Is Facebook the next Google?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2177562/ <comment><USER2> Key insight:

 _The secret of Google's success? They let you market anything, no matter how uncool, to anyone who can figure out a PC. We can Google for anything and buy it without anyone knowing. Google for "dandruff," "hemorrhoids," or "erictile disfunction" [sic]. Boom, boom, and boom--$4 billion adds up fast. Do you think I'm going to let Facebook use me to hawk Preparation H to fellow writers? Not a chance._

I hadn't even thought of that. One reason Google is so powerful with its advertising is that it is _private_. A lot of Internet purchases fall under this banner besides those mentioned above; a big one that comes to mind is gifts. Someone looking to purchase a gift for a friend is not going to do it through Facebook for fear that they might learn about it before receiving it. They will also be unqualified to review the merit of the item since they are not the ones who own it.

Facebook's advertising plan might work. It certainly has to be an improvement over their current methods. Then again, it has the potential to drive away users who are tired of being constantly marketed to. (Is it just me, or does it seem like when I finally do decide to buy something, it's a lot harder to find than when I didn't want it?) I agree, however, that Google certainly has the upper hand here with a model that Facebook can never hope to match, because on Google, many users are actually looking to buy something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can I get a greasemonkey script that removes all articles about Facebook from tech sites please?

</comment><comment><USER4> Facebook is the next AOL. Started as a walled garden. Tried to reach into content delivery and now transitioning into full service ad company. But NO ONE has a more lucrative platform than the Internet and email.

<comment><USER5> The guys running FB are a lot smarter than the guys running AOL were. From what I remember, AOL didn't have a hackerly culture even at the very beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> at last an article that speaks the truth

</comment><comment><USER7> No.</comment>


Fermat's Last Theorem Solved after 300 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/16/europe/fermats-last-theorem-solved-math-abel-prize/?iid=ob_article_footer_expansion&iref=obnetwork <comment><USER2> Fermat's Last Theorem has been solved for a while. A better headline would be "Andrew Wiles Wins 2016 Abel Award for Solution To Fermat's Last Theorem". CNN's headline uses the generic "Professor" but I think a lot of people around here would know who Andrew Wiles is, especially in the FLT context.</comment>


Google's suggestion for a better infinite scroll? - <AUTHOR> http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items <comment><USER2> I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it.

Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page.

It just feels... icky.

<comment><USER3> I wish to join your infinite scroll haters club.

To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's "Ian Malcolm" in Jurassic Park:

"Yeah, but your front-end developers were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

I personally find infinite scroll to be far worse than cleanly paginated pages in every regard. YMMV, I guess.

<comment><USER4> Every time I've witnessed infinite scroll being implemented into a project I've been involved with, the decision was not made by the developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would feel kind of okay with infinite scroll if it wasn't creating memory problems. Especially on image-heavy (tumblr) / DOM-heavy (facebook) pages. If I browsed the web in 90s mode (one window, one page opened) that would maybe work, but when I have dozens of tabs opened, youtube playing in background and I start browsing an endless memory-hungry page, my laptop (3 GB RAM) starts dying.

Another issue is the one mentioned in the other subthread here, often when you accidentally click some link on the page, you can't go back, it'll start loading everything from scratch. Happens to me e.g. on facebook on IE Mobile (apparently they don't use pushState). This effectively means I have to open links in a new tab.

<comment><USER6> Google's Wave used (and reused) a fixed number of DOM elements that were filled by fly-weights containing the data to be shown on that page. While the scroll bar showed the appropriate position in the thread, there was a limited amount of data for the items above and below the visible set, and an even more limited number of DOM elements that could be filled with data.

<comment><USER7> Wave didn't strike me as the most performant of client-side webapps, but certainly may have been ahead of its time in terms of what it was trying to do. I wonder if browsers could make this sort of thing easier, or even automatic. Querying the positions relative to viewport of elements on scroll is expensive, even using throttling.

<comment><USER8> My friends and I were heavy Wave users back in college. It was simply the best tool available by combining chat, Google docs and forums into a single tool. It was slow at first, but after the first 6 months of improvements it became progressively very responsive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really liked Discourse's approach to infinite scrolling[1], it updates the URL as you go with the History API's replaceState() function so you can safely navigate away from the page without losing your position.

[1]: [http://eviltrout.com/2013/02/16/infinite-scrolling-that- work...](http://eviltrout.com/2013/02/16/infinite-scrolling-that-works.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you look at the URL bar in google's example it does that as well.

<comment><USER10> The difference is that Discourse does it on a per-item basis, Google's on a per-page. A small implementation detail.

<comment><USER11> Well with discourse you want to go to a very specific comment in the thread so doing it per item is best. But that's not for every use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Infinite scrolling like this works pretty well if you want to do scrolling for, say, search results.

It's all around horrible for something like Twitter, IMO.

The problem with Twitter is that it's conversational, and it's showing the newest part of the conversation at the top. So instead of having a nice conversation history:

      Hi!
        Hello to you good sir.
          How are you doing today.
            I'm fine.

You get:

      I'm fine.
         How are you today?
           Hello to you good sir.
             Hi!

...and you lose the navigation state, so it's impossible to tell where you were at last on Twitter except by memory.

 __tl;dr __: don 't copy Twitter's UI. Please.

<comment><USER13> Twitter already fixed this in iOS (you always apparead where you left so you read everything in order), is just taking them a while to fix it in the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my favorite features of infinite scroll is how it can make clicking on the footer of a page nearly impossible. E.g. try clicking on "About" or "Careers" on the bottom of [http://venturebeat.com](http://venturebeat.com)

<comment><USER15> There's a link to the footer, and the footer links are in a fixed footer that is always visible. Not super-pretty but I think infinite scroll just means no footer.

<comment><USER16> On Facebook there is a footer, and seemingly no way to get to it unless you find a short enough page or manage to get to it faster than the infinite scroll can load.

<comment><USER17> All of the links in the footer are also at the bottom of the right-hand main column

<comment><USER16> Thank you for pointing that out. I think that area might have been a blind- spot for me. (immediately below the ads)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It still jumps around if you hold and drag the scrollbar - always my complaint with these.

<comment><USER19> I wonder how many people do hold and drag the scrollbar, I am so used to scrolling using a touchpad on Mac and mousewheel on PC, so I never even touch a scrollbar.

<comment><USER20> You'd be surprised.

I've done many user tests and training sessions only to inwardly wince every time the user painstakingly does that. (And this on their own hardware, with their own mouse they use every day at work.)

After you explain it, they say "wow, that's neat." And then promptly forget it and start dragging the scrollbar again.

<comment><USER21> I was until recently a devoted scroll-wheel-user. But I'm starting to see the first signs of arthritis in my fingers (far too early if you ask me) and scroll wheels are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

I've been surprised to find that dragging an old-fashioned scroll bar is actually a faster and more accurate than the wheel if you're scrolling by more than a page or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More explanation on their blog: [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite- scroll-search-friendly.html)

<comment><USER22> Thanks.

I could not find what was new witouth explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I suggest not using infinite scrolling. It's annoying as hell when I want to get back to where I was or just browse some older entries.

</comment><comment><USER24> This dentist had it all figured out 3 years ago [http://tumbledry.org/2011/05/12/screw_hashbangs_building](http://tumbledry.org/2011/05/12/screw_hashbangs_building)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741)

<comment><USER25> Sometimes there is no substitute for the insight of an outsider saying "that makes no sense, this is how I expect it to work"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hate infinite scrolling with a burning passion. You're reading the article and scroll down 2 pixels too far and WOP you're loading something again. Qz.com is one of the worst offenders here.

<comment><USER27> You're welcome.

In this case I called it pre-loading (it's not infinite either). You get to the end of an article and we have the next one ready for you. No need to make a choice on what to do next, just follow through if Headline is of interest.

Not perfect, but those who use it most do love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't this still effectively break the back button or at least the users view of the back button? To the user although there are visual hints, he/she hasn't left the page. Scrolling down the page however creates multiple history entries.

<comment><USER29> Nope, this seems to use history.replaceState, not pushState: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/Manipulating_the_browser_history)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm not a fan of infinite scroll in the main, but there are use cases for it. I've often thought search results would be a good candidate. The don't suffer from the need to provide user feedback on _progress of completion_. I also think it provides Google with more ad opportunites including placing them within the infinite scroll at some interval, and, of course, the highly prized sticky ad ;) [edit - wanted to add that it would also lessen the blow of being on p2 ... in fact I would expect search users to frequently get deeper into the results yielding an improved feedback loop]

<comment><USER31> I've been using a userscript [1] for the past year that adds the feature to search results and the like. Huge improvement, and with a little custom CSS styling the additional pages are appended more seamlessly.

