Aprenita: Growth capital for mobile app developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.aprenita.com <comment><USER2> This is essentially a payday loan for app developers, fairly low risk since they can see clear sayed numbers from itunes/google play. Smart Idea.

<comment><USER3> Or µVC. No exchange of equity, just debt. Actual debt.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, it is a term loan: we extend a loan to our clients, and they repay it in equal installments over a set period of time (the "term"). However, mobile app developers operate at a more accelerated pace than a traditional brick-and- mortar business, which means that the terms of our loans tend to be shorter and the interest rates are more forgiving than a traditional term loan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site includes a 'TrustE' seal at the bottom of the page. It's not clickable, so I went to [https://www.truste.com/consumer-resources/trusted- directory/](https://www.truste.com/consumer-resources/trusted-directory/)

It did not return any results for aprenita.com

I'm not saying I place any faith in TrustE, but it seems strange to use a certification mark which has online verification, if that verification is going to fail.

Also: s/gurantee/guarantee

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, thank you. Recently we did some changes to our website and induced new defects, as always: new code – new bugs. We will fix them by the end of this week. Please check our McAfee SECURE seal here: [https://www.mcafeesecure.com/verify?host=aprenita.com](https://www.mcafeesecure.com/verify?host=aprenita.com)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I'm curious - what did you change on your site that caused no results being shown when someone searches for you on [https://www.truste.com/consumer- resources/trusted-directory/](https://www.truste.com/consumer- resources/trusted-directory/) ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> skovalenko, please take a look at the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Relevant section:

> If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, > because the site name will be displayed after the link.

> ...

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or > linkbait.

Under these guidelines, "Growth capital for mobile app developers" would be a better title.

<comment><USER5> But if it's introducing a project or a company, it's customary for the title to begin with the name.

<comment><USER3> It was changed. The title wasn't on the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome. No messing around, straight to the point. Let's see if they meet the "2-3 days" timeframe for an offer!

<comment><AUTHOR> Dear kiwidrew, thank you for your interest. Did you submit your application? If not, please start here [https://www.aprenita.com/sign- up](https://www.aprenita.com/sign-up) :)</comment></comment>


How to engage candidates and recruit faster with Texting - <AUTHOR> https://blog.quodeit.com/most-powerful-way-to-increase-candidate-engagement-in-recruitment-ecd71de9019 <comment><USER2> I would like all recruiters to take note. Don't text me or call me. 2/3 of you are information collectors. If you have something reasonable, email it to me and we can take it from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can understand the hate for the call but why for text?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> OMG, no. Want me to blacklist your recruiting firm? Spam me on my phone. To be fair, the article was from a company that does SMS, not a recruiter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it was by SMS company. However, I shared this article in the recruitment groups and they pretty liked this.</comment></comment>


Ken Thompson: A Brief Introduction   - <AUTHOR> http://www.linfo.org/thompson.html <comment><AUTHOR> FTA: "It is sometimes mentioned that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, wrote a compiler that only required four kilobytes of memory. However, Thompson wrote an entire operating system that could operate with the same amount of memory -- and not just an ordinary operating system"</comment>


Remote Development with VS Code - <AUTHOR> https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/05/02/remote-development?WT.mc_id=social-twitter-ticyren <comment><USER2> I don't understand, why isn't there more excitement about this.

This is huge in my opinion.

Now you can get any environment in container on your local machine, with working Intellisense and all the IDE integrations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I submitted the story because it's a huge feature that's going to make me much more productive. There are many hacks for vs code already to do something similar, but this is truly unique. What's odd, is I've seen other topics related to vscode for small features that have gotten a lot more feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting is the licensing. The VS Code Server inside of the container is not MIT licensed. They claim to stay free of charge but want to add premium features later (whatever that is).

</comment><comment><USER3> Are they finally cloning Eclipse Che? Looks like. Their architecture is explained in the FAQ: [https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq)

<comment><USER4> I think native WSL support will be a differentiator, I'm seriously excited for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So for beginners, you will still need a Remote Machine or Container for your development?

This could potentially fix the problem with Ruby Rails on Windows. But we now need to figure out the remote "part".

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait, are extensions still running locally?

<comment><USER3> Part of them

<comment><USER6> How does this handle things like syntax differences across different versions?

For "unstable" languages like Rust and c++ for example?

<comment><USER4> I think that can be gracefully solved by the language server. The client is local, the server is remote and each remote has the server corresponding to the correct version.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin, or How to Hammer in Nails with a Microscope - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=939

<comment><USER2> See also this: <http://www.loper-os.org/?p=988></comment>


Hey: An upcoming email service by the people behind Basecamp - <AUTHOR> https://www.hey.com/ <comment><USER2> Some comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257374)

Not everyone is convinced ...</comment>


Creating Web Traffic "Out of Thin Air" - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/porn-runs-the-internet <comment><USER2> > And like so many things on the internet, the technique and even some of the > traffic used to execute this burgeoning method of ad fraud, traces some of > its origins to porn.

Sex: the true driver of most human innovation since forever.

> [T]he VP of content and marketing for DingIt, told BuzzFeed News that the > site uses "4 independent traffic verification tools that monitor each view > on our video player"...

I wonder how much that cost to develop and deploy.

Details at Slideshare, sadly... [https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/traffic- origination-...](https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/traffic-origination- super-networks-83853611)

The fact that this is the foundation of the tech economy does not augur well.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Adam Simmons, the VP of content and marketing for DingIt, told BuzzFeed News that the site uses "4 independent traffic verification tools that monitor each view on our video player" and prevents any fraudulent traffic from viewing content or ads on the site.

I wonder what the hell a "traffic verification tool" is.

<comment><USER4> Vendors like WhiteOps, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Forensiq, DoubleVerify, etc. that are used to see if visitors to a website viewing the ads are actually people during normal browsing or whether they are bots or other fraudulent behavior.

None of them work well.

<comment><USER3> What do they do to decide if a user if real or fake? I am not remotely surprised that none of them work well

<comment><USER4> That's their trade secret but distills down to measuring all the various factors that a person actually reading a page would do: time, scroll speed/depth, click rate/location, previous history, mouse movements, http, ip, network traffic, browser profiles, etc.

Although these days with headless chrome and how easy it is to just record and replay someone's session, it becomes incredibly hard to detect with accuracy, especially while trying to not affect browsing behavior beyond the typical ad load experience.

There is lots of overlap with this and other security-focused companies that work with financial and government companies to protect their own websites and apps, although it's easier when you own and control the site, proxies and backend.

<comment><USER5> Jesus Christ, that is creepy and perverted.

<comment><USER6> Welcome to marketing! Get out while you are still sane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the subtle dig, using "porn or illegal downloading site" as a stand-in for "unscrupulous site". The two sets are not equal, and just saying "unscrupulous" would have served better.

