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

[https://www.supermemo.com/help/faq/memory.htm](https://www.supermemo.com/help/faq/memory.htm)

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been using Anki on my iPhone for the past 3 years and it's been quite effective. Highly recommend it for anybody who has a lot of content to learn. It's really useful if you can make time for it on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER28> Remember that you read it here first, there will be a unicorn built on the concept of SRS. I use Anki daily and love the application but there's a learning curve and you have to build your own workflow to make it work. Someone is going to take the concept and make it accessible to the masses.

<comment><USER29> First thing that comes to mind when I read your comment is Memrise. Or is even that missing something?

<comment><USER28> Kind of on the right track but I don't think that is it though... But if you had shown me facebook in 2005, I would have said the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've used AnkiSRS and recommended them, but I still don't have a good solution to catch up on decks that you're behind on. It's very good for keeping memory in tact with lots of info.

Gwern has an excellent overview of spatial repetition software too: [http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

</comment><comment><USER31> Someone please create a browser extension that automatically adds every word you "Look Up" to an Anki stack. My vocabulary would be vastly improved if I had this, I always find myself looking up the definition of the same complex words over and over again that are for whatever reason slippery for me to remember.

<comment><USER32> I always wanted a dictionary app that would make flashcards based on words I looked up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love Anki, been using it for the last year. What has been most powerful for me, is that I no longer take standard notes when trying to learn a new topic. Instead, all of my notes are in "question" form, so that I can keep on top of it over time. The spaced repetition keeps my learning efforts efficient and keeps things from leaking out of my wetware memory.

The synchronization feature between devices has also proven to be very useful, as I use my laptop usually to put in new questions, but use the iPhone app to quiz myself whenever I have a few spare minutes during the day (waiting in line, walking to work, etc).

UI is a little wonky at times, but its features and flexibility more than makes up for it for a dedicated student.

</comment><comment><USER34> We've been working on a product more oriented towards "everyday" remembering instead of hardcore educational learning called Remembered.io ([https://remembered.io](https://remembered.io))

It's meant for use cases like reminding yourself about lessons you've learned in books, to keep yourself inspired, or for encoding tidbits from short term to long term memory.

Here's a recent Lifehacker post about us: [http://lifehacker.com/remembered- io-offers-smart-reminders-t...](http://lifehacker.com/remembered-io-offers- smart-reminders-to-keep-you-inspir-1742240345)

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm loving learning Arabic with [http://orangeorapple.com/Flashcards/](http://orangeorapple.com/Flashcards/)

The website looks underwhelming, but the app is amazing. The more I use it, the more it's flexibility impresses me. There are lots of options to review the cards, and it'll use card data to make quizzes, etc for you.

<comment><USER36> Yep, I've used Anki for years and moved over to Flashcards deluxe because after a few months on both noticed little difference in its algorithm compared to Anki. I find the mobile interface of Flashcards deluxe to be a whole lot less kludgy than Anki and the developer to be a whole lot more responsive.

[http://mnemosyne-proj.org/](http://mnemosyne-proj.org/) is pretty good too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anki has many features but I found it too complicated and I didn't like the UI, nor having to sync across devices. So I decided to develop a basic, simpler alternative, a web app that can also be installed in the home screen of an iOS or Android device, [https://omnimemory.com](https://omnimemory.com)

<comment><USER38> [http://mnemosyne-proj.org/](http://mnemosyne-proj.org/) is also a simpler alternative

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ask HN: What's the coolest thing you've used Anki for?

<comment><USER39> It's not "cool", but I'm a professor who's always struggled to learn my students' names. A few years ago, I started to populate an Anki deck with their photos from the college lookbook paired with their names and a few other details. Now I usually recognize most people on the first day of class and just about everyone within the first couple of weeks. (I had trouble that year when I had identical twins in the class.) Anki has transformed a point of shame to a point of pride, and I'm grateful.

<comment><USER21> That's a great idea. It makes a massive difference too when the prof remembers your name, I bet your students appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's also a web interface

[https://ankiweb.net](https://ankiweb.net)

</comment><comment><USER38> I would like to recommend Mnemosyne [1] as an alternative to Anki. It uses a very similar algorithm for spaced repetition (based on SM2), but has a simpler and cleaner UI.

[1] [http://mnemosyne-proj.org/](http://mnemosyne-proj.org/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Anki is an great tool. I used to read javascript Coercion algorithm from JS Specs using this little tool. It have immensely helped me to remember almost everything!

</comment><comment><USER42> The problem with every app like this is the lack of good quality material. For language learning, I prefer learning whole sentences as examples of an appropriate context. But creating good lists of sentences & translations is cumbersome and just throwing a tool at the "crowd" doesn't automatically get you quality content.

That said from all these tools I prefer anki since it has a web-based UI and an android app.

<comment><USER3> "lack of good quality material"

You definitely are correct and I agree with you 100%. The problem is that you can't just throw a tool at people and expect it to stick - ultimately people need good content to study. For us at [https://www.memorangapp.com](https://www.memorangapp.com) it comes down to two things: (1) Better collaboration and (2) Pre-made expert content. The latter takes a lot of money and time as we've effectively split the tool into a publishing platform and technology platform in parallel. (You can see an example of the expert marketplace of content at [https://www.memorangapp.com/premium](https://www.memorangapp.com/premium)).

You can check it out at the website and there's another discussion in this thread. We have a web-based UI and Android/iOS apps currently. Brand new versions of these are being released next month as part of a 2.0 launch.

<comment><USER43> I would happily buy pre-made decks, but for decks I spend hours crafting myself, I want to know I have access them forever and not lose them if you get bought out or go bust.

Do you have export functionality?

<comment><USER3> Currently you can export the HTML and also as printed sheets. In the next few months we'll enable exporting to formats such as csv/tsv. (This is currently supported in the admin interface, but we haven't made it a user-facing tool yet).

If it's any consolation, we already prepaid the next 2 years for AWS and are cash-flow positive. (i.e. not going bust anytime soon).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Anki is what's getting me through med school

</comment><comment> a-dub I used this for foreign language vocabulary when I was in school. Did it work? I honestly don't remember...

</comment><comment><USER45> I've been working on a similar concept after using Anki for a year. [http://www.looprecall.com/](http://www.looprecall.com/)

I wanted to have a more modern UI and plan on adding the ability to share decks between users. I would welcome any feed back! :-)

</comment><comment><USER46> I spent using Anki, and all I have to say is that my graphs actually dovetail neatly.

Space repetition just works.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is really great! I'm building a SaaS that is similar to this, but I was feeling bummed about not releasing it as open source; but now I can just point people to this if they want to run their own. awesome!

<comment><USER10> Is it in a ready enough state to share?

<comment><USER47> That depends on how you look at it. I'm using it, but is it ready for normal humans? I'm not sure. It's equally or more complicated than anki, and serves a larger usecase of doing the remembering for you and collaboration; and is not nearly as well documented as anki at the moment.

