Leap Motion: hand and finger motion controller - <AUTHOR> http://www.leapmotion.com

<comment><USER2> Previously on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002418>

</comment><comment><USER3> So it's a smaller Kinect (with no Linux support) for half the price? I'm assuming it's using infrared, they don't say... Personally I'm still waiting for a company to discover ultrasound and combine this with tactile feedback. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e8tsG4uIt0>

<comment><USER4> I agree tactile feedback would be helpful. But it's not as critical here as it would be on a normal touch screen. Here you at least have visual feedback. Because on a touchscreen you only have two states: touch and not touch. Your app cannot know where the user finger is when he's not touching, that's why there are no cursors and onFocus elements lose their meaning.

But if the leap is as good as in the videos, then your app could show a cursor of where the fingers are before touching the UI. And you can use that as a visual feedback to the user to help him mentally locate himself. So I'd guess using a virtual keyboard on the leap would be much more efficient to work on than a touchscreen virtual keyboard.

Of course, since the existing apps won't be expecting this, it will be hard to use existing stuff. Ideally, people will have to adapt their apps to this input instead of trying to just migrate from touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that the user has no tactile feedback. It could quickly become very painful to hold one's hand/arm over the device.

Maybe they should orient the device toward the table and transform it into a virtual trackpad.</comment>


(In)Accuracy of Alexa and Compete - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-blog-stats It's a little dated--2 years old--but maybe someone can submit a link to a more recent experiment? <comment><AUTHOR> It's a little dated--2006. Does anyone know of a more recent experiment?</comment>


Show HN: Arcamens – A project management platform on top of Django - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arcamens/arcamens <comment><USER2> I'd personally be interested in figuring out the question of whether the stated position is true.

If a person made some commits to a certain codebase without any form of contract or agreement, do they have any legal position to demand it not be published?

Especially if they cannot actually prove they wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't really about a software project. It seems to be two people in a disagreement over ownership / payment / whatever and has been posted to HN to get some attention.</comment>


Google Inbox - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/an-inbox-that-works-for-you.html <comment><USER4> Congrats to Google on shipping!

Side question: am I the only person fully satisfied by my email workflow? I practice inbox 0- if an email is in my inbox, it means something needs to be done about it (whether it's replying, filing a bug report, writing a patch, etc). Once it's done, it gets archived. I star the stuff that I'll need to refer to later, like tickets for a flight or concert. I then have a few server side rules to do things like mark certain classes of emails as read (eg build logs, mailing lists), so as to not flood my phone with notifications. And... that's it.

(edit: oh and yes, I am also very diligent about unsubscribing from the stuff I know will never be relevant, rather than just archiving it and forgetting about it until another email from the same source comes up a week later. After a few weeks of consistently practicing this, your inbox gets much better)

I get probably a few hundred emails a day at most (work+personal), and this system works great for me. I know people like Paul Graham think email is utterly broken, but when you're at their level I'm not sure ~any~ tool will be satisfying - they're absolutely outliers.

So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so?

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say I have a problem with email as it is today, but I am the exact opposite of you; I never archive or organize any of my email (besides rules for labeling email lists and groups so they directly bypass my inbox). I appear to have 11,600+ emails in my Gmail inbox.

If I need something, I just search for it. As the Gmail search is really, really, good, I can pretty much instantly bring up any thread. I therefore don't see any value in spending even a second of time in trying to organize a piece of email. I also really like the "Social" and "Promotions" tabs Gmail added, it's like a smart filter for "unimportant stuff" that I don't even need to bother looking at but can search for if needed. I look forward to Inbox automating and highlighting actionable items even more (check in for flight etc, should just be a button press without even opening the email).

I would rather apply a label, or mark a message as unread (this is what I typically do), if it is something I need to return to later. Most emails can either be directly acted upon, or don't require a followup at a later time, so optimizing the common case down to "do nothing" makes sense for me.

<comment><USER6> I think you have to really consciously process your email though, in order for your system to work. I have gotten really bad at email lately and it's because of this: I leave my emails in my inbox like you. Except I archive something that I'm really, truly done with (never wanna see it again, not even for reference; archive = trash). But now my inbox is a mix of things I haven't yet read, I've read but haven't acted on, things I've read and keep in my inbox for reference, and things that I'm done with but I'm ignoring them so hard that they never actually get archived like they should. "Mark as unread" is used at a whim, usually when I read something on my phone and think "I should read this on my computer" so I flag it unread to make sure it stands out. Nothing is starred, except I have colored stars and mark a bill with a green star before I archive it (this is a remnant of a system I tried in the past but didn't fully stick).

As a result, I end up missing or not doing things, and re-reading emails I've already done, and my inbox is just a big chronologically-ordered mess.

This is my personal email anyway. My work email I'm a little more careful with, but it also piles up over time and rarely something will slip through the cracks. Outlook's flag/reminder system is decent at least, so it's manageable, but it still at times feels disorganized and just not quite how I want it to be.

<comment><USER5> I think you're still trying to do too many things at once and mixing concepts. Simplify: If an email requires a followup, label it with "todo". Don't archive email (except as an alternative to delete), don't try mark read things as unread, etc. Then, in order to check your current list of actions, have a view of only the emails labeled with "todo". I try to review this list twice a day or so. As you work off the list, remove the label from email when done! This workflow is almost identical to the Outlook flag system which I also like. In this way, the goal is only to get your todo list to zero, which is a very small subset of all items that are arriving in your inbox.

I think the key is to use one system consistently, and to have a concise view of your current open items with minimal manual effort.

<comment><USER7> I agree with the don't archive email... Who cares if all my mail is in my inbox? That's what search and labels are for, but... Why bother with a "todo" label? Emails I need to act on are simply "starred".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using Inbox at El Goog for a while now, and I am happy to answer questions (in between dealing with a newborn...)

FWIW, I really like it, and use it exclusively for my work and personal accounts. Inbox functions very much more like a ToDo list than it does an email client. Here are the workflows I have:

Work:

I filter all mailing lists into different clusters that I have appear at 7AM every morning. I then scrub through the subject lists to see what happened yesterday, pinning things that require my attention, and then sweeping the rest. At this point, everything pinned in my Inbox is now "something I need to look at". I then read the email, and decide if it has an action item or not. If it's actionable and I intend to do it today, I'll leave it pinned. If it's not something I'm going to do today, I'll Snooze it until I think I'll have time to do it, or at least evaluate another Snooze time.

To make sure I don't miss important emails, I have a cluster that I put all email that has myself explicitly in the To: line, and have that appear whenever anything arrives. I do occasionally miss things that didn't have me in the To: and went to my 7AM clusters, but this is few and far between, and I hazard happens less than my Gmail inbox where I had far more cognitive load on managing the emails there.

Home:

The defaults are tuned well for home, and I use the clusters (like Travel, Purchases etc) like I do for work, having them appear at 7AM each day. Most things get swept immediately, and again I pin things that require my attention and are maybe ToDo items.

Inbox is really opinionated about its workflow: if you struggle against it, you'll have a bad time, and you'll prefer Gmail's flexibility. However, if you are Inbox Zero or GTD minded, I think you'll love Inbox. Inbox is my ToDo list, and replaces Wunderlist/Things/Evernote/Google Tasks for me. I set reminders to myself for work items that don't have an email attached.

I encourage everyone to give it a week to see if it suits them, but I'm afraid I'm all out of invites for now :(

<comment><USER9> I wrote a review of the Inbox on facebook (that was my deal with the person that invited me). Cross-posting here if it interests you.

My review of Google's new Inbox, based on two hours of use (thanks [redacted] for the invite).

First the good parts: 1\. I really like bundles. The idea that I can "Sweep" all the promotional emails I get in one click fills me with glee (and marketers with anxiety, I imagine). It's also nice to have all the travel related emails in one place. Never again am I going to be confused whether I should be going to SFO or SJC.

2\. I like the new compose. My emails are too long (both those I write and those you do), and I'm praying that showing just one line to write a response will make emails briefer.

3\. Snooze/procrastinate: How I like the idea of "someday". Combined with my own future discounting, I'm not going to feel guilty about not responding anymore.

The not-so-good parts:

1\. Boy is this opinionated software! There is an inexorable push to empty your inbox. I guess I'll like it if I get with the program.

2\. It's too pretty. No, seriously. The title-bar is too bright, there are too many people's faces, too many colors and font styles. I like my email drab so I can focus on what people are saying and not get distracted by the colors.

That's all I see with two hours of use. Oh, also, I don't know how to invite people yet. If someone tells me, I'm happy to invite y'all.

edit: formatting.

<comment><USER10> My review of Inbox, based on about 4 hours of use:

#. I hate Bundles. I rarely if ever have more than 5 emails in my inbox. Hiding things from me is counterproductive.

#. WAY too bright and big. Regular gmail fits 3x as much information in the same space, and I was already unhappy with how bright and big regular gmail is.

#. Love snooze. I've been using boomerang for ages.

#. No idea where the compose-suggestions are coming from; they're for people I haven't communicated with since _before gmail even came out_.

