iPhone 6 Plus bending in pockets - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/23/the-iphone-6-plus-gets-bent/ <comment><USER2> That's a shame, and not something I've experienced with my Galaxy Notes of various generations. You'd think it would be tested for this sort of thing.

Though who knows, maybe some folks have had problems with these devices and it's just not widely reported. Given the high profile launches and expectations of flawlessness from Apple (rightly or wrongly), it may well come under increased scrutiny.

<comment><USER3> As a counter-point, independant testing indicates that the iPhone 6(+) is the toughest iPhone yet: [http://blogs.wsj.com/personal- technology/2014/09/22/iphone-6...](http://blogs.wsj.com/personal- technology/2014/09/22/iphone-6-is-the-most-durable-iphone-yet-says-insurer/)

I think we're at least going to have to put an asterix on the tale of the guy that bent his phone in his pants pockets. Until it's been reliably reproduced, I for one won't be jumping to any conclusions.

<comment><USER4> True, but I, on the other hand won't be jump-buying the device either :)

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. Of course there's a bunch of us for whom the 6+ is simply too large to be putting into front pockets whether we want to or not. For us this is a total non-issue :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The mild level of hysteria over this has been interesting. It's a slab of thin aluminium that has a large surface area, a consistent amount of pressure is going to cause bending. I'm personally surprised that the glass didn't crack on some of the pictures.

<comment><USER6> True, but I would assume that most people have a reasonable expectation that their phones will not get damaged in typical usage scenarios. And yes, I do think that putting your phone in your front pocket is typical. In my view that means that there is a design flaw.

<comment><USER7> > I do think that putting your phone in your front pocket is typical

Correct. And for, hm, probably 99.98% of the 10m iPhone 6 users created over the weekend, that isn't an issue.

You're drawing a misleading comparison between putting your iPhone in your pocket and it becoming bent out of shape. What happens when you put your phone in your pocket is crucial: exerting sufficient pressure to bend (as opposed to flex) the phone.

This is a problem with any object of similar proportions and rigidity when sufficient pressure is applied.

Tl;dr: if you sit on something, it might break.

<comment><USER8> If you compare the 6 plus to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and even the 6, it doesn't seem as if any of those phones have a problem. In or outside the pocket.

Of course with enough pressure anything will bend or break, but consumers expect that with 'reasonable use' they can expect their device not to malform. And surprise, reasonable use for most people (particularly men) includes putting their phone in their pocket at least some of the time instead of in their bag/purse ALL of the time. That's a design flaw. Either change your material (not majority aluminium), or really change your communication (push it as a tablet or a phone for in your bag) and warn of the risks. Don't just push it like an ordinary larger phone and stay silent when people say it bends in their pocket days after release, and when people bend it with their fingers on camera. I don't see how people can deny this is an issue.

Obviously it's not a problem of people using their phone in an insane manner, as we simply didn't see similar bending problems with every iphone release before.

<comment><USER7> > If you compare the 6 plus to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and even the 6, it doesn't > seem as if any of those phones have a problem. In or outside the pocket.

Incorrect. I saw reports of this with the 5S last year. Cult of Mac did a good round-up: [http://www.cultofmac.com/297404/get-bent-shocking-history- be...](http://www.cultofmac.com/297404/get-bent-shocking-history-bent- smartphones/)

> Of course with enough pressure anything will bend or break, but consumers > expect that with 'reasonable use' they can expect their device not to > malform.

I'd say that if you're applying enough pressure to bend a slab of aluminium and glass, you're A) someone who should have to have a licence in order to safely operate it without injuring yourself and B) definitely using it outside of its intended usage.

> And surprise, reasonable use for most people (particularly men) includes > putting their phone in their pocket at least some of the time instead of in > their bag/purse ALL of the time. That's a design flaw.

No. You're misrepresenting the problem entirely. The problem is not "putting the phone in your pocket" as you state. The problem is putting your phone in your pocket and then applying enough pressure to the device to bend it, whether intentionally or not. If putting the phone in your pocket caused this, EVERYONE would experience it, and it would truly be a design flaw. As it is, a tiny minority of people have put the phone in their pocket, applied a huge amount of pressure to the frame, and bent it. I held one earlier today and I doubt I could apply sufficient pressure to permanently bend it with my hands. It's insane that people are blaming Apple for this.

> Either change your material (not majority aluminium), or really change your > communication (push it as a tablet or a phone for in your bag) and warn of > the risks.

Warning: if you drop your iPhone it's going to smash. Warning: if you set fire to your iPhone it's going to burn. Warning: if you put your phone in your pocket and bend the phone, it will fucking bend.

> Don't just push it like an ordinary larger phone and stay silent when people > say it bends in their pocket days after release, and when people bend it > with their fingers on camera.

Just like the 5S did. Just like the Samsung Galaxies do. Why don't people understand how this works? If you bend something, it will bend.

> I don't see how people can deny this is an issue.

Because 9.9 million people have the phone and no problem. Because they're not idiots who put a phone in their pocket, apply pressure to it somehow, and bend the phone.

> Obviously it's not a problem of people using their phone in an insane > manner, as we simply didn't see similar bending problems with every iphone > release before.

How many reported instances of this versus iPhone 6 users who have managed to not bend their phones? It's definitely an edge case of people using their phone in an unusual way (if it was the usual way it would be bending more phones). It's that simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am hopeful that this will lead to a decline in skinny jeans, and I will be back in style.

</comment><comment><USER10> This guy seems to exert a lot of force for it to bend.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znK652H6yQM#t=34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znK652H6yQM#t=34)

I can't understand how having the same happen in your pants wouldn't indicate that maybe you should take your phone out or adjust your trousers.

And I will beat you to the you are wearing your pants wrong joke.

<comment><USER11> Notice the bending in OP's video isn't the same level of bending in the pocket-bend claims. The latter is much more subtle, yet still noticeable. I'd say any kind of permanent bend from just being in pants' pockets is a design flaw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm skeptical about the reporting, but the quotes are choice:

 _" This is not an issue that Apple - or other phone companies - need to be compelled to respond to or fix. If anything this is a reflection of how people have started to use devices beyond what they were designed for,"_

What kind of absurd industry apologist do you have to be to assert flatly that there's no reason people should be expecting their phones to hold up to _pockets_? I thought the whole reason people want thinner phones in the first place was so they fit better in their pockets.

</comment><comment><USER13> Think about the person that waited in one of those long lines that I dont understand and now their walking around with a warped cell phone.

In all seriousness. Why do people stand in those lines? What can you do with the phone that you can't do with another phone? Is it just a material thing?

<comment><USER14> You can sell the phone in China for $3000, that is why.

<comment><USER15> This is what the iPhone launch looks like, now:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I just tested this on a few non-aluminium bodied phones, i.e., plastic and glass bodied phones. Plastic is more elastic (etymological irony) than aluminium and returns to its original shape.

I wouldn't have believed if someone claimed my plastic-glass phone wasn't perfectly straight when in my pocket, because I'd never witnessed it bent, and truly believed it sturdy enough to not easily bend.

I guess Apple's miss was that aluminium is less elastic, and the larger/taller your phone the more linear deflection it suffers.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hipsters do wear very tight jeans.

<comment><USER17> Hopefully no one will downvote you for this comment.

Tighter pants would lead to more force being exerted from multiple angles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yep, bend a phone and it bends: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwdZzvCFhLo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwdZzvCFhLo&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER19> Not in your pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's almost like they'd be better off making the glass less flexible so it would just crack when people bend it too much, and then they'd know they did the wrong thing. The fact that the phone can bend like this without breaking might mean they don't realise that they've subjected it to an unreasonable amount of force.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's amazing that people think nothing can happen to a phone. Years ago I sold phones. People wanted money back because they drowned a Nokia in the toilet. Or complained the device stopped working after they dropped it from a great hight.

Nowadays people complain something will bend when you apply a lot of force to it.

<comment><USER19> It's not an unreasonable expectation seeing as a different phone of a similar form factor does not bend: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FwM4...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FwM4ypi3at0)

<comment><USER21> Well the Samsung Galaxy S4 will bend. And so will other phones.

Large and flat will bend, break or crack. It's just the nature of things.

<comment><USER22> But will the galaxy S4 bend in your pocket and still be bent when you take it out?

<comment><USER5> No but it could potentially crack in your pocket, and still be cracked when you take it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ungrateful peasants. They are privileged to use the world's best phone and complain about such benign issues.

> Clearly if I got the plus I'd never be able to sit at a table with it. This > is bringing back the holster.

This should be the preferred way for hipsters to wear their apparel.

<comment><USER24> They're trousering it wrong. Their problem.

I currently have a Galaxy S4 - no problems. Previous phone was a whopping-big, first generation Note - ditto. Both live/lived in my front trouser pocket.

The only device I have managed to break while in my pocket was an HP/Compaq iPaq, about 10 years ago, when I sat on a child's swing next to my son in a playground - the metal 'rope' went taught against my side and the pressure cracked the screen.

Edit: For a bit of objectivity, what was the last phone that received this level of attention for being prone to bending in tight pockets - has there been one?