The feature I appreciate about this particular userscript is it's clear where the page breaks are, and adds links to each newly appended page, allowing the user to link directly to them - which would be useful to see in more infinite scroll implementations, and seen used in the main HN link.

[1] [http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121191](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121191) [1a] [http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/164782](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/164782)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me how much I dislike infinite scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER33> Designers: please stop it with infinite scroll. They are painful to work with and work around.

When a service switches to infinitely scrolling lists, I stop using it.

<comment><USER34> Designers: Please continue to use infinite scroll where it's appropriate, it is much better than pagination much of the time, especially on mobile devices.

When a service sticks with pagination (like Amazon's movie service) I stop using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Infinite scroll is about making it as seamless as possible for the user to get new information.

How many times do you go on a paginated page, get to page 5 and say "okay, after page 6 I'm done." Then you either leave or continue on that process...

Infinite scrolling takes away your perspective of exactly how much content you're consuming and how much time you may be wasting. It is only until youre done and you attempt to scroll back up that you realize how much time youve spent.

My side-project now is very much like Tumblr/Pinterest and I found this post interesting because for awhile ive been trying to find the best middle-ground between infinite scrolling and some form of incremental, pagination-styled display of content.

Honestly I'm stumped but for right now my best solution is to load about 20 items, lazy load another 30, and use pagination for the rest. Although I've been thinking about just displaying an infinite scroll toggle switch on the bottom of the viewport after the user reaches the end of the initial item list.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you are someone who actually likes to have some control over what is happenning on your computer, and if you want to have some organization when you are dealing with a list of things that is pretty long - hundreds/thousands or more items - then pagination is useful. And continuous scroll is tempting/seductive, but ultimately flawed.

</comment><comment><USER37> This also needs to keep only N pagefuls above and below the page cut. E.g. if N is 2 and I'm on page 5, then it would only have pages 3-4,5,6-7 in DOM.

This would ensure that users get the same scrollbar range on page 5 regardless of whether they infi-scrolled themselves there or just clicked on "page 5" in the index.

</comment><comment> dj-wonk Favor: could someone share an intelligent (or at least in-depth) write-up of the pros/cons of infinite scrolling? Most of what I'm finding on the web is content farmy.

Also: at what point is memory usage worth worrying about? Scrolling for pages on end has to be tough on a browser.

<comment><USER38> pro : good for mobile users - con : no footer

<comment><USER39> Another possible pro (from the site-owner's perspective) is increased user engagement. When you are quietly loading more content all the time, it's easier for the user to continue to say, "I'll just look at one more post."

On the cons side, as others have mentioned, if you navigate away from an infinitely scrolling page, then click the back button, you often don't land in the correct place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I can't believe all the negative comments on here. If you have enough tabs open that infinite scrolling starts to bog down your browser, you should probably find a girlfriend/boyfriend and get out of your mom's basement or replace your computer with one made after 2003. Infinite scrolling, especially as shown here, is fantastic because it doesn't require endless hitting of the back button to get to the original post. The only time I've had a problem with infinite scrolling is for facebook friend purging and even then, who cares!?! If you don't like sites that use infinite scrolling, don't use those sites. This hybrid pagination/infinite scroll option looked awesome to me.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't think this fixes what is the core issue with infinite scroll: when I click into a subview and then press back, I am not returned to the same place where I was before. iOS, for instance, handles this extremely well by literally stacking the new view on top of the old one rather than changing the contents of the view. This implementation attempts to fix it, but only gets close, and so I have to re-contextualize myself every time I press back.

</comment><comment><USER42> I would argue that Airbnb's old Infinity.js is way better than this. Smoother and has a fully functioning scrollbar still. This one's pretty janky imo.

</comment><comment><USER43> My problem with infinite scrolling is that it is very hard to go straight to the last element. My example: A Flickr user with over 1000 images in their photostream. photostreams are loaded most recent first. But what if I want to see the first picture they submitted? Virtually impossible.

</comment><comment><USER44> Telerik's RadGrid has this same feature for quite some time [http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet- ajax/grid/examples/performan...](http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet- ajax/grid/examples/performance/virtualization/defaultcs.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER45> So is there a way to use any of those devices coming out (including health monitoring!) without leaking everything to the cloud?

I'm getting really annoyed that none of those will actually give you the tools to dump your data yourself in total privacy.

(And no, I don't care how many step you had today!)

</comment><comment><USER46> Off Topic: I don't know what the connection between the things the elements linked is, but many of them have single digit view counts:

[http://scrollsample.appspot.com/item?id=33](http://scrollsample.appspot.com/item?id=33)

</comment><comment><USER47> Infinite scroll is fine, if it remembered state when you click on a link/article and go back to the scrolled page. They rarely do, and you have re-infinite scroll to wherever you where before. So frustrating every time.

</comment><comment><USER48> Its easy when you are just dealing with "text elements" of equal size. But if you are loading images or injecting content in the list elements, the back- button starts to break.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not a big fan of infinite scrolling, and when it breaks standard desktop functionality like CMD + Up Arrow, as in the case of Google image search, I could really do without it.

</comment><comment><USER50> This reminds me a lot of ScrollSpy in Bootstrap [1].

1: [http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#scrollspy](http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#scrollspy)

</comment><comment><USER51> Why do so many designers/developers of pages with infinite scroll forget they put their footer menu in there and it is now inaccessible due to the scroll ?

<comment><USER52> I'm also concerned about the footer menu, may it be sticky or keep it on the bottom not shown. Looks like most of the sites have the latter. Maybe the footer is not that important, just to embed more links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why is this so hard that even Google can't get it right? If a page has little to no other content than the content in the list, why is it worth the hassle?

</comment><comment><USER53> StumbleUpon has been doing this for a couple of year. I always liked the built-in pagination.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ingenious. Now if only I could Ctrl-F through unloaded elements I'd be a happy camper.

</comment><comment><USER55> The permanent menu - with locator options - at the bottom is brilliant.

<comment><USER56> Unless you scroll a page at a time using Page Down or Space.

When I'm at the top of the page, the last visible item is "Live Room". If I page down once, the first visible item becomes "Black Refraction". I never even see that there's an item called "Live Room Out", it's obscured first by the footer and then by the header.

<comment><USER57> I've wondered if browsers couldn't reduce the paging distance by subtracting the height of header and footer regions on the page (as identified by position: absolute?). Something tells me it would not be so simple.

<comment><USER56> it should be possible for the page to fix, I think, by listening for a pagedown or spacebar press and changing the scroll position based on the height of the viewport minus the height of the stuff that obscures the viewport.

I think it would be really difficult for the browser to come up with a solution that would work anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I would like to add a suggestion for better infinite scroll: ban it.

</comment><comment><USER59> Love this. If only Hacker News and Reddit would implement it.

<comment><USER60> I don't even know how to get a second page of HN results. Never had the need. Infinite scrolling creates a daunting never-ending feeling. I like the sense of accomplishment after scanning/reading through a fixed list of results. Infinite scrolling makes that carrot forever out of reach.

<comment><USER61> It's the "more" link at the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Fucks up my scroll bar -> will not use

</comment><comment><USER63> Why is the title mentioning Google?

</comment><comment><USER64> my suggestion for infinite scroll: make it finite.</comment>


China bans exports of black clothing to Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/article/3033312/china-bans-exports-black-clothing-hong-kong-amid-protests <comment><USER2> Foodstuffs and liquid on the list too. So...they're going to starve them?</comment>


Great April Fool's Day Hoaxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/

<comment><USER2> Ugh. I am really not looking forward to tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have my sympathies. I figured the submitted article would be the best combination of humorous relief from much less funny April Fools jokes and a warning not to believe everything we read online for a day or so that I could share with the HN community. Have a safe, happy, and credible April 1st.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I really do like a good April Fool's joke... It's just that they're all so predictable now.

It's kind of like... "You mean site X has always done X and now it will be doing the inverse of X? That's preposterous!! O WATE - APRIL FOOLS U GUISE!!!"</comment></comment></comment>


Terminal IDE: full-featured terminal/shell/SDKs on Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spartacusrex.spartacuside

<comment><USER2> This kind of thing makes me sad. If Google had just built on top of the regular linux stack, even without X, they'd have all this for free. But instead Android is trapped with forked core libraries which track upstream poorly if at all; needless duplication (dumbed down rewrites of glibc, busybox, udevd); cave man software maintenance ("updates" by unzipping crap inside a boot loader).

It's a great app framework. But it's not even remotely close to being a self- hosted development environment, and probably never will be. Toys like this are just reminders about how much they threw out.

<comment><USER3> Both HP's webOS and Nokia's Maemo/Meego platforms were much more similar to a standard desktop Linux desktop. I wonder if Mozilla's Boot2Gecko, or even Samsung's Tizen will be good replacements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this was posted a while ago, it's also open source <http://code.google.com/p/terminal-ide/>

What I don't understand is how can someone code on this, even on a tablet.