That said, if you're up for beta access, shoot me an email at r.letmein [a] ruru.name and i'll see about access

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've been using the Anki iOS application for a while now. I'm considering moving my stack over to org-drill.el to minimze context switching. Anyone made a similar switch or can compare the two at all?

<comment><USER21> Very tempted to do so as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Anki is a very impressive project if for no other reason than its constant development. It basically got me a degree in Japanese seven years ago and it's still being polished.

</comment><comment><USER50> I remember trying to use this for school stuff, but I didn't find it all that useful. There is after all very little you have to remember that isn't about schedules

<comment><USER51> UK:

I found this sort of thing, can't remember if I used Anki specifically, incredibly useful for remembering dates and percentages and so on when taking my A Levels. There were something like a hundred different studies that you had to learn for a good grade in Psychology - at least the way we were taught it - you could't derive them or anything, you just had to memorise them over the term.

It was similar for wanting to remember specific quotes from books for English Lit.

The vast majority of the work I put in for those exams was just trying to eat a textbook so I could vomit it back up. :/ For which this worked great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I couldn't get past the awful UI, written using a generic portable UI toolkit which makes it uniformly terribly looking on all platforms.

</comment><comment><USER53> Also see the mentat wiki:

[http://www.ludism.org/mentat](http://www.ludism.org/mentat)

</comment><comment><USER54> Anki has a nice android app too by the way

</comment><comment><USER55> A simple screenshot on the landing page would make this a lot easier to immediately understand.

</comment><comment><USER56> That's what everyone needs in a busy schedule</comment>


Scoop gets Bay Area cities to pick up the tab for carpooling - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/04/scoop-gets-bay-area-cities-to-pick-up-the-tab-for-carpooling-to-alleviate-traffic-jams/ <comment><USER2> I was commuting between SF & Sunnyvale a year ago for a couple of months. For the whole time I tried to find a service connecting people for carpooling. Found several but none of them had a meaningful number of active users.

It was mind boggling to sit, day after day, in stalled traffic on the 101 with two empty carpool lanes on my left and four lanes filled with lone drivers all the way between San Jose and San Francisco.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if traffic would improve if didn't take away lanes for carpooling.

<comment><USER4> It wouldn't. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand)

<comment><USER5> This doesnt really explain why it wouldn't. In fact it talks about the exact opposite where people are choosing cars over public transport

<comment><USER4> More lanes means a temporary decrease in congestion, which incentivizes people to choose automobiles as their primary form of transportation, which fills up the roads again. Repeat this cycle endlessly as roads are widened.

Basically widening roads doesn't decrease traffic in the long term. This is why LA and Houston and other car dominated places have wider roads than anywhere else and terrible traffic.

Google "Induced Demand" and you will find a ton of articles about this such as this one. [http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot- admit...](http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admits-that- more-roads-mean-more-traffic/415245/)

The core issue is that automobile oriented infrastructure infrastructure isn't very efficient at moving people in the first place. If you're going to spend a lot of money to increase transportation capacity, extra car lanes is a poor choice.

<comment><USER6> in theory yes but i don't see any proof that traffic would increase as much as the increased capacity. reminds me of bogus economic arguments. in your universe we could make a 10,000 lane highway and there would still be congestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting. Lyft originally was 100% focused on car pooling. I wonder if the time is better now for this type of offering.

<comment><USER8> Technically that was Zimride, the original startup by the same two founders but is actually a separate entity.

<comment><USER9> Boy do I miss zimride. Much more useful to me than Lyft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scoop has salespeople out in force in Oakland -- waiting in line at the DMV some lady from Scoop was lobbying all the bored people in line hard.

<comment><USER11> Ooh boy, I doubt that will work out well for them. Captive audience, but I can't think of a place where people are less likely to be receptive to marketing than the DMV.</comment></comment>


TinEye - Reverse Image Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.tineye.com/

<comment><USER2> Many more articles about TinEye in case you're interested:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/tineye?sort=by_date></comment>


Secretive Billionaire Makes The Cheese For Pizza Hut, Domino's And Papa John's - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2017/05/23/james-leprino-exclusive-mozzarella-billionaire-cheese-pizza-hut-dominos-papa-johns/#7ca143b54958 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the last boss I worked for that works diligently since high school to build a hundred million dollar business in an unsexy industry with factories across America. Aside from growing up in silicon valley, he's the only other inspiration that rich is attainable and accessible.

Unflashy and unassuming, he doesn't try to draw press, hired older folks to be the faces. It's just like watching someone that's really good at playing this video game called spreadsheet. Patiently stacking and stacking day in and day out the same thing, but bigger and bigger.

      consistency and scalability... Leprino made himself indispensable

That's all it is.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of commander Chris Hadfields philosophy of always aiming to be a Zero. He said in any environment you could be a -1 a 0 or a +1. You don't get to decide which of those your efforts end up being. He further observes coming into a new environment and doing too much or trying to overachieve can often just make a mess, making you a -1. Aim to be a zero. Stack those shelves, do the boring work you know you can do well until you are sure you can handle the more complex chores. Also sort of reminds me of Net Promoter Score; would you recommend X to friends and family?

Just do the thing that is the point of the place and do the shit out of it, why wouldn't you? -- Louis CK

There is wisdom in hard, but simple work that others value, even in tech. Don't be too clever in that MVP. Substance over style. Etc etc.

<comment><USER4> Just a note that NPS uses a scale with low predictive validity and you should probably tell people to stop using it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS)

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I do like the question from a general 'do you like thing X' perspective, but as critics seem to rightly argue, you should not use it alone.

Another question I like in the same vein, "Would you recommend other people to work here?". I think it is just one of many measures of "engagement" though.

Also, I have to agree with the general sentiment against NPS. I have seen teams forced into UI enhancement death marches because their app got a low NPS. It was plastered on billboards and there was a huge push to get the NPS up. It became a bit of a running joke. That anecdotal experience made me really wary of it in general, even though I like the concept as a general engagement measure.... maybe you shouldn't base management decisions on just that :)

<comment><USER4> I have worked for multiple large and small companies who thought NPS was a valid metric for customer feedback, and in my experience it has told us little to no information even though management has generally said we have to be at X to be successful.

When I worked for Apple Support the best in breed was a five point scale with a neutral midpoint and multiple questions on different axis, just as the wikipedia article stated, and I felt it was a clear and straightforward method of measuring customer satisfaction and in some cases quality, so that is what I recommend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this story. Yes, building unsexy things can be lucrative. It's also amazing that him and his partner has spent their lives producing a product that within a margin of error has fed everyone in America at some point. But, it gave me time to stop and reflect, I've personally (and unknowingly until now) worked with about 25k lbs of his cheese during my tenure at Pizza Hut.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's sad that the engineer that made everything happen, Lester Kielsmeier, only got a tiny fraction of the overall wealth. Maybe this can change someday? I'm not hopeful though...