<comment><USER25> I've had a Galaxy Note 3 damage _pockets_ that were particularly tight, but not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You're not-holding it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's trending on Twitter in my area [https://twitter.com/hashtag/bendgate](https://twitter.com/hashtag/bendgate)

</comment><comment><USER28> When the antena gate happens with iPhone 4 Apple gives bundle cases to their customers, I wonder if this time they will give new pants. :)

<comment><USER23> > I wonder if this time they will give new pants.

No, they will automatically add the new Justin Bieber album to every iTunes user's profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think they should put a thicker battery in the iphone. why do cell phone need to be so thin? they are hard to hold.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's not really a pocketable phone. Even in my sweatpants (trendy!) it proved so heavy it ended up dragging them down past my ass in the style many kids are rocking nowadays, except I don't rock the underwear or have the ass definition to pull off the look.

Like an iPad, it's better placed in a bag. With everything else, really. Carrying stuff in your pockets is a pain in the arse and a great way to lose stuff.

<comment><USER31> I'm interested to know why you employ two spelling variations of ass/arse.

Does each cheek identify to different naming conventions?

<comment><USER32> He has a transatlantic backside

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 48 points in 2 hours. Page 3. Why ?

<comment><USER34> number of comments is higher than the number of upvotes. HN uses this as a heuristic to bury flame wars.

<comment><USER35> really? Where do people find out about the algorithms, etiquette and other unwritten stuff about this site. Often people seem to make claims about certain aspects of HN, like you did above, but I can never find anywhere to either prove or disprove it or understand what the 'rules' are.

<comment><USER34> [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang) is probably your best bet

<comment><USER35> He is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Using words I don't know (sockpuppeting) and telling everyone else off for their conduct without actually explaining what or why it is the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe the bending is a consequence of a better than average shock proof design. Not an apple fan boy here but I find hard to believe that a top selling phone would go on the market without extensive mechanical testing.

<comment><USER37> Funny, as I'm yet to meet an iPhone 4 that didn't have a smashed screen

<comment><USER38> Mine. Had it since launch. Not even a scratch on the screen either.

<comment><USER39> Which just goes to show, different people (ab)use their devices differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I thought that would be considered a feature!

</comment><comment><USER41> Can wait for dialog "it is a feature" and response from competitors "our phones do not bend" :-)

<comment><USER8> Already heard one today: 'Apple phones at this pressure bend, Android phones at this pressure break'. i.e. it's a feature.

It's a fair point if actually true, but I've seen people bend this iphone with their fingers. I haven't seen anyone break a flagship android phone with their fingers.

In any case, it's not relevant to me to do a competitor comparison, as when you make the comparison to the iphone 1,2,3,4,5, it's obviously worse.

edit: video of a note 4 bend test, seems the 6+ has a unique problem.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwM4ypi3at0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwM4ypi3at0)

<comment><USER41> It is sort of parody for antenna gate. Motorola responded to Jobs that they do integrated antennas for decades and do not have signal issues. Also there was ad campaign:

"No Jacket Required."

"it's just one of those things that comes as a given when you've been making mobile phones for over 30 years."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> So if you feel a pressure in you pocket, DO NOT REMOVE the phone.... Are people just plain dumbs or what?

<comment><USER43> A coworker just got that new waterproof Android phone from Kyocera. For some reason he thought waterproof == indestructible, so he never got a case for it. Two weeks later it ended up with a cracked screen. He cracked it when he had it in his pocket and leaned against a table.

Yes, these devices are made to withstand rough conditions, and each generation seems tougher than the last. But cases exist for a reason; no phone is indestructible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What was the line again? "Apple produces only high _quality_ devices" or something?</comment>


Is Slack Really Worth $2.8B? A Conversation with Stewart Butterfield - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-worth-2-8-billion-a-conversation-with-stewart-butterfield/ <comment><USER3> > _" I don't feel like there are any serious vulnerabilities in the > business."_

No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.

If the tech world remains relatively unchanged Slack is easily worth $3 billion. All they need to do is get a few million workers on there chatting away and they've got ~$10/month * millions, which is hundreds of millions per year.

They should probably sell to Microsoft and let them take on the risk at this point. There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth. Or they could try to become the new Microsoft.

<comment><USER4> > There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole > thing will come tumbling back down to earth.

What supports this claim? Yes tech and the tech world changes quickly but some of the core functions of running a business, such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.

<comment><USER5> And yet Slack was able to seize large portions of the market. Did communication just recently become a need?

<comment><USER6> There have been many before them, see Flowdock, Campfire, IRC, going back as long as we've had the Internet. What sets Slack apart is they've executed it better than anyone. They took the industry by storm overnight, it seems.

<comment><USER7> Thats not really en explanation.

There are several reasons why they are doing well and they have much less to do with execution than with the right people getting involved.

<comment><USER8> "right people getting involved" IS execution

<comment><USER7> With the right people getting involved I am talking about the investors. That has nothing to do with execution but to do with access to distribution and press.

<comment><USER6> Have you actually used Slack? Where I currently work, we have gone through two other chat products in the past two years: Campfire followed by Flowdock. They all fizzled out and died - people just stopped using them for some reason.

Then we tried Slack, and it's the first time the entire team has adopted 100% and maintained it. Slack mobile has even replaced text messaging/GroupMe for a lot of us as well.

Don't hand-wave away their success by giving credit to investors. It makes you sound bitter and insecure, or at least uninformed. They've done a great job building their product and deserve the position they're in. Whether or not $2.8B is an accurate valuation is beyond me, but it does seem like they're minting money over there.

<comment><USER9> Campfire and Flowdock are both pretty awful compared to Hipchat (the previous market leader) and Slack. I think Hipchat is feature-wise mostly on par with Slack, but has a much more approachable interface. Hipchat is also learning from slack on how to make integrations easier to install and configure. Slack surged into the space by marketing to companies that were using nothing - <USER2> by winning people away from competitors. I'm not sure that Hipchat can take the space back from slack without a major new killer feature, but Slack's marketshare is hardly guaranteed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My team just gave up on Slack today, because push notifications seem too unreliable when we're on our phones. Paradoxically, we've found it works better when the app is not running than it does when it is running. Most of us are using Android phones. I couldn't find anyone else having the same problem, and I couldn't find any answers googling around, other than the obvious "turn on push notifications"\-- push notices were definitely on.

We may go back to Slack at some point, if we can get it to work effectively for us.

<comment><USER11> Slack only sends a notification if you're offline or away: [https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/201895138-Notifi...](https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/201895138-Notifications-overview)

The assumption is that if you're actively in the channel, you saw the item already and don't need a duplication notification on your phone for the item you just read.

<comment><USER12> To expand on this, the desktop clients keep you active for much longer than say the web client. I was also having these issues so I asked for a clarification from their support.

I stopped using the desktop client for this reason and now I have a separate window open for the web client. Push works much better for me now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slack is one of those curious tools that seems to take off despite doing nothing particularly new or innovative. We started using it due to some colleagues who raved about it. I haven't come across a feature yet that we've used that hasn't been part of IM / IRC clients for more than 15 years. The main feature of it seems to be that it's new, so when you first start using it only the 5 other people that you are collaborating with right now are on there, so it starts off feeling more productive and focused than other tools.

But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.

<comment><USER14> Honest question, outside of writing your own bot are there any real IRC integrations for even half of the services Slack integrates with? It's really useful to set up monitoring services in a dev channel where we can not only read errors, but share code snippets with pretty formatting, Github integration to let us know when a PR has been opened to fix the issue, and then Trello to manage features too.

Not to mention the integrations outside of developers. I haven't worked in enough large companies, and never as a nontechnical employee so I'm not sure what sales teams were using for communication but I doubt IRC was their cup of tea. I imagine they used a lot of email, maybe some CRM communication but that's still not as useful, or rather I imagine it's less useful than Slack. Having a single place to discuss Stripe purchases, hiring with Breezy, MailChimp et cetera that isn't a gigantic email forward sounds seriously useful and I don't know that anything like that exists on IRC.

There are alternatives like HipChat, but they clearly didn't it the mark the way Slack has.

<comment><USER13> You make a good point about all the integrations. I might be in an minority situation, but none of the people who are enamoured with Slack that I work with are using any of that stuff. It's just instant messaging with a sprinkle of file sharing to them. It seems to me the biggest thing, as others have pointed out, is the polish and the native apps. For example, Hangouts does most of it, but Google has killed of their native apps and the in-browser experience is really suboptimal. Having a simple, dedicated, well designed native app really makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unlike switching VM's or databases, switching from one front-end for a pseudo- irc-client to another is essentially simple, the migration is probably significantly less painful, there are no proprietary formats in the way (.pdf .dwg).

The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest.

So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.

<comment><USER4> Switching databases is significantly more painful for a _small_ portion of an organization. Getting a large organization to switch messaging platforms across all team functions probably wouldn't be a seamless as you'd like to imagine.

<comment><USER16> Even at a 100 person company I knew, half the organization used gchat and half used jabber/webex connect. Each side had champions that spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to convert everyone to one platform, and last I checked they still hadn't succeeded.

<comment><USER15> There are gui clients that support both protocols (i.e. I think Pidgin does) - why not just write a plugin that allows to cross-communicate between the two?