<comment><USER5> It comes with telnetd and sshd so you can connect to it using a regular PC, if you feel like it. I also wonder, can you plug a USB keyboard into an android device and have it recognized (using a full size to mini USB adapter)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Terminal IDE is great and I use it frequently on my Prime, but it has no DNS name resolution built in. Also it is missing emacs. This has limited it to really just another place to SSH to a VPS.

*NOTE you can use jping to get the IP for a hostname. FWIW

</comment><comment><USER7> Very cool, but I can't pipe commands together because the shell doesn't recognize the pipe character on my phone (htc evo)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using the built-in Terminal IDE keyboard that comes with the app? You will probably need to enable it explicitly in the keyboard settings. It's big and a bit unwieldy, but one criticism that _can't_ be levied against it is featurelessness..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any ideas for setting up a package manager?

<comment><USER8> this looks pretty cool. use it to install python and/or ruby: <http://botbrew.inportb.com/></comment></comment>


Google+ loses key partners as PopCap, Wooga pull games  - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/172408/Google_loses_key_partners_as_PopCap_Wooga_pull_games.php <comment><USER2> It's strange to read the comments here on Hacker News that people are glad and "relieved" that games in Google+ are gone.

Put it this way, if Google+ remains a nerdvana, then it has lost. Google wants Google+ to be a household name. Not a niche product. It may well die a slow and painful death if it doesn't gain widespread use and adoption. Either way a nerdvana or equivalent means Google+ will never have reached its potential or what it set out to be. That's a huge failure in the scheme of things. Remember, Google changed EVERYTHING to center around Google+.

Google wants to remain one of the biggest and most relevant brands in technology to EVERYONE. Not just people interested in Linus Torvalds post comments.

March at GDC 2012, Punit Soni, lead product manager for Google+ games and mobile: "Games are key to the success of Google+"

Hacker News comments can be so out of touch with what's at stake, what is reality and what they view as "great" for their own skewed opinions. Hacker News readers are meant to understand intended audiences and project goals. Not feel relieved that games are gone.

Link Quote: [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168726/Nine_months_later_...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168726/Nine_months_later_Google_game_devs_are_reluctant_to_share_success_stories.php)

<comment><USER3> Google has made G+ intentionally unattractive to most people, and has encouraged the 40-50-ish white male technology self-promoters to be the focus of the network. They could have made other choices. This isn't our problem and can't be fixed by us.

Games, as currently implemented on social networks, are a terrible and useless waste of human time. (Imagine a true social networking game. We haven't seen it yet, but it's out there somewhere. But trying to figure out how to make people come back to your app every two hours to "harvest crops" is dumb.)

<comment><USER4> >Google has made G+ intentionally unattractive to most people, and has encouraged the 40-50-ish white male technology self-promoters to be the focus of the network.

Could you explain your reasoning? I'm not sure why you believe this to be the case. Introducing games was just one sign that they wanted to attract a wider demographic.

<comment><USER5> Google limited the appeal of G+ early on when they started enforcing their real name policy. Throwing out users when you're trying to expand the user base turned out to be counterproductive. But the policy seems more misguided than intentionally unattractive.

<comment><USER6> And we see the same problem again. The number of people who care about the real-name policy is so vanishingly small that it just doesn't matter. It's the 37 Signals cat.jpg[1] issue problem.

Look at Facebook. Everyone[2] uses their real names, and it seems to have done ok.

[1] Apparently some people thought it was outrageous that 37 Signals posted that the 100 billionth (or whatever) file uploaded was called cat.jpg.

[2] I expect some pedantic comments here about how their friend's boyfriend uses a fake name to avoid an ex-gf. If you think that is important then may I suggest you are missing the point.

<comment><USER7> It is funny, cause the no pseudonym policy was brought up as the reason why Google+ is an older male technologist wasteland, and vast majority of the vanishingly small number of people who care about the no pseudonym policy are older male technologists.

<comment><USER6> Very nicely put.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't surprise me a lot.

When the games launched I went to try a few and they all demanded to know my personal information - name, birth date, etc. I was pretty offended by that and never bothered going further. I'm generally OK with targeted advertising but there is zero reason for a game to need to know my full name and birth date.

<comment><USER9> From a legal standpoint, there absolutely is a need to know your full name and birth date. It's called the FTC Coppa rule, where it's illegal to collect and disclosing personal information of children under age 13 without their parents' prior consent. Acclaim got dinged by that last year and as a result, some games no longer allow underage players at all.

<comment><USER10> Uh, if you don't collect any personal information, COPPA isn't an issue. So if you don't ask for name and birthdate, you have no need to ask for their birthdate. To my knowledge, playing a game requires no personal information.

<comment><USER11> ...unless they plan to monetize your information, hence first requiring your concent to it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, that's one bullet dodged. I think the last thing anyone wants to see on G+ is games. I recall the Facebook UX being significantly (negatively) affected by the addition of so-called "apps".

<comment><USER13> It is one of the first things that Google+ launched in August of last year. It may be why they built their network in the first place. Page views, signups and monetization on Facebook are heavily correlated to people playing games on the platform.

<comment><USER14> I think Google did it more for the users than for themselves. They thought people like games like Farmville and such, and it's a big reason why they spend so much time on Facebook. This is also why they left full control to the user so he can't get spammed by the games, like you get on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> G+ has attracted a different audience than FB so I'm not surprised that games aren't catching on.

<comment><USER16> although i'm not a fan of facebook or g+, the idea that games are a key factor to their success is an alien idea to me.

<comment><USER17> >* the idea that games are a key factor to their success is an alien idea to me*

Games are an extra reason for people to visit the site regularly, perhaps many times per day. That increases the users exposure to your advertising and creates more opportunity for them to add some information to your database (people are more likely to post an arbitrary thought if they are already logged in to check on their farm than if they'd have to open a new browser window specifically to do so) which both helps you target your advertising and (if you are lucky enough to have people who care about what you say) may provide more reason for other people to visit regularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> No games on Google+? Colour me relieved - and this is coming from a game designer!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm relieved about games not being on Google + too.

But I also know that's not what Google wants. Google wants the herd. They don't want to be 2nd (or 3rd). And if you want the "herd" you cater to the herd.

<comment><USER20> Yep, so far Google+ hasn't reach its eternal september yet, and that's a darn good thing IMO.

<comment><USER21> Not that good when Google declares it a failure and lets it stagnate like Orkut.

<comment><USER20> I'm happy with my Linux desktop, though Linux desktop penetration stagnated for the last decade. I'm not sure I have that much to gain from being mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm disappointed by this, but I have a feeling that Google is going to make a big gaming play. My money is on a 'game center' type app for Android at IO and that this will have some sort of tie in with Google+.

On a different note, I think that Google is basically implementing games perfectly on Google+. The reason people hate games on Facebook (and consequently, without thinking, want them gone on Google+) is because Facebook is constantly pestering you to "play Foo Game 2000 with such and such a friend", or "such and such a friend go 10000 points in Foo Game 2000". I've never once seen this on Google+. Gaming on Google+ is completely separate from its other functions (which are in turn just ways to tie Google's multitude of services together).

Google+ does social gaming perfectly, and if there's a tie in with Android gaming I think it could really take off. Imagine games that save your progress between the browser and your phone, and allow you to do all the social things that OpenFeint tries to do (but fails at).

</comment><comment><USER23> There are games on Google+?

<comment><USER24> They did the right then and kept them hidden in the corner. I guess that did mean no one saw them at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Given that Zynga was the biggest reason for Facebook growth second to nothing other than the Facebook itself, I can see how this could hurt the numbers.

Then again, we all remember Farmville. We can live without that on G+.

</comment><comment><USER26> While I am not a big fan of games, I don't mind G+ putting games on it's network to cater to the current internet generation.

Just keep that crap out of my news feed ( _cough_ Facebook _cough_ ) and all is well.

I don't give two craps that you opened a fortune cookie and now you want me to open one.

Facebook will be a thing of the past. I logged in after a long time and the UI is still cluttered with game requests, fortune cookie requests, kiss requests all other garbage I am not fond of.

Yes I can ignore these apps, but I'd rather not waste my life click ignoring on each of these stupid apps. G+ has a good signal to noise ratio on content I SUBSCRIBE to and that is why I let them use my data.

</comment><comment><USER27> One big reason I don't like FB is, it is having games. Even though I don't play games on FB, but my friends do. And every day I see lots of notification saying, your friend is playing that awesome game, score of your friend is xxx can you beat that, your friend needs your help for abc game.