<comment><USER7> It's important for scientists, engineers and inventors to also understand how business works to not get short-changed and how to negotiate an equal equity stake. Ignorance is no excuse.

Anyone whom offers to go into business with someone (at a less than equal footing) or tries to make them their employee when they're the primary technologist is likely cheating them a-priori.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just an FYI: cheese is the most expensive ingredient in/on a pizza, so this makes perfect sense.

Reason: think of all the gallons of milk and processing it takes to make an unit of cheese.

Source: Someone whom worked at a Pizza Hut in South San Jose in high-school.

PS: Another interesting business model (in Texas) is Braum's, which is a large co-op ice cream/restaurant/convenience store chain run on behalf of a consortium of dairy farmers. This cuts out middlemen and is basically direct- to-consumer. The prices are much lower than similar SKUs in local grocery stores and the quality is quite high.

<comment><USER8> Don't mean to nitpick but Braum's isn't a co-op/consortium. It's a single family's massively-integrated retail operation. They own and operate basically all of their farms and ranches along with the manufacturing plants for their containers and even their delivery fleet. Braum is the last name of the guy who founded it.

(Oh, and it's not Texan. Braum's is an Okie brand; they don't open up stores more than about 300 miles from their central farms in Oklahoma.)

<comment><USER7> Everything before the word "but" is BS.

I never said it was based in Texas, you read the wikipedia and acted like an expert. It's a vertically-integrated supply-chain.

<comment><USER8> I worked for Braum's for four years in Fort Worth, Texas. It was my first "real" job after high school. They have a little book that they give employees that describes the company and the history. The company describes itself like I did. Would you like a picture as proof of my bona fides?

Please don't assume malice.

<comment><USER9> On the internet nobody knows you're an expert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aside: screw Forbes. Between the pre-load ad screen and the autolay ad video (which for some reason I couldn't even close), their site is downright unusable.

<comment><USER11> I just gave up visiting Forbes long since. I use ads myself (eg AdSense and AdWords) and have no objection to well-behaved ad copy, but I run NoScript for safety and F's site is thus pretty well unusable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> See also from 2014 "New Mexico dairy shuts down after undercover activist videotape". A dairy that supplied Leprino was caught on video treating cows horribly. Leprino seems to have responded reasonably.

> On Thursday, Denver-based Leprino Foods, for whom Winchester Dairy was a > supplier, announced a program that requires its dairy suppliers and farmers > to comply with new company guidelines regarding animal care. Leprino, the > world's largest producer of mozzarella cheese and a supplier to fast-food > chains nationwide, has said that it was "extremely repulsed" by the video.

[http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dairy-farm- video-2014121...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dairy-farm- video-20141219-story.html)

<comment><USER13> > Leprino seems to have responded reasonably.

In line with his "ethics" principle that comes after quality and price.

Anyway, if you value the wellbeing of animals going vegan is pretty much the only to me. There's no such thing as animal-friendly meat or bio-industrial dairy.

<comment><USER14> But then there would be no cows.

<comment><USER15> Define "no cows". There are plenty of animals we don't eat that continue to exist.

<comment><USER14> Cows don't really exist in the wild. I guess we could have some in zoos but we mostly keep animals around that have a purpose for us.

One could make the argument that evolutionarily speaking, being domesticated (usually then eaten) by humans is the most reliable survival strategy for any species.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I admire the business idea... but, rapacious capitalist though I may be, it fails my personal "would this business embarrass your children" test because what unifies all of these products is that the quality of the cheese is terrible IMHO.

<comment><USER17> What unifies all these products is the fact that they are mass produced. If you want to sell a pizza to everyone in America and you want them all to taste the same, you start to value consistency in your inputs.

I love to get pizza from some of the smaller pizzerias near me occasionally. I don't love that the cheese breaks sometimes, leaving me with a watery, ricotta-like mess on top of my pizza. I don't love that the crust is sometimes too thin and gets soggy or tears, or that the crust is occasionally burned in spots. This doesn't happen with Pizza Hut. Whatever else, they're consistent.

Personally, I also think that the cheese on a Pizza Hut pizza is just fine. If you're buying Pizza Hut or Papa John's, you're not looking for an old-world artisan experience. I don't want buffalo mozzarella on a delivery pizza.

<comment><USER18> Why not? I mean, buffalo mozzarella is pretty nice right? Are you saying you don't want food you can appreciate?

<comment><USER19> yeah sorry, not everyone's a liquid millionaire and can eat buffalo mozzarella whenever they please.

we'll try to work harder and make more money, to be more like you, so we can have excellent gourmand-level taste 24/7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone parse this sentence for me?

*Instead, he hired Lester Kielsmeier, who had run a cheese factory in Wisconsin only to find out that it was sold during his stint in the Air Force during World War II, because his dad believed he'd been killed in action. "When Lester came, I went downtown to the junkyard and I bought a couple bigger cheese vats to make it look like we were really in the business," Leprino says.

Leprino's dad thought Lester Kielsmeier died in WWII, or?

<comment><USER21> Lester's dad thought Lester had been killed. He was presumably the executor for Lester's estate, which was liquidated (e.g. the cheese factory was sold).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These are precisely the 3 pizza joints I cannot convince my room mate to order from. I guess he doesn't like the secret billionaire cheese.

EDIT: Not sure why this is being downvoted. Analysis of the mass market pizza industry as a race to the bottom, in terms of ingredient quality, is an old idea. Couldn't the secrecy, fake differentiation of leading megacorps, and low quality cheese be connected? Are we supposed to be impressed at this way of making money?

</comment><comment><USER23> He was private because his buyers wanted it that way. Do they really want everyone knowing they use the same cheese? I wonder what changed for him to come out like this.

<comment><USER24> They use the same cheese company but the story makes it clear that they do not use the same cheese. Each company has its own product tailored to their needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Punchline: combine science with sales! ;)

<comment><USER26> Sales and engineering are the two pillars of the Conjoined Triangles of Success.

<comment><USER27> I presume there must be at least 6 pillars?

<comment><USER28> Just the four. [http://conjoinedtriangles.com/](http://conjoinedtriangles.com/)

[EDITED to add: For the avoidance of doubt, yes it's a spoof.]

<comment><USER29> There are only two pillars. He didn't give a name for the lateral connectors.

<comment><USER28> I quote, from that very web page: "The four pillars of CToS (pronounced see- to-ess) are Growth, Sales, Engineering and Manufacturing."

<comment><USER29> The whole thing is from the Silicon Valley TV show. I'm fairly sure that the two pillars are Sales and Engineering, but you're making me actually go watch Season Three all over again to find out if Barker referred to Growth and Manufacturing as pillars too. YouTube clips on that particular part of the series are sparse.