<comment><USER17> As time goes on I get more and more disillusioned with solutions that begin with " _why not just write_ ".

Nothing excites me more than having to think about supporting yet another codebase deployed to non-technical people who will undoubtedly cause more bugs than thought possible and open more JIRA tickets about it with increasingly vague title names.

At some point Slack or [integration of choice] is cheaper than having an internal engineering team to write half-baked communication solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slack is good but it's nothing revolutionary that would merit the valuation. My main argument against their crazy valuation is that there's no lock in so it'd be easy for teams to move on to the "next big thing." Also, see [http://getkaiwa.com/](http://getkaiwa.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> The problem with trying to kill email is that you're never going to have everyone migrate off of it. It's going to have to be some type of layer on top of IMAP that then moves to a more sophisticated protocol. Google has done such a great job with NLP/AI/ML that spam from facebook, twitter, etc. are all put into a separate tab that I only see when I want to. When I click on an email about a flight, it gives me updates on the status of the flight. Gmail also makes it seamless to share docs. I could make a clean interface for email groups using the Gmail API and have the same product as slack. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER20> Probably just that you haven't done it yet. VC's are paying anything for growth and Slack has got it, seems as simple as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Slack is a great product but I do not think it's worth $2.8B. Hipchat has a much bigger company behind it and people switched to Slack pretty quickly because for the most part it is a better product. The reason for that switch is because the cost of switch is relatively minimal. Any competitor can come in and take that away from Slack. They are only worth this much if the tech landscape is static, which we all know it isnt. Just my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER22> The value is not in the actual product, but in the lock-in that this solution creates. I find this outrageous, and I hope that soon a better and open chat/communication standard will emerge.

</comment><comment><USER23> Slack is really a nice application. People have been saying email overload is a problem for years, and Slack has really put a dent in it for work/office use. Yes it's a simple app, but so is email, and simple done better is genius.

[1] [http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html) (pg, 2008, see number 28)

</comment><comment><USER24> > Replace e-mail

Ah, because I would only _ever_ want to talk to people within my specific team...

</comment><comment><USER25> Slack's valuation will make a lot more sense once they delve into the video chat and conferencing world, making their way further into the enterprise.

People need to understand that investment is a vote of confidence in the team, not just the product. What can this team accomplish with that investment? That's the question.

</comment><comment><USER26> We recently switched from Hipchat to Slack and at first I hated it, now I'm only mildly disgruntled because I did a few modifications:

1\. Bubble when I get a direct message. 2\. Leave all but about 3-4 groups. 3\. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them) 4\. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel.

5\. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.

<comment><USER27> We switched from Hipchat (buggy in the beginning, smooth and ideal at the end) to Hall (a buggy, slow, awful mess) to Slack (also slow, but not buggy, and awful UX).

Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations.

The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid.

It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL.

But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think.

Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes.

The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment.

But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I _really_ dislike it. :-p

<comment><USER17> Maybe our settings are set correctly, but HipChat's notifications seem half baked. I've been trying out Slack on another org, and I noticed the biggest issue in the way we use Slack is that most of our communication is person to person.

This seems to come about because any HipChat message to a room you are in notifies & alerts the whole room on OS X. Because of this, most communication happens in private person to person rooms which defeats the purpose of having public rooms for transparency. I haven't been able to get any of the rooms feature to stick and so what commonly happens is two people discuss things on chat, then repeat those conversations to everyone who should have been on it in meatspace.

All of this because HipChat still doesn't let you set per-room notifications.

<comment><USER27> I'm 99% sure that's not the default and you've turned on some option to notify everything.

Otherwise there'd be no point of @all and @here if you were going to be notified anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Amazing insights in this article. This will prove a remarkably prescient interview.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, people are focusing too much on slack in particular and less on what the interview reveals about how VC and the tech industry actually operates. I'm really impressed by the way this guy thinks. These are things I haven't heard from other people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There seems to be a booming market for Slack integrations lately. This is great because Slack just = text, and so building prototypes can be fairly easy. Our product ([http://focusr.co](http://focusr.co)) actually started purely as a Slack integration, and evolved into something else.

</comment><comment><USER31> > _Acquisitions would be one. We might have to defend ourselves against > predators._

Soooo time to create a Slack clone and sell it to Slack for a few million?

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it me or does Microsoft just need to get a decent persistent group chat in office365/lync/skype for business along with a decent api for integrations. As small business/startup running office 365 the reason we started with slack was due to the lack of persistent chat rooms in office365. (yammer is just not usable and not sure who it's aimed at!)

<comment><USER33> Lync's lack of persistent rooms is such a downer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The funny thing is that Atlassian, whose HipChat had a few years lead on Slack, was only (?) valued at $3.3bn last year for their whole suite of products

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554904)

</comment><comment><USER35> For over a decade, the most important question for any enterprise data tool was:

      Does it import/export to Excel?

The potential value of Slack is to ask that same question about any B2B software an exec is considering. Slack's a "king-maker", not a king.

</comment><comment><USER36> "no"

(And go use Flowdock.)

</comment><comment><USER37> Butterfield: "It is because people say it is."

</comment><comment><USER38> SSShhhhh.....people need to stop questioning these high valuations, seriously. People might suspect a tech bubble, or something...

</comment><comment><USER39> Betteridge's law of headlines says no

<comment><USER40> Simple economics says Slack is worth whatever they can find a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestor or buyer to value them at.

<comment><USER41> Don't confuse price with value. A corporation is worth the discounted present value of all the dividends it will ever pay. That figure may not be knowable, but it does exist and in this fevered dream world can safely be assumed to be zero for almost everyone. The price, however, can be pretty much anything, reflecting what at least one person is willing and able to pay for it.

<comment><USER42> It'd probably be a bit more than zero. You can buy the company, fire all the engineers, set the price to $10 per user immediately, watch 95% of users leave, remaining 5% paying $10 per year, and then discount and sum over that cash-flow, and you could probably end up with a value of several hundred thousand dollars in the minimum.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adventures with Dockerised Headed Chrome, Extensions and Selenium-Python - <AUTHOR> https://tech.ovoenergy.com/adventures-with-dockerised-headed-chrome-extensions-and-selenium-python/ <comment><USER2> A vendor recently switched from self-hosted to AWS, and the API I was using to backup our artifacts that are stored in their system stopped working. I submitted a support request, but they still haven't replied a month later. Not even a "We're looking into your ticket".

So I created a Docker container that uses chromedriver+selenium and it works GREAT. My first attempt at Selenium.

I did run into one problem though: Downloading large attachments failed. After a bit of searching, I found I needed to add the following docker argument: --shm-size=5g I had tried various other memory-related arguments (I figured it was memory related), but that's the one that did the trick.

<comment><USER3> I'm very close to needing to do the same exact thing, would really appreciate a GitHub link or something do your Dockerfile

<comment><USER2> I'm definitely able to open it up, I just need to sanitize it to get my information out of it and clean up some things. I've started with the component I referenced here, but I do have a basically complete workflow that I'm able to release.

I'm putting it here: [https://gitlab.com/linsomniac/fogbugz-to- jira](https://gitlab.com/linsomniac/fogbugz-to-jira)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to use Selenium with Python, Splinter library provides some of much needed abstraction and utility functions to make your test code shorter and more readable

[https://splinter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why.html](https://splinter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> We have rolled our own wrapper around selenium implementing page models, using pytest. It feels as though we are reinventing the wheel, though I'm not aware of an existing public package providing this.

There are many caveats for the unwary when beginning a selenium adventure: detecting and retrying stale element exceptions (you can't just retry the final (say) click operation; you need to retry a DOM interaction sequence), detecting when an async operation begins and reaches a steady state, reliable snapshots and video recording across browsers, injecting the correct args to the browser containers, etc.

<comment><USER6> Adding 'waits' in for UI elements to be available feels wrong. Seems like busy work.</comment></comment>


Decentralized Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/07/11/auction/ <comment><USER2> This looks... _incredibly interesting_. Having a multitude of neural networks as agents competing with each other to maximize a general objective for the entire "society of agents" seems very appealing to me as a mechanism for scaling computation. Call it Minsky's pyrrhic victory, if you will.[a]

One obvious next step is to partition both network and resources within the this "society of agents," so that no agent competes with all other agents and no agent competes for all resources, creating sparsity and small-world dynamics at runtime. The authors are probably already considering this.

Looking forward to digging in :-)

\--

[a] Minsky, who developed the "Society of Mind" theory, is often credited as having caused a decline in neural net research and a shift to symbolic AI research in the 1970s and early 1980s, after the publication of his book "Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry," with Seymour Paper. I find it a bit ironic that the "society of mind" in this new paper consists of descendants of the perceptron. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_(book)#Reception_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_\(book\)#Reception_and_legacy) for details.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Composing archetypal agents in complex adaptive systems is the game I want to see played. Enter into the realm of the structural topology of the brain to see the power of NNs.

<comment><USER4> Would you mind elaborating upon this?: "Enter into the realm of the structural topology of the brain to see the power of NNs."