I wished g+ don't have such craps at all.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not gonna brag, but this was very easy to see coming. Here's a blog post I wrote last year:

[http://coryliu.com/post/8637665056/google-plus-sucks-for- soc...](http://coryliu.com/post/8637665056/google-plus-sucks-for-social-game- developers)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've heard from multiple sources that online social gaming is tapering off as a market, to be overtaken by mobile gaming apps.

Perhaps G+ was skating where the puck was, instead of where the puck should be?

</comment><comment><USER30> Meh, life goes on. It was only a matter of time, Google+ just hasn't caught on with the masses and I don't think that it ever will. The only people that use Google+ are Robert Scoble and well I'd hardly call that a successful website if Robert Scoble is your only user, hahaha.

</comment><comment><USER31> I can tell you I don't use G+ to play games.</comment>


Web Development Basics Learning Bookmarks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felipesabino/web-learning-bookmarks

<comment><AUTHOR> I started collecting all links I used to send to people that asked me for help when they were just started on web development and it initially resulted in this repo.

I still don't know the best way to organise it (topic, sub-topics, etc) and how to let it simple for those who are starting and have no idea how to search for stuff...

Any suggestions or PR are welcome, thanks</comment>


Never Hate. Only Ever Destroy. - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-ever-destroy.html

<comment><USER2> This is how I see it: The startup scene is like a big mall where one quarter have shops selling stuff that people are looking for, and the other 3/4 are borrowing money to buy lottery tickets. Every now and then, one of them will win the lottery, driving the others into an even greater frenzy.

And people like Arrington and Graham are on the sidelines with megaphones cheering on the lottery ticket buyers because, it turns out, they are earning a 6% cut on ticket sales.

<comment><USER3> YC only benefits from a small percentage of startups. The rest on average _decrease_ our returns, because some compete with the ones we fund.

<comment><USER4> It seems like a lot of YC startups have more partners than competitors, but maybe those are just the ones most visible to me, e.g. disqus, clickpass, tipjoy. Snipshot, one with a lot of competition, still has more than twice as many partners as competitors. The only YC company I know of that was stopped by competition was Kiko, and its competition was not a small startup.

<comment><USER3> Nearly all have competitors. Plus any startup trying to raise money has to compete with pretty much every other startup currently trying to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the post - loved the presentation as well - the longest presentation that I have ever sat through on the web.

I realize his arguments are sort of drummed up for effect, but I thought the analogy between VC and patronage was weak. Its true they were both systems whereby rich people would pay talented poorer people to make things for them, but the further connection - the reason for the payments and the building, doesn't hold up. Do VC's really want to build companies to feel good about themselves, or to show off, or to look better? Only if those companies make money. Pets.com was a stupid idea and if anything the VCs that invested in it have probably never lived it down. Not too successful as a vanity project. Also, the VCs aren't investing their own money, so they are responsible to do more than look good, while those whose actual cash is invested (angel's aside) aren't well known - nor do they appear to seek out reknown.

Anyway - I figure this wasn't a legal case he was pleading, just my .02

<comment><USER6> "Do VC's really want to build companies to feel good about themselves, or to show off, or to look better? Only if those companies make money."

I think you misunderstand the VC business. They charge a fee for managing money. Therefore, their business is attracting investment. This is exactly how mutual funds operate as well.

Now, they stand to make money when their funds make money through various incentives and so forth. But by far the biggest incentive is that if they have a home run, they get more money invested, which means more management fees.

So aren't they incented to make money for their investors?

Not really: if they have a string of modest investments, averaging out to making money, they will not attract a lot of capital: the money will flow to the VCs that have name brand hits.

Whereas if they have a ton of total and otherwise embarrassing failures but hit one out of the park, they will get a ton of new money when they start another fund.

Or if their portfolio companies are the darlings of the press, they will get a ton of new money when they start another fund

So...

Their strongest incentives are to own companies that get a lot of press and hopefully get a few really press-worthy hits.

That is a lot like patronage to me.

<comment><USER7> I have to agree with goodgoblin: VC is not quite like patronage.

Patronage is gift culture; its message is: "Look how much I can afford to give away!" A patron patronizes something not merely with a risk of losing money -- losing money is the expectation and practically the goal. VCs, on the other hand, invest in something with the hope that they will eventually have more money than they started with.

You point out that ambitious VCs will invest in riskier propositions to increase their chances of a big hit. But their motivation for doing this is so that the big hit draws more money for the next round. This feedback loop (money -> fame -> more money -> more fame) is not present in patronage, because a patron's fame is not expected to lead to significantly more money.

<comment><USER6> There is room for both of the expressions "a lot like patronage" and "not quite like patronage" to be true.

The big question about using patronage as a metaphor is whether discussing the ways in which Venture Capitalism 'is' and 'is not' like Patronage leads to greater insight.

What do you think?

<comment><USER7> You are correct -- the insight is what matters. But in this case, I do not think the patronage analogy is helping.

Giles brings up patronage as an explanation for why VCs -- who are otherwise interested in money -- are not interested in hearing about a profitable microloan business. From the patronage analogy he gathers that they are more interested in power than money, hence their class hierarchy and why microloans are beneath them.

I feel the patronage analogy misses the point because it implies that VCs are somehow not interested in profit. If you follow this logic through, you'd conclude that startups are profit-losing ventures kept alive only for the power trips of VCs. While this may be true in a few cases, I think it is an incorrect conclusion, since VCs _are_ interested in profit (or, at least, their investors are), and there is apparently enough return in startups that investors do not go elsewhere.

There is a simpler explanation for why VCs are not interested in microloans: it is far enough out of their geographic and technical areas that they don't think they could do very well at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When he brought up Grameen Bank as the kind of thing that TechCrunch wouldn't bother reporting on I became incredulous and thought "um, Kiva?" So I went to techcrunch.com to find their post on Kiva. Which doesn't exist. Not only have they never written directly about Kiva but when they mention it they characterize it as a p2p-lending site rather than as a microfinance organization.

<comment><USER8> omfg. This is from the CrunchBase description of Kiva:

"Kiva is alone in their business model of online p2p lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries as a nonprofit entity. Other p2p lending sites, like Prosper, Zopa and Lending Club, make lower-risk loans to people in the same country as for-profit entities. Online p2p lending is new and it is hard to maneuver around financial regulations to make higher-risk, international loans as a for-profit entity, which is partly why Kiva formed as a non-profit."

Looks like these "new jounalists" could learn a bit from the New York Times: [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section4.t-6.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section4.t-6.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dead insightful and well put. About the only thing I read TechCrunch for is to get invites to beta start-ups. I don't care about MA's perspective on Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER10> I agree. It could be a false perception, but it seems there used to be a far greater amount of start-up reviews. What was a great way to discover new and interesting products/services seems to have changed into editorial on the valley, technology issues, and financials.

I liked this when it started, as it was a little bit of the "behind the scenes" of the products/services I liked learning about. I think it has since gotten a bit out of hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact that a person's name often makes a lousy search term is the very reason we have brands and branding, it's one of the reasons internet semi- anonymity or pseudonymhood can be so interesting and useful, and it's one reason to question the future of businesses that assume we all wish to consolidate the shards of our multifaceted online identities.

</comment><comment><USER12> "you ridiculous MBA-having suit-wearing dumber-than-a-monkey Friends-episode- reject J-Crew-catalog muppetfuckers.... you scum-gobbling weasel-brained magic-eight-ball-flipping clueless fucking nimrods."

Funniest thing I've read all week.

</comment><comment><USER13> Indeed. The primary metric by which bloggers are judged is popularity, which we long ago dismissed as being a terrible measure of value. Popular books, popular music, popular movies, popular television -- these are rarely our best works.

It's as though we've forgotten this on the web though, and re-instituted a hierarchy of who matters that is based on meticulously engineered stacks of grade-A bullshit, which, surprise, surprise, favors peddlers of distraction and get-rich-quick schemes of all sorts. We've replaced "Old Media" with "Tomorrow's Old Media".

Technorati even equates machine-estimated popularity with "Authority", a dangerously loaded word and wholly inaccurate besides. Certainly popularity means _something_ , but it doesn't say much at all about whether any person, even someone in the ostensible target audience, should pay any attention at all.

<comment><USER14> Although, don't we sometimes unfairly criticize entities that are popular only because they are popular? [http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/40-indi...](http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/40-indie- music/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did you watch the video of his presentation? (the link is at the bottom of the article). Very entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good article, but why does he take screenshots of his email and attach them to the post instead of just cutting and pasting the text into the post?

I personally have no trouble reading it, but pictures of text are not very easy to read for some people.

<comment><USER17> I like the pretty colors.

Also, Blogger is fucking evil, and it eats the > from quoting e-mails, which sometimes is a very time-consuming bug.