#. In general, just feels very clunky compared to Gmail.

<comment><USER11> Why are you concerned with the amount of information it can hold if you only ever have 5 emails in your inbox?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure what this 'inbox' does, but from judging from the video it's about a bunch of twenty-something hipsters from California high-fiving each other.

<comment><USER13> You could sum up the post dot-com startup craze with "a bunch of twenty- something hipsters from California high-fiving each other". Nothing more than an unparalleled amount of resources thrown at solving first world problems that millenials have.

<comment><USER14> Yes because as we all know email is exclusively the domain of the young, idle Bourgeoisie

<comment><USER15> Well, that's who Inbox is targeted to with the given video, at least.

<comment><USER16> That's who you target first, to spread it toward people who aren't so technically inclined. iPhone wasn't for moms at first, and now many don't know what they'd do without it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been using this for the last 4 hours or so. I closed the old gmail in my browser and swapped default apps on my phone.

My quick thoughts on the iPhone app:

Good overall. It's just as good as most of the new line of productivity focused apps that have been released (and acquired) over the last year.

My quick thoughts on the web interface (inbox.google.com):

This is where it's really shining for me. Finally email doesn't feel like a spreadsheet with buttons anymore. It feels like Gmail should feel in 2014. Now that I've started using this, it would feel painful to go back to normal Gmail. You just kind of have to start using it to understand, but I really like it.

All of the new features (reminders, pinning emails, bundles, and one-button archiving of bundles like promotions and forums) are great . I've used almost every new feature already and they all feel like a natural part of a flow.

The only nitpick I have at the moment is the integrated chat in the web interface. It's defaulted to the Hangouts style chat, which I'm not a huge fan of. In old Gmail you have a choice of using the normal version of chat or Hangouts chat, and I've always turned off Hangouts chat. I really wish you could do that here, but I'm not seeing an option for it and my guess is there will never be one.

Overall however I'm really happy with this new version of Gmail and will continue to use it everyday.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh god, the video? Amazing models doing fun recreational stuff. At the end of the video I didn't feel I knew anymore more about Inbox than I did before.

I mean I get it... but it still feels stupid to do something like that, worse to sit through it and realize you're not watching to be informed by substance, you're watching to be convinced by style.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's what I got in response to my invite request:

      Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

         email@example.com

      Technical details of permanent failure:
      Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the relay gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com by gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com. [2607:f8b0:400e:c04::e].

      We recommend contacting the other email provider at firstname.lastname@example.com for further information about the cause of this error.

      The error that the other server returned was:
      550-5.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that
      550-5.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. For more
      550-5.2.1 information, please visit
      550 5.2.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6592 j1si1502294pdb.1 - <USER3>

Nice one, Google.

<comment><USER20> I received the same error; I tried again a few minutes later and it worked.

<comment><USER21> Same here. Got the error, emailed a second time, it worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I got the demo on Monday, I was struck most by how Google Now technology was integrated. That's why I called my piece (on Medium/Backchannel) "Inbox, the app child of Gmail and Google Now." Now that I have the app, I'm enjoying it. Very clean.

</comment><comment><USER23> Chrome only, it seems. Disappointing. [https://twitter.com/brianleroux/status/524987137892954112](https://twitter.com/brianleroux/status/524987137892954112)

<comment><USER24> It doesn't use any Chrome specific features and it will work on FF, but it needs to be optimized to get buttery smooth 60fps animations. As you know, the logic for when the various browsers do layout, create layers, upload them to the GPU, etc is different, and that causes divergence rendering performance. It was hard enough to do this on Chrome, it just takes time.

We also ran into a recent difference in the way sparse JS arrays as handled. We use sparse JS arrays for some data structures, but array.splice(0) on Chrome runs much faster than FF when using this to clone a sparse array.

There's no intent to exclude Firefox, engineers are staying late in the office working on it.

<comment><USER25> What an incredibly disingenuous reply. Chrome is truly this decade's IE, and watching Google try to play this kind of crap off would be disappointing if it wasn't so insulting.

"There's no intent to exclude Firefox", it just turns out you've done that for like 2 major product releases in a row along with a giant flashing button suggesting that the user downloads Chrome. I'm not stupid, you don't have to lie to my face.

<comment><USER24> I take offense to someone calling me a liar.

Try typing this into a JS Console: var xx = []; xx[30000000]=42; var yy = xx.slice(0);

It took almost a week to track down this problem where FF was taking 13 seconds to startup. We've spent a lot of time working on this and it is always in the cards to support this on all the other browsers. We've fixed tons of bugs and have gotten closer to it working the way it should, and people have spent countless hours staying very late at the office to try and finish a polished FF release before the deadline, and we just didn't make it in time. I spent the past 5 years of my time working on open web stuff.

Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just _flat out wrong_. This was a "mobile first" designed app, it's not designed to promote browsers of any stripe, it's designed to promote an experience for gmail users. If we really wanted to shit over a platform, why bother with iOS? Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't.

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately, V8 implements slice() fast at the expense of correctness. A basic edge-case testcase like [https://bug1087963.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=85...](https://bug1087963.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8510317) fails.

That said, it's clearly possible to do this fast _and_ correctly (e.g. IE manages this).

But as a note, some V8 folks would like to remove the buggy-but-fast thing completely. See [https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3612#c2](https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3612#c2)

<comment><USER24> Thanks Mozilla for the quick reaction. We were not really blocked on this as a for-in/Object.getOwnPropertyNames loop is an easy workaround, it's more that finding the cause of an unexplained slow down took a bit of time (the usage comes from another engineer's rpc-serialization library)

Is there a point of contact for rendering/paint performance issues? We've had problems in Chrome where we had to work around excessive invalidation/paints, but those were diagnosed by using Chrome's layer/paint debugging tools and talking to Blink engineers, things may go quicker if when we encounter problems, there's someone we can email for help or a fix.

<comment><USER27> (SpiderMonkey engineer here)

What VerGreeneyes says is true for our JS engine, too: you can always file bugs in our bugzilla (in the "Core/ JavaScript Engine" component). We react to such bugs very promptly (as you can see in bug 1087963[0] which was fixed six hours after being filed) and, in many cases, can uplift patches from Nightly to Aurora and maybe Beta, so they'll reach release builds more quickly.

If for some reason you're not comfortable with filing a publicly visible bug, you can also abuse the flag for filing security-sensitive bugs. That way, we may be better able to help with issues affecting unannounced products.

For asking questions or getting our attention even more quickly, you can either join us in the #jsapi channel on irc.mozilla.org, send mail to dev.tech.js-engine[1], or send mail to one of the SpiderMonkey engineers directly. A list of these engineers is available at [2], or you can just email me at [my nick]@mozilla.com.

[0] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963) [1] [https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js- engine](https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine) [2] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Modules/Core#JavaSc...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Modules/Core#JavaScript)

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the info.

I'll make sure we file bugs as repro-case-able issues come up, but if we get stuck on a deeper mystery, we may need some more direct help. We've made a lot of progress, and from a logic and speed issue, a lot has been resolved and mostly working, but animations are janky, and from "subjective" speed point of view, it unfairly makes FF look bad. Based on previous experience with Chrome, hitting the sweet spot of 60fps is usually where the JS developers need help from the rendering engine folks.

<comment><USER27> That makes a lot of sense, yes. We can profile cases like that and get info/help from people working on the relevant components. It happens fairly frequently that we move perf bugs from the JS component into GFX or DOM bindings or something else entirely. So really, just file a bug in one of these components, maybe CC a person you already interacted with or send an email, and we'll do the triage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This looks very much like Mailbox, in particular the swipe left and right to archive/snooze a message.

<comment><USER29> It seems to take strengths from Google's email aggregation prowess + Mailbox- like functionality + Google Now integration. A smart play but yeah it's going to look very derivative in light of how awesome Mailbox already is at tackling the majority of the issues with email maintenance.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, but it's possible many folks trust Google and don't trust Dropbox (or haven't even heard of Mailbox) so it's interesting for Google to access that untapped market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I get the impression that this is more the next generation of Google Now than it is the next generation of Gmail. (Google Now is all about plucking out information from larger sources of data and bringing the most important stuff to the front as it's needed.)

I suppose I could see how this would be useful if you're using your smart watch or your phone and only want the most important facts, boiled down to their essence. (But then, doesn't Google Now already do that?)

Outside of that context, it doesn't seem like you'll ordinarily have both Inbox and Gmail open at the same time, because (as far as I can see) Inbox is just a way of better organizing and presenting the underlying data, whereas Gmail is more like the raw feed.

</comment><comment><USER32> The first video on the page is useless. Full of images of people on their computer and phones, running on the beach, etc. After watching the video, I still have no idea what Inbox really is besides "an improvement to email" (supposedly).

</comment><comment><USER33> Snoozing emails, and turning emails into tasks, is the one feature that is important to me and gmail has been missing. I have tried some hacks like "mailbox" by dropbox, and "taskforce", etc, and they worked well, but it didn't work across all platforms.

I am looking forward to trying this out.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been messing around with the new email schema stuff that Google has had out for the past year or so.