<comment><USER5> A part of what makes the brain so special and capable is how it's able to structurally and functionally layer regions upon each other with their own specialized functions which all funnel their outputs up and down as needed. So even if every part of the brain is using the same kinds of neurons, they're all completing very different tasks. This is something (afaik) we haven't seen much in modern AI and it's probably a missing piece of the puzzle.

<comment><USER6> Not every part of the brain is using the same kind of neurons. There are many different cell types, and neurons are especially involved in epigenetic changes even at the microscopic time scale. It's a common misconception to assume that the classic artificial neurons are what real neurons are like. Real neurons are incredibly more complex with many many more moving parts and a misleading analogue to their artificial counterparts.

<comment><USER5> I'm not aware of any neuron that functions differently from other neurons. You have a soma, dendrites, synapses, electrical impulses and glia. Even if there are subtypes, they are all based on this basic functionality. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER6> To elaborate on my first point:

In the context of neurobiology, the term "type of neuron" has a specific meaning referring to the cell type of the neuron. The brain is host to many many different cell type populations. But I see now that you're not talking about this at all.

My second point:

I think we're running into a semantic/ambuiguity issue here. I'm not sure what you mean by "type" or "kind" and "functions".

For example:

> I'm not aware of any neuron that functions differently from other neurons.

Every single neuron functions differently from other neurons, not just in practice, but in theory (Leibniz's law). When you sequence the RNA present in the nucleus or the soma (either one, usually not both), you will never get two neurons with the same profile. In fact, you can "barcode" individual neurons based on their gene expression profile. This profile is so complex and ephemeral that it is essentially a fingerprint of the neuron at the time you sequence it. And like I said, this profile changes very quickly over time. Just in case the connection between function and RNA sequence is not clear, look up central dogma. Pre-translational functions are a huge portion of what neurons do.

> they are all based on this basic functionality

In terms of what you mean by basic functionality, I believe you are mostly correct. However, one thing to note is that glia are separate from neurons, and there are two main subtypes of neurons depending on what type of synapse they have. You can have an electrical synapse, or a chemical one. But usually when people talk about "neurons" they are talking about the chemical type. The difference between the two are huge and this leads to my next point:

You can get as basic as you want to argue that all neurons are the same "kind". You could argue that a binary tree and hashmap are the same "kind". I could argue that everything in existence is the same kind since everything is made of elementary particles (mereological nihilism). However, my original argument is that artificial neurons are misleading when you want to think about the actual brain. Although you focused on topology (which I'm assuming you mean physical organization), I don't think you can really ignore the atomic units of the brain, which are the neurons and glia. Now we are certainly still very much in the dark about them, we have learned a lot, but we are still very far from a complete understanding. However, our current understanding is very far ahead of the "basic" idea of a neuron.

Take learning for example. A ANN learns by backpropagation. Learning is essentially just gradient descent of the loss function with respect to weights and biases. This is not at all how neurons "learn". If you focus on long-term potentiation (LTP), the strengthening of synapses, the reason why this happens between two artifical neurons is because the larger the weight and bias is in a synapse (connection between two artifical neurons), the bigger its partial derivative and impact via chain rule, meaning that backpropogation will increase its weight proportional to its impact. In biology however, it is incredibly complex and I don't really see how an ANN is really following the brain here.

Our current understanding of LTP in biological neurons is that there is short- term and long-term LTP (yes, long-term long-term potentiation). When an excitatory neuron releases glutamate (not all neurons do, a key example of how different cell types behave very differently), it binds to AMPAR and NMDAR and the receiving cell is depolarized by the influx of Na^+, which allows the Mg^+ plug in the NMDAR to be removed which allows Ca^{2+} to flow in to the dendritic spine. The Ca^{2+} binds to Calmodulin which binds to CaMKII (one of many targets of Calmodulin) which undergoes autophosphorylation but also phosphorylates AMPARS (GluRs) which results in LTP, since they are now allowing in more positive ions. However this short-term LTP is temporary, and to maintain it, it must be converted into long-term LTP. Long-term LTP requires epigenetic changes.

How high-frequency stimulation changes gene expression is not yet fully understood. But we know that G-protein-coupled receptors (which cascades down to cAMP), calmodulin, and MAP kinase all directly affect the behavior of CREB, which is a protein in the nucleus that binds to DNA and regulates transcription (a transciption factor). So CREB controls the genes that directly result in long-term LTP. One of these genes makes a protein called Arc, which travels to the synpases (look into synpatic tagging theory if curious how) and increases the amount of F-actin (not sure if this is fully understood these days) which grows the dendritic spines and therefore results in long-term LTP.

Note that what I just typed out is really just an overview, and there are entire textbooks that describe LTP. Also, I'm just a student of this topic, not an expert. And I only talked about LTP which is one of the basic subtopics of learning and memory.

So how does this compare to ANNs? An artifical neuron does not adjust its weights solely based on its connections, it must also be done with respect to a loss function. I don't think biological neurons can be grouped in a way to be said to be part of a network with a loss-function. Doesn't really make sense. The only loss-function in biology is natural/artificial selection, which means that loss is calculated at a population level, not at the individual level, and certainly not at a neural network level. Furthermore, evolution works on the phenotypes of random variation. It does not adjust genotypes to some specific goal. Brains that reproduced relatively more fertile offspring are able to slightly increase the proportion of their genes and behavior. Not sure how this translates to artifical neural networks.

What does it mean for an artificial neuron to have short-term LTP? Artificial neural networks are essentially a collection of matrices and connections. How does it go through "time"? It changes with each epoch rather than a continuous flow of time, so I guess you can make the number of epochs the analogy for time. But this difference between trial-based models and time based models also results in its own set of differences like the difference between the Rescorla-Wanger model and the temporal difference model. Being tied to each epoch and the loss function like how the R-W model is tied to each trial of CS learning means that it is limited in what it can understand and optimize for.

The way I see it, artifical neurons and networks still very far from "entering into the realm of structural topology of the brain" which I guess is another way of saying that we are very far from GAI. Furthermore, I was only talking about the disparity between biological neurons and artificial neurons in the narrow context of LTP. I'm sure I could write much more about the disparity between the organization of the brain and the organization of ANN described in the article ("topology").

<comment><USER7> That was a great intro to a lot of nuances I suspected existed!

My only quibble is equating GAI with human-modeled AI in your last paragraph.

I expect the first successful GAI's won't be modeled on human AI, due to the advantages of creating new algorithms without the limitations of evolution, and due to the complexity of our evolved brain as you well explained.

But in any case, GAI is likely to be achievable many different ways.

Even in biology, I wonder if the independently evolved octopus nervous system, bracketed into a short life time, mentorless childhood, and much higher levels of decentralization, and higher sensory and motor complexity, might be more scalable than our brain if it were artificially implemented.

The octopus ability to pull color information out of grayscale sensory information is just one of many ways their short lived minds exceed us in interesting ways.

<comment><USER6> You're definitely correct that GAI is not necessarily going to be human- modeled. Who knows how that's going to happen if it does. However, I'm betting that it will be, or at least heavily inspired by it. I think you are underestimating biomimetics. For example, convolutional neural layers and residual neural networks were both based on cat/primate visual cortex systems. And both were huge advances in computer vision.

The most "advanced" GI we know of right now is human intelligence, and I think it would be wasteful not to extract as much as we can from it. You mention octopus brains, but I would argue that for GAI we're more concerned about what humans are good at with their oversized prefrontal cortex, which is higher- level, abstract, executive cognition. Pulling color information out of grascale doesn't sound all that impressive to me (especially since that sounds like an easy unsupervised deep learning task) compared to being able type all this out.

You mention the limitations of evolution. I think the key limitation of evolution is that it is largely append-only. Our brain is like a nested doll where the deeper you go, the further back you go in evolutionary history. The way evolution plays out means that things are always built on top, there is never really a large overhaul, since 99.99999...% that just means the zygote isn't even viable. Do we really care about the lower levels beneath higher executive function? Do we really care about modeling emotions (e.g. fear/flight) like the limbic system, or modeling how the brain stem maintains homeostasis such as monitoring carbonic acid levels in blood? Perhaps. But I think the prefrontal cortex is what is most interesting. But I guess it depends on what you want from a GAI.

<comment><USER7> We probably have similar views, with some differences.

We definitely have and will pick up inspiration from the brain as you point out.

That is especially true in terms of the basic topologies of our brains neural networks. I.e. the painfully simplified artificial neuron model, two layer networks (which may roughly corrrespind to some single biological neurons that can have hierarchies of dendrites as I understand), then deep networks, convolution, recurrence, competitive layers and other topologies.

But I think the freedom of math to produce global algorithms directly allows faster innovation in a way that incremental change via evolution never had.

I expect GAI will always have some biologically inspired roots, but my untested (obviously!) opinion is that the first GAI will significantly benefit from global gradient based algorithms, and incorporate symbolic and database sides too.

The latter two not looking anything like how our neurons operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good to see the Hayek Machine idea being rebooted in the age of deep learning. I've been wondering when someone would try this out again.</comment>


Steve Cole's "Running a Game Publishing Company" - <AUTHOR> http://www.starfleetgames.com/book/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is obviously a book about how Steve's small business succeeded in one small niche industry -- but a lot of the advice here is more general.