By the way mad apologies but I'm actually banning my own blog from my view of Hacker News, using a Greasemonkey script in Firefox. I would seriously kill people to defend my right to post gifs instead of cutting and pasting text, even though I realize it's ridiculous. Reasonable people can disagree, but for the rest of us, there's Greasemonkey.

<comment><USER18> Congratulations on pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing.

I have a question for you. If the VCs are the Medicis of the modern age what would our Da Vinci look like? Or our Michelangelo?

How would we recognize greatness amongst us?

<comment><USER19> Were they recognized at the time?

Michelangelo did get one of the most prestigous jobs of his time, but what about the rest of the now-recognized great artists - were they more popular than the hacks of their day?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the outside, all the infighting makes the blogging scene feel like high school again.

</comment><comment><USER21> I didn't understand what this was about. Cory Doctorow and TechCrunch are bad, because TechCrunch doesn't like Rails and never wrote about Grameen Bank? plz advise.</comment>


Five languages that came from English - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160811-how-english-gave-birth-to-surprising-new-languages <comment><USER2> A curious side note - hardly a language or even dialect, really - is the effect that having a large number of immigrants from one country can have on a region's language.

For example, in my own eastern Wisconsin, a large part of "Wisconsin-ese" is nothing more than German translated directly into English. So many people settled Eastern Wisconsin from Germany at the same time that their efforts to learn English all had the same mistakes, and became our local "pidgen".

For example -

\- to soften an imperative in German, add "mal" \- short for "einmal" (once) \- there is only one word for borrow or lend - "leihen".

And so "Leih mir ein dollar mal" is "Could you lend me a dollar?" in English, but,

"Borrow me a dollar once"

in Wisconsin "accent". Many other small examples of this.

<comment><USER3> yep, another example of this is when Wisconsinites talk about visiting someone. "Let's go to Jeremy's house" becomes "Let's go by Jeremy", which is correct in German.

<comment><USER4> Though "Let's swing by Jeremy's" would be AFAIK pretty common across the US-- although I suppose in that case there's a [house/place] implied by the possessive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In general, there are 2 ways to classify something as a language instead of a dialect:

1\. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0]

2\. Easier test is mutual intelligibility – dialects of one language are mutually intelligible – US English speakers chat and understand with the Brits (even when they can hear the extra 'u's in colour). Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German.

0 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)

<comment><USER6> Mutually intelligible is not an exact thing. From my own experience:

A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. It worked OK, but not great, and not for anything technical (like science and finance, where the Germanic words are very different to the English).

With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Also, I found the TV Series "The Bridge / Broen" quite unlikely. Swedes and Danes don't talk that easily together, and certainly not with slang. The scenario of the cops from opposite sides of the bridge working together could still work, but mostly in writing. Also, the cadence is very different. Swedish is melodic. Danish is grunty.

Of course I have had no instruction in Swedish or Norwegian, but it wouldn't be hard, based on friends who have moved.

German is not mutually intelligible with Danish. But it is. I went to a handful of German classes, and it dawned on me that changing a few things around makes High German pretty much like old Danish, like what you'd hear in old black-and-white movies from around the war. These days Danish has a lot of English in it, and something about the way sentences are put together makes old movies seem very... old. But once you have a simple map in your mind, Danish appears to be German with some substitutions and simplified grammar. I can read the paper in German now, despite having had just those few lessons.

Swiss German, now there's a weird one. The sounds are different. I suppose I'm twice removed from it, but even native Germans I know will produce the WTF face when they hear a Swiss German. Words and grammar are similar, but different enough to be recognisably so by a foreigner like myself. But I suppose it's like Swedish and Danish.

Apropos the article, Singlish I found quite interesting. To me it's just English with sprinkled Chinese, and I think most English speaking people will not have a problem understanding it without instruction. One useful addition: English doesn't make much use of the modal particle, so it makes sense that Cantonese "la" is heard all over the place.

<comment><USER7> When I learned Norwegian, my teacher used to joke that all of Scandinavia spoke Norwegian. It's just that the Swedes were pronouncing things wrong and the Danish couldn't spell it correctly.

<comment><USER8> and she just left out Finland because it didn't make any sense.

<comment><USER9> Finland is not usually considered to be a part of Scandinavia, though.

<comment><USER8> [http://images.google.com/search?q=scandinavia](http://images.google.com/search?q=scandinavia) Every image in googles image search says you're wrong.

<comment><USER10> Eyeballing Google Image Search? What an absolutely absurd way of figuring out what Scandinavia is. First of all, "every image" isn't even close to true, as many of them clearly highlight Finland (and Iceland) in different colors and many of them include non-Scandinavian countries for context (like Poland and the Baltics). If you actually click on any of those links, they don't "say he's wrong". From one of the first result's webpage (Wikipedia):

> The term Scandinavia always includes the mainlands of the three kingdoms of > Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Norwegian dependencies, including Svalbard and > Jan Mayen, are usually not seen as a part of Scandinavia, nor is Danish > Greenland. However, the Danish Faroe Islands are sometimes included, as > sometimes are Iceland and Finland

Finnish isn't even remotely related to the Scandinavian languages. If you're going to be needlessly pedantic and contrarian, at least put a little more effort in it than glancing at Google Images.

<comment><USER8> blah blah blah. Finnish is related to Scandinavian languages because it is a Scandinavian language. There are even similar words like appelsiini vs apelsin for Orange, in Finnish/Swedish respectively.

<comment><USER11> That's... not how languages are grouped together. Russian has the word "apelsin", meaning the same thing - is it a Scandinavian language also?

Finland is associated with Scandinavia by virtue of being dominated by actual Scandinavian countries (notably, Sweden) for so long, which influenced the culture. But it's not Scandinavian per se, any more so than, say, Georgia is Eastern Slavic. Ditto the language - influenced, yes; belonging to the same group, not at all.

<comment><USER8> I speak Finnish. Well aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I found this video of a woman reciting the opening to Genesis in Tok Pisin, and it struck me as really interesting. The repetition in the verses is likely what's key to this, but if at first upon hearing it you're bewildered, about halfway through you realize that you can understand what she's saying.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laTpd2ofjKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laTpd2ofjKg)

The history behind the language is interesting, too. Interacting with English speakers created a language that unified a geographic area that was rich in individual languages with no common tongue.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Development_of_Tok_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Development_of_Tok_Pisin)

<comment><USER13> > if at first upon hearing it you're bewildered, about halfway through you > realize that you can understand what she's saying.

As a non-native English speaker, this is basically my experience watching some movies (where the characters speak with regional dialects). The first 10 minutes I feel like the actors are mumbling and then after 20 or so minutes I have no problem keeping up anymore.

Also what it feels like when someone with an accent is holding a lecture at my university.

<comment><USER14> It took me longer for British accents to become intelligible; I think it took about a season of Top Gear before I no longer had to rewind certain portions or listen very actively to understand what was being said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These five languages didn't 'come' or evolve solely from English - rather they are all English-based creoles[0]. Many of them are grammatically quite different to English, but they've all had heavy influences from other languages as well.

On the other hand, French, Romanian and Portuguese aren't Latin-based creoles - they're separate languages which have evolved from Latin (although you could make the argument that Portuguese and French are two ends of a dialect continuum[1]).

Really, the relationship between Tok Pisin and English is very different to the relationship between French and Latin. English hasn't had the time and geographical spread to diverge into different languages that Latin has had.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English- based_creole_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English- based_creole_languages) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Romance_lang...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Romance_languages)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the article title (premise?) is flawed in that way. Otherwise an interesting overview of a few languages I'd never heard of

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shelta, is a language spoke by the Irish travellers, came from Irish and English. It is pretty interesting : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta)

<comment><USER18> huh, interesting that linguists would call it something totally different from what speakers call it (always called some variation of "travellers cant" from the speakers I've known).

<comment><USER17> Yes, I have no idea why...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How about all computer languages? They're largely subject to grammar constraints (e.g. LR, etc.), but they're quite subject to creolization and almost all the widely used ones are derived from english, nerd slang, slang tech terms, short tech terms, and shit that early programmers made up to express themselves. I've been wanting to do a study on the evolution, understanding, and psychology of programming languages (even wrote a blog post awhile back about it) but i haven't gotten around to it.

<comment><USER20> Computer languages are only very superficially similar to English. Like a whale is superficially similar to a fish. The syntax of ALL computer languages is completely unlike English. Computer languages don't have the phonology or morphology of English either (they don't have any phonology or morphology).

<comment><USER19> morphology I'm not so sure. looking at the evolution of keywords seems to suggest that the morphology is there. phonology, I'd have agreed with you a few years ago after I finished a minor in slavic linquistics, but now after seeing how people verbally communicate programming concepts over the last decade and how that communication has impacted language design itself...I'm not so sure. In either event, the structure of the english language has heavily impacted the design of languages used to program computers. Not so drastic a difference as whale to fish, more whale to dolphin.