<comment><USER8> Those are the two main types of site that Google ads won't touch, though. So if they monetize using ads, they need to use an unscrupulous ad network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this sort of stuff resolves on its own in time. Eventually the marketers actually paying for bogus ad impressions look at a spreadsheet and notice that the despite strong numbers, these ads aren't translating into sales or new user signups or increased brand awareness. And then they pull the plug and put their ad dollars elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> That already happens. Right now, net marketing spend of $1 still returns > $1 in sales or whatever value metric the marketer wants - so in effect all the fraud is already priced in.

The problem is that the price is inflated and passed down to consumers so there is still strong motivation to actively combat ad fraud, at least until the cost of the combating is more than the savings, but that's a long way off.

<comment><USER9> Presumably a competing ad network with less fraud will provide even better returns and dollars will migrate there.

<comment><USER4> Most ad network campaigns are bought through politics and relationships, especially all the branding objectives which are a majority of the market, so it's not that simple.

Performance marketers are definitely more sensitive but they're happily served by Google and Facebook for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "It's unclear what Haim's current role is with DingIt, as he opened but did not reply to two emails from BuzzFeed News. Visser opened but did not reply to an email."

I find it odd that they would report on "opens". Particularly in an article about how tracking / verification technology is so easily duped.

<comment><USER4> There is a big difference between a tracking pixel image in an email that's only delivered to a single inbox vs the vast environment of the open web with all the various websites and ads that run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is hard to believe that it really works:

a) For all these tracking scripts acompanying each ad it should be trivial to detect that the window is invisible and really nothing is even hovered

b) For everyone it should be easy to detect that a page that was loaded in the background redirects after a short time. It should be so easy to find these pages manually and ban them.

Why does such an obvious and primitive technique like popunders with auto- redirecting "webrings" even work at all???

</comment><comment><USER12> One of the sites he lists as fraudulent rargb.to is actually a torrent site as large as thepiratebay

</comment><comment><USER13> What is the technical explanation of the invisible window mentioned? Do all browsers allow it? Will an ad blocker stop it?

"A user often has no idea this is happening in the background, and in some cases porn sites load the pop-under as an invisible window that can't be seen."

<comment><USER3> It's not terribly complicated JavaScript. A pop-behind is generally done by calling Window.open() to open a new window, then Window.focus() to re-focus the original window. Another method I've seen is opening a pop-up with the original site, then redirecting the original window to the advertising site. The MDN page for Window.open()[0] actually mentions some of the restrictions around opening windows and focusing other windows that have been added to browsers.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Window/open](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Window/open)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a policy on [NSFW] tags or the equivalent? Nothing about this headline suggested to me that opening it while at work was going to plaster my screen with a giant cartoon ass, and while I'm fortunate to work in a tolerant space, others might not be so lucky.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't sound like it's anybody else's responsibility to help you dick around while on the clock.

I'm not saying a workplace should care about you visiting a webpage with a cartoon ass on it, but I just don't think it's anyone's problem but your own since there are precautions you can take yourself, like using a separate browser for dicking around with images disabled.

If you can't be bothered to do that, then why should anyone else.

<comment><USER16> Yikes, can you please drop the nasty swipes when posting here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Glyph Metrics - <AUTHOR> http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/glyphs/glyphs-3.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The folks at freetype.org have gotten "advance measure" (also known as simply "advance") correct -- It depends on the horizontal or vertical layout orientation. Unfortunately, it seems the mozilla folks _may_ have implemented the CSS3 'ch' unit incorrectly:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/#ch- unit](http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/#ch-unit)

      ch unit
        Equal to the used advance measure of the "0" (ZERO, U+0030)
        glyph found in the font used to render it.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/length](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/length)

      ch
        This unit represents the width, or more precisely the advance
        measure, of the glyph '0' (zero, the Unicode character U+0030)
        in the element's font.

If you change the layout orientation of text from horizontal to vertical, the "advance measure" will change. If the "advance measure" remains constant between the two, then vertically orientation would result in characters (glyphs) overwriting each other.

The above is just the mozilla docs so I really need to check the mozilla source code to make sure.</comment>


VexFlow – HTML5 Music Engraving - <AUTHOR> http://www.vexflow.com/ <comment><USER2> Very nicely done.

Minor nitpick - the slurs/ties could be cleaner. If you look at professional musical typesetting, slurs/ties usually go from the middle to the middle of each note head, _unless_ they cross a note stem. Then they get as close as possible to the head without overlapping the stem.

They shouldn't overlap other symbols, including accidentals or dots.

Otherwise, great job!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome!

Music notation/engraving is something that isn't widely supported, partially due to its complexity. There are a few more or less expensive tools out there, but I haven't seen many attempts at something open source and even less for the browser.

</comment><comment><USER4> The reference open source software for this is LilyPond.

[http://www.lilypond.org/](http://www.lilypond.org/)

The innovation with VexFlow seems to be that it runs in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER5> engraving...?

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_engraving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_engraving)</comment></comment>


A strange-looking fish washed up on a California beach - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/us/hoodwinker-sunfish-north-america-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> _"Except for one time in the 1890s, when drawings and records documented the fish appearing in the Netherlands."_

Reading [https://science.naturalis.nl/en/about- us/news/collection/new...](https://science.naturalis.nl/en/about- us/news/collection/new-autumn-collection-naturalis-mola-tecta/), those 'records' seem to include plenty of remains of the actual specimen.

Also, the species was first described as a separate species in 2017. So, it seems not having seen it in the northern hemisphere may be more a matter of not having looked for it than of it being rare there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sunfish are amazing. You see sunfish and manta rays on the eastern seaboard of Australia. What's weird is where it is, not what it is: it's a well known fish

<comment><USER4> We came across one once off the coast of Sydney while fishing. Sadly, by the time I managed to get in the water it had dived, so I only got a blurry glimpse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here are a couple of videos of a live one for reference:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nwA1hW0kUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nwA1hW0kUw)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1WBilMrDIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1WBilMrDIU)

</comment><comment><USER6> Yup, must be Mola tecta. This tail is not from M. mola or M. alexandrini (syn. Mola ramsayi).

Apart of USA, the species has been found in New Zealand, Chile, South Africa... and Netherlands.

Sunfish have often huge loads of parasitic worms inside.

<comment><USER7> Parasites are good for you as they feed on dead, damaged cells. They're the quickest method of detoxification. The best thing to do when you have a parasite is to let it run its course while eating plenty of raw eggs and fat.

Source: Aajonus Vonderplanitz, We Want To Live and The Recipe For Living Without Disease

<comment><USER8> Does this go for all parasites, or only certain parasites? Is there data on that? Intuition and quick Google tells me that may have to be careful about which parasites you "ignore".

<comment><USER9> The normal case is that parasites cause serious problems and are permanent. Take hookworm, which causes anemia in whites and was responsible for the stereotype of the poor Southern white being pale and lazy. There is no reason to expect a parasitic infection to "run its course".