For those interested in his niche market, there's also interesting stuff here about entertainment franchise licensing, SFG's switch from big print runs to in-house print-on-demand, and more.</comment>


EmDrive: Nasa paper has finally passed peer review - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa-eagleworks-paper-has-finally-passed-peer-review-says-scientist-know-1578716 <comment><USER2> TLDR: Now deleted forum comment by a scientist says that the paper "Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum" has passed peer review and will be published in AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power. A line of text was included that _may be_ from the paper itself: "Thrust data in mode shape TM212 at less than 8106 Torr environment, from forward, reverse and null tests suggests that the system is consistently performing with a thrust to power ratio of 1.2 +/\- 0.1 mN/Kw ()"

<comment><USER3> What is a "Kw" ? Must be a typo?

<comment><USER4> 1024 watts

<comment><USER5> You're thinking of the Kiwi, which is a base-2 measurement of watts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been doing some reading on this recently, and as far as I understand it, this paper is not going to settle the matter one way or the other. IANAP so take these notes with a grain of salt.

There was an experiment done by a Chinese lab a few years ago, which seemed to support the effect, but when they re-did the experiment using an on-board battery instead of a power cable, the effect disappeared.

So far noone has publically replicated this condition (i.e. battery instead of power cable), and either confirmed or disconfirmed this null-result, and I do not think this new paper will report any experiments using this condition either.

There are however efforts underway to actually put one of these things into space in the form of a tiny satellite, and see if any thrust is produced there, which seems like the perfect experimental setup.

All in all I think it is going to be years before we know what is what in regards to this technology.

<comment><USER7> > There are however efforts underway to actually put one of these things into > space in the form of a tiny satellite, and see if any thrust is produced > there, which seems like the perfect experimental setup.

Wouldn't this have the problem that the object will constantly being hit by particles (and the distribution of particles will not be random) and accelerated by these?

<comment><USER8> yes but they can use data from pioneer to correct for it, especially if they are far enough from earth, also if the drive can be cycled, they can measure against the condition at rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This paragraph made me laugh.

 _> Eagleworks is an experimental lab that is to Nasa essentially what the secretive Google X "moonshot" R&D lab is to Google/Alphabet_

So Google is the gold standard for R&D now?

<comment><USER10> Not to mention that NASA made the first ever "moonshot" actually happen.

A term that's since been cheapened for the purposes of good PR.

<comment><USER11> That was the bit that made me really facepalm. It's one thing to compare to something more familiar but it's sorta sad when you need to use Google or something like that to explain what a "moonshot program" is in reference to NASA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An older discussion on HN about an experiment that was unable to replicate the effect when using batteries

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007877)

<comment><USER13> Couldn't you connect the battery by the cable and get the effect back?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Almost as interesting, its reported/discussed that light entering the EmDrive chamber via laser appeared to have travelled superluminally thought to be due to some distortion of the light cone inside the chamber.

Thread: [http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36313.1860](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36313.1860)

</comment><comment><USER15> FTFA :

"The work we're doing is difficult and expensive and the people paying for it don't necessarily want to give it away to the rest of the world, but EmDrive will make a huge impact and a lot of people have thought of a lot of things to apply it to," he said.

I hate this world sometimes...

<comment><USER16> Old-style science is apparently dead. Imagine if Einstein created General Relativity today, but (in keeping with the times and contrary to everything we know about Einstein) realized the commercial potential of the ideas before submitting his paper for publication.

Or the quantum theorists of the 1920s -- imagine that they somehow foresaw all the commercial potential of these ideas, before publishing the broad outline of theories that essentially define modern times.

This is not to suggest that the EM Drive will necessarily pan out as some of its adherents are claiming, only that the old, pure-research tradition of publishing everything in advance of any consideration of applications seems to be dead.

<comment><USER17> Old-style science was not as expensive as new style science. If a team does something for commercial gain then it becomes publically accessible 20 years later when the patents expire. Probably sooner if people ignore the patents or find a way round them. The worst case scenario is that they sit on their invention and do nothing about it. The best case is that they create a new viable industry. Either way, eventually the technology will become available to everyone for free. If there was little incentive to develop these ideas then fewer people would bother and this tech may only have been invented in 100 years time.

<comment><USER18> "it becomes publically accessible 20 years later when the patents expire" I'm about 90% sure this is the opposite of how patents work. You describe the methods in the patent, and in exchange you get to use or license it for the duration of the patent. It's publicly accessible but not usable, which is a useful distinction. Without patents there wouldn't be an incentive to disclose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _" People think it's black magic or something, but it's not. Any physicist worth his salt should understand how it works, or if they don't, they should change their profession."_

This got me thinking about The Emperor's New Clothes. Be it that I'm not that bright to fully grasp how the RFRCT might actually function, the king is still naked to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> See also wikipedia [1].

Most interestingly:

> Their design principles are not supported by prevailing scientific theories, > apparently violating the law of conservation of momentum; as a result they > are controversial.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> Can't wait to get a look at this paper. And the results of reproductions of the experiment that are inevitable. If the result is confirmed, i expect a number of people to really start playing with the shape of things to see if we can get the power to thrust ratio up. It'd be awesome if this could make orbit both energy efficient and environmentally friendly.

</comment><comment><USER22> I opened this ibtimes link with Chrome on an Android phone, and my screen was hijacked by a prize offer, asking me to press OK. I couldn't get rid of it -- not even by stopping and restarting the browser. Finally I stopped Chrome and deleted all its stored data. That worked.

Has anyone else experienced the same problem with this link?

<comment><USER11> Haven't tested it on Chrome (mobile) but now I'm afraid to. Either way, you might want to look for an adblocker. I know that's the basis of a hundred discussions on this site but I find that the relative intrusiveness compared to the more limited resources of a mobile device make ad blocking even more valuable on mobile than on the desktop much of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> OK, I'm officially interested. I'm a physics undergrad. What paper should I be reading that more or less summarizes the mechanism at work?

<comment><USER24> The EmDrive website ([http://www.emdrive.com/](http://www.emdrive.com/)) has papers.

Quickly flipping through this paper[0], I think it explains the principles.

[http://www.emdrive.com/FeasibilityStudytechnicalreportissue2...](http://www.emdrive.com/FeasibilityStudytechnicalreportissue2.pdf)

<comment><USER25> The theory is simply wrong, it neglects the electromagnetic pressure between the electromagnetic field and the tapered wall of the waveguide, it should produce the missing force component for a net force of 0.

It's impossible to arrive at a non-zero net Force with classical electrodynamics. It's theoretically proven that it conserves momentum.

Very possible reasons for _measuring_ non-zero force:

> Systematic measurement errors.

> Leaking EM field carrying momentum.

> Energy channel from outside carrying momentum (failing measurements > including battery mentioned in comments)

Unlikely explanation: All currently used theories of electrodynamics are wrong.

But explaining non-zero force from classical ED is _simply impossible_.

Also note that breaking conservation of momentum + relativity means that conservation of energy is broken as well.

edit: typo

edit 2:

I mean the theoretical approach presented in the paper makes obvious mistakes. I'm not arguing that breaking conservation of momentum is impossible (although I think it's really unlikely), I argue that even if it would happen it couldn't be described by classical electrodynamics (or even QED). We would have to come up with better laws for electrodynamics.

<comment><USER26> This is exactly the kind of comment I would expect to read shortly before some presumed law of the universe were broken. Reminds me of the "maybe in thousands of years people will fly" newspaper comment the same year the Wright brothers flew.

I'm not treating it lightly that conservation of energy etc. would be broken. I'm just saying... it's a law until it's discovered that it's not. Or rather, that the law is only applicable within certain conditions, or needs some asterisks on it.

<comment><USER27> I think the issue is that if it were possible to break conservation laws using such setups, we would have seen nature doing it by now.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps we have: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyby_anomaly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyby_anomaly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I went to the article and got one of those bogus your phone has been infected redirect pages. I am on an Android phone.</comment>


Show HN: Hadron. A tool that makes design with code visual and easy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@HadronApp/its-about-time-to-design-in-the-real-world-introducing-hadron-f17c460401f7 <comment><USER2> It look's like a Dev Tools for designers, really cool idea congrats!! looking forward to give it a try

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!can't wait to try it</comment>


Ruby Quicktips - <AUTHOR> http://rubyquicktips.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate the tips, but please don't confuse ruby and rails.

I'm scared for the poor newbies who don't know where to look for help when things go wrong. If they think they have a ruby problem when it's actually a rails problem they'll be stuck looking in the wrong places for help.

Also, doesn't exactly make you look smart :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks more like worthless Rails tips.

<comment><USER4> Rails tips sure, but some of them were pretty interesting to me. Didn't know that irb had _ like in perl, and that error_messages_for took those nifty named parameters.

Some similar tips of my own: Enumerable.each_with_object sort of like foldl/inject but without the explicit return of the memo is a pretty nice monkeypatch that exists in activesupport. Object.returning is pretty nice too. Creates an object to return and then yields to a block, very handy.

<comment><USER5> FYI: #returning is a hack that #tap supplants, and is supported in Ruby 1.8.7 natively, and is supported in Rails via ActiveSupport for older versions of Ruby.