I'm really looking forward to having a more intelligent layer around email. It's a great messaging protocol but up until now it's been mostly contextless.

I don't see email going away anytime soon and projects like this just confirm its usefulness.

For those who haven't seen it yet take a look at Google's email schema stuff: [https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/](https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Certainly ties into the discussion about google making two of everything [0]. It's not clear how this product is meant to co-exist naturally with gmail.

[0]: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product- stra...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-strategy- make-two-of-everything/)

<comment><USER36> ...And Google Now and Lollipop's new Smart Notifications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks great. It seems like the extension of what they've been doing with Now for a while - all the information you need in easily actionable cards.

</comment><comment><USER38> What does this mean for [https://www.inboxapp.com/](https://www.inboxapp.com/) [http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/inbox- app/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/inbox-app/) ?

</comment><comment><USER39> I wish Google had used a less generic name. Searching for _" mail isn't showing up in my inbox"_ is either going to show you generic mail problems or Google Inbox problems. Apple's "Messages" app is a terrible name in the same way.

<comment><USER40> For a company that still makes the vast majority of it's money from search, Google sure generates a lot of products with absolutely horrible SEO.

The chrome browser vs chrome os search overlap is just awful as I found out this week.

<comment><USER41> Google don't make money on Search. They make money on Advertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I recently spent the better part of a day clearing out my work inbox because I'd heard too many people preach about inbox 0, and how the only things in their inbox were things they actively needed to work on.

This worked for all of two days for me. Now, a week later, my inbox is once again packed, with nothing being moved or deleted, just read. That's just a flow that seems to work better for me. My to-do lists that I actually need to pay attention to are in other places... I'm looking at Jira to see what needs my development attention and in what order, for example. I'm pleased with treating my email as a giant bin where everything gets thrown, but can easily be fished out again given the need.

While I imagine this is all dependent on just how much email you actually get in a day, systems like Google Inbox seem useful to me at first, until I realize I'm no longer following the system, or I'm spending too much time deciding on where an email should be filed instead of simply acting on it and moving on with my life.

<comment><USER43> You should probably work on getting less email then. I find zero inbox easy to do. It takes practice, but I also unsub from newsletters and reduced my work load. Tons of email is a symptom of either over-loading yourself with work or not managing how you communicate with people well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> After a bit of use, I think I like it.

I was curious about the relation between Inbox and Gmail. My current Gmail has a lot of filters and labels.

When looking at the labels, you have the choice of displaying them as "Clusters" in your main inbox, which is pretty convenient.

I did that to my Friends label and it is now a Friends cluster.

Note that it doesn't change anything in Gmail: the label is still here, all the filters that interact with it are still here too.

I realized that one of my friends wasn't in the cluster, so I moved it in it, and clicked on "Always do this", it prompted me : "Always move emails from firstname.lastname@example.com to Friends" . 2 remarks about this:

\- This is a very basic way of adding some emails from bundling, in the future I except to be able to specialize more: for instance sometimes I get important emails from a co-worker, but he also sends a daily reminder that I don't care so much about, I would like to be able to move it to the bundle "Useless updates" only it comes from him AND has this specific subject. That is something we can do through the Gmail filters, but not through the "Always do this" interface yet.

\- Curiously it created a filter in my old Gmail filters with as a rule : " from:email@example.com Action: " The filter has no action, so I assume that when I will be receiving an email from that friend , in Inbox it will go into the good cluster, but in Gmail the label "Friend" won't be appended to it, this means that Gmail rules/filters apply to Inbox, but Inbox rules don't apply to Gmail.

The Inbox's "Done" is doing the same thing as the Gmail's "Archive" .

I haven't been able to experience the snoozing feature yet

</comment><comment><USER45> Hmm. I'm not sure that this is actually an email app. For the record, I think Gmail and its steady incremental improvements embody email perfection -- I can't imagine going back to life before auto-sorted tabs -- and I'm totally willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt. Still... it's tough to see how Inbox improves on Gmail.

Instead of email, I think Inbox is an effort to finally (FINALLY) improve GTasks by marrying it into Gmail and Google Now. GTasks is woefully lacking. My recent switch to Trello has absolutely revolutionized my work flow, more than I thought possible. Inbox's autotasking looks like a big improvement on the dumb list, but it still doesn't look like a real competitor to Trello's kanban system.

(One last plug for Trello, just because using it for an hour has turned me into a wild-eyed fanatic. It's AMAZING. Try it!)

</comment><comment><USER46> Looks interesting; is this coming to iOS and Android or just Android? Also curious if this will make an appearance in web form as the Gmail and its suite of apps are woefully outdated (Gmail, Contacts, Tasks and Calendar have had some bugs for years and are simply behind on the good UX front).

<comment><USER47> It's IOS, Android, and Web.

<comment><USER48> Do you have a source for this?

<comment><USER47> Yes. [http://www.google.com/inbox/](http://www.google.com/inbox/) shows it

But i'll shortcut it and just offer an existence proof, since you can find all three pieces with creative searching:

[https://itunes.apple.com/app/id905060486?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id905060486?mt=8)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.inbox)

[https://inbox.google.com](https://inbox.google.com)

:)

<comment><USER46> Oh damn; the link from the OP I didn't see it but it's very clear on this page. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> If you are using Google Apps Free edition, you're good to go.

If you pay for Google Apps, you get shafted. Nice.

<comment><USER50> I have the old Google Apps Free edition and I apparently can't use Inbox, so there you go.

<comment><USER51> Same - the help page says it's not available at all for Google Apps accounts, only for personal Gmail accounts.

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/6082718?rd=2](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6082718?rd=2)

Since I only use my @gmail.com account for spam and have my own domain for personal emails, guess this is a no go for me. I was considering switching back to a personally hosted mailserver for privacy reasons anyway, would have liked to try this though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> New Rule: I'm officially done with artificially segregating people into "cool people" who have an invite and the rest of us who have to get in line.

Simple was the worst offender-- I should have known with the multi-year wait, to be capped off by bigoted comments from a cofounder to me on twitter (about an unrelated matter. But hey, your CxO makes a bigoted comment- I'm no longer your customer!)

But it's not just Simple, it's google with the wave invites, google with the gmail invites going back when, google with the orkut invites, google with the Plus invites, etc.

No more, Google.

<comment><USER53> I expect the reason Google is doing this is to be able to control the rate at which they allow people onto the infrastructure behind the new service. Going from internal testing to everyone on the Web using a service can be pretty rough.

[Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to Inbox or Gmail]

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Video: we're fixing email because people send too much of it

Blog Post: email firstname.lastname@example.com to try it.

..I got a good chuckle.

</comment><comment><USER55> GOS talked about it a few days ago before the announcement for those interested: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.se/2014/10/google- inbox.html](http://googlesystem.blogspot.se/2014/10/google-inbox.html)

I'm interested but I keep seeing that this sort of stuff never takes into accounts things such as mailing lists (a la mailman and such). I hope I'm wrong.

</comment><comment><USER56> WTF google? You get me interested in a product. I download it on my phone no problem. But then when I go to open it I'm told that it is invite only. I missed this detail in the blog since it isn't mentioned until the end. Knowingly allowing me to download a program I can't even use? This is a perfect recipe for a 1 star review. How it has so many 5 star review is beyond me.

Oh well, I still really want to try it. So I clicked the invite link that makes me use gmail (the app I'm replacing) to send an email. However, it's not a standard mailto link but a link to [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=new](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=new) . Seriously? Now I have to type in an email address because Google failed to use one of the most primitive features of HTML. So far my email experience has only been less convenient.

Anyway, I uninstalled it from my phone. I'll just wait a year or so to see if it flops like several of there other products and then maybe install it.

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't understand why people want some algorithm to sort your email for you. IMO email should always be sorted chronologically, and if it's too much, then used rules and folders/labels. Your inbox is not the place to add reminders. With the Google strategy you will have reminders everywhere seperately: calendar, email, phone, IM, texts, etc.

Inbox by Gmail: the Facebook of email.

<comment><USER58> As a counterpoint, I use Gmail's "Priority Inbox", and it's basically the best thing since sliced bread for me.

I don't want to have to bother creating rules for every Kickstarter I back, mailing list I join, marketing email that's just useful enough not have me unsubscribe.

The Priority Inbox does a 99% perfect job of sorting the emails I actually care about. Occasionally (once every other month), it misses something, but a quick scan of the "everything else" box usually, which I do anyhow, has me catch that.

That's the kind of algorithmic sorting that I want more of.

<comment><USER59> > rules for every ... mailing list I join

This one at least is solved for me now, since most list software implemented RFC 2919 a few years ago. Lists should include a list-id header, so just write one rule "if mail is to a list named _foobar_ , file it in _lists /foobar_". Or if you don't care to separate them out, even just "if mail is to a list, file it in _lists_ ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The basic assumption behind this seems to be that marketing spam in email will keep increasing and instead of fighting against it, organising content around it is better approach.