<comment><USER11> As an aside, I wonder if anyone has studied how learning an English-based (at least wrt keywords and such) programming language before learning English affects the latter.

From personal experience (I am a native Russian speaker), I have a feeling that it does, to some extent. To this day, for me, the primary meaning words like "loop" and "string" is that of programming - the first mental association with "string" is text, not an actual string, for example. Surely this has got to change perspective somewhat.

This also has an interesting side effect, in that code doesn't look like mutilated English - it just naturally reads and feels like, well, code. This is not the case when I'm reading a program that uses keywords in my native language (e.g. the 1C language - [http://www.asd- dnepr.com/images/v8/two_variants_of_embedded_...](http://www.asd- dnepr.com/images/v8/two_variants_of_embedded_language.gif)) - those just look weird as hell, and very awkward/funny. I have often asked myself if that's what C and Python look like to native English speakers; and if so, then what difference does it make in how we code.

<comment><USER21> > To this day, for me, the primary meaning words like "loop" and "string" is > that of programming

In my case (another non-native English speaker), I had come across 'a piece of string' and such before encountering programming, and so that's the immediate association string brings to mind. 'Loop', however, I hadn't come across before I learnt programming, so it's very strongly associated with that sense in my mind, even though now I know the "other" meaning.

> This is not the case when I'm reading a program that uses keywords in my > native language [...] - those just look weird as hell, and very > awkward/funny. I have often asked myself if that's what C and Python look > like to native English speakers; and if so, then what difference does it > make in how we code.

Yep, I too wondered the same thing after finding a programming language in my native language ([https://github.com/Ezhil-Language-Foundation/Ezhil- Lang](https://github.com/Ezhil-Language-Foundation/Ezhil-Lang)), and seeing how even keywords that are meant to sound natural for their usage get bent awkwardly out of shape by the thousand different contexts we use them in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Having lived in Papua New Guinea twice while growing up, I have a certain fondness for the language Tok Pisin. I can't really speak much of it, but I can understand a fair bit.

You've got to love a language where "gras" means "hair", "bagarap" means pretty much the same thing if you say it out loud in English, and while expressing how full your tummy is after a good meal you accidentally say you're pregnant[1].

It's charmingly idiosyncratic to an English ear.

And there's even an edition of Wikipedia in Tok Pisin: [https://tpi.wikipedia.org/](https://tpi.wikipedia.org/)

[1] True story. My dad did this and all the locals fell on the ground laughing.

[2] Brief blog post I wrote in 2009 which is the source for this comment: [http://www.michevan.id.au/content/wikipedia-really-does- have...](http://www.michevan.id.au/content/wikipedia-really-does-have-page- just-about-everything/)

[3] Another blog post about the Vanuatuian cousin, Bislama: [http://www.michevan.id.au/content/by-any-other- name/](http://www.michevan.id.au/content/by-any-other-name/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Really neat. Especially the idea that:

"English may come to have a global standard that is not exactly what is spoken in any local culture"

</comment><comment><USER24> As others have mentioned, many of the examples in this article are creoles. A non-creole example of language descended from English (or rather Middle English) is Scots, which has its own dialectical variations that vary in intelligibility with Modern English.

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

</comment><comment><USER25> Gullah is a neat language. I came across a website that had a Gullah translation of the bible -- at first glance it looks unintelligible, but when you read it out loud it makes complete sense (as a native english speaker):

[http://www.gullahbible.com/e-GullahNT/index.htm](http://www.gullahbible.com/e-GullahNT/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER26> Creoles are fascinating. If we can assume that modern language came about with modern humans some 50,000 years ago, I wonder how many modern languages are creoles of extinct languages?

</comment><comment><USER27> There are, of course, other languages that came from English. One that comes to mind is Bislama, a dominant language spoken in Vanuatu.

</comment><comment><USER28> Also Hawaiian Pidgin (not a literal pidgin).

</comment><comment><USER29> Out of interest, is American English considered a dialect of British English?

<comment><USER30> No, they are both dialects of English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Take this article with a grain of salt. Their description of Singlish is enough to disqualify the accuracy of the rest of the piece. Singlish is not a unique or separate langauage, or even an actual language. Comparing Singlish to English is no different than comparing Cockney to English. I don't think the different dialects of English within the U.K. are all considered separate languages, and therefore Singlish should not be either. An American English speaker will likely have much better chance of understanding a Singaporean than understanding some of the U.K. dialects.

<comment><USER32> Most Singaporeans still have a concept of "proper" English, and can code switch across the creole continuum, but interestingly the acrolect ("variation most associated with refinement") is basically standard UK or US English - though not everyone can get there. As a comparison, the closest similarity I can think of in terms of having a similar English creole continuum is Jamaican patois.

I doubt most native English speakers (despite my best wishes, I certainly can't) could decipher the Singlish basilect ("least refined") - the cadence is syllable-timed, the vocabulary is part Hokkien, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay, grammar is nonstandard and a substantial part of emotion is conveyed through particle suffixes (the stereotypical Singlish "lah" is emphasis).

<comment><USER33> Here's an example of some of the continuum [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXRJiMkKpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXRJiMkKpI)

and some more (from a film) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo4ufPKTq0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo4ufPKTq0E)

and an explanation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC8nM75AqUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC8nM75AqUk)

<comment><USER34> > Here's an example of some of the continuum > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXRJiMkKpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXRJiMkKpI)

Wow, that accent shift is _really_ striking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What about Canadian? ;)</comment>


Latency Tricks - <AUTHOR> http://clarkgaebel.com/latency-tricks.html <comment><USER2> Helpful quotes on optimization fall in to two categories, first - the fallacy of optimization in general.

 _Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it._ \- Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming (2003)

 _Optimization considered harmful: In particular, optimization introduces complexity, and as well as introducing tighter coupling between components and layers._ \- RFC3439

 _Spell create with an 'e'._ \- Ken Thompson (referring to design regrets on the UNIX creat(2) system call and the fallacy of premature optimization)

 _The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don 't do it._ \- Michael Jackson

 _The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only): Don 't do it yet._ \- Michael Jackson

Second, the established method.

 _Before optimizing, using a profiler._ \- Mike Morton

... from my fortune clone @ [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't the minimum of 2 iid rvs drawn from a pareto distribution be calculated analytically?

</comment><comment><USER4> The article while interesting doesn't even attempt to talk about identifying _WHY_ he is experiencing latency spikes.

It seems to me that the first step is to instrument the heck out of your application. That way you know _WHY_ it sometimes takes longer to respond than at other times. I understand this is harder in a GC'ed/JIT'ed language, but its not really an excuse.

Good instrumentation is helpful for far more than tracking and isolating problems in ones software stack. The project I work on has pretty extensive request level instrumentation which tracks each request at multiple points as they are processed. More than once the first signs that a piece of hardware is failing is the disk or network IO's start to have unusual latency patterns. Often software performance regressions show up as highly variable database requests, etc..

</comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. Of course you now have to synchronize state between the servers, and it will only work if a significant fraction of the higher-latency events are independent between servers.</comment>


If you wanna learn about Big Data, you should definitely read this - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/haifengl/bigdata <comment><USER2> If you wanna prevent brain rot -- in yourself as well as in others -- you gotta stop using inane teaser headlines.</comment>


David Sinclair on preprint claiming 54% age reversal in rats - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1259912928695857152 <comment><USER2> [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1259912928695857152.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1259912928695857152.html)

Accidental death is ~50/100k/lifetime. So 0.9995^n = 1/2 is our accidental halflife. That's ~1400 lifetimes, or about 100k years. Someone please check.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Similarly, young mouse blood rejuvenated the hearts and muscles of old mice._

I don't like where this is going. "Sell your young blood to aging old billionaires!"

<comment><USER4> There are about 2100 billionaires in the world. I'd said the market is much larger than that.

Decades ago I used to sell my plasma when I was in college for a little extra cash. If this actually works, you could probably pay your way through college by donating plasma. I think I did it every week.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if I like the idea of literally selling my lifeblood to go to college

<comment><USER5> Why do you need to go to college so bad?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Invitation software for social networking platform - <AUTHOR>

We're looking for specific functionality in our social networking website. When users sign up, we want to offer checking their google, yahoo, hotmail address book for a) users currently in the system b) automatically connect with friends currently in the system c) send invitations to those not in the system to join. Can you give a recommendation for how to add this functionality? (prefer to outsource rather than build in house)<p>Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Free: <http://openinviter.com/>

Paid: <http://www.octazen.com/> <http://addressbookimport.com> <http://www.improsys.com/importer.htm>

Most of these have the best support for PHP which may or may not work for your needs. Various free libraries have been released for other languages but 1) generally support only a few email providers and 2) may not be actively maintained. Octazen has a fee-based API which sounds great but I haven't used it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the response. looks like octazen is the winner</comment></comment>


No, You Probably Can't Work Remotely - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2013/02/agile-when-you.php?id=17

<comment><USER2> "Here's where it gets a bit tricky, and remember that I'm only trying to reverse engineer why we're observing that it doesn't work. I don't have all the answers."