Edit: Yep, Barker refers to Engineering and Sales as the _two_ pillars of success in S03E02, and Growth as the "foundation" of the CToS. Compromise is the "shared hypotenuse". Jack was fired before they could discuss Manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Thank god for the Willy Wonka of cheese.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait, what's the "technology" that's being talked about in this cheese? Isn't it just normal cheese? Am I missing something here or is this artificial faux cheese?

<comment><USER17> Cheese production doesn't lack technology just because it's a familiar product. There are hundreds if not thousands of types of cheese. What distinguishes them is partly the dairy origin, but also largely the techniques used to produce them. Just looking at mozzarella, there are hundreds of different mozzarella cheeses on the market. They are not identical. Being able to consistently produce a mozzarella that has certain attributes requires tight control of a process that starts with an inconsistent output. What temperature do you process at? When does it change? When do you add rennet? How do you separate whey from the curds? How long do you age? etc. All of this is tech.

<comment><USER31> To be picky, it's (good or bad tasting, _de giustibus non dispoutandum est_ ) not "mozzarella" but just "cheese for pizza".

<comment><USER32> The distinction is irrelevant to the point made by the parent. That it's simply _just_ "cheese for pizza" does not negate the fact that significant process tech is leveraged when manufacturing a product of strict quality and consistency at scale.

<comment><USER31> Sure, no doubt that tech and a strict control on production and ingredients is needed, just like any industrial product, and evidently they are very good at both, I was just referring to the "just looking at mozzarella" part. A large number of cheeses called mozzarella on the market are very different from mozzarella and most shouldn't be even called so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Buffalo milk cheese is amazing for pizzas (after you have the pizza cooked, put a bit of buffalo milk cheese on top).

</comment><comment><USER34> I swear it was government cheese caves

</comment><comment><USER35> mom_i_posted_it_again.jpg

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Billionaire%20Cheese%20Pizza](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Billionaire%20Cheese%20Pizza)

</comment><comment><USER36> I find it disgusting to think that such a horrible industry that pillars on exploiting sentient animals up to the point of their death from exhaustion handles so Billions.

It's even sadder how people seem not to care at all, and are okay with all the torture and mutilation that goes behind the milk/cheese industry if they've something tasty in front of them.

<comment><USER37> You're gonna have a hard enough time getting people to not bitterly attack you for even merely suggesting it might be better for everyone if they ate a little less meat.

Going after dairy is an absolute non-starter (unless maybe you're talking only to vegetarians). I highly recommend sticking with targets that might actually be achievable in your lifetime without requiring the complete collapse of global civilization.

<comment><USER36> The dairy industry is one of the most brutal and soulless ones there is. I don't know what you'd call a "starter" if that isn't.

I also fail to see why this would "collapse global civilization". The fact that there's a huge industry behind this in some countries doesn't make it critical. The world economy wouldn't change that much IF these vanished (people would just consume something else).

<comment><USER37> > people would just consume something else

Yeah... this is the problem right here. The biggest issues facing our species and our planet boil down to one simple thing: the majority of the human race is too selfish, shortsighted, stupid and stubborn to change even the smallest aspects of their destructive behavior.

I mostly agree with you, the reason I said eliminating dairy is a 'non- starter' is entirely about how difficult it is to get fellow humans to upgrade their life choices. That was my whole point. This is also why I half-jokingly mentioned a civilization collapse as the sole way to 'fix' this, because it is only after the nukes have gone off and things have gone all to hell worldwide (and dairy is no longer available) that you will get people to stop eating cheese and ice cream. Outside of complete dictatorial control over a population closed off from the rest of the planet, they will keep consuming dairy until they cannot. It's sad and pathetic, but that's nature of the human beast.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are 'weekend projects' just a way to grab attention? - <AUTHOR>

There are quite a few 'weekend project' titled submissions all the time and many of them make it to the HN homepage. With no disrespect, are these really weekend projects or just a way to grab everyone's attention and get to the homepage?
Do you think a weekend project would have a psychological edge making others upvote in awe?
Or am I getting it completely wrong and weekend projects really mean made over several weekends? <comment><USER2> Talking about weekend projects developed at events like <http://garage48.org/>, two of the teams from these Garage48 events have won Seedcamp investments and become real startups: <http://qminder.com/> and <http://campalyst.com/>

So weekend projects can turn into real companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> could not access qminder but campalyst looks good...!

<comment><USER2> Oops, wrote the wrong address, correct one is: <http://qminderapp.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am not sure Why Weekend Project is the wrong way to tag these submissions. I saw a similar post about people complaining about these being called "startups". Personally I couldn't care less if the thing was built in 10 months or 2 days, It's more whether I would use the idea/ site or not.

</comment><comment><USER4> I read it somewhat metaphorically, equivalent to "side project" with a connotation of a smallish off-hand side project, as opposed to a big multi- month investment. May or may not have _actually_ been done in one weekend, though some probably were.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, a side project makes more sense. I guess, if we look at them that way they can also be called as weekend projects since it's not what someone developed as a full time activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would suggest making the best product that you can. Whether it is accomplished over a single weekend or not is irrelevant according to me. If you release something unpolished, it won't make you look any better.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should really try it for once its very exciting to get all the wonderful feedback from HN. You may even end up talking to the founders of some cool startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> I sure will someday, but I just hope it turns out to be as well made as the other apps :)</comment></comment>


How to get a job at Google, Apple, or Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354853/how-to-get-a-job-at-google-apple-or-microsoft/print

<comment><USER2> Depressing stuff.</comment>


The Android Screen Fragmentation Myth - <AUTHOR> http://rustyshelf.org/2014/07/08/the-android-screen-fragmentation-myth <comment><USER2> As a developer, layout and screen size is not the main problem with Android. To be honest, Android isn't even the problem. It's hardware that Android is built on that is the problem. If a handset is broken down into all of it's sensors [Speaker, Camera, Light Sensor, Microphone, Compass, Accelerometer, Clock, NFC, GPS, Screen, BLE, Wifi, Altimeter, Speedometer, CPU] that's where the fragmentation problem is. It's hard to say which devices contain certain sensors (CPU, Screen, Camera, Mic, and Speakers are pretty standard). Of the devices that have most of those sensors, it's hard to say say which devices have those sensors working correctly.

I attended a Facebook/Parse hackathon where FB detailed issues about a certain bug in specific CPU's with respect to a C++ based photo processing library. Certain Android phones would randomly crash. There is also the infamous compass video [1] where multiple devices all with different hardware report different readings. As a developer, the Android Emulator makes me think I'm going to have a consistent user experience, but based on hardware, I may not.