Most people (who nowadays carry lot of personal/group communication around facebook/whatsapp) still get a lot of mails on product deals, newsletters etc. Email is also the tool for login, password recovery and for other utilities like that. Beyond that its the primary tool to do the most important thing : send a official mail to whoever concerned. May be to the president of country or to the school principal. Reducing the noise into this core tool should be of importance. Facebook/Whatsapp has take out a big chunk of casual and group communication, which is good. Something that could keep out the product marketing out of email could be of next good change.

I think the movement should be towards reducing the unwanted content in emails, than organising the unwanted.

<comment><USER61> The promotional cluster is only a very small part of Inbox's feature set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> They are building a new e-mail system - yet still nothing one end-to-end encryption?

Oh sure, I know they want to build the End-to-End _plugin_ for _Gmail_ (the service they are trying to make obsolete), which they know only a few people will use. But this is an opportunity to start from scratch with end-to-end security by default.

<comment><USER63> Inbox changes nothing about how email works. It simply tries to make the UI/UX more useful. Gmail content is what powers Inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm so happy Google finally found its design language. This looks beautiful. Really something to build on.

<comment><USER65> I love it too. Certainly prettier than ios 7/8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> What I always wonder - do people actually use email for private communication? Everybody uses email at work, but at home? From time to time I sign up for a new service or order something and get confirmation mails or I send a couple of emails back and forth to resolve an issue with a service I am using, but it is always between me and some business.

The number of emails I have written to or received from friends is negligible and I am not aware of anyone heavily using email for private communication. Everybody just calls or writes a SMS or uses WhatsApp or Facebook or ICQ, but never email.

So am I - and the people I know - a rare case or did just nobody advertising email related stuff recognize that no one uses email for private communication?

<comment><USER67> I may be an odd one, but I use email for personal things. If messaging a group of people, there's inevitably _someone_ who refuses to get Facebook or doesn't have a smartphone or never checks their texts or something. At the same time, everybody has an email address that's checked at least daily (at university, and email's how anything course-related is communicated).

By emailing, it removes the cognitive step of working out how to contact someone - it just works. Yes, I'll use text or Facebook for certain things with certain people, but email is something that just works with everyone.

<comment><USER66> University is a bit a odd case - it's often a mix between work and private life and during that time I indeed used email quite a bit more for private communication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is the first step towards some of the functionality in the movie "Her."

Trusting an AI (or algorithm in this case) to sort your email and bubble up different aspects is a huge task, and I'm glad to see Google finally start putting their full might behind it.

<comment><USER69> That functionality has already existed for quite a while in Google Now.

<comment><USER68> Yep, you're correct. I should have been more clear in that while some of this was in Google Now, it didn't really "manage your email" like this does.

I was specifically referencing the scene where Sam is noting key points about the various things in his inbox and organizing it for him. Of course the movie title is possibly one of the most generic words out there, so finding a link to share is non-trivial :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> After using Inbox for a day, here's my initial thoughts: Incredible mobile experience, but not as productive as Gmail on the browser side. If you're an inbox zero fan, you'll love it. I think the point of Inbox is to bring inbox zero to the masses. They've replaced the "archive" button with a check mark button labeled as "done". This button has the exact same functionality as archiving a message in Gmail, but to someone using Inbox for the first time, it would more natural to click "done" rather than archive. The reminders & pins are a nice touch as well.

The snooze functionality takes a page from Baydin's boomerang service. However, this is where I'm still not sold. I've used Baydin's boomerang service for nearly 2 years now. I use it on approximately 80% of the messages I send. Inbox gives you the ability to "snooze" messages, but not "boomerang". I think it's much more important to be able to bring an email back to your inbox when someone hasn't replied to it as opposed to snoozing a message to take care of at a later date/time. I've come to the point of not understanding why you would even attempt inbox zero without boomerang. It blows my mind that email has been around for this long and we're still relying on a third party app to achieve this functionality. For anyone unfamiliar, Boomerang allows you to set a message to come back to your inbox if a person does not reply to it in 12 hours, 2 days, 4 days, or any later date you choose. I started using it for business, but then I realized how much it helps with everything. I use it on most personal emails now as well. Let me give you a real world example: 3 people on an email chain, everyone agrees we need to meet one day next week. The last email of the chain someone suggests, "Are you guys available next Wednesday at 10:00 AM?". In a world of inbox-zero without boomerang, this message may go unanswered if everyone on the chain forgets to reply (very common in my world). For a boomerang user, I set the email to come back to my inbox "if no response" in 2 days. This way, if there's no response, I can send a follow up, "So are we meeting next Wednesday or not?" I still can't figure out why this hasn't been built in to more email services by now.

Anyways, coming back to Inbox. It's beautiful, cool, great on mobile, but I will not be able to use it as my main email client unless they allow 3rd party apps like boomerang. Or, for the love of technology, build their own functionality that brings no-response emails back to the inbox! Am I the only one?!

</comment><comment><USER71> I love Google Now, so I will probably like this as well. However, one thing I start worrying about more as I come to rely more on such tools is: what is the chance to miss something important? What is relevant is picked based on heuristics and statistical models, and it might miss things that I consider to be very important.

Obviously, human errors occur in a more traditional approach where you use an e-mail client, calendar, and todo application. However, it would be interesting to see how accurate such machine-learned approaches are, compared to manual methods for information management.

<comment><USER72> I've been using Inbox and you won't miss anything. The auto-surfacing is really not as aggressive as you might imagine. If you just use Inbox without changing any settings you basically just get a cool GMail UI with the addition of 'Done' or 'Remind me Later' on each message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I have used Google Inbox, but if I read the comments here, the overarching thing seem to be to make a zero inbox. Why cannot you do this with your existing email client? What are the features of Google Inbox that helps you do this? And why do you need to make your inbox zero? Is it like you want the email client to show up the high priority ones that you need to attend to at the top? How does a Google Inbox automatically know what is high priority for you ? Sorry if my understanding is not aligned to what is offered by Google Inbox.

<comment><USER73> Sorry, Typo - read as 'I have not used Google Inbox'

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I would love to love this... but it's only for @gmail.com accounts, so far. What a disappointment.

It would seem like Google would get more REAL traction with this if they made it available to Apps for Work customers. Every single one of my business domains uses Google for email.

Business folks use productivity solutions more than individuals, I'd think. I don't understand why they don't target us first??

The only people I give my personal @gmail.com address to any more, are ones I don't want to be bothered by, in my main mailbox.

</comment><comment><USER75> Sending an email to firstname.lastname@example.com fails with the error : "the user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered."

</comment><comment><USER76> MIT can't be thrilled with the name being taken (albeit it Inbox is so generic I dont see this brand becoming worth much)[1][2]

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999814)

[2][http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/07/mit-and-dropbox-alums- launc...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/07/mit-and-dropbox-alums-launch-inbox- a-next-generation-email-platform/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb)

</comment><comment><USER77> years in the making of solving a problem that doesn't exist. another google "wave".

</comment><comment><USER78> When composing in Inbox, how do we get the nice "Plain text mode" option available in Gmail? The most useful thing it brings is to automatically line- wrap the emails.

</comment><comment><USER79> What I would like to see is Gmail becoming more like Zendesk/Desk.com. So I can effectively manage responses, contacts, etc, with a single click and pre- defined responses.

</comment><comment><USER80> I can't stand how little I can see at a glance in my inbox now. With the Gmail app on my Nexus 5, I could see 7 emails in the default inbox view. With Inbox I can see 3. Two of which do not include a subject line because they have been grouped "Social" or "Purchases" and will take an additional tap to view. I'm going to give it some time, but for now I find most of the content to be a horrible waste of space.

</comment><comment><USER81> I am sad that this seems to be Gmail only. Why have developers lost touch with standard IMAP protocols so we can use these new fancy apps with any email provider...

<comment><USER82> An unfortunate reality is that IMAP is a really bad protocol. I encourage you to try implementing a client to get a feel for how difficult and quirky the protocol is. (Be sure to try implementing IDLE)

I'd love to see a better base protocol with a clean extension mechanism and a culture of documenting and publishing such extenstions. One can dream :)

<comment><USER83> EWS (Exchange Web Services) is actually a very good and well-documented protocol built on top of HTTP/HTTPS. Unfortunately, it's Microsoft only, but it's the closest anyone's really come to a "modern" e-mail protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I am the developer of Eπvelope email app for iOS. Its got a clustering feature that seems similar to Gmails' Bundles - auto grouping of similar emails (Receipts, Offers, ). Entire clusters can be moved,deleted,archived. And it works with Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Outlook.

[http://bitly.com/envelope-clustering](http://bitly.com/envelope-clustering)

[http://PiEnvelope.com](http://PiEnvelope.com)

</comment><comment><USER85> It's good that they got the 'bundles' in there, but much of this looks like it's a Google Now integration into Gmail. There's a ton of anxiety around information gathering, organizing, monitoring, and 'checking the box' that this solution glances by, but doesn't directly address. I don't believe this solution will compete with most people's other email inbox.

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm definitely not the target audience for this and I really hope that Google isn't going to force me to upgrade to Inbox. Looking at you G+.