This is also known as rationalizing. What would be powerful would be to predict company failure using this as the sole criteria and demonstrating a significant deviation.

I haven't seen that yet, but I'd love to if the data exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

It might be rationalizing if I wanted the outcome to be a certain way. I actually do not like this outcome, as noted in the article.

This is pattern recognition. Of course, there are many variables, and correlation doesn't equal causation. Still, as rational actors we are forced to give it our best guess using data, anecdotal or otherwise. Simply because "it feels good" doesn't make it better -- or worse.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that humans aren't pattern recognizing machines, they're pattern projecting machines hence the proliferation of many types of biases.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I am trying to give away free $130 products, need marketing advice - <AUTHOR>

My startup, ReviewFairy.com, gives away top products in exchange for high-quality product reviews. Right now we are giving away $130 home monitoring cameras:
https://www.reviewfairy.com/camera-products.html
Our general sign-up form for all products is: www.ReviewFairy.com
I see user acquisition as a function of traffic and conversion. Conversion is hurt by the trust needed for my business (reviewers pay first and then get reimbursed) and probably a host of other things. If you see any easily fixable trust-blockers, please let me know :)
I am most curious about traffic channels. Though. Does anyone have any experience advertising to heavy online-shoppers? I've tried ads but cost per customer has been pretty high. I've tried to apply the Traction framework, but it's been a tough battle.
I am new to the startup world, so any help or feedback would be most appreciated! And if anyone wants to get some of the coolest new tech products for free - please sign up :) <comment><USER2> You say "giving away", I see "being forced to buy, then later apply for some form of or equivalent of rebate, which I've had really shitty past experiences with by virtually every single company ever offering a rebate in any way"

That's the biggest stopper for me.

\---

On top of that, think of it this way: if someone writes a negative review, wouldn't they innately feel that you wouldn't reimburse them? So you are basically "paying for positive reviews" psychologically, rather than the more fair reviews if they were compensated in the first place IMHO

<comment><USER3> Not just positive, the reviews have to be "top-notch" so you never know if your review good enough.

Same experience here. Did one mail-in rebate in my life and of course that failed with no chance of follow up (they kept all the original receipts, no phone number etc). Never again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) What's been your cost per customer? Maybe it's your expectations that are incorrect. That said from what I'll say below I doubt this.

2) Your website isn't appealing to sign-up to. Lack of information, or anything really. You need to rethink your landing experiences I cant see very good conversion happening.

3) You ask for a heap of personal information without establishing any trust - see above. Having a Gmail address as you contact really exacerbates that this is not a serious/legitimate business.

4) I feel this post is veiled attempt to bring exposure. I've offered some advice in the hope that im wrong.

5) I cant see this business working as is. But good luck.

<comment><USER5> Agree with this. At the very least i'd say you need a 'How it works' or something similar on the landing page and to drop the Gmail email as your contact email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious, how are you making money on this?

<comment><USER7> I don't think they are :(</comment></comment>


The Boxee Box Experience Now: Netflix, Vudu HD and Lots More Refinement - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Boxee-Box-HD-Media-Player-Updated-and-Netflix-Ready/

<comment><USER2> I have a lot of local video files, and I've (briefly) tried the Boxee software a couple times. It has a feature where it tries to identify that media, but I've found it to be comedically awful at doing so, especially when it comes to TV series, where it tends to pick out maybe one or two episodes from a given series directory, then for some reason completely ignore the rest, even though they're all following the same format in their respective filenames.

Does anyone know of a way to just turn this off entirely? I already have things organized by directory/filename. From what I can tell, the current 'solution' is to manually go through each file and fix whatever stupid information was auto-detected. Which is backwards, because if someone's anal enough to deal with that, they've likely already got things meticulously organized how they want by directory/filename, so why not just go by that directly?

I get the strong impression that they didn't really make local media playback a priority.

<comment> mike-cardwell Also pisses me off that it doesn't let you delete stuff you've watched from the interface.

I ended up having to write an app to tail my boxee log looking for files that have been watched and then moving them into a "watched" directory where they are purged several days later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I unboxed a Boxee Box yesterday and was quite impressed. It's a tiny powerhouse at a great price point ($199 on Amazon). The remote is quite clever and made it easy to type, something that's often annoying with these types of set top boxes. I got online and it easily found and cataloged video files on a shared USB drive plugged into the wireless router--DVD covers, episode summaries, the works. The mobile app is a slick way to control it as well and it found it automatically--zero configuration.

My only gripe so far is there is no Amazon VOD support yet, but I only have that gripe because it's now free as a Prime member.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bought a Boxee over the Christmas holidays and have loved every minute of it.

Over the years I've built tons of HTPC's (dating back to 1999) and have had to put up with all of the strengths and weaknesses related to the variety of solutions.

I've loved the array of options in regards to small boxes that make HTPC's mostly irrelevant.

The D-Link Boxee Box is the best overall solution I've used to date. Does it have some problems? Yep -- but they're never really in the way of me doing what I want to do with the device.

It has also had an excellent WAF.

I seriously recommend .. especially if you consume lots of divx/mkv/x264 media.

<comment><USER5> Curious if you used the Boxee interface on a homemade setup prior to getting the official device...?

Mostly wondering if official package offers a tight enough experience to warrant the $200 vs. getting by on a spare laptop + Boxee.

<comment><USER6> I used to run boxee from a macbookpro onto my main television in the living room. This worked surprisingly well alongside either the Apple remote or Boxee Controller App.

Moving and re-hooking up my main computer to watch media was obviously tedious, so I ordered a Boxee Box at launch.

The Boxee Box simplified the hell out of my media experience, which is definitely worth the $200 price tag. A laptop would probably work just fine, but the Box has the new 1.0 software, and the remote included is pretty great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a HTPC, you have to do a one-time organize to get your files in order. For movies, it's helpful to add the year to the title. For TV, it's helpful to organize so that the season/ep is in a standard format like S0XEXX. Once you do that it's pretty flawless. If you run SickBeard + a bittorrent client, you can pretty much automate things 100%. It's a very smooth setup once you get through the initial hurdles of organizing your downloads.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know how it works with video sites that only have a web interface & flash player? I'm thinking of Tai Seng (<http://mytv.taiseng.com/>, a Cantonese movie site my wife watches that's based on the same tech as Crunchroll).

<comment><USER9> Just download boxee for the PC and try it out, it's free.

<comment><USER10> That's usually not good enough since the Boxee Box handles flash website different than the version that you download and install yourself. For instance, many sites on the DL version start in full screen but with the Boxee Box they don't. I think this was done to satisfy content owners but it significantly hampers my experience with the Box.

They do try to do two clever things with the box to make this better: Hit menu and sometimes there is a full screen button, sometimes not. Also, they try to place the mouse cursor over the "Fullscreen Button" in the Flash player, but this is wonky at best.

<comment><USER8> I gave it a try, and at least on the Windows version, their browser crashes if you mouse over the wrong areas or click the wrong buttons (on mytv.taiseng.com).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is that really the shape of the case? It looks ridiculous!

EDIT: I used boxee about 6 - 9 months ago an old XP machine and it was nice, but still enough rough edges to be annoying at times. As anyone used it recently on say, a mac mini and apple remote?

<comment><USER12> Really? I love the design of the box and the remote.

For me, the experience with boxee has been great. I use it everyday and love it. I have it hooked up with a NAS and indexing files etc is pretty good.

<comment><USER11> I love the remote it looks awesome. Just the shape of that box makes it seem like it would awkward to place it anywhere.

<comment><USER4> Since the remove is RF vs. IR you can actually put the thing just about anywhere. Mine sits behind my TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Boxee or Roku? I've been wanting to buy one of them but can't decide.

<comment><USER14> Roku if all you want to watch is netflix and some other streaming services (which I can't enumerate right now). Boxee if you'd like to watch a lot of local content as well streamed over your network. I ended up choosing Boxee the day after they announced Netflix support had been implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does Boxee play Video_TS files with DVD menus and the whole nine?

<comment><USER6> Yes it does. It also can handle ISOs (DVD & BluRay).

<comment><USER15> Thanks. Good to know. I'll add the Boxee Box to my super short list.</comment></comment></comment>


Parser combinators in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wbhart/comb

<comment><USER2> I found have boost::spirit to be a fascinating view of parser combinators in C++. It produces extremely fast parsers, but for large parsers can take over 15 minutes, and 4GB of RAM, to compile (from personal experience).