In my personal experience, I built this game ([http://joeblau.com/orb./](http://joeblau.com/orb./)) which runs on iOS and Android and I noticed a crazy bug where it would only crash on S4's from Sprint, not from Verizon or AT&T. I re-worked some code to get the application working eventually, but the fact that something would only break on a specific carrier's version of the hardware was crazy to me. The problem is not Android; Android as an OS is actually very good. The problem is HTC, Samsung, Motorola and all of the other hardware manufacturers that build the handsets. Thankfully Google is doing what it can to address the hardware issue by announcing their Android One program, but that hurts other hardware competitors.

[1] - [https://vine.co/v/MgWLMmmwUQQ](https://vine.co/v/MgWLMmmwUQQ)

<comment><USER3> This was addressed at the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Linux kernel mailing list a few years ago. The problem is not just hardware manufacturers trying to differentiate themselves, but carriers fucking around with software loads trying to differentiate themselves. On the hardware side at least, this resulted in virtually a brand new port to every new SBC that came out, even though they were almost all ARM.

It used to be you could run Linux on MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, Intel, etc, and not be able to tell the difference from an end user perspective. Then everyone got dollar signs in their eyes, and Google managed to fudge the whole "open" thing so that people were okay with binary drivers (I also blame Ubuntu for acceptance of this), and now you see the mess it's resulted in.

Don't get me wrong, I'll take the Android bazaar with its wide variety of choice every day (and twice on Sunday) over the one-size-fits-all-we'll-tell- you-what-you-need style of iOS, but the insanity with differentiating things via closed methods needs to stop. And the Android/Linux developers are aware of the problem and dealing with it the best they can; the problem is all the handset manufacturers and carriers fucking things up.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for calling out Ubuntu (a wolf in sheep's clothing in many ways, despite the significant role Ubuntu has played in bringing great people to the Linux community and the fact that they do a lot of good too) and fronting open-source drivers. HN seems mostly ignorant of how critical free drivers are while it continues to flock around diatribes against far-downstream effects of relying on closed blobs. User freedom stems fundamentally from the ability to _make use of the components in devices they own_. For the uninitiated: that's exactly what drivers do.

<comment><USER5> Free drivers are the way to go, but pushing proprietary drivers was never really Ubuntu's fault. It has been a lack of development of free software drivers because of non-cooperation by hardware vendors. But the community has stepped up with better support for historically unsupported things like accelerated video. If you install 14.04, it does not recommend proprietary drivers except in cases where there is still a lack of options.

I'm not saying Canonical is entirely innocent, but they do employ a lot of fervent free software advocates and developers. What we need to fix the situation is more pressure on hardware vendors to release specifications and free software. Perhaps if Ubuntu Touch takes off, Canonical will be in a better position to provide that pressure.

<comment><USER3> _What we need to fix the situation is more pressure on hardware vendors to release specifications and free software._

Very much this. Even with the vast power that kernel developers wield, even with offers to write (for free!) and integrate drivers into mainline[1], the biggest pull is still consumers. Push your hardware vendors to (at a minimum) release specs; it's the right thing to do.

[1] - For seven freaking years this offer has stood: [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/487536](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/487536) And yet we still have retarded fucking hardware companies who won't release specs. Fuck 'em - don't buy from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Android fragmentation is real, but screen sizes are not part of the issue. The whole system is built around the idea of supporting different screen sizes, and provides you with the tools you need to handle them.

The real fragmentation is in hardware support (don't get me started on OpenGL- ES drivers) and manufacturers that modify the OS in crazy ways. It's quite frustrating to receive crash reports with stack traces showing a crash originating in some manufacturers custom code, with no way of knowing what went wrong.

<comment><USER7> For the wild west of Android html5 hybrid development, fragmentation is a huge problem. Different manufacturers roll different implementations that behave differently. Javascript event propagation varied and broke my app on my last HTML5 project. Luckily, the chrome view will be the default webview from KitKat onwards, but it will take at least two years for 4.4+ to become ubiquitous.

<comment><USER8> This! I feel your pain. I'm on the same boat, trying to support mobile HTML5 on Android.

To be fair, iOS has it's own issues with HTML5 development.

<comment><USER7> I think iOS' HTML5 issues (webview throttling) are self induced though. Apple has a vested interest in developers learning, and being locked into their proprietary ecosystem.

A bunch of devs building slick HTML5 apps would go against this.

<comment><USER9> It was pretty stupid of them to use the new llvm-based javascript JIT for webviews in iOS 8, then...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At the same time, Apple is strongly pushing developers to not use pixel perfect layouts anymore that are dependent on particular screen sizes, and to use auto layout everywhere. If you follow Apple's iOS 8 guidance, you really shouldn't have any problem dealing with even the original graph of "terrible" fragmentation.

Which prompts the question whether it was really that bad after all, or just a gut reaction to something that was different.

<comment><USER11> So I'm just a old town country ios programmer for fun, so please correct me if I'm wrong. But wasn't the original issue that there wasn't a great way to deal with the multiple layouts/issues on the early 2.3 and below android models?

ios8 makes it plainly obvious that "something" is coming that will throw out the "the size of the screen shall be 5 and 5 shall be the size of counting, not 3 nor 4 but 5" paradigm. That or multitasking similar to windows 8 maybe.

But this shouldn't be all that crazy hard, we had how many years to deal with 800x600/1024x768/etc...

<comment><USER12> The core infrastructure for variable screen sizes and densities was introduced in Android 1.6 Donut (September 2009). There have been improvements with newer versions (e.g. more sizes and densities), but that's straightforward to deal with.

The other big improvement was the Fragments API that came with Android 3.0 Honeycomb (February 2011), but that came with a compatibility library that worked all the way back to Donut. And it was more about decomposing your UI into components that could be arranged differently for phones and tablets, not about adjusting a single UI within a device class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Android is shooting itself in the foot here by making things look more complicated than they might be. Take a look at the documentation for screen support ([http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support...](http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html)).

They split phone sizes (2-10") into four generalized sizes (small, normal, large, xlarge). Then they split screen density into generalized densities (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi) based on 3:4:6:8 ratios. The example on the page lists 5 different layout XML files (the 4 previously mentioned + extra large landscape orientation) for different sizes, and three folders for image assets in different densities.

But, there are tablet layouts for Android 3.2+, which use a completely different system based on size qualifiers where you can provide minimum/maximum pixel sizes for layouts.

The logic for iOS seems super simple in comparison.

With a few Android projects under your belt, you have probably internalized how everything works, and which parts are fringe cases you can ignore. But if you're new to this (or a journalist/analyst with limited technical depth), it seems like an absolute mess. Simply rewriting this documentation and providing better tutorials and resources could go very far to clarify the situation.

<comment><USER14> Generalised sizes are a deprecated way of handling screen sizes on Android, from version 3.2 onward we use far more traditional dividers such as minimum width. For many developers it's viable to support only 4+, which lets you avoid a lot of the trickiness.

Also, even if you are supporting 2.x, you don't HAVE to have a separate layout file for each generalized size. If you make a flexible layout that works on all sizes, you can just declare it once (and doing so is not difficult in most cases).