<comment><USER71> If you are on Google Apps, you can (as an administrator) disable Google+ completely. In that way, you won't get any Google+ stuff in Gmail.

<comment><USER71> Really, downvoting? Care to explain?

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/1689647?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/1689647?hl=en)

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/1638152?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/1638152?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> An interesting comparison might be to the Zoho Inbox Insights [1] app that is slated to land fairly soon. If reports are to be believed this app has similar functionality.

[1] [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2837812/zoho-nips-at- google-i...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2837812/zoho-nips-at-google- inboxs-heels-with-its-own-email-filtering-app-inbox-insights.html)

</comment><comment><USER88> Google says "it's a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters."

I thought that things like having a text editor that allows me to reliably do complex things like typing and pasting without losing my place, or perhaps a compose window that can be resized, really mattered. Since Gmail doesn't have either of those, maybe Inbox will add them :)

<comment><USER89> You seem to be more concerned with features of the _outbox_ than features of the _inbox_.

<comment><USER88> Touche.

Maybe Google Outbox will end up being amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Eventual consistency / Lost Updates at play? I have tried sweeping the "Low Priority" emails; whenever I clicked the tick that group entry was gone. So far so good. However, whenever a new email popped up and was classified in that group, the whole group appeared again.

Or am I just misunderstanding the feature and do I just have to mark individual email as done one by one?

</comment><comment><USER90> from the site is is just gmail with the ability to accept/snooze calendar events.

also the spam inbox (what they are trying to label as offers or something on gmail) is not part of the priority inbox.

besides that, and all the smiling happy people in the Ad, all i could grasp is that they added lots and lots of white space around each message to compensate for the humongous size of that phone screen.

</comment><comment><USER91> It looks pretty, it looks like it might end the hide and seek with attachments on a smart phone client; not a problem on a desktop but I can never find the attachments in Gmail on the phone. I'm not sure I like that idea that it decides what's important and highlights it; probably because it would get it right most of the time. I could get used to it.

</comment><comment><USER92> Perhaps cool. I honestly wish they'd change their approach to quality & bug reporting, though. I get the impression that all of their developers are so busy making new & shiny that the tools that we rely on everyday are just languishing. I've never had any bug that I've reported via their product forums fixed.

</comment><comment><USER93> It will be interesting to see how companies like Boxer 'pivot' in response to this. I started using Boxer a little while ago specifically to deal with the email-becomes-todo-item issue which Gmail generally lacked. Not sure I'd have any reason to continue to use it if I could score an invite to Inbox (hint hint).

</comment><comment><USER94> I really, really like the idea that they are pushing you to always have clean inbox. I always struggled with that, making my own systems. Also grouping of similar emails sounds promising. But I hate this invite thing, so if someone have a spare invite, I would be really thankful if you can send one to firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER95> Sadly I have my google account hooked up with custom domains so it won't work. I'm looking forward to trying this when it is available.

I can understand why google don't want to push this on large organisations in case it results in expensive support, but as a paying google customer It'd be nice to have the choice.

</comment><comment><USER96> I went to a google IO event when wave was the next best thing to email clients. Like many things, it died off because of adoption rates and bloated UI trying to achieve world domination. On the flip side i loved the talk like a pirate channel bot ;p Lets hope Inbox does not go down the same path..

</comment><comment><USER97> 5 star reviews in the Google Play Store from people who haven't even got an invite? The system is broken.

<comment><USER94> 1 stars also

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> I really have no idea how this thing is going to help me organize my life. Google failed to explicitly highlights the difference between INBOX and other things like Reminder, Notes, google calendar, gmail. And on top of that using a name that is making it more confusing.

</comment><comment><USER99> Is it just me, or do all these attempts to mould e-mail to avoid cognitive overload just create cognitive overload.

"E-mail - a list of messages from people, by default displayed in the order they arrived." Isn't that simplicity refreshing?

<comment><USER100> If e-mail were indeed only messages from _people_ we'd have no need for these products. But it's not realistic to expect that anything we pay close attention to won't be thwarted by some form of spam or advertising in this day and age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Mods can you change the URL of this post to [http://www.google.com/inbox/](http://www.google.com/inbox/) ? It's way more informative and actually details what the app does.

</comment><comment><USER65> Man, no wonder Google has a diversity problem. This video was a montage of young millennial hipsters partying. Somewhere in there email was involved.

On topic... Looks a lot like Mailbox. I'd be worried if I was Mailbox.

</comment><comment><USER102> So my question is this an App only or will it be part of the Gmail interface?

<comment><USER103> It's accessible via inbox.google.com, so works on Chrome as well as iOS and Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> What's the "sync" between Gmail and Inbox like? If you Snooze an email in Inbox, what happens to it in Gmail? If you put it in a bundle, what's that do to it in your inbox?

<comment><USER61> [https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6098273?hl=en&ref_to...](https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6098273?hl=en&ref_topic=6067565)

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> I'm wondering if the inbox is integrated with Google Keep for tasks and if there will become API's available?

It's to bad Google Keep only has an internal API (that isn't available to us)

</comment><comment><USER106> I can't wait to try this out. I'm drawing a few parallels to Acompli (when it comes to how Inbox handles attachments) and I love Acompli. Hope they add Google Apps support soon.

</comment><comment><USER107> Sounds to me very much like the Active Inbox plugin, which I've been using for a couple of years and proselytize mercilessly. It's based on the GTD way of doing things.

</comment><comment><USER108> These bundles, categories, etc. that are being introduced really just seem like re-hashed labels. Why did they need to introduce these other methods of grouping e-mails together?

</comment><comment><USER109> I haven't tested it, but watching the video with no sound it looks like making email more like a social network. Either way, how about going back to the way email used to be? I dislike composing e-mails inline, I dislike having to dig through a menu to pop out a modal, or having to memorize everyone's icons because apparently text isn't cool anymore.. how about giving me a page dedicated to composing, instead of adding another layer to the current page and hiding the options from plain sight? From what I've seen on this so far, it appears that this moves in the opposite direction of that

</comment><comment><USER110> The UI looks a lot like Twitter.

That doesn't attract me for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER111> This looks awesome! Now I won't be able to decide between this, myMail and Mailbox :'( Can anyone shoot an invite to andrew(at)algorithm.dk? Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER112> Does anyone know how to merge my old 'starred' emails from Gmail and make them all 'pinned' emails in Inbox?

</comment><comment><USER113> Meta note: That is one of the smoothest and pleasant scrolling experiences I've had on the web! Kudos to the web devs!

<comment><USER114> It's funny, because for me the scrolling on their page ([https://www.google.com/inbox/](https://www.google.com/inbox/)) doesn't work at all, on Safari 8.0/OSX.

<comment><USER115> It works for me, and doesn't obviously glitch in the sense of dropping frames, but it feels wrong. The animations all start really slow, and the curves are way off the curves of OS-native features that do a page-at-a-time swipe. Also, if you continuous scroll with the trackpad and backtrack your fingers even a little, it jumps back a section. Still, I am not sure it is easy to fix these issues given what the web platform offers today, and kudos for not blatantly dropping frames.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Judging from this: [http://www.google.com/inbox/](http://www.google.com/inbox/) , we have:

* Folder and Rules (with the only distinction of having some pre-populated ones, I think)

* Some smart content extraction from known emails (reservations, invoices, etc...) - probably going to be a privacy nightmare

* Todo and reminders ( what's new about this? outlook/gmail calendar/thunderbird-lightning all do this)

* Snooze for reminders - yeah...

</comment><comment><USER117> I really hope this means that if I disable this "Inbox" in Gmail clients I can get back my ASCII email...

</comment><comment><USER118> > You can even teach Inbox to adapt to the way you work by choosing which > emails you'd like to see grouped together.

Finally!

</comment><comment><USER119> The latest product from Sparrow? I've been already into the refreshing UIs of Inbox.

Can't wait for the invitation.

</comment><comment><USER120> If you happen to have invites, could you send me one too? Thank you. My e-mail: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER121> They didn't show the web interface, I wonder if it will just be baked into the Gmail mobile apps?

<comment><USER47> No, it's web as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> Could someone please invite me -- email@example.com. I'd _love_ to play with the product

</comment><comment><USER123> No support for Gingerbread on play store (I have an Ace Plus but I'm about to buy a Moto G) :(

</comment><comment><USER124> A "new way" to push a "sponsored content" to me, like FB's feed does?)

</comment><comment><USER125> And here I am with a Windows Phone.

</comment><comment><USER126> Anyone got an invite to spare? Would be great to get one! (my email is email@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER127> If anyone is offering invites, I'd love this. firstname.lastname@example.com -- Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER128> Don't hurt me too much, if anyone has an invite: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER129> I'd love to get an invite, if anyone has an extra lying around.

</comment><comment><USER130> You can request an invite by sending a E-Mail to email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER131> pretty much inspired by PG? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI#t=450](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI#t=450)

</comment><comment><USER132> video made me cringe

<comment><USER133> I watched it without sound. Definitely enough to put me off forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> I opened Inbox and it crashed within 10 seconds. :-(

</comment><comment><USER135> Not getting a invitation yet, pity

</comment><comment><USER136> Can not find the Invite option..