Particular parasites may be largely harmless due to context; I believe a tapeworm won't do much to you other than causing you to stay thin while eating large quantities of food. This was more dangerous when people enjoyed less of a food surplus than we do now. Of course, the tapeworm will also transmit tapeworms to everyone in contact with you.

<comment><USER10> All good points, parasites are generally to be avoided and do have consequences.

As for tapeworms, it really depends on the type. Some as you say just eat your lunch, but pork tapeworms are dangerous. They carry a risk of having their eggs wend their way into tissues such as muscles, and most dangerously the brain, with predictably disastrous consequences. Neurocysticercosis is no joke, and if you'd like to never sleep again try a google image search for it.

The only two (controversial) benefits of human parasites I know of are non- pork tapeworms used for dieting, and... something very interesting indeed. I give you... Helminthic Therapy. Some clever folks noticed that certain parasitic worms (helminths) are very good at modulating the immune system of their host, presumably to protect themselves and their offspring. They reasoned that a controlled infection could help with some autoimmune diseases, and it's a subject of research.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5401880/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5401880/)

Even more interesting though is the hypothesis that widespread helminth infection is a contributing factor to lower rates of allergies and autoimmune disease in developing nations.

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

<comment><USER11> This raises the question whether some of our so-called lifestyle diseases are due (or more prevalent or severe due) to eradication of some common parasites we evolved with.

<comment><USER9> I think the evidence is decently strong that this is the case. The problem is that the lifestyle diseases, while bad, are clearly much better than the diseases they replace.

<comment><USER7> What is the evidence for that? Autoimmune conditions can really suck.

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis)

<comment><USER7> I meant the evidence that the lifestyle diseases are better than the diseases they replace.

Very cheesy how I got downvoted for genuinely asking a question though lmao. I don't know what the answer is -- I feel like it could go either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if the Japanese omen about oarfish have any weight? How concerned should we be about events like these?

</comment><comment><USER13> There is this famous snd hilarious rant about sunfish on facebook [https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1874957885867615&id=10...](https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1874957885867615&id=100000602658648&set=a.669037176459698)

<comment><USER14> Which is entertaining, but shouldn't be read without this response, "why the rant is wrong".

[https://m.imgur.com/gallery/MMRg9](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/MMRg9)

<comment><USER15> Wonderfully informative post and presented in such a beautiful manner. Thanks a lot for the link.

<comment><USER16> Except for the end. That wasn't necessary. Good read though, very informative indeed.

<comment><USER17> What are you referring to? I didn't see anything inappropriate at the end of the article.

<comment><USER18> Imgur's unfortunate UI - there is a button at the "end" of the page to load the rest of it, which is not very noticeable if you're not looking for it.

The sentence refered to is:

        PS. The only living things that deserve to be
        considered useless are scumbags, like Scout
        Burns, or this moron who is riding an
        unfortunate ocean sunfish.

<comment><USER17> Ah, that is exactly what happened.

Now I know how to read all the way to the end of an Imgur article, thanks! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TLDR: It's a huge sunfish, but not the species of sunfish they first thought it was. Turns out it's a "Hoodwinker Sunfish", and this is the first known sighting in North America -- they're usually found in the Southern Hemisphere.

</comment><comment><USER20> Washed up right by here; it caused quite a stir. It wasn't the only one, either: another one had washed up a mile or so west, though I don't think it was a hoodwinker.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ugh ok, I'll bite..

</comment><comment><USER22> A whale also washed up on an island in Brazil a couple of weeks ago, apparently the tide movement and a river helped that happen

</comment><comment><USER23> There was another news story, shared by Drudge the same time as this, where dozens of dead dolphins were washing ashore of some southern Cali beach. I wondered if both stories, along with the case of the newly-discovered glow in the dark sharks found somewhere around Hawaii a year or so back, all have to do with traces of the Fukushima disaster being washed here and there around the Pacific.

<comment><USER24> I think that's extremely unlikely. Radioactivity doesn't really work like the spider in Spider-Man.

<comment><USER23> It can be a huge catalyst for change though. Food chains poisoned and disrupted, throwing off migration patterns, etc. And THESE changes can illicit evolutionary jump-starts. Unless he was just a fishy Paul Revere coming to warn us CTHULHU is awakening.

<comment><USER23> Sick marine mammals turning up on California beaches in droves:

[https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/wires/state- nation...](https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/wires/state-nation- world/sick-marine-mammals-turning-up-on-california-beaches-in-droves/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"I'm never doing this again" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docracy.com/post/23247592561/hacks-docs-and-1-year-review

<comment><USER2> docracy is pretty sweet. I use this every week for client work. This thing is going to be around for the long run.</comment>


Show HN: Screenleap launches simple API for adding screen sharing to your site - <AUTHOR> http://www.screenleap.com/api

<comment><USER2> Awesome job, can't wait to play around with this. I've used Screenleep before and a the quality is better than most screen sharing tools I have used in the past.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Please let us know if there are any customizations you would like to see added. We will be adding lower-level API calls in the next month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is super cool. I used screenleap to try it out with my remote team members and I am very impressed personally. I wanna mess around with their APIs a bit.

<comment><USER4> Is the quality good enough to support remote pair programming?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that's what I used it for. I've used it every day for about a week and it dropped maybe once or twice. At which, I created a new connection.

I should add that I did use a screen session to share vim though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone interested in this might want to check out <http://code.google.com/p/red5-screenshare/> also

</comment><comment><USER6> (edit) Oh. That's how. It requires Java.</comment>


Ask HN: Historical Market Data for use in webapp? - <AUTHOR>

I'm building a webapp that lets you practice trading. I don't really expect to make much/any money out of it and so I'm after a cheap source of daily historical market data that I'd be allowed to use in the app.
Lots of sites offer free historical data, but they appear to be for personal use only and I guess this doesn't qualify. Does anybody have experience with a supplier that lets you use the data in your own online app?
(many thanks in advance!) <comment><USER2> Haven't used their service, but this seems to be what you need: <http://www.opentick.com/>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks lpgauth. I scanned their faq and they mention that opentick doesn't currently allow redistribution of the data [http://www.opentick.com/index.php?app=faq&event=index#b8...](http://www.opentick.com/index.php?app=faq&event=index#b88)

I'd guess that because my planned webapp is public this would be construed as redistribution of the data - does that sound likely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=2870>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Prakash there's some useful links here, but this thread refers to somebody needing realtime data for private use. I'm after pointers to a supplier offering historical data that can be used within a public webapp.</comment></comment>


Coronavirus: Real care home death toll double official figure, study says - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/coronavirus-real-care-home-death-toll-double-official-figure-study-says <comment><AUTHOR> This UK study is yet another piece of evidence that shows we are under- counting, not over-counting, Covid-19 deaths.</comment>


America's identity politics went from inclusion to division (2018) - nil-sec https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-politics-went-from-inclusion-to-division <comment><AUTHOR> > For the first time in US history, white Americans are faced with the > prospect of becoming a minority in their "own country."