I totally agree the documentation needs work. Some areas have not been updated in a very long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never got the problem anyway. What magic one resolution devices did you use to develop on before the iPhone?

<comment><USER12> Well there was that generation of web designers that believed the world was 1024x768 (or 800x600).

<comment><USER16> To be fair, the belief is a little more that anything wider than 1024 is typically too wide. Find me a site that lets text run for even that long. Typically you box things in much more heavily.

<comment><USER17> That should really be the decision of the browser user, but sadly years of poor training has led far too many people to just maximize every window, no matter how big their screen is.

<comment><USER18> Poor training? Or could it, perhaps, be a conscious desire to be at least semi-modal? Unless I have physically separate screens, I much prefer to have a single, maximized application going on onscreen almost all of the time. That doesn't mean I want only one application running, but that I generally only want one occupying my attention at any given moment. (The very existence of "distraction-free writing" applications makes me believe I'm not alone here.)

<comment><USER19> Do you use a tiling WM?

<comment><USER18> Name it, I've used it. I _prefer_ full-screen, one-task-at-a-time if I can have it, no matter what _you_ may like. Neither side is wrong (or doing it wrong). I just don't want the stuff I'm not using right now to be there. Period.

<comment><USER19> Well, you're wrong in that you seem to think I was trying to convince you of something. I was just curious as to your setup, since my habits run similar.

Personally, I use ratpoison, typically with one window full-screen.

<comment><USER18> Many, many years (just about 30 of them, in fact) of people telling me I really, really want tiled or overlapping windows despite my protestations have conditioned me to expect it.

<comment><USER19> Understood - but you've still not addressed my question :-P

What's your setup like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "That's the beauty of Android's massive market share, we can ignore all the people with phones running Android 2.3, those with odd and rare screen sizes, and target only 4.0 and above"

Well duh. If you ignore all the things that give you trouble/fragmentation you automagically get a trouble-free/fragmentation-free environment. Silly

<comment><USER21> I think he is trying to say that because there are so many Android devices out there, you can afford to ignore the troublesome ones and still have a huge market to cater to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Screen fragmentation was a large problem even before Android. When I was first learning to program, one of the platforms I initially targeted was Windows Mobile, version 6.0. On this platform fragmentation was limited because there were only so many devices developed for Windows Mobile (although screen resolutions were generally different for QVGA vs non-QVGA screens, and smartphones with keyboards had smaller resolutions). Nevertheless, fragmentation was still a problem.

Without an api adequate for handling different screen sizes and resolutions, it was hard to develop an application for one device then port it to other devices. I use the term "port" because usually this was actual porting; in some cases it would have been better to have a separate binary for each target device than to have a single binary for all devices.

I think the reason Windows Mobile developers were so rare compared to developers for emerging platforms like iOS and Android despite Windows Mobile having been around longer is that the alternatives learned from WM's poor example to create better apis. When I switched from Windows Mobile to playing around with Android 2.1, there was so much more I could do with layouts and the simulator in the IDE to target more devices. Newer versions of iOS, Android 4, Windows Phone, and others have all been improved in this regards even more, to the point that I now think of screen fragmentation as something of a non-issue when I tinker with mobile apps.

</comment><comment><USER23> One thing that the op doesn't address is that the top 10 devices they have selected account for only a fraction of android market. I think there is an implicit assumption that if you cover the top 10 device models you can consider that a proxy for the overall android market but the original fragmentation report shows that to even cover 50% of the market you need to consider around 60-70 device models.

<comment><USER24> i think his larger point is that it's not screen _size_ that causes layout fragmentation, it's screen _aspect ratio_ , which is (basically definitionally) more consistent across devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm developing my first Android application and am beginning to work on the interface in earnest.

Can anyone recommend some good tutorials or guides for producing elegant layouts that respond well to different screen sizes? I understand the basic mechanics and laid out in the dev guides, but I'm a bit lots when it comes to putting it all together elegantly.

</comment><comment><USER26> This post pulls a neat trick: the diagram they criticise is all android devices while their diagram is only phones. And suddenly:

> The above diagram and analysis also only take into account phones, not > tablets, _where designing for physical screen size becomes more important > than resolution._

</comment><comment><USER27> What I don't get and frustrates me, as a developer, is the impossibility to use SVG in Android. We need to handle a lot of PNGs, in result.

Android is re-compiling/re-optimizing for ART, so why not re-export the SVG in PNG format, at the right screen size, at first run?

</comment><comment><USER28> I think that OS fragmentation/backwards-compatibility is more of a problem than screen fragmentation, definitely more so than iOS.

</comment><comment><USER8> my main issue with Android fragmentation is trying to support HTML5 Apps with PhoneGap/Cordova and various JS toolkits (Sencha Touch, JQueryMobile, Dojo).

Each version(4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) has a slightly different version of the default browser and WebViewUI component(and don't get me started on Samsung devices which have their own issues regarding the default browser) with it's own quirks and rendering issues.

They kinda fixed that in KitKat 4.4, using Chromium 30 as the basis of the WebViewUI component, but KitKat deployments in the wild are in the single digits.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hmm, the whole write-up doesn't really disprove the screen fragmentation issue. Mostly downplays it. That there are layout tools to help you cater for multiple screens for example, doesn't mean they do that work for you. Or that the "slight variation in width" he mentions should not also be taken care of.

(Which is just part of the whole problem -- there's also the hardware features and OS version issues which are even more important).

<comment><USER30> > Or that the "slight variation in width" he mentions should not also be taken > care of.

What exactly is the issue with this? Just like with any other sane widget toolkit designed since the 80's for varying screen or window sizes, Android's layouts and widgets work perfectly fluid to occupy more or less space. One layout works just as well on a 4-inch phone as it does on a 5.5-inch phone, and it will naturally fit more content on the bigger screen.

The only problem is with tablet screens where blowing up a user interface designed for a small phone screen technically works but is pretty terrible to use. This is no different from another unnamed mobile platform where you also need to design a separate tablet layout.

<comment><USER29> > _What exactly is the issue with this? Just like with any other sane widget > toolkit designed since the 80 's for varying screen or window sizes, > Android's layouts and widgets work perfectly fluid to occupy more or less > space._

It becomes an issue if you're not a sloppy kind of designer/programmer, who just lets the widget flow to occupy more available space. It's not like design only use things like a text entry boxes or a web-views (widgets that just letting them get more space is usually fine and natural).

Second, it becomes an issue for every app where you want to have a custom interface -- so the built-in Android widget and layout are of no use to you. This holds for most games, customly designed apps, etc.

<comment><USER31>
        It becomes an issue if you're not a sloppy kind of
        designer/programmer, who just lets the widget flow to
        occupy more available space.