<comment><USER137> I don't have Inbox yet, but I don't think everyone gets invites immediately. Anyways, here's some info:

> _Once you have an invite, you can hover over the red create button and you > will see a gold ticket - Invite to Inbox. Select that to enter your friend > 's email address and send the invitation._ > _Quick note: if you received an > invite from a friend today, your 3 invites to share won 't be available > until this Friday._

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/gmail/nCtyOEbZH...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/gmail/nCtyOEbZHh8/vxMeQSj75XUJ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> E-mail is constantly changing.

</comment><comment><USER139> There were bad Google outages earlier today (at least in the UK). I wonder if these were connected?

</comment><comment><USER140> > designed to focus on what really matters

So it has open and auditable secure end to end encryption?

<comment><USER141> Not exactly what you want, but there is at least this: [https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/)

<comment><USER142> also [https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/](https://code.google.com/p/end-to- end/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER143> Does it read RSS feeds?

</comment><comment><USER144> Is Inbox going to be broken on GApps accounts like Now is?

<comment><USER145> Disclaimer: Googler

In what way do you think Now is broken with GApps accounts? I use Now with GApps, and don't know what you're referring to.

<comment><USER146> "Gmail cards are currently not available when using Google Now with a Google Apps account."

[https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2839480?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2839480?hl=en)

<comment><USER63> Not supported is not broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER147> Slightly off-topic, but can we talk about that video? I would love it if Google could just sell me on the idea of their products for once, instead of trying to sell me on a twentysomething Brooklyn lifestyle.

When I get hit in the face with these cheap emotional ploys that feel like an early 2000s Microsoft Zune ad, I get distracted from the actual product being touted. My resistance goes up.

Does this approach work for anyone? If you really are a Williamsburg hipster, I'd expect this kind of pandering would feel off-putting. If you're not, it's alienating.

There's certainly a place for emotion in ads. But how about a bit more _product_ , and respect for our intelligence?

<comment><USER148> The video actually caused me to laugh from how cliche it is: A racially diverse group of 20-somethings doing "active" things like skateboarding and running on the beach.

<comment><USER149> Is that what 20-somethings do (or aspire to do) these days? Skateboarding and hanging out on the beach? Most of my peers and I spent our twenties busting our ass studying and then busting ass establishing a career. I must be getting old--watching that video I couldn't help but think, "It's daylight. Shouldn't you guys be in the office?"

<comment><USER150> Ads are aspirational, not representational according to mostly everything wrote by thelastpsychiatrist. While they are bust-assing their studies they still aspire to look cool, friendly and careless. Hence the add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER151> Google really knows how to toy with my emotions with these videos.

</comment><comment><USER152> Google please stop trying to be everything to everyone.

</comment><comment><USER153> I'd love to see the data behind why this justified a team of 100+ people making more than 100,000 per year to re-invent email.

Does the typical email user have an inbox which is half empty? Do users just read email that seems exciting? Do users want to just glance at their email periodically?

</comment><comment><USER154> Seriously folks, who cares. It's a minor change to gmail's workflow.

No really, think about it. It's just email.

</comment><comment><USER155> Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

         email@example.com

... The error that the other server returned was: 550-5.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that 550-5.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. For more 550-5.2.1 information, please visit 550 5.2.1 [http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6592](http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6592) fl6si3394876qcb.0 - <USER3>

Anyone knows what that "rate limit" is?

</comment><comment><USER156> Today, we're introducing something new. It's called Exfil. Years in the making, Exfil is by the same people who brought you Gmail, but it's not Gmail: it's a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters.

Email started simply as a way to send digital notes around the office. But fast-forward 30 years and with just the phone in your pocket, you can use email to send your most intimate thoughts, feelings and sexual fantasies to an undisclosed warehouse in Utah where our expert systems will analyse it for signs of emerging criminality, non-normative behaviour or just any juicy information that we can sell to some dude who's willing to pay.

With this evolution comes new challenges: we get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when you use encryption. For many of us, dealing with encryption has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do - so we decided not to use it and to make sure that your email is always stored in plain text so that we can read it easily and hand out copies in bulk to all our friends, associates and subcontractors.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your current pet project? - <AUTHOR> In other words, what are you working on for fun? And why do you find it fun?<p>Don't forget to upvote the poll so other people can see it and share their projects. <comment><USER2> I'm playing with home automation/control. I integrated "smart" devices from 6 different vendors into a webapp with voice control that I run on wall-mounted tablets throughout the house [1]. From any room, I can say things like "dim the lights", "lock the front door", "turn up the heat" or "launch netflix on the living room TV". And, because I'm a bit of a Trekkie, the computer talks back. [2]

1: [http://i.imgur.com/sduLRv6.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/sduLRv6.jpg)

2: [http://www.lcarscom.net/sounds.htm](http://www.lcarscom.net/sounds.htm)

<comment><USER3> Any recommendation of which ones were easier to write against? Any APIs/interfaces that stood out?

<comment><USER2> None of it's particularly hard. I wrote a node.js server that serves a webpage for the dashboard, and passes messages back and forth between that webpage and the various devices.

Belkin WeMo switches and motion sensors are UPnP. Discovery can be flaky sometimes, otherwise they work well and there's plenty of sample code out there for UPnP and WeMo specifically.

The garage doors are Chamberlain MyQ, a proprietary website/app with no public API, but the website talks to a JSON API that was simple enough to figure out with Chrome's network inspector. I probably wouldn't buy MyQ stuff again if I were starting over just because of how closed it is. They don't want to integrate with anything else.

The Nest thermostat has a JSON API, also unofficial though an official one is in beta testing. There's a node package for that, so plug-and-play for me.

The rest of my stuff is Z-wave (short range 900MHz radio), which you need a hub for, to bridge that network to the home IP network. I got a Vera Lite for that as it's the best hub I found that has no subscription fees, is entirely self-hosted (there's an optional cloud component for remote access and setting backup without configuring your firewall), and exposes a REST API. That was the easiest thing to code against -- to lock/unlock the deadbolt on my front door for example, I just GET a URL with the device ID and command in the query string.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that's great info. You have my admiration for that kind of setup!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My son and I have been working on our hobby site [http://CutRateGamer.com](http://CutRateGamer.com) for the last two years. We both love PC games and were always on the lookout for great deals.

The site started out as a simple blog, but, being a lazy programmer, manually looking for deals got old quick; so I decided to automate as much as I possibly could. We are at the point were the site almost runs itself.

It has been a great excuse to try out new technology, keep my skills sharp, learn marketing, teach my son programming and what goes into running a website.

Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mines a real "pet" project. I installed a bluetooth signal/sensor in my dogs harness, put an infrared sensor strip on backdoor and hacked together something like twillo for notifications. When I let him outside, I know when he is back at the door because his motion gets picked up by the sensor and a text message gets fired off to say "Woof. Let me in. Love Simon." This didn't take me long to build and it gets the job done. Still refining. It's all good fun... COST: under $19 for all electronics.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a blog describing the parts and where you got them? I'm interested in doing the same type of thing, but for a different situation and was going about it differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I make this sweet Google Chrome extension for fun in my spare time: [http://streamus.com](http://streamus.com) It's a YouTube music player that I find more useful than Spotify b/c it integrates well with the browser. I've put 16 months of nights/weekends into it. It has 14k users, 4.8/5 in the web store and is completely open-source:

[https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension](https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension)

[https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusWebsite](https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusWebsite)

[https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusServer](https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusServer)

I find it fun for a TON of reasons. I'm learning a lot more about programming than I ever had in the past. This is the first time I've ever been super interested in absorbing material because it has a great impact upon me.

I get messages from people all around the world every day saying thanks for the work. That feeling is super rewarding -- more so than a paycheck. I've had to bust out Google Translator to try and decipher messages and hold conversations, had people tell me their dreams of getting to America or even something as simple as just being excited to talk to the developer. It's really great.

Finally, it solves a problem I was having and for that I am stoked! I went from having tons of bookmarks organizing music on YouTube to having a much more friendly interface for storing and listening to the music.

</comment><comment><USER8> To teach myself Python "properly", I've been slowly writing a script that posts to Github's Gists - I'm finding it more and more useful as a note taking utility so I wrote something that lets me pipe input into it and get a URL out.

[https://github.com/voltagex/python-gist](https://github.com/voltagex/python- gist)

Python is just nice to code in, and I find it a lot easier to start a project in than C#, which is my day job.

The other thing I've been doing is getting into reverse engineering of embedded devices - [http://blog.voltagex.org/bdplayer.html](http://blog.voltagex.org/bdplayer.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6997623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6997623)

I also buy far, far too many tiny devices like Raspberry Pis and Cubieboards.