I was told this was a conspiracy theory??

> When a grand jury failed to indict a white cop who was videotaped choking a > black man to death, black writer Brit Bennett captured this growing mistrust > in an essay entitled, "I Don't Know What to Do with Good White People":

I'm sure the author will be delighted to learn that this happens to white people as well [1]. One would also assume the rate of being killed by police would be proportional to the crime rate, as every interaction with police carries some risk, and the rate of interaction with police is proportional to the crime rate. Of course we have to be careful when measuring "crime rate", as it's easy to fudge - a cop might let a white man off with a warning for jaywalking, but give a black man a fine. So you use something very difficult to fudge - the homicide rate. We find that despite blacks being 6.3x more likely than whites (including Latinos) to commit homicide [2], they're only 3.7x more likely to be killed by police (3.5x if only killings of unarmed are examined) [3]. I.e. whites are 67% _more likely to be killed by police_ , per homicide committed, than blacks. The conclusion is inescapable - the police are actually anti-racist!

[1] [https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/07/31/yo...](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/07/31/you- re-gonna-kill-me-dallas-police-body-cam-footage-reveals-the-final-minutes-of- tony-timpa-s-life/)

[2] [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in- the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in- the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls)

[3] [https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends](https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends)

<comment> nil-sec This is a very one-sided view of what this article is talking about. That there is systemic racism in the US is not up for debate. It's a fact. Even if your back of the envelope calculation there were correct, you have to ask yourself why there are more black people committing crimes. The reason isn't skin colour, but socio-economic factors which themselves are a result of a long history of oppression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> By turning this election into one about identity, I fear that Democrats are are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If the election was about competence and performance, it would have been a slam dunk win with coronavirus and the economy in tatters. But if it is about identity a lot of people are going to feel that this is a good way of giving a middle finger to people who are saying bad things about their group. Tribes are often very happy to cut of their nose to spite their face. Even if they know Trump is bad for them, as long as they think he might be worse for their opponents, in the privacy of the voting booth, they might just vote for him.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that both parties, while not equivalent, are factions of elites seeking power more than anything else. Getting or keeping power means getting votes while enriching your donors and doing favors for your friends. To get voters, there is a lot of lip service and carefully choosing issues that will get certain people to vote. The thing is, you actually have to do something that helps the bulk of the population out once in a while, or at least keep them from being flushed down the toilet economically, or all the branding and marketing in the world won't save you, even with TV news keeping the narratives going. I think the elites live in an echo chamber and are just totally out of touch at this point. They don't even know what to say to voters to stay in power. Trump's success is because he's a master salesman and entertainer, and then you have Biden hanging on by a thread with the message "Trump bad," having successfully crushed the economic progressives (including pretty much any Democrat born in the last few decades).

People are angry because they feel disempowered, across the board. Each party is just trying to deflect the anger and put it somewhere else. It's a silly game.</comment></comment>


Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce for the Ancient Roman Masses - <AUTHOR> http://www.notechmagazine.com/2015/10/garum-fermented-fish-sauce-for-the-ancient-roman-masses.html <comment><USER2> Mark Kurlansky's book titled "Salt" covers the history of fish sauce in both the West (Rome) and the East, among a great number of other topics.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142001619?keywords=Salt&qi...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142001619?keywords=Salt&qid=1445573599&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1)

While I put off reading it for months (neither title nor cover appealed to me), once I started it proved to be one of the most fascinating books I've read.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're interested in a close approximation, you can find colatura in gourmet shops and online. It's a direct descendant of garum, but more refined.

<comment><USER4> Super easy to make delicious pasta: 1.5 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp colatura, 2 cloves minced garlic, a bit of dried pepper flakes, a handful of parsley, 120 g pasta. Cook pasta, mix ingredients in a bowl, combine while hot. No need to cook the sauce!

<comment><USER5> Where do you buy your colatura? The prices I see online are about $30 for a 100ml bottle. That comes out to $4.50 for the single tablespoon (15ml) in your recipe. Exorbitant may be too strong of a word, but that seems like a lot of money. (I'll have to try out that recipe regardless. :) )

edit: I see a bottle for $15 as well, which makes it a bit more reasonable.

<comment><USER4> The one bottle I have I bought in Italy, I'm afraid. :)

But yeah, the Amazon 100ml-for-$15 price seems quite reasonable. I might not be using full tablespoons either because my colatura of the same size has definitely lasted me more than 7 servings. (I'm guessing it'll end up being closer to 10-15.)

PS the parsley should be chopped Italian parsley. Some recipes also involve a bit of lemon zest. Here's a dude making it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr18nP8GIgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr18nP8GIgc)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apply HN: An app that teaches people how to code and make apps - <AUTHOR> Hello internet,
I am the founder of We Heart Swift - one of the first swift only websites/blogs - we have about 50k monthly visitors on the site.
I've learned how to code by myself at age 10 by reading the help section of Borland Pascal. In high school I've been a competitive programmer and even got a medal at the international olympiad in 2009. I've always been interested in teaching others how to code and trough We Heart Swift I think I found a way to make it sustainable.
Our main product is an learning platform similar to codecademy. Its not web based, instead it builds on top of xcode and playgrounds in order to give feedback to the user.
The first version teaches people how to code in one month - https://www.weheartswift.com/swift-programming-scratch-100-exercises/ - it has close to 1000 users. At the moment we are working on the second version of the platform which offers a similar experience on iOS.
Beside people on the internet wanting to make apps or learn how to code we have been contacted by a few universities and programming bootcamps for bulk purchases.
If you have any questions please let me know :) <comment><USER3> Looks like you're having some great success with a how-to-code book. What would an app do better than the book?

<comment><AUTHOR> The app understands a lot of things about the code you used to solve and exercise. This comes either from understanding the syntax tree or from the output of the code. Based on that it gives feedback to the user. It can tell if a exercises is solved correctly. Or it can help fix mistakes: finding typos or checking if a function is recursive and many others... The usual feedback you would give a person that's learning how to code. So basically fancy training wheels. Another factor to consider is that people are lazy - <USER2> through the exercises without having to click "new project" 100 times is way easier.. + bonus a tiny amount of gamification. Also not sure if its clear - the learn how to code app is already implemented and used by over 1000 people. The iOS version is in development.</comment></comment>


StackOverflow bans one of its top contributors over frivolous matter - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+BaukeScholtz/posts/GRjfSAXYw9t

<comment><USER2> I contributed to StackOverflow a little when it first got started, got frustrated by the heavy-handed censorship (too aggressive about closing question), and then gave up and left.

It seems any moderation-based community eventually has that flaw. If you deviate from whatever the majority believes, you will get disgusted and leave, and eventually you're left with a core that all act the same.

I'll read Stackoverflow sometimes, but I'm never again contributing.

Stackoverflow sucks!