<comment><USER4> Tap is also an incredibly nifty function, but they are slightly different, I hadn't thought of using tap in the same way as returning before you mentioned it.

Using _returning_ with a local variable makes for superbly readable code imho:

      def foo
         returning values = [] do
           values << 'bar'
           values << 'baz' if @iffy
         end
       end

      def foo
         [].tap do |values|
           values << 'bar'
           values << 'baz' if @iffy
         end
      end</comment></comment></comment></comment>


So Pythonistas, you want to get rid of the GIL... - <AUTHOR> http://functional-orbitz.blogspot.se/2012/07/so-pythonistas-you-want-to-get-rid-of.html

<comment><USER2> > You will rewrite your code to not make use of the guarantees.

I suppose a problem is that unlike Java, Python is not fast enough to implement low level data structures in the language itself, so you can't easily implement non-thread-safe data structures without losing memory safety at the C level, which is unacceptable.

Still, I have the feeling that with heavy use of biased locking, you could stick locks everywhere without a lot of overhead in the non-contended case. Or maybe that famous patch just needs to be revisited, tweaked to more efficiently address the areas of highest contention... see [http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil- remova...](http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal- patch-of.html) for some context.

(some forms of biased locking are patented.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Python objects only need to be thread-safe if they are accessed by multiple threads. A proven solution that could preserve Python's atomicity guarantees is actor-based concurrency like Erlang or Go. When Python objects are queued to an actor's channel, a deep copy (or copy-on-write reference) could be sent to avoid data sharing.

<comment><USER4> The blog's example is stupid. Of course if you pop a list in more than one thread the behavior is undefined. Who on earth doesn't expect that?

@jagw: ok fair, but that is going to be the very first example of things thou shalt not do when using threads in any article, book, or course

<comment><USER5> People who have never done proper multi-threaded programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do actual pythonistas really hate the GIL? I thought it was mostly a troll talking point, just like the whitespace.

<comment><USER7> Why would the inability to write multi-threaded programs that are worth a damn be a troll talking point? It meaningfully lowers the appropriateness of using python for server code.

<comment><USER8> There's more than one way to do it. If you're thinking about hundreds of threads doing chunks of work, then my comment will not be meaningful but if you're talking about maximizing CPU utilization for a particular task, then multiple processes is a valid and proven approach (Tornado does just that for example, forking as many processes as you have CPUs and putting them to work).

<comment><USER9> The viability of separate processes is highly dependent on the problem domain and algorithm. Threads have their place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm actually interested to know what the HN community does to achieve parallelism in Python? Do you use multiprocessing module, Stackless python, PP module (parallel python)?

<comment><USER11> That's usually the point at which I decide the project could really use being rewritten in C.

If I need performance badly enough that I'm considering making major structural changes in order to utilise multi-process or find some other way around the GIL, I probably ought to be considering using a language that supports what I'm trying to do. Of course my python projects tend to be fairly small.

<comment><USER12> Or just write the fast bits in C, call it from Python via ctypes and get the GIL unlocked and parallelism for free.

<comment><USER11> If my projects were large enough to make that a more attractive option, sure, that's a great plan.

Usually when I've hit this situation I'm writing something simple but processor intensive, and it's easier for me (12 years commercial parallel/distributed C programming, amateur python enthusiast) to go back to home ground at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could we not have a per-object lock, but only on objects the programmer defines as requiring thread safety?

<comment><USER14> If you tag objects as being either "owned" by a thread or "shared" then you could (in the python implementation) do something like:

      if (obj.owner == current_thread):
        # just get in and mess with it
      elsif (obj.owner == shared):
        # get in and mess with it under a lock
      else
        throw "not your obj - make this obj shared if you need that"

From a language perspective, you'd just need a way to declare that an object was 'shared'. All other objs would be owned by their creating thread.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Nate, an app to help you track your subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.natesaves.nate <comment><AUTHOR> These past few months, me and a friend have teamed up as a developer and a designer with the goal of building a subscription manager that does the basics really well. That involves creating custom or popular subscriptions, sorting your expenses and multi currency support. We have an upcoming roadmap of features which includes detailed expense tracking and much more. The app is free to download, however here are a couple of premium promo codes for those that are interested.

\- YJS81D13CBB04K119HJ4QUC

\- 7R2PXRZK9MCQRQGU99SU5AB

\- MKEL4KW2XJL8RPZ540B31CN

\- ZX5ETSS05B458R52JB9XRQL

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Looks really cool, the design is very well thought out!

I couldn't figure out what the premium options were or how to subscribe to them, though. Is it possible I'm on a previous version (1.0)?

<comment><USER3> I figured it out. Premium features come when adding more than 3 subscriptions. When the Google prompt comes up, there is an option to add a code. The premium features, for now, are just adding more subscriptions. Hopefully, more to come!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right, and we definitely have several ideas in mind!

<comment><USER2> Ah, got it. Just as a point of feedback: I didn't realize the app required the premium version to have more than 3 subscriptions.

For me, 'premium' signifies something extra, not a version of the app that allows you to fully use the core functionality. The 'free' version right now is more like a demo in that sense.

Having said that, the app really works well and the design is very nice as well!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


15 Greatest Open Source Terminal Applications Of 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/best-terminal-applications-for-linux-unix-macosx/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to mention vshnu, ranger and vifm for directory browsing and traversal.

Dterm is also great (OSX only, i think). Can pop up a command line from anywhere and copy the results of a command easily. (Come to think of it, its not a terminal app, but terminal lovers should like it).

What good music players are there? I use cmus, but it does freeze after a day. Article mentions screen, but not tmux.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice list that may be useful for those running their own servers or managing some vps...</comment>


Tumblr is Invisible to the News, As These Charts Show. Why? - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/tumblr-invisible-news

<comment><USER2> A good question. What is the answer?</comment>


Ask HN: VisaEase.com - TurboTax for Immigration Startup - Please Review - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to get some feedback on my project and now startup (we have our first paid team member now!) VisaEase.com.  I've tried getting some HN feedback before, but I think my heading was not enticing enough.
Friends, non-Romans, internet people...I come to you bearing a link to the project and now company I've been working on the last few years (it's completely bootstrapped and we're ramping up) asking for advice in a combination of a Show HN and Ask HN. I wanted to see if I could get your feedback on what is certainly not a weekend project.
I present to you VisaEase: http://www.visaease.com
If you could spare a moment to check it out, I'm hoping to get feedback on the site in general and specifically: - Ways to increase customer conversion - Any suggestions on how to reach the right audience of people ready to emigrate?
- Many of the site's visitors are early on in the immigration process and not yet ready for our services.
- Suggestions on ways to improve the site design, especially the homepage which I think may need a redesign
- What do you think about the style of the copy on the site? - We created all the copy, videos, etc. ourselves and wanted to get some outside opinions from pros and semi-pros to this part of marketing
- Do you know anyone that would be interested in freelance infographic design work (I/we have lots of interesting stats to share, but want to do so in a fun and hopefully aesthetically pleasing way)?
- Know anyone that may be interested in investing in the immigration space with a qualified team that really knows the area?
Thank you in advance and good luck with your startups as well. <comment><USER2> Hey Jonathan, some quick fly-by points from a marketing perspective. Only had a few minutes to review, but you can contact me to chat more about this:

\- The call-to-action on the main page is... Not clear. What's the main thing you want a visitor to do? Is it to click "Get Started," or "Why VisaEase," or "View a Video"? (BTW, "View a Video" is really vague... Maybe "See How it Works" with a small "play" icon to indicate it's a video.) Whatever the main action is, it needs to be way more prominent.

\- You can probably squeeze more conversions out of the service pages (also SEO landing pages, I'm assuming) by:

        - getting rid of the weird large text image and replacing it with actual text and call-to-action button.

        - using the sidenav more wisely. "Related links" don't encourage action as much as the testimonials or the 100% guarantee*, so they should be re-ordered accordingly. BTW, the testimonial byline (name) is a link with no target... confusing.

\- You can probably decrease form drop-offs by properly setting people's expectations. I was surprised to be thrown into what looks like a long and tedious application, which doesn't even look like the site I came from. Also in some cases you call it a "free consultation" and in others a "free application." Which is it? I'm guessing you get a lot of drop-offs in the first step because of false or missing expectations.

* In fact, that 100% guarantee should be way at the top, next to your phone number. That's a huge comforting factor.

Totally random issues:

\- On the Immigration FAQs page, the Fiance Visa and Green Card item links to a lorem ipsum URL: [http://www.visaease.com/visa-topics/in-vehicula-sapien-in- li...](http://www.visaease.com/visa-topics/in-vehicula-sapien-in-ligula-porta- faucibus/)

\- On the Service Offering chart, at bottom-left, "receipt" is misspelled as "reciept."

\- For your service offering levels, "Platinum" is misspelled as "Platinium."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the feedback! We'll take all of it into account. Making some changes as I type.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You are missing a few use cases.

1\. The employment based conversion to a green card process.

2\. The current setup seems to be designed from the perspective of someone who is being sponsored by a U.S. citizen (marriage or family based). E.g. I went through the process of selecting "Adjustment of status". Now the AoS happens in situations other than sponsorship. E.g. I got a diversity lottery and then did an adjustment of status here in the U.S.