So it's sloppy to build your UI in the exact way it was intended to be built? Not hard-coding every widget sizes is somehow... sloppy? Because the impression I get is that if you can make your app handle different screen sizes appropriately _without_ having to meticulously hand code for every resolution, you're coming out way ahead of the game. That way you present a nice, consistent UX across all devices, and don't have to scramble every time a new resolution or device size comes out.

It's also possible to do this with custom interfaces - a little extra attention to your layout engine will net huge benefits in terms of time saved in designing layouts for each of the possible resolutions.

Hardware variations, vendor customizations, capabilities variance - these are real issues. Building a UI that flows well across most resolutions and sizes? Not so much.

[edit for grammar]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reporting wrong dpi is the real issue.

<comment><USER33> How many phone out there do that? I'm really curious on this and who I should watch out for. Also how do you detect and deal with it?

<comment><USER32> Don't have the answer. I tried with i-Ball tablet (India made), noticed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So if you ignore all the weird screen sizes it is only fragmented into 4 different sizes? And you still have to create layouts for each of those sizes? I wouldn't say the point was very strongly made.

<comment><USER35> I can confirm this, at least for games. For the last game I made, I had to have all assets in 4 sizes, which makes it look nice in all resolutions ranging from 800x450 to Nexus10 2560x1600. I maintain the aspect ratio and have background that is larger (both wider and taller) than "playing field", so that I can fill up that space on devices with different aspect ratio. What article fails to mention that all Android devices have aspect ratio between 4:3 and 16:9, and you should design around that.

The background image looks like this (not my game):

[http://blog.gemserk.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/mainmenu-...](http://blog.gemserk.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/mainmenu-areas-example2-300x210.png)

the area inside red rectangle is guaranteed to be shown on all devices, and area outside that is the filler.

Now, to make sure your "action area":

\- uses device native resolution for crisp image and

\- is not too small

...you have to have all the assets in different sizes. I found that having 4 different sizes does this nicely:

        1. targeting 800x450 action area
        2. targeting 1280x720
        3. targeting 1920x1080
        4. targeting 2560x1440

Now, you could pick different boundaries, but a lot of devices use 800, 1280 or 1920 as their base width.

The only drawback to this is that some tablets with 1024px width would have a lot of filler area because they would use 800x450 assets. So, having:

        5. targeting 1024x576

would make it complete. But I'm not sure there are many 1024px devices out there, so I skipped that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Don't think there's any fragmentation problems on Android OS?

Just try creating a mobile website that supports common "modern" devices. Have fun trying to wrap your brain around all the idiosyncrasies across various versions and browser implementations (Android Stock vs Chrome etc) that will endlessly dirty your code if you want the site to look at all correct in a majority of Android devices.

The Android emulator is pretty nice... once you figure out how to set it up for whatever device you're trying to test. It's a ridiculous resource hog though by default (there are ways to mitigate this if you're on an Intel chip). Say what you will about simulation vs. emulation but the iOS Simulator is a dream to work with (again, for web development) and I've never had it mislead me even though it isn't truly emulated. But then you realize there is no way to install the Chrome browser unless you are hooked up to the Android Marketplace (even if you're on the latest version of OS). The best you can get is Chromium, which is a pain to install and doesn't work on some AVDs.

All that ranting aside, I've never had a problem with screen sizes, even when working on responsive stuff. But, yeah, Android is basically the Internet Explorer of the mobile space. You'll keep hearing "oh the next version will fix that!" and it may... but you'll be stuck supporting the versions that are broken for years to come.

<comment><USER37> That's fragmentation in web browsers, that has fuck-all to do with the OS or Android's SDK or anything the author is talking about.

<comment><USER36> Oh thanks for breaking it down for me. When it comes to web development, for all intents and purposes, they can be thought of as one in the same since the browser version issued with a device is tied to OS version[1]. Of course some users will upgrade OS and/or browser, independently in some cases, which complicates things further.

[1] [http://jimbergman.net/webkit-version-in-android- version/](http://jimbergman.net/webkit-version-in-android-version/)

<comment><USER33> In that link he mentions it but it bears a little breaking down. His chart is showing the versions of the rendering engine that is used to back a WebView. It isn't for the browser included with the phone. Google has requirements how WebViews are implemented but the requirements for the default browser are pretty light. Even if the user doesn't swap out their browser you don't know what you might get. See section 3.4 of the CDD for the requirements.

<comment><USER36> "Even if the user doesn't swap out their browser you don't know what you might get."

My point exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Choose boring technology - <AUTHOR> http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology <comment><AUTHOR> Oldie but sort-of classic by now. TL;DR: use new shiny technologies in moderation and rely on time tested ones that have proved themselves.

Specially loved the footnotes (chuckled at 2)</comment>


Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? - Review  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/trigger-warning-is-fear-being-offesnive-killing-free-speech-mick-hume-review <comment><AUTHOR> This is a review by Galen Strawson of the book by Nick Hume.

I agree with Strawson's thoughts about the cause of outrage and offence not being narcissism but "something vastly more toxic: righteous indignation felt on behalf of others".

"righteous indignation felt on behalf of others – typically a group with which one identifies or sympathises. ... It's precisely because such righteous indignation is not narcissistic, and is not experienced as mere self-concern, that it comes with a feeling of absolute purity – purity of cause and of justification – that seems to license absolute violence.... the anger is cleared to express itself without inhibition."

Group psychology - The defence of the group will always come before the protection of the self. Having a group behind you allows your actions to be justified - no matter how badly behaved, aggressive or morally wrong - <USER2> the group justifies these as right and good.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is no right to not be "triggered". There is a right to free speech. The expansion of the victim mentality in the last few years blows my mind. Maybe I'm just getting older? I don't fit in with this society anymore.

<comment><USER4> Especially since a "right to not be triggered" is impossible to enforce.

Let's say I had a traumatic experience involving a dolphin and an harmonica in my youth. Am I gonna demand that people/movies/songs/... give me a trigger warning before talking about dolphins and harmonicas?

People have their own experience and it's great (or not when it's traumatic), but why demand from others to _know_ about them before talking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is appearing in the _Guardian_ \---then, no, not anymore.

</comment><comment><USER6> No.

<comment><USER7> Yes.</comment></comment>


Lost In Space: Chiat Day's Deskless Office Disaster (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. I'd always wondered how that experiment turned out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I was motivated to dig up the article which I had vaguely remembered, when I read that apparently desk less offices are a growing trend: [http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/18/brave_new_of...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/18/brave_new_office.php)

Made me wonder whether this trend is because companies have learned from the previous failures, or whether it is because they have forgotten about them.</comment></comment>


DOJ Subpoenas Twitter About Five Users Over a Smiley Emoji Tweet - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171023/18275838465/doj-subpoenas-twitter-about-popehat-dissent-doe-others-over-smiley-emoji-tweet.shtml <comment><USER2> One of the subpoenas was about PopeHat, who of course is public, and he wrote about it on his blog. Why demand twitter unmask a public account?