[http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2009/02/stackoverflow- su...](http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2009/02/stackoverflow-sucks.html)</comment>


The Road to Offering Plotly On-Premise - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@plotlygraphs/the-evolution-of-plotly-on-premise-v2-2954c83e7d22 <comment><USER2> For those of you building for the enterprise and looking to use a Docker-based or container-based approach, Plotly's experience may prove instructive.

</comment><comment><USER3> We just shipped on-prem via the same approach. Much lighter weight than we anticipated, and Replicated has great support.</comment>


Roving Slovenian Hackers come visit TechCrunch and other companies... - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/17/roving-slovenian-hackers-turned-away-by-facebook-google-but-welcomed-at-techcrunch/

<comment><AUTHOR> They're actually offering 1 week of (free) coding skills to anyone with a good idea. But it seems like the offer stands only for techcrunch readers.</comment>


How to build great products - <AUTHOR> http://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html <comment><USER2> Wow. One of the best articles I've ever read on HN. I wish you'd also do one titled "How to find great markets":)

<comment><AUTHOR> _I wish you 'd also do one titled "How to find great markets"_

I'm working on a blog post on this now. Unfortunately I understand this piece a lot less. If you point me at a market and say "build a product for this market", I'm pretty confident I could do that and be the best. But if you asked me to pick a great market, I'm not confident that I could do a great job at all.

I think finding and analyzing market opportunities is much, much harder than building great products. There are hundreds (thousands?) of phenomenal product managers, but only a handful of people that _really_ understand markets. The few that come to mind are Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs (unfortunately he's gone now). I've read all I could find from them, but even they are having trouble articulating this, which suggests they don't have it entirely pinned down.

I'll see if the blog post goes anywhere in the process of writing it. I'd really like to understand this better.

<comment><USER3> _If you point me at a market and say "build a product for this market", I'm pretty confident I could do that and be the best._

That's quite a bold statement! Any market? A social network, an online retailer, a search engine, a mobile phone, a browser, an electric car? Give me a list of those books you've been reading! But then of course, we could create a paradox - we can't both be best, can we? :)

I believe creating the best product has an amount of luck in it. The better work you're doing - the better are your odds, but at the end, like making an Oscar winning movie, like writing a top of the charts song, like writing a bestselling book, like a perfect storm, a lot of the right things need to happen. But that of course shouldn't stop us from trying!

<comment><AUTHOR> _Any market?_

It would have to be a market where I can get a handle on the state of technology and its economics relatively quickly. I couldn't do it for biotech, or cleantech, or surgical instruments, for example. I'd also need to be able understand the users and their culture extremely well. I probably couldn't design a great breakfast cereal, or sneakers for teenagers in Japan.

I really meant this comparatively. Understanding markets is an order of magnitude harder than understanding products (at least to me), and is probably more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The conclusion is very reminiscent of [http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html) (see the last two paragraphs). As it should be, because identifying game changing features is tantamount to understanding what people want. And nobody knows what users want until they have feedback from product iterations.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is excellent for the high level view of things, to plan a successful product for a market.

Keep in mind that a successful product for a market does not necessarily equate to a high quality product. Internal product design should be user- centered and cohesive with itself, not just within the market.

Thus I only further advise you to hire a UI/UX person to ensure this disjoint product planning approach has some coherence in the bigger picture.

The overall picture here is excellent, especially the last bit. It reminds me of this quote that I've always thought was one of the best pieces of business wisdom ever conceived:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." \- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

<comment><AUTHOR> _Keep in mind that a successful product for a market does not necessarily equate to a high quality product._

I know what you mean, but I'm pretty convinced that it's not fruitful to make this distinction when building products. To quote George Orwell's response to Tolstoy's critique of Shakespeare "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion."

[http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf](http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf)

<comment><USER5> I think you have a point, but the greater point is that both are false proxies. Survival is a proxy to majority opinion, which itself is another proxy to quality.

Quality itself is not equal to survival. Survival does not determine quality, nor does public opinion, each having far more variables and influences than just pure product quality.

However, quality can of course influence public opinion, and public opinion can greatly influence survival.

I think it is important to make this distinction—perhaps not to work by it at all times, but you must realize that you're not working only by requirements and measurements and proxies, but also by some intrinsic essence that your product has, some idea that it stands as a cohesive tool, not just a set of parts. Furthermore, sometimes people don't know what they want until they see it, and use it, and realize its potential; and you'd never get there by simply following a market. This is where the game-changing product creators of this century have surprised the world with a vision.

I'm not saying the OP didn't realize this, just that I think it's more important than many product teams realize to create more than just a set of features that meet a market in the middle. Quality is a thing in itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. This formalizes a bunch of the intuitions about product design that have been running around in my head lately.

I would extend the model a bit and divide the Gamechangers into two categories: one (and only one) Hook and 1-3 Painkillers. Your Hook is the feature that your market didn't know was possible, but thinks is awesome now that it exists. Your Painkillers fix long-annoying problems in the problem space. If you think of an individual's psychology when they encounter your product, the Hook is what catches their attention, the Painkillers feed into their confirmation bias to make them absolutely sure they want to purchase, and then the lack of Showstoppers prevent any monkey wrenches from jamming the sales channel.

Some examples from famous consumer web projects:

Google Search: Hook = pagerank. Painkillers = clean, uncluttered UI; fast loading

GMail: Hook = 1 gig of email space! Painkillers = search over email, threaded conversations

Google Maps: Hook = satellite imagery! Painkillers = Smooth AJAX UI, local search results directly on the map.

YouTube: Hook = easy upload of all formats, even from cell phone video. Painkillers = in-page embedding, Related Videos.

DropBox: Hook = Just drag to a folder to share! Painkillers = easy web viewing

FriendFeed: Hook = real-time updates. Painkillers = centralizes all your major social networks, supports in-depth commenting.

Apple: Hook = Integrated beauty. Painkillers = good device performance, high DPI screens, long battery life.

One easy way to categorize features into Hook, Painkillers, Showstoppers, and Distractions is to put yourself into the position of the user and try to accomplish the task they want to accomplish. Distractions are anything you grumble about but then go about your business. Showstoppers are anything that you drop what you're doing to fix, because you can't accomplish what you want to otherwise. Painkillers are things that make you so depressed about your task that you think about doing another task entirely. The Hook is interesting, because by definition it's outside of conscious awareness and requires an outsider's perspective to see. But if your cofounder is doing the same exercise, putting himself in the mindset of a user, then you can use that to illuminate it. The Hook is the feature that convinced your cofounder that this was a company worth starting.

An interesting thing is that though the bulk of your engineering time will be spent on eliminating showstoppers, basically all of your marketing should be spent on the Hook. Let customers discover the Painkillers for themselves; if you try to market yourself as solving more than one problem, your customers will get confused and you won't solve any.