I haven't quite decided my final opinion on boost::spirit. I often use it for tiny hacky things, but have generally stopped using it for really big parsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm totally guessing, but perhaps there is no way to memoise when using preprocessor magic and so the algorithm for constructing the parser is O(n^2). (Of course my parser combinators don't memoise either.)</comment></comment>


Babies Understand Dogs, Bark-matching Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720163559.htm <comment><USER2> My 7 month old certainly seems to understand dog language. I have two dogs and if they get to playing too rough, he gets concerned. Once when they decided to both pounce on the cat angrily, he even started crying - which stopped the dogs! If they're playing gently with each other, he'll start giggling and want to play too. It's uber cute, really... :)

<comment><USER3> Why do you think your son was upset about the dogs harassing the cat? Why would it even matter him?

I think that's more interesting than the dogs changing their behavior based on his reactions.

<comment><USER2> He responds to emotion in pretty much any animal (or human) as far as I can tell. We also have an iguana (yeah, our house is a zoo...) and the iguana had to get some eye medicine at one point. I was holding my son nearby when my wife was trying to catch the iguana (because at this point it had caught on to the whole medicine thing and it did not like it). This also elicited a cry from him, as if he even managed to sense fear or anger in the reptile. In that case, though, it's also possible he was just responding to the iguana thrashing his tail and trying to run away inside his enclosure. The sights or sounds may have just scared him that day or even the actions of my wife trying to catch the iguana, or something - it's hard to say for certain.

As to why... I can't really ask him - he's not big on word use yet. :) I would guess, to some extent, that there's an instinctual desire to stay alive and that hostility can be a risk to that. Anger or fear could result in the people or animals around you doing something dangerous. It could also be a trust thing whereas anger represents a possibility that he can no longer trust your motives, maybe? I don't know - just guessing. :) It isn't just anger or fear that gets responses, of course. Happiness gets a big response, too, from a huge grin to joyful giggling to bouncing and other things that are like a direct visual indication of a burst of endorphins.

I did just think of a dog parallel, though. When he cries out of fear when the dogs are playing too rough with each other or the cat, it's a bit like how dogs will correct one another in a pack. If you've ever observed dogs in groups greater than 1, they have this interesting dynamic where they will keep each other in line. One dog may get too excited and another will perhaps bark or nip at them to get them to settle down. Crying out of fear could be a similar response in the sense that it's all the baby can really do to inform the "pack" nearby that they need to calm down, please.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to monitor external sites uptime? - <AUTHOR> I am interested in verifying uptime for various cors services like google, icloud, microsoft, bank of America,DNS root servers, whitehouse.gov, ect. Both due to the uptick in ddos attacks and general reluability.
what design considerations should I be cognizant of?
- is a simple ping enough?
- should I implement a crawler and test http status codes?
- is it necessary to go further and use something like phantomjs?
Also, some sites and services do this and I would love to lean on external (free) sources and parse rss/atom feeds but this will be very granular
Any data sources or design tips would be helpful <comment><USER2> If you're just checking for wether the box is up, a ping might be enough. If you want to see if the actual web server is down, you'd need to send a HTTP request.

Phantomjs is unnecessary as you won't need to render any JavaScript.

I don't see why you couldn't just make a crawler and test for status codes, but if the site is under DDoS it will time out.

Then, of course, you'll need cron or something to check it at regular intervals. I guess this is probably the most interesting part of the question, at least to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is essentially my thinking but I don't fully understand the profile of an attack. Small websites would go down, but something like google or twitter would certainly not simply cave. Twitter would serve cached content (as most sites) unless it was really nasty. I am not sure if I should manually set up logins and test for timeouts or potentially get away with testing status codes on example.com/login?

Do you know what signs or tests could be done on these robust services that would tip off an attack?</comment></comment>


I wrote an entire blog post explaining why I'm quitting iOS… - <AUTHOR> http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2011/09/i-wrote-an-entire-blog-post-explaining-why-im-quitting-ios/

<comment><USER2> I agree that application titles should be unique. I'm surprised that's not the case as it makes sense and is easily enforced.

> the straw that broke the camels back was when another dev released two apps > with the same name as my apps whilst they were in the Top 5… Apple did > nothing about it.

If someone can compete with your product with little effort, then how good was your product in the first place? If their product is not as good and yours already sits front and center in the top 5, who cares if carbon copies exist? If theirs is better, then be glad you made it to the top 5 first.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't that he can't compete, it's that his potential customers can't tell which one he is! They hear from their friends that 'xyz app' is awesome, they search the market and find 2 of them... And 50% download the wrong one!

Of course, ratings and that top-5 spot should help shift that percentage in his favor, but it's still really ugly that it's even possible for people to do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. It's not the quality of the competing app, or it's closeness to my functionality. It's the consumer confusion, and the blatant piggy backing off of others success which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm more surprised Apple doesn't deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a good one I was told about a Twitter client I developed: "The links in the tweets just open up a webview when you press them..." - It was rejected on this basis, and this was the appeal board telling me this... :(</comment>


Earn 43 cents every time you infect a Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/09/24/earn-43-cents-time-infect-mac-vb2009/ <comment><USER2> Interesting... I have an almost morbid fascination with how this will pan out. I use and love a Mac, and I don't plan on switching to a different machine, but I'm curious as to how Cupertino will respond.

I'm betting this doesn't get much traction, and that Apple with individually prevent and manage infections through Software Update. I also doubt that the Macintosh market is big enough and easily infected enough to be significantly targeted by malware.

We'll see.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to know how this compares with the going rates for other architectures. I assume Macs are at a premium, but by how much?

</comment><comment><USER4> Virtual machines, anyone? :-)

<comment><USER5> I imagine the type of person who would install a random "Mac Codec" on their machine isn't going to start up a VM with OS X running to test it out, first.

<comment><USER4> No, I was more thinking about you installing it yourself on your Vm, then reinstalling it on anohter etc... thus cheating the system ;)</comment></comment></comment>


iOS 7 UI Stencil for Omnigraffle - <AUTHOR> http://njimedia.com/ios-7-ui-stencil-for-omnigraffle/

<comment><USER2> I can't read this site; (very) light grey on white background is invisible.

<comment><USER3> Then you probably won't want this stencil, or to use iOS 7 :)

<comment><USER4> Actually I think it's mainly due to differences in font rendering across platforms. The site is fine in OS X, but the same font is rendered lighter in Windows, and with a lightly stroked sans font, that makes a big difference in legibility.

<comment><USER5> This is why best font for any web page and application is default font.

<comment><USER6> No I think it is the one that only works on mac ;).

<comment><USER7> The article is from the blog of a Mac only program and it's content is targeted at iOS developers. Windows users aren't remotely in the target market for the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a little confused by the "Main action" and "Cancel" buttons. Shouldn't the Cancel button have the red text and not the other way around?

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries. I've doubled check on the apple UIKit - [https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/UIKitUICatalog/UIActionSheet.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40012857-UIActionSheet- SW1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I add to the stencil palette in OmniGraffle 4, it ends up super tiny [http://imgb.mp/jk2.jpg](http://imgb.mp/jk2.jpg)

Maybe time to reconsider if I use OmniGraffle often enough to pay $50 to upgrade to 6... I don't really need any new features, just to fix all the bugs that have cropped up.

<comment><USER10> OmniGraffle didn't crash on me until I upgraded to 6, take that for what it's worth.

It's also the first piece of software that makes me feel like a curmudgeon. I don't know how less 'usable' it all feels. Stencils are buried and I stared at the screen for 10 minutes before I was able to do anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The little pointer arrows on the "Select | Select All" and "Select | Select All | Paste" tooltips are a different color from the body of the tooltip.

But it looks really nice overall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up.

Glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> SVG's of these would be pretty amazing.

Edit: Scratch that. All I see is 4 images in both zip files... I'm confused.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, that doesn't sound right.

Can you give a little more detail on what's happening?

<comment><USER12> Um, I might just be stupid I guess. I saw "if you're not using Omnigraffle 6" and took that to mean "If you're not using omnigraffle at all", so then I expected it to be a folder of assets. So if I open the zip file, there's a single folder with 4 images and a plist. I assume that on a mac the .gstencil would open in Omnigraffle, whereas in windows it just opens as a folder.

Anyhow, just operator error I'm sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh yes, that is partly my fault. I should've been a bit more clear. The .gstencil is for versions of omnigraffle prior to 6.

Sorry for the confusion.

You can download a trial of omnigraffle 6 and then export the stencil as an .svg

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That looks well done. What is the license on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> License is free for commercial and personal. Use it however you want.

No need to attribute but I won't complain if you give credit back to NJI Media. Also, Chris at Pixeden did all the line icon work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stencil is very well done, and easy to work with!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>