In general, if you really have a background of well qualified immigration attorneys, you really need to leverage that know how in the process. The visa process is as much art as it is science. E.g. when I went for the visa interview, the only question he asked me was for my pay stub. Not really a super necessary document in this situation because I was eligible (by virtue of having a Masters degree) for this process. This sort of preparation comes not from reading the application but having know how through experience.

Also $79 is rather low if the objective is "End to end Green card application support". I frankly would be skeptical as to how good the support will be. This is not to say that there aren't lawyers who take $10K and do nothing. But you really need to up your price point to take into account the fact that there is a psychological belief that the best lawyer is an expensive one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, we are likely going to raise prices due to perception. We offer free review by an immigration attorney or paralegal as well, but people seem to be in disbelief at our current prices. Seems odd, but raising prices is something we've considered.

We're thinking about entering the employment based space as well.

Thanks again for the advice.

<comment><USER3> Also, I don't know how good you guys are as lawyers but really you should emphasize the hell out of that more: connect to avvo reviews, background information. Right now, the site looks like a DIY guide to the green card. While that may be the intention, you should probably rejig it such that the lawyer bit gets emphasized.

It also depends on your target demographic. If your target demographic is nice clean cases of U.S. citizens sponsoring their wives or whatever, then I think you are good. If not, make it look more "lawyery" will only help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting and potentially very helpful for people trying to navigate the U.S. immigration system (I know how hard it can be, having navigated the bureaucracy with my spouse, from resident visa to naturalization).

I have a few questions:

Does this service have to conform to any laws or regulations governing immigration services, or the collection of data related to visa applications, change of status, naturalization, etc.?

What sorts of representations are you making if/when something goes wrong/gets lost/gets delayed?

Are you working with an immigration law firm?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a full time immigration attorney working for the company and are setting up a separate law firm. We offer a 100% accuracy and satisfaction guarantee or your money back. We are thinking about offering far more than your money back (e.g. insurance and $1,000 if we make any errors), but that requires some administration and additional legal aspects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks professional, my feedback is to reduce/simplify words on homepage box and consider using bold.

Example: "1\. Verifies your application process and checks for any issues"

could be..

"1\. <bold>Verify:</bold>Find errors automatically"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.visaease.com](http://www.visaease.com)</comment>


Intrusion Detection: How do you find the Needle in a haystack? - <AUTHOR> http://analyticsmadeskeezy.com/2012/11/29/intrusion-detection-made-skeezy-how-do-you-find-the-dea-in-a-haystack/ <comment><USER2> This work is intuitive and heuristic. But with some meager assumptions, it's also possible to make a real 'statistical hypothesis test' out of such things.

So, with a hypothesis test we get not just a heuristic 'local outlier factor' but a probability of Type I error.

And we can have some other advantages that tell us some good things about the probability of Type II error.

Of course, with more data, we know what to do, use the classic most powerful Neyman-Pearson result. There all those seemingly important intuitive consideration in the OP of 'A is a friend of B but B has lots of friends much closer than A so that B is not a friend of A' don't get involved and, thus, look suspicious.

There is, of course,

David J. Marchette, 'Computer Intrusion Detection: A Statistical Viewpoint', ISBN 0-387-95281-0, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2001.</comment>


Staples prints CVs for free. - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthiasmcgregor.com/print/good-marketing-staples-prints-cvs-for-free/ <comment><USER2> Printing a CV?

Do they also allow you to browse Altavista, Lycos, Excite and AskJeeves and use ICQ for free too?

<comment><USER3> I do contracting in NYC (similarly to what you do) and even though I submit my resume through email, I was always asked to come with printed version when I was called for an in-person interview.

<comment><USER4> It helps to have multiple printed copies of your resume, references, and the position you're applying for. The printed resume is the most essential because you may interview with several people in succession and go through 3+ copies of your resume easily.

<comment><USER5> It's also helpful when the recruiter edits your resume (e.g., adding skills).

Having your own printed copy will convince the employer that it's the recruiter (not you) who is being dishonest.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely true. Several years ago I had a recruiter hounding for nearly two months(calling me multiple times per week) me to go on interviews that didn't appeal to me despite the fact that I made my expectations clear. I finally relented and went on one that seemed the most reasonable of the bunch. Late in the interview, we found a few a changes that the recruiter had made, including lying about my education history. The interviewer must have chewed them out because I didn't hear back from them at any point after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sorry but whats a CV? Im assuming its a resume?

-update-

Guess I should have googled harder: A curriculum vitae, commonly referred to as CV, is a longer (two or more pages), more detailed synopsis than a resume. (<http://jobsearch.about.com/od/cvsamples/a/blsamplecv.htm>)

<comment><USER8> I've never come across that distinction before.

In the UK, a CV is the catch-all term for what's called a resume in the US. Conventional wisdom is that it shouldn't be longer than 2 sides of A4 paper.

<comment><USER9> I wish some of the people that have submitted CVs to me knew that "conventional wisdom". There's nothing quite like trawling through someone's entire detailed job history, including an exhaustive list of their responsibilities at Big Fat Burger when they were at college.

I once applied for a job that stipulated "all CVs longer than one side will be ignored". I got through to the interview and commented on what a good idea that was. He said, "you wouldn't believe how many we get that are still 5 sides long......".

<comment><USER6> What if your job history is relevant to the position at hand? Do you submit a shortened resume with the points that you would like the respective company to see and bring a copy of the longer one in case they ask?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This appears to be UK only. Apparently Staples did a similar promotion for US- based stores a couple of years ago (along with free business card printing)

[http://www.centernetworks.com/staples-free-resume- printing-b...](http://www.centernetworks.com/staples-free-resume-printing- business-cards)

</comment><comment><USER11> I bet they print them on cheap paper, and try to upsell you to better quality stuff. Still a good deed, though.

<comment><USER7> They got you in the door didnt they? If one out of ten people decide to upgrade I bet they would be happy with that.</comment></comment>


The Evolution of Emotion - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/stephen-t-asma-evolution-of-emotion/ <comment><USER2> Emotions to some extent could be conserved between related species. But this does not mean that every animal has the same repertoire of emotions. Some animals could exhibit emotions completely novel and unimaginable to the likes of us, while at the same time some emotions could be uniquely human.

I would suppose that some very basic emotions such as fear might be widely conserved among higher organisms.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to be abrupt, but did you honestly read all of the article? Your musings here are really the most rudimentary points of what the author talked about.

As the author states, "evolution is filled with contingent and convergent pathways of adaptive behavior". So yeah, the anthropocentric notion that we have "all of the feels" is bunk.

General intelligence is a fascinating field of neuroscience and is really making mainstream evolutionary psych seem a bit naff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Phenomenal experiences, like emotions, feelings, thoughts, sensations, are inexplicable [a]. Yet we know they evolved.

[a] [http://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_c...](http://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness)

<comment><USER5> It seems like the typical ploy of the new age pseudo-scientist is to begin referencing people's internal experiences, jump from there to the point that people highly value their internal experiences and finally claim that the things explain the outside world couldn't possibly explain these internal phenomena, that the intensity of internal experiences makes them "inexplicable".

But the entire "argument" is purely psychological. An intelligent being having internal representations seems very logical - computer programs often build a variety of representation of the things they modeling. Memories can seem vivid but my recall is that the brain doesn't reconstruct full movies. But even more, the vividness of internal movies is pretty thin argument to the leap halfway into Chalmers video where he speculates "(maybe) even a photon has consciousness".

<comment><USER4> David Chalmers is not a scientist. Is a philosopher, and quite a respectable one. Consciousness is a much older problem than the new age thingy. And definitely is much older than the pseudo-skeptic that knows better than scholars in a branch with a very long and wide tradition.

<comment><USER5> It seems like you are defending his claims only based on authority.

I can't say whether modern philosophy has dived into New Age nonsense or whether Chalmers just happened to be in the mood to make lazy, bogus arguments just for the video link you posted.

But when someone starts saying "maybe a photon has a litter bit of consciousness", they have rather clearly entered the realm of pseudo-science.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, 'pseudo science' is both a very sweeping and loaded term. Hate to be that guy, but we have to remember that scientism and 'new age' theory can be equally toxic.

<comment><USER5> Pseudo-science is a strong term indeed, but I'm not sure what's a clearer term for an approach that uses a dose of social authority - indeed the mantle of science, to make statements that clearly fly in the face of facts that real scientific processes have established with some accuracy.

The properties of photons are very well documented. Consciousness has not been found among them. Claiming that photons have "a little bit" of consciousness based "we don't know what consciousness is so it must everywhere/in- everything" seems to rather clearly like an abuse of logic.

I am not claiming the mantle of science myself to tell someone what their subjective experiences are. I'm just saying the someone merely referencing their subjective experiences doesn't refute a long string of scientific experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Neuroscience has begun to correct the computational model by showing how our rational, linguistic mind depends on the ancient limbic brain, where emotions hold sway and social skills dominate._

Why can't emotions be computational? For example, in case of danger, fear event gets fired and body responds to that.

<comment><USER5> Well, you argue that all of the phenomena is "computational" if computing in the brain means something.