Another interesting corollary: this may be why big companies are seemingly incapable of pushing out great innovative products unless they have an experienced product person with wide discretion at the helm of the division. When you market to executives, they will - of necessity - focus on the Showstoppers. If your attention is focused on their attention (which is the usual formula for advancement in a big company), then you will focus on the Showstoppers too and develop a "feature mentality", where you just try and list out features as a way of distinguishing yourself to your VP instead of to users. You'd think the way to solve this is for the executive to focus on the Hook instead, but when they do this, the Showstoppers tend not to get fixed, because their underlings naturally tend to focus their attention on the VP's attention.

<comment><USER7> Additional ideas:

\- There are some showstoppers that apply to all products: Reliability, security, trust, ease of use, speed, customer support.

\- To find gamechangers you need to think outside the box. Most people accept things as they are. Most people run away from schlep work. The only way to find gamechangers is to question everything and add a question mark when you find yourself saying "that's not possible".

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure that it's actually true that showstoppers apply to all products. Reliability and security, for example, are not showstoppers for Zynga games. Security evidently was not a showstopper for Microsoft. Customer support is not a showstopper for Google. Speed is not a showstopper for Gumbo (the HTML5 parsing library I just released).

Remember that a showstopper is defined as "Something that will _prevent a customer from buying your project_." Sure, reliability, security, trust, ease of use, speed, and customer support are always nice to have. But part of building a startup on limited resources is knowing what's nice to have and what will _prevent a customer from buying_ , and not spending resources on the former. You can always go back and fix the nice-to-haves later when you have more resources; you can't go back and resuscitate a company that runs out of money.

<comment><USER8> This gets to the whole issue of "product/market" fit. For some hypothetical market, security _is_ a show-stopper: Eg, there are people who chose not to use Windows largely based on security concerns.

So for any combination of product attributes, you appeal to some market of size _n_ , and are unappealing to some other market of size _z_. The question is how do you build a product for which _n_ is sufficiently large, acknowledging that you can't satisfy everybody at the same time.

Expanding beyond just product attributes, this whole discussion aligns with the thinking from _The Discipline of Market Leaders_ which talks about how you can choose to construct your value proposition based on optimizing one of three possible axes (where product excellence is one), while striving for merely "acceptable" on the other two.

Since different markets will purchase based on different value propositions, the important thing (or so the authors argue) is just that you be really good at one of the three, and just good enough at the others.

<comment><USER7> Just started reading "The Discipline of Market Leaders", and it seems to be a great book I've never heard before. Thanks for the recommendation.

<comment><USER8> Cool, I hope you find it helpful. I only just discovered it recently as well, and haven't even finished reading it all the way through. But my initial impression is very favourable and I suspect that TDOML will become a "go to" book for me, much like _The Four Steps To The Epiphany_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an excellent framework Slava. Succinct and pragmatic. Thanks for sharing it.

As you state, a big problem is developing enough of an intuition about how to slot features into these buckets. Founder preference for given features can be a good thing, but we have to be aware of this bias as we slot features into these categories.

Slotting properly is especially important when you don't have many 'feature arrows' in your quiver due to a lack of resources, morale, etc.

The other side of this coin is in measurement - each feature is in some ways a test of a hypothesis. And you should have some idea of which metric matters and how a given feature will move the needle.

It would be cool to hear how you approach this for RethinkDB -- since you are appealing to developers, perhaps tracking how quickly devs move to a new version for example.

</comment><comment><USER10> An article like this reminds me of some of my own roots in consumer behavior research and classic market research. Formal models of finding feature-to- market fit are not particularly new. One that comes to mind is the Kano Model. I tracked down an article that I co-authored back in 1998. [http://www.quirks.com/articles/a1998/19981002.aspx](http://www.quirks.com/articles/a1998/19981002.aspx) In that article we gave an overview of the model. I find the model conceptually helpful but I was less enamored with the measurement methods.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is good stuff and I can totally relate to this based on our experience at [https://starthq.com](https://starthq.com) so far - we've been alternating between game changers and show stoppers, while trying to keep distractions to a minimum.

Another thing I want to add is the idea of the one key metric. In our case at the moment it's the weekly growth rate of active users. Every iteration we do, whether it's a game changer or show stopper, aims impact that metric.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for your thoughts here. You break things down in a really easy to understand way and you have a good writing style. I don't usually make it to the end of articles this long, but your information is clear, concise, and useful.

I'm launching a product right now (that uses RethinkDB!) and I'm going to put some more thought into differentiating between "this would be a cool feature" and "90% of people would kill for this feature." Very good idea on the mission statement too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting post. I often took "product sense" to be magic, I did not really understand what was it that made iPhone soar in sales when it introduced very little over a Nokia S-series I had at the time and didn't even have a keyboard. Reasoning alone did not suffice: I could explain success of OS X (a UNIX that ran on commodity-ish hardware that "just worked" \-- I did not have to rebuild my kernel to get a WiFi card to function!), the iPod (ease of iTunes/ITMS/using a large hard-disk instead of a 128mb flash...), but not the iPhone.

When I (reluctantly) went to pick up an iPhone 3GS two years after the first iPhone's release, I began to "get it" \-- it wasn't about a feature matrix, but the quality (including visual) of the features it did have and (most importantly) the way these features played together. Within minutes of having an iPhone I was able to use capabilities that my Nokia phone claimed to have, but that I have never found particularly useful/usable. Technically I could use cut-and-paste to share articles from the web browser on my phone via email, but I never did (but I began doing it daily on the iPhone!); technically, I could I could run apps on the Nokia but the only third party app I remember loading was Google Maps, etc...

iPhone was far from the first smart phone, but it "democratized" use of smart- phone as a smart-phone: while it was still a toy largely for the well-to-do, it was no longer a toy solely for a small fraction of well-to-do technical intelligentsia.

I could apply reasoning to retroactively conclude that "yes, iPhone is a great product"; however, it would take intuition to guess that right off the bat or much less formulate what features would be vital to a consumer smartphone. The popular image is that intuition is compartmentalized, innate, and unreachable to training, practice, or (especially!) learning. I suspect the reality is that talent does play a huge role (there's no way around it), but it is possible to deliberately cultivate at least some forms of intuition.

That said, what's even more amazing is when one develops a sense of gamechanger/show-stopper/distraction intuition about a topic that's not in their domain of expertise. There's an anecdote that when Steve Jobs visited Xerox Parc and met Alan Kay in the late 70s/early 80s he remarked that OO will be hugely important to future of programming. What I find amazing about this is:

1) Steve Jobs was not a software engineer, much less a PL wonk

2) In hind-sight the remark is obviously true

3) It wasn't a foregone conclusion in the 1980s, even among programmers. Smalltalk and CLOS were seen as crazy ideas in the 1980s, who knew that in 20 years large bulk (if not majority) of programming would be done in an IDE, in object oriented languages that run under virtual machines... Image based persistence was seen as one part of Smalltalk (and some Lisps) legacy that would never take off, but with user-accessible file system going away in iOS I am not so sure...

tl;dr Intuition about products in a specific industry can certainly be cultivated and learned (with hard work), but intuition about unknown (even if interrelated) product industries (or concepts) still feels "magical".