I think between experimenting with and reversing tiny linux-running devices (I'm looking at you, consumer router manufacturers) I'll find a new career direction, but at the moment it's a good challenge and a glorious time and money sink.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been having a lot of fun playing around with site scraping. Which probably sounds weird and lame but the challenge of building stuff from metadata has been interesting, and seeing how context behaves between linked sites. Here is an example, which builds a threaded feed from outbound links (still not quite ready for prime time): [http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/https://news.ycombinator.com/...](http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/https://news.ycombinator.com/news)

Also i'm cloning HN in Laravel. Most of the basics work but i've got nothing online to show yet. I find it fun because I like imaging how the structure of the site might affect the way people communicate and use it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Building a citation manager (for like research papers and stuff) that maintains a central list of all sources, authors, and publications cited and also helps manage paper/project level stuff for the individual level. Hoping that the central list makes it easier to keep the db clean and also provides the user with some benefit by being able to just look stuff up instead of typing it in.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm currently building ghostream ([https://github.com/ghostream/ghostream](https://github.com/ghostream/ghostream)) - it is a data stream processing framework. Having used numerous commercial ones (most notably IBM's Streams), and building various other part-frameworks (i.e. for time and budget reasons focussed on one particular thing) I has an itch to build an open source one (while storm and samza are definitely related, I feel they fall into a slightly different category - I'm all about the streams :) )

It is still in very active development - but the base is solidifying and the new test framework is starting to shape up nicely.

I have already started dog-fooding it in my other personal projects - the most visual of which can be seen here: [http://jamielewis.me.uk/posts/2013-11-03-Mapping- Earthquakes...](http://jamielewis.me.uk/posts/2013-11-03-Mapping-Earthquakes- with-ghostream.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I teach an intro programming class in Python each fall, and this fall I started an open project to help my students learn Python: [http://introtopython.org](http://introtopython.org)

It's progressing steadily, and people seem to be responding positively to the first project, a tutorial about plotting geospatial data using matplotlib and Basemap: [http://introtopython.org/visualization_earthquakes.html](http://introtopython.org/visualization_earthquakes.html)

The whole project is on github: [https://github.com/ehmatthes/intro_programming](https://github.com/ehmatthes/intro_programming)

PS I just accidentally ended a 132-day github streak, mostly focused on this project. I stared watching a movie with my wife last night, and at the end of the movie I looked at the clock and realized I forgot to make a commit before 11pm. No matter, it was never about the streak anyway. :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on implementing my first Lisp compiler and virtual machine. My last Lisp was a simple inefficient AST interpreter, so this seems like the next step up.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm using Twilio, PythonAnywhere, and Google Directions API to send myself texts when my commute length is longer than a specified tolerance, then sending texts with commute lengths for alternate routes if they are shorter. Currently gathering commute length data to make my commute length tolerances dependent on an average commute length for that workday plus a specified percentage above that.

Also playing around with Flask and other APIs as well as building a blog in Django.

<comment><USER14> Great idea. This would have helped me with my morning commute today when SF Muni had a bit of a meltdown. Have you put the source up on github? Also, if you're already playing around with APIs and frameworks like Flask and get the itch to create a REST API, check out flask-restful [https://github.com/twilio/flask-restful](https://github.com/twilio/flask- restful).

Disclaimer - I work at Twilio.

<comment><USER13> Awesome! I love Twilio. Very fun and easy to use (and affordable).

I do plan to put it on GitHub although it needs some refining. I'm a financial analyst by training and trade so my programming skills are below par.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.trackersound.com/](http://www.trackersound.com/) I'm working on a website where people can track the artists and bands they like in order to be notified when a new album/EP is released. It's like Songkick or BandsInTown but for albums instead of concerts. It's still work in progress and I'm also looking for a new website name.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm teaching myself Obj-C, one of my apps[1] has made it to the store and whilst I continue to learn, I'll be pushing improvements to it. I've just pushed another app that'll hopefully make it to the store - the simplest QR Code Scanner ever.

1\. [http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios- app/](http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Playing around with making projects with Arduino + sensors, it's fun because there is so much you can do with the Arduino platform these days. The hardware course in university was a rush through, and I never really had time to experiment on my own with it (the real learning). So now, I get to do it with the Arduino, which makes it SO much easier (and cheaper) than it use to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hadn't really looked into Arduino until now. Thanks, this looks like it might turn into an interesting summer project for me and my son.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Recently, I've been having run working on Huginn ([https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn)) and BeeLine Reader ([http://www.beelinereader.com](http://www.beelinereader.com)). Both are tools that augment people's abilities, which is one of my current interests.

</comment><comment><USER19> A browser based comic book reader:

[http://reader.justforcomics.com](http://reader.justforcomics.com) [https://github.com/balaclark/HTML5-Comic-Book- Reader](https://github.com/balaclark/HTML5-Comic-Book-Reader)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm working on [http://trysnitch.com](http://trysnitch.com) to make simple mobile notifications by issuing http requests with JSON data. Getting to know Appcelerator for mobile development and Flask as a backend.

</comment><comment><USER21> My group of close friends and I meet up once a week to slay dragons (yes, we are nerds). I was unimpressed by the character sheet offerings available online so I ended up creating my own for fun. It is running on flask, postgres and knockout.

<comment><USER22> Link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm currently working on an programming contest judge[1] written in Node, that uses Docker to run submitted programs in.

1: [https://github.com/EmilS/OnlineJudge](https://github.com/EmilS/OnlineJudge)

</comment><comment><USER24> A console-based mail-client, with integrated Lua scripting:

[https://github.com/skx/lumail/](https://github.com/skx/lumail/)

[http://lumail.org/](http://lumail.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds really interesting, and I've often wanted to do something similar myself. Do you have plans for a convenient curses-based interface, so I don't have to type stuff out or press enter all the time?

<comment><USER24> I suspect one of us is misunderstanding the project, and I'm unsure which it is.

There is already a curses interface, as per the (outdated) screenshots page:

[http://lumail.org/screenshots/](http://lumail.org/screenshots/)

Really lumail is a console application, similar to mutt, but with a different feature-set. (i.e. No IMAP, no POP3, real scripting, modal-mode, and similar.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Applying actor model to a game engine.

</comment><comment><USER26> github.com/karabijavad/cadet

easy embedded neo4j, via jruby!</comment>


NodeFu Launches - Opensource Node.js hosting platform - <AUTHOR> http://nodefu.com

<comment><USER2> Heroku does have experimental Node support if anyone is interested:

[http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/9/20/an_update_on_herok...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/9/20/an_update_on_heroku_node_js_support/)

And Joyent's Node service is pretty good too:

<https://no.de/>

<comment><USER3> Just to add to the list, there's also nodeJsCloud: <http://www.nodejscloud.com/>

<comment><USER4> Thanks to everyone providing the links to all these services. I knew of some of them, but not others. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I got tired of waiting for Heroku and Joyent invitations so I created NodeFu and open sourced it so that others could have fun too! The repo is at <http://github.com/chrismatthieu/nodefu>

<comment><USER3> Fantastic! Are there any real differences between the current node.js cloud platforms (nodefu, no.de, nodeJsCloud, Heroku's service etc...) from an architectural point of view?

<comment><USER5> Hi, so we wanted to chime in a bit. We are building our node.js hosting platform (nodeJSCloud) on our own hardware, in a data center. Going this route vs using 3rd party hardware EC2 or Rackspace, gives us complete flexibility to do some nifty things. We are going to e-mail out a newsletter shortly with additional details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If its free, who is footing the EC2 bill?

Which gives me the idea: it'd be cool to have a service like this and have it use a user-provided AWS account.

So you could use a service like this to automatically manage the EC2 instances, and then if you need to take control to expand your instances' functionality you just stop using the service.

Just a thought...

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! I took notes on the installation of NodeFu on EC2. I would like to include them in the bootstrap readme in the repo so others can easily standup their own instances too.

<comment><USER7> so you need EC2 to use NodeFu? Not a dealbreaker, but I didn't get that from the splash page.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can deploy it to your own instance of EC2 or Rackspace or GoGrid or you can run your apps directly on the <http://NodeFu.com> hosted platform.

<comment><USER7> gotcha! the hosted platform is killer! When I want to take the dive into node, I'll be sure to try this out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Logo and company name seems very similar to <http://www.nodejitsu.com> It's also curious NodeFu seem to be using some of Nodejitsu's open-source offerings to make this work. ( <https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy> and <https://github.com/indexzero/forever> ).

Are NodeFu and Nodejitsu the same company?

<comment><AUTHOR> NodeFu is not a company but rather an open source project. It does use the http-proxy module - <https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy>

<comment><USER8> I'm even more confused now. Is NodeFu the open-source offering for Nodejitsu?

If NodeFu isn't a company, how can it be the "heroku for node.js".