The main difference between an emotional response and a "rational" or "linguistic" response might be an emotional response would send a signal to the whole system whereas a "linguistic" response might require a chain of manipulations before a final result appeared.

Of course we have a long way to go before these speculations become at all accurate.

<comment><USER7> _...might be an emotional response would send a signal to the whole system..._

No wonder emotions are so messy: they're a form of mutable global state.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What browser extensions have you built for yourself? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> My highschool ( I just graduated) has a some sort of gradebook management software used by the teachers / admin / parents / students to view and manage grades, attendence, payment, and so on. The frameowkr used is down kind of convoluted framework Enterprise software combination that the school purchased. And for some reason the school let us see our points erned on ecah assignment out of the total but only showed the letter grade and not the percent for the class. So calculating weighted grades by hand to figure out your class percent was a huge pain for everyone (and some teachers didn't like if you asked them.to show you your percent which they had access too). So one of the first experiences I had writing stuff with js and web technologies was writing an extension to take in all the grades, parse them, and calculate grades based on percents imputed for weighted catagories. Everyone thought it was cool and it became a big thing. I was even super stoked when I got it to save and load the weights using chrome local storage so you don't have to input it everytime. Even though it's pretty simple software, it was my first experience seing the actual impact on my peers every day by some price of software I write.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tripoli/jmiafjndie...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tripoli/jmiafjndiefejlbbgiadmfhbgcbffgio)

</comment><comment> matt-tingen Not extensions, but I have a few userscripts I use to fix minor annoyances with various websites:

\- Netflix - Skip intros and quickly go to next episode

\- Github - Linkify branch names in PRs

\- Yelp - Open directions in a new tab rather than a modal

[https://github.com/matt-tingen/userscripts](https://github.com/matt- tingen/userscripts)

</comment><comment><USER3> I had built and published 4 different Chrome extensions:

\- Random Facts: a random fact about numbers with a beautiful image on new tabs. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-facts-on- ne...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-facts-on-new- tab/golgobfokbeogpppkfookhgoalecliea)

\- Game of Thrones Quotes: a random GoT quote on every new tab. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/game-of-thrones- qu...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/game-of-thrones- quotes/pfdpbbjmnlfggaiecpbecgjjpfbcdecp)

\- Open Wikipedia: an extension to overcome the Wikipedia blocks in Turkey. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-a%C3%A7%...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-a%C3%A7%C4%B1c%C4%B1/fgahdplpgmaoalaececccdphcmbinjog)

\- Open Imgur: an extension to overcome the Imgur blocks in Turkey. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imgur-a%C3%A7%C4%B...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imgur-a%C3%A7%C4%B1c%C4%B1/adcjcicnaepmahfjlglahaehjgagjoch)

All of the extensions are open source; the links can be found in the extension descriptions.

</comment><comment><USER4> I made an extension for my teachers that let them put a Google Doc onto Google Classroom, from the Google Doc. It's weird how Google doesn't have that built in, but it means that my teachers don't have to open up a new tab and go through the process, they can just do it from the Doc. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/share-doc- to-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/share-doc-to- classroom/)

I also made an extension that opens the current page (or link/video/image) in a popup window. Because I have so many tabs sometimes I just want one window, and it does it. I have options for half/third/full screen size so I can have them side by side (as well as just dragging to resize the window). [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/focus- popup/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/focus-popup/)

I also made an extension that fixed a specific issue on Apple Intranet Wikis playing videos in Chrome, but that Wiki system isn't used anymore.

Usually my extensions are just to fix minor problems/annoyances.

</comment><comment><USER5> I ported Alisdair McDiarmid's bookmarklet[1] to an add-on that will hide sticky content on a site. There was already a Chrome equivalent, but nothing for Firefox. It can be found here: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/) It's especially handy these days with the influx of cookie/GDPR agreement overlays, or app download dickbars[2].

[1] [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky- headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/) [2] [https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars](https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars)

</comment><comment><USER6> Deep Thought Tabs [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep- thought-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-thought- tabs/)

Adds funny, profound observations in newly opened empty tabs, with fresh images each time.

        - WebExtension written in plain JavaScript. No libraries. No cruft.
        - Displays "deep-thoughts" even in offline-mode (no background-images).
        - Fetches relevant fresh background images each-time from Unsplash and Flickr.

Checkout the source to learn how to create simple webextension addons for Firefox in JavaScript.

Few interesting bits of code:

        * Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm.
        * Ken-Burns effect for still images.
        * Visual (image-preview) tooltips in CSS.
        * Asynchronous XMLHttpRequest.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bing Wallpaper for ChromeOS

[https://github.com/chew-z/Bing-Wallpaper-for- ChromeOS](https://github.com/chew-z/Bing-Wallpaper-for-ChromeOS)

Augment - simple reminder that Google is a Big brother

[https://github.com/chew-z/Augment](https://github.com/chew-z/Augment)

Foogle - fool Google - my fork of TrackMeNot - which pollutes your search history with possible but random searches....

[https://github.com/chew-z/Foogle](https://github.com/chew-z/Foogle)

NewTab - custom new tab page

[https://github.com/chew-z/NewTab](https://github.com/chew-z/NewTab)

<comment><USER8> This seems sightly masochistic

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://github.com/choyg/ChromeNotis](https://github.com/choyg/ChromeNotis)

Notifications toggle. The code is comically simple but it's the one extension besides adblocking I regularly use.

<comment><USER8> So simple that I actually didn't know any js when I wrote this which has become quite clear to me when rereading the source

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Used to love playing dice on various crypto sites. Always have been in awe at those custom dice bots that people have built on Chrome.

And I've noticed that there isn't one for Edgeless (dice & blackjack with 0% edge), and so I've created a dice bot that allows a multiple steps martingale strategy.

It's open source and 100% free, give it a roll!

Github repo: [https://github.com/Whatzhub/edgeless- dicebot](https://github.com/Whatzhub/edgeless-dicebot)

EDG DiceBot 1st Run! [https://youtu.be/CUqNCWi6pPA](https://youtu.be/CUqNCWi6pPA)

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://github.com/lutostag/webextension- formsave](https://github.com/lutostag/webextension-formsave)

It saves what you write in textareas so it doesn't get lost when something goes awry.

When the old-style Firefox extensions were going to be deprecated, I went through my installed ones, picked one that wasn't built yet and started from scratch.

The most interesting/difficult part was getting CI setup for both Firefox and Chrome with the always changing landscape of support for extensions in selenium.

</comment><comment><USER11> A friend and I have been building some small tools that make it a little easier to make better investment decisions (and to get some experience with some different frameworks and technologies).

We released this extension recently to make it easy to jot down quick notes and keep track of stock prices.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yogi-invest- more-w...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yogi-invest-more- wisely/ejnbhjkjbmndbehmolegmapncflmcgfo/related)

</comment><comment><USER12> I realized I was spending a whole bunch of time tracking down web references for my grad school assignments (and forgetting most of them) so I made something super simple that generated them from my bookmarks:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmarks-to- refer...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmarks-to- references/aigindmbmcgegjhjnonholgaebnldmln)

</comment><comment><USER13> I made [https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/) to check for SEO, security and speed best practices on websites. Most tools only check for a small number issues or one page at a time whereas this extension crawls from page to page checking your whole website.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not much of an extension but I created a simplistic dark chrome theme to go with the dark menu bar on macOS.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode-theme- fo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode-theme-for- googl/dogmjhegnegcnfdnjdlmjfgghceifgmg)

</comment><comment><USER15> Firefox web extension to save a page's content as an image (save recipts, etc).

[https://github.com/grafie/acceptum/tree/master/firefox/dist](https://github.com/grafie/acceptum/tree/master/firefox/dist)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jump-to- hn/fopjleg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jump-to- hn/fopjlegcdhogedbmpkdljokglemjckdm?hl=en)

Read HN discussions on any article.

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://github.com/VoIPGRID/vialer-js/](https://github.com/VoIPGRID/vialer- js/)

A softphone built on top of Sip.js and Vue. It also runs in a webpage or as an Electron app.

</comment><comment><USER18> Google Search, Tumblr and some other.

BTW, do you use apps to build extensions?

Not wysiwyg but sort of wysiwyg? I don't mean IDE.

</comment><comment><USER19> I built a WhatsApp Web bot which runs as a Chrome extension, recently made the code public.

[https://github.com/aalsuwaidi/wabot](https://github.com/aalsuwaidi/wabot)

</comment><comment><USER20> I noticed I spend too much time reading wikipedia articles, jumping from one to another, so I built a chrome extension to limit that browsing time to a few minutes per day.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wrote one to get my Chipotle faster, back when Chipotle's online ordering didn't validate the order time server-side.

</comment><comment><USER22> extension that allows you to quickly block sites when you're trying to focus.

[https://github.com/tmm/block-fox](https://github.com/tmm/block-fox)

</comment><comment><USER23> I made an extension to make Photobucket photos visible again, since last year Photobucket suddenly put all their photos behind a huge paywall last year, and destroyed a lot of knowledge on forums that I use: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket- embedd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket-embedded- imag/ogipgokcopooepeipngiikdkpmcpkaon?hl=en-US)</comment>