</comment><comment><USER14> This is all nice and stuff, but it's basically just re-inventing decades old thinking using new words.

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model)</comment>


Police Camera Footage Will No Longer Be Made Public in North Carolina - <AUTHOR> http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/police-camera-footage-will-no-longer-be-made-public-in-north-carolina/ar-BBug3AV?ocid=ansmsnnews11 <comment><USER2> Half good, half bad:

 _House Bill 972 does make such video accessible to people who can be seen or heard in it, along with their personal representatives ― but they must file a request to obtain the footage. If the request is denied, the petitioners must go before the state's superior court. Requests can be denied to protect a person's safety or reputation, or if the recording is part of an active investigation.

Current state law establishes that dashcam footage is in the public record, and it doesn't address body camera footage. But police departments usually consider body camera footage to be part of an officer's personnel file and thus private. The new law will make body camera footage accessible under the same stringent new conditions that dashcam footage will be._

So, you have to request the footage (Acceptable IMO), but they can choose to deny the request based on safety (okay), reputation (troubling and confusing. I see no reason to protect someone's reputation from themselves. Blur a public version if needed), or if it's part of an investigation (makes sense to me). Making sure departments don't use a loophole to keep officer camera data hidden is a plus.

The only case that comes to mind with regard to safety is if officers enter my residence illegally (e.g. by accident) and catch me in a compromised position. If you couldn't legally be in my house anyway, you sure as hell better not release footage of me to the public while you were there.

<comment><USER3> > if it's part of an investigation (makes sense to me)

This part seems curious to me. Isn't that exactly when a person "who can be seen or heard in it, along with their personal representatives" (e.g. accused person and lawyer) would need access to such footage? Perhaps there is some nuance here about what constitutes an active investigation?

<comment><USER4> Yes, you get access to evidence if it's going to be used against _you_. That's a whole separate thing.

<comment><USER5> What if it isn't going to be used against but could be exculpatory?

<comment><USER4> Of course, it's illegal for them to withhold _any_ exculpatory evidence.

<comment><USER6> If its not public, you have minimal chance of discovering it if it isn't provided, so while it is illegal for them to withhold it, you'll never know it existed and was withheld unless someone who does know of it -- almost certainly the police themselves, or the person shown in it (quite possibly, the real criminal, who would be revealing their own identity by coming forward) -- actively reveals it. So, illegal or not, it makes it much easier for them to get away with concealing exculpatory evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm an NC native. The governor and most of the NC legislature are an embarrassment to our great state.

The history is complex, but basically, the Democrats controlled NC state politics for decades (weird, I know) and lost both the governorship and the legislature in the wake of backlash from Obama carrying NC in his first term. Big-money Republicans poured money into the state to ensure that a) Obama didn't carry NC in 2008 and b) Republicans would control the state during the key years following the US census, during time which they would gerrymander the ever living fuck out of our districts. Expect to hear lots of stories about our state's laws getting slammed by SCOTUS. There are several cases already in flight.

Don't try to make sense of it all -- it's about power and pandering and the worst most regressive parts of "conservatism".

Police are employed by the public. That footage, taken by public employees, in (mostly) public spaces, ought to belong to the public. I'm very concerned about privacy, the police / surveillance state, but I'd rather strap cameras to all officers than continue to allow them to _literally_ get away with murder.

</comment><comment><USER8> On it's surface making the footage not immediately public isn't a bad idea. The classic example would be a swat team showing up at the wrong house, busting down the door, and having video footage of John Q Citizen in his birthday suit. As long as there is a process for getting access to the footage that's impartial, that's fine.

What's really needed though is a way to escrow the footage. This is a solved problem in the tech world. The stream should be stored off site, cryptographically signed (public sig), in the control of a third party (though still a government entity, not a private corporation). Otherwise you'd be asking the criminals[1] to hold onto the evidence.

[1]: Not that all or even most police are criminals, but in the case where a police officer does commit a crime they are de facto criminals.

<comment><USER9> Not even de facto, if they genuinely broke the law, they are de jure criminals!

<comment><USER10> Exactly. They're just de facto protected by overly police-friendly prosecutors and juries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Phew, for a second there I thought we might have some transparency in our government. Glad to know that in the wake of historic video footage of public abuses, this is being taken away. Our leaders have listened and what they heard horrifies them! So now they don't have to listen, unless you come with a court order, that is.

<comment><USER12> If dash and body cam footage was available easily, you're not gonna like what you see. And people will then be up in arms because they are being harassed for their own bad behavior on camera given to public. I personally want body cam footage to be seen because I know it will cause that backlash and it will show the public how terrible their neighbors are and they'll understand why the police are so necessary (and necessarily rough sometimes) to keep society civil.

<comment><USER13> Part of the issue, however, is that police aren't civil to the public in the first place.

We expect folks in call centers to take all sorts of abuse. Folks working at the local pharmacy are supposed to keep a smiling face and professional demeanor, even if folks are yelling obscenities and insults in their direction. Folks tell retail workers that if they can't do that, or if they can't handle that, or don't like it, they need to find another job.

I don't see why we shouldn't expect that from police in most situations. I understand the need to be firm at times with some folks, but it isn't something that needs to be done at a traffic stop. Even if the person being pulled over is grouchy. Works both ways.

And yes, some folks will be harassed for their behavior, but I think it'll be a minimum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The millions being spent on police cameras only serve as a gift to Tazer and the other paramilitary industrial complex companies. True reform will only come from the continued release of uncensored citizen video. The right to record must be protected at all cost.

<comment><USER15> > The right to record

It's hard to contort the First Amendment in such a way not to protect this.

I agree that this is one of the core rights of information age society.

<comment><USER16> Wait, wait. So it's a right to record, but if I go out and start recording stuff I get called out as privacy violator? So which way is it?

(I'm pro-recording here btw.)

<comment><USER15> The former, and strictly so. This version of "privacy" can't survive in a free society I don't think.

<comment><USER10> That's why I think the European concept of "right to be forgotten" is deeply flawed. I understand that they're trying to protect people from being negatively judged using outdated information, but the problem lies in the judgement, not the information. A better alternative would be "right to be not given a damn about".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They realized that they can only claim the camera fell off so many times.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is tough. I see the intent and logic in this bill. At its core, _this is a win for citizen privacy and data protection_. It protects the integrity of criminal investigations, and limits public outrage without context. (E.g., a 30-second clip of a cop tackling someone presented as police brutality, omitting the previous 30 seconds of the individual resisting arrest or being a hazard to the health of himself or others.)

The _downside_ , of course, is transparency at a time when public trust in police and proper oversight is at an all-time low. And the "oversight" piece of this is critical. We simply _don 't believe_ answers like, "Our internal investigation shows that the officer acted correctly."

So I do think this is the right move, but this needs to be coupled with real reform in independent police oversight and investigation.