<comment><USER3> Link to said popehat blog article, [https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/24/in- which-my-identity-is-s...](https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/24/in-which-my- identity-is-sought-by-federal-grand-jury-subpoena/)

Speculated reasoning in the comments on the article was that it then gives an admissible account of who owns the twitter name. Otherwise the assertions about who owns it are inadmissable hearsay. That said it's still really weird that the accounts were subpeonaed

EDIT: fixed link. Just noticed it went to an old article. Apparently the new one is up but not listed on the homepage? (Similar topics so I didn't notice right away)

<comment><USER4> Link to the actual post:

[https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/24/in-which-my-identity- is-s...](https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/24/in-which-my-identity-is-sought-by- federal-grand-jury-subpoena/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks just fixed mine. Didn't realize that it was the wrong one since the topics were similar and i grabbed it off the homepage. That's one thing popehat has always suffered from, weird caching/publishing their rss feed was running a few weeks out of date for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What amazes me is somewhere along the process someone with power didn't notice and think "Hey you know this all seems like a bit much considering what we're looking at here..."

<comment><USER6> Never underestimate the power given when people take the attitude that something they are looking at is "not my problem".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to tell my son that there will always be work for computer security specialists and that he should go for that. This makes me wonder about my advice.

<comment><USER8> I assume that if you're freelance you're at more risk of finding yourself on the receiving end of a CFAA violation. What I wonder is that if security researchers who work for domestic companies face the same degree of scrutiny that these freelance researchers do.

I guess that if you work for a company you're probably not looking at anyone's website that's not explicitly paying you/your company and under some contract.

<comment><USER9> While what you posted makes sense with the right definitions, I think you might understand better if you're careful with your definitions of "security specialist" (what SubiculumCode said), "security researcher" (what you said), and the other classifications.

Not all specialists or researchers are doing penetration testing. Of those, not all of them are penetration testing third party stuff, and of those, not all of them are doing it without permission. That's the only one that will get you into trouble.

I'm not, technically, a "security specialist" of any stripe, but I take a very careful interest in the defensive side of security, and am currently in the middle of implementing a fairly security-sensitive system. I don't worry that the FBI is going to bust down my door at 2am because I've tweaked the API of my code to make it harder to write cross-site scripting attacks, or because I fixed the architecture so that authentication is done very early in the request cycle instead of ad-hoc and inconsistently very late in the request cycle in a way that requires every developer of every individual web page to have to enforce all authentication. Most security work is going to involve internal matters and the fixing thereto, and, yeah, the job isn't going anywhere any time soon.

(Though it does have the eternal challenge of convincing people they need to pay for it, and the problem that even in companies where programming is the major product like Facebook and Google, you're _still_ going to be a cost center.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't even anymore. If this story is anywhere near true -- and I have no reason to believe it is not -- then what the hell do we as citizens DO about it?

How can we put an end to ridiculous infringements on rights and wasteful use of resources?

It certainly starts with voting for representatives that won't allow thus, but damn. There aren't a lot of good choices out there. And even if there are, how do we fix the issues that allow the bad actors to get elected over a "good" rep?

<comment><USER11> The problem isn't the government, it's the "citizens." We're a society of cowards, who are afraid of everything and want the government to do something about it. _E.g._ crime rates are at historic lows, but more than half of Americans say that they worry a "great deal" about crime: [http://news.gallup.com/poll/190475/americans-concern- crime-c...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/190475/americans-concern-crime-climbs- year-high.aspx).

It's not getting any better, it's probably getting worse. We're not that far away from people being arrested for the tweets they post: [http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/17/us/twitter-journalist- strobe-e...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/17/us/twitter-journalist-strobe- epilepsy/index.html). Millennials don't see anything wrong with that sort of thing: [https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why- it...](https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad- idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970).

<comment><USER12> Not true that crime rates are at historic lows, particularly violent crime which is over double the 1960 rate:

[http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime- tre...](http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-trend/)

But if you are in the Chicago area, you should know that like wealth, crime is incredibly unevenly distributed. There are communities that have effectively zero risk of violent crime, and communities within 30min drive that have violent crime rates that rival the most dangerous cities in the world.

<comment><USER13> >Not[e] true that crime rates are at historic lows, particularly violent crime which is over double the 1960 rate:

Which ignores the context of the data that while still double the 1960 rate, it is also _half the peak 1991 rate_ , and has generally been decreasing since then. The murder rate is similar to the early 1960's, after it's peak in the 70s/80s.

I have nothing to disagree with your comment on Chicago, which sounds plausibly accurate.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't ignoring the parent context, which was that crime is at historic lows which is not true.

<comment><USER13> I found this neat crime vs population density study, but as with most things, you answer one question and end up with more:

[https://blog.nycdatascience.com/student-works/pressure- cooke...](https://blog.nycdatascience.com/student-works/pressure-cooker- higher-population-densities-increase-crime/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is Ted Stevens a fool for saying the Internet is a series of tubes, but so many otherwise level-headed are fine pretending networks are houses?

<comment><USER15> It's a metaphor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So... Tweeting now is a form of assaulting ?

<comment><USER17> Yes. The victim had epilepsy, and the tweet was something like "You deserve a seizure!" accompanied by a rapidly flashing animated GIF.

<comment><USER16> Oh. Didn't think of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And this is why you should be very careful what you tweet. Once its out there it can never be deleted. Even with a fake name and handle. Your ip address, mac address, location, etc.

<comment><USER19> Mac address? What is possibly recording that?

<comment><USER20> Many WiFi networks record MAC addresses to help associate devices with IP/users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So a security researcher who was angry about getting raided and hit with a CFAA accusation after an unauthorized access of private medical data started doxxing the FBI agent responsible on Twitter. And in response the FBI is requesting information about the Twitter users that were part of the conversation.

Doesn't seem quite as sensational once you know the backstory. The author is right that the charges aren't the strongest but we can't be obtuse and pretend that posting the personal information of the officer and his family couldn't meet the bar for intimidation or harassment.

<comment><USER22> Doxxing? Hardly. Looking at the Twitter thread, he did far less than a lazy casual fan of a TV star would do on an average Google/Facebook search.

> Doesn't seem quite as sensational once you know the backstory.

Though your summary was sensationalised by the addition of the term doxxing (usually negative connotations there), whether you meant it to be or not. It is all about how the spin is put on it. An innocuous situation can be played up, or down, by either side.

P.S. @Spivak, it's your 1024 days anniversary on HN! :-)

<comment><USER23> actually if you read the attachments at the end of the referenced complaint[1] the FBI is claiming he did a _bit_ more then look up the agent and his family. He also sent various semi-threating messages to them on facebook.

Still not sure why that gives them grounds to subpoena everyone on the thread.

[1] [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4116064/Shafer- Co...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4116064/Shafer- Complaint.pdf)

<comment><USER22> Darn it. Apologies for going off with my half baked facts ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>