<comment><USER9> I am founder of Nodejitsu. Nodejitsu and Nodefu are not related in anyway, although based on reading these comments it looks like NodeFu does use open source software we wrote, which is great to see

<http://github.com/nodejitsu> <http://github.com/indexzero>

Node to win :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> New blog post just released: NodeFu - Free Hosting of Your Node.JS Apps In The Cloud! <http://t.co/iHIuTtb> < It's a step-by-step example for deploying a @Tropo node.js communications application on NodeFu!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> NodeFu has just surpassed 150 hosted node.js applications since the launch on yesterday - <http://nodefu.com/status>

</comment><comment><USER6> Also, you really might want to add some read permissions to your CouchDB on CouchOne. Currently all nodefu global config data is world readable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! CouchDB is now secured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anything of significance actually been developed on Node yet? Seems like there is a lot of excitement about it (like the early Rails days), but I haven't seen any sites announcing they're written in it.

<comment><USER4> ReadWriteWeb had a piece on that topic today: [http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/how-3-companies- are...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/how-3-companies-are-using- node.php)

That pointed over to this longer piece about how Yammer, Proxlet and Bocoup are using Node.js: [http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/15/who-is-using-node-js- an...](http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/15/who-is-using-node-js-and-why- yammer-bocoup-proxlet-and-yahoo/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks like this story made it to Mashable! <http://twitter.com/#!/chrismatthieu/status/27435153945010176>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> New NodeFu blog post (Node.js Coming of Age) spotted at <http://www.voiceingov.org/blog/?p=2228>

</comment><comment><USER11> I like the name... nothing wrong with it.

And congrats for the initiative !

Learning some Ruby now but next step is Node.js, then I will try it out.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the fu scheme. Great idea. Sensei, are you still giving out coupons?

The site is down for me. /edit: It's now reachable again. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site had an out-of-memory error probably from all of the Mashable traffic. It's only been online for 2 days and needs more tuning. Thanks everyone!

<comment><USER12> This proves, there is a lot of demand for such a solution and you had an idea, that people like a lot. Congrats.

<comment><USER13> There is a huuuge demand for ssjs but hard core coders don't want to accept JS is a great programming language for the whole web stack, including mobile apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks like @NodeFu has a new corporate sponsor! Thanks Tropo (<http://tropo.com>)!

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks great! Thanks for open sourcing it so others can learn from what's involved in creating these type of services

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there any information about the length of the waiting list for coupons?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning to release the next batch of 50 coupons on Friday! Stay tuned...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And.. it's an "under construction" PPC link page already. 2 days!?

</comment><comment><USER7> Love your ninja

</comment><comment><USER17> Why the name?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the domain and twitter handles were available. Other name choices like Nodester and Nodeku were not available on Twitter.

<comment><USER18> That is cool, because NodeFu sounds much better than either of those names. It is a pretty cool name.</comment></comment></comment>


Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain:Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum and Smart Contracts - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073CPP581/ <comment><AUTHOR> The author, David Gerard, is an HN regular: @davidgerard.

I've reviewed a pre-publication edition and recommend the book.

</comment><comment><USER2> out Monday!

Book page: [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/)</comment>


Building an ethical bank in Britain - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/triodos-uk-md-bevis-watts-on-building-an-ethical-bank-in-age-of-trump-and-brexit-2017-4 <comment><USER2> If there was a modern, truly ethical bank in the US I'd be signing up in minutes. It's a great differentiator in a sea of corruption and morally apprehensible investments…

<comment><USER3> I was actually thinking of checking out a few local credit unions. Maybe that will work?

<comment><USER4> Credit Unions work _for_ their members. My experiences are constantly positive, and the complete opposite of banks.

<comment><USER5> Yes and no. An FCU I'll leave nameless, has for years been selling their member mailing list to "partners"... some of whom then send mail that tries very hard to look like official FCU correspondence outlining benefits, and is actually an otherwise unaffiliated life insurance sales exercise. A sign-up scam. The FCU has been ok with this for several decades now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "... Triodos is unusual in that it ... lends out less than the total of customer deposits entrusted to it, subverting the fractional reserve model."

What? That's pretty much the _definition_ of fractional reserve banking. You accept $N of deposits from customers. You lend $0.9N. You don't have enough liquid assets (e.g. cash) to pay pack all depositors in the event of a bank run.

<comment><USER7> I totally agree with you, but the counter-argument will then always be "what incentive does the bank then have to operate?".

For this reason, I believe the idea of a bank as a business or an entity that is operated privately without the implicit requirement to operate ethically and on behalf of a state's citizens, needs to be completely done away with otherwise we will inevitably end up in the current sociopolitical mess we have now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's impossible to build an environmentally ethical bank on top of an inflationary economic system - the very nature of the money in such a system encourages individuals to consume.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's great to see something like this because ethical banking is definitely necessary if we want a future that is desirable.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the biggest problem is the way the economy "booms" based on credit, which led to things like derivatives to take advantage of them. Housing is a good example here.</comment>


Here's why you shouldn't cremate radioactive dead people - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/heres-why-you-shouldnt-cremate-radioactive-dead-people/ <comment><USER2> _Investigators found lutetium Lu 177 contamination on the crematorium's equipment, including the oven, bone crusher, and vacuum filter, with a 7.5-mR maximum exposure rate per hour on direct contact with the Geiger-Mueller detector. For practical purposes, that converts to a dosage equivalent of .0075 rems per hour. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration's limit for a worker 's whole body exposure is 5 rems per year, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's annual total exposure limit for a member of the public is 0.1 rems per year._

At least they included this; the original stories in the news didn't bother. It's actually one of the few radiation stories for which the punchline isn't, "Who cares?" You'd be getting the equivalent of about a chest and a half x-ray every two hours. Depending on how long you worked in the affected area you could get a distinctly non-lethal, but still arguably unhealthy dose.

Maybe a decent scintillation counter or GM counter at the entrance to the crematorium would be a sound investment. An NRC certified GM counter isn't expensive, especially compared to closing for a couple of months or decontamination efforts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't know how it is in the U.S. but in Japan you're often given the option to cremate cherished objects with the deceased, things that the person in question loved. Relatives bring all kinds of stuff, from clothes to photographs, and anything in between.

In one occasion I was witness myself of a family wanting to cremate a whole school uniform with a dead child, and they where told that was excessive, but in the end just the jacket was allowed, metal buttons and all.

Most places will not check contents of a small box, bag or container with the additional material to cremate, out of privacy and respect.

Who knows what kind of stuff is thrown in there, in what amounts, and with what consequences, if any.</comment>


Online Dating Prospers in the Recession - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13381506

<comment><USER2> It's always fun to see the graph of a startup's user-count-double-up start on the time axis a month after you left.

I'm hoping OKC continues to kill it.</comment>


Build your own web search engine - <AUTHOR> http://himmele.blogspot.com/2011/05/build-your-own-internet-search-engine.html <comment><USER2> Have you investigated <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> ?

I'd really recommend reading up on the Solr (I notice you mention Solr in your first post) and ElasticSearch projects; these guys, along with Lucene, have collectively solved many of the problems you're investigating.

They're both open source, and (Solr at least) have extensive mailing lists so you can see the sorts of problems people face when building generalized search engines.

<comment><USER3> Nutch will do the crawling and indexing for you. Solr has a web interface built in. You can build your own SE in a couple hours. Then you can do some clever machine learning based on usage data with Mahout.

<http://nutch.apache.org/> <http://mahout.apache.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommend reading 'Managing Gigabytes' by Witten, Moffat and Bell:

[http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Gigabytes-Compressing- Multime...](http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Gigabytes-Compressing-Multimedia- Information/dp/1558605703)

</comment><comment><USER5> Best of luck to the author.

Does remind me a broader question -- why is there no popular open source search engine? This seems much more tractable than an open source social network. I wouldn't be surprised if it could money/resources from major players like Facebook, Apple, Oracle. Apache has a lot of hte pieces, but no consumer facing front-end that ties it all together to search the web (AFAIK).

<comment><USER2> Edit: there appears to be such a project, at least on the crawling side: <http://www.commoncrawl.org/>

I'd say there's a combination of factors, the first (and most important) being that Google is good enough for most people.

You'd need to coordinate crawling so as not to turn it into a giant DDoS machine; speed will be an issue due to geo distribution, variable hardware and result sets.

Validity and reliability of the data would also be issues, and would probably require several peers to "agree" to consistency, but in a way that does not allow easy gaming of results.

I suppose they're all solvable, though I think there would have to be a powerful incentive to do so. I imagine it'd be quite pricey too for the individual, though perhaps Gabriel Weinberg* could weigh in there.

[*] <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/>

<comment><USER5> _I'd say there's a combination of factors, the first (and most important) being that Google is good enough for most people._

This is actually why I think it's important to have a good open source alternative. Google is good today. And frankly, if Bing wasn't around, Google could probably stop doing any work on search for the next five years with impunity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Talk to the guy behind gigablast.com

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe the solution to much of the problem lies in Riak. It is erlang based, has Map Reduce, is document oriented, has Free Text Search built in, is Solr compatible (though sketchy on details there) and is very scalable, and importantly, operationally easy for a small team.

I too found an impedance mismatch with CouchDB for what I'm working on (which is much like a search engine, but not quite), and found Riak to be a good solution.</comment>


An alternative way to capture childhood on your phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40483495 <comment><AUTHOR> Whilst harming, this is so simple there was no need to specify iPhones</comment>