</comment><comment><USER19> The way I see it, this footage is there to safeguard both the public and police from lies about each other. It's not there for general perusal, and making it public will expose a lot of private situations that shouldn't be, especially for the civilians in the videos.

So long as the video is available for related court cases, now and in the future, that's fine. There does need to be a way to safe-guard it from destruction when someone wants to hide something, but I think that's a different matter than making the videos non-public.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thus showing that nobody in the North Carolina government cares about minorities once again.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is massive win for privacy.

<comment><USER7> As long as you're the right _kind_ of person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> FOIA

<comment><USER23> "... makes police dashboard camera and body camera footage exempt from the public record."

I may be wrong but wouldn't this make the footage exempt from FOIA? (Unless the people involved filed the FOIA request ...)</comment></comment>


Uber has produce an 18 (so far) part series on why a union would be a bad thing - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/927777/the-teamsters-have-finally-begun-to-organize-uber-drivers-in-seattle/ <comment><USER2> Because they are. If Uber wanted to run a tradititonal taxi service with a Union run driver system they'd have been just another version of yellow cab or that ilk. Nobody forces a driver to be a driver. One could flip burgers, drive busses, etc. Instead the ultimate end game is driverless cars and an expensive Union would do harm to that end.</comment>


Subway Passes McDonald's as largest fast food chain - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703386704576186432177464052.html?mod=e2fb

<comment><USER2> I think the relationship to HN interests is the subtle point that seemingly unassailable dominance in an industry can shift right under your nose.</comment>


Book Search (very KISS) - <AUTHOR> http://bigbooksearch.com/books/Paul+Graham

<comment><USER2> This was actually made by a reddit user: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7ckzw/dear_reddi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7ckzw/dear_reddit_i_wrote_a_new_search_engine_its_like/)

<comment><USER3> He should advertise that fact on the site. "Made by a Reddit User".

<comment><USER4> Seriously, very, very funny!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR>
      Whoever wrote this, did things right by keeping things simple(compared  to Amazon's own window shopping application and many others). What amazed me was that the author doesn't appear to have put on affiliate links in those searches (or maybe Amazon tracks the referrals in some other way?).

<comment><USER2> I can't tell if the affiliate link is hidden or not. Traditionally Amazon affiliate usernames are "username-20" and as you can see in the URL the pattern does exist, only with a strange username: "_0"

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0964729237/_0-20>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's quite impressive. I think my favorite simple feature: it doesn't try to build its own search engine. As a result, I could find some of the really hard-to-find items on Amazon, which I doubt a more custom search enging would have done.

I also love the title of the site.

<comment><USER6> I think that's really smart. There isn't much point building your own search engine now unless you are very large. There are normally a few great alternatives with some kind of partnership arrangement out there to use instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice, I would just add one thing. Repeat the book title in the title attribute, not just the alt.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's pretty sweet.

</comment><comment><USER9> neat. bookfinder.com has worked well for me for 10 years.</comment>


The Future According to Tim O'Reilly - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/10/the-future-according-to-tim-o-reilly.html <comment><USER2> Previously submitted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997408>

Subsequently killed.</comment>


Apple building $45M research center in Beijing to develop new hardware - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/30/13118548/apple-research-center-china-beijing-hardware <comment><USER2> They will mostly be researching Andriod devices to see what they can copy/re- invent.</comment>


Wired's Response to Glenn Greenwald (re:Lamo-Manning Chat Logs) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/greenwald/ <comment><USER2> Greenwald fucked this one up. That NYT article he relied on was plain wrong, something he should have been aware of given all of his critiques of the mainstream media's handling of the case and since Wired had already put out an article saying that piece was incorrect and that the specific allegations _were_ in the already-released logs.

(Greenwald _does_ get stuff right sometimes though: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M&feature=player_embedded) )

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone with journalism training, I find this argument compelling. If it was a case-study in a classroom setting, the answers would be difficult and the subject of much debate.

Choosing to "redact" private parts of a document without otherwise information important to the public is a perfectly reasonable position. While it is easy to say "how do we know it's just private information unless they release it", that sort of reasoning would force journalists to release all of the information they have about any topic, even when they clearly violate the professional ethics of journalists.

<comment><USER4> > that sort of reasoning would force journalists to release all of the > information they have about any topic, even when they clearly violate the > professional ethics of journalists.

Jouornalists don't get to say "professional ethics" - you they to explain why the relevant decisions are correct, and journalists don't get to decide what's correct.

Example - it may violate "professional ethics" for a journalist to not reveal that US troops are walking into an ambush, but if certain journalists don't do exactly that ....

<comment><USER5> Journalists are entitled and indeed obligated to be bound to ethics just as much as the next guy. The argument that everyone is obliged to deliver to the public everything they know about everything, then we will get into problems very quickly. If you don't like someone's journalism, you are free to perform your own counter-journalism; investigate and publish your findings.

There's no necessity that every journalist must publish everything they ever learn just because some guy says the journalist should. If that's how you feel journalists should behave, hire a bunch of journalists to behave that way, and perform your own journalism and do likewise.

<comment><USER4> > Journalists are entitled and indeed obligated to be bound to ethics just as > much as the next guy.

Yes, but when they're claiming privileges, as they frequently do, they don't get to decide the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server > and the encrypted chat room.

Interestingly, if you look at the link [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks- conspirac...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-conspiracy- case/) nowhere does Manning say anything like 'Assange set up an FTP server just for me which I then used for the video and cables'.

What he actually says is that hypothetically speaking, one of the best ways to transmit hot stuff is through SFTP, but he immediately mentions that one could also transmit over HTTPS (plus Tor) to get stuff into the Wikileaks submission queue and discusses general considerations like senior sources getting looked at first.

The only way you could read Wired's claim into that excerpt is if you made stuff up or are making a large inference based on other non-public logs. So at least with that claim, Wired is bullshitting readers.

</comment><comment><USER7> This sort of thing never winds up reflecting well on people involved, just getting caught up in a personal back and forth and speculating on people's motives and nonsense like that. This part seemed particularly silly to me - Greenwald emails on Christmas and when they don't respond by the 26th, he says they're acting unprofessionally -

> Nonetheless, once the Times story — and our explanation — was over a week > old, Greenwald sent Poulsen an e-mail inquiring about it, and giving him one > day to respond to his questions. He sent that e-mail on Christmas Day.

> When we didn't meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he'd imposed on himself to > publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his column > that we "ignored the inquiries," adding: "This is not the behavior of a > journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever > reasons, to hide the truth."

<comment><USER3> What part of what Wired is doing seems amateurish? I thought this response was thoughtful, well reasoned, and professional.

<comment><USER7> I could've phrased it better - I meant that that the whole unfolding of events generally doesn't reflect well on participants. Just getting sucked into a mudfight is bad, though their response was good. I'll do a clarity edit.

For context, here's my exact edits:

Before - This whole thing is coming across pretty amateurish on all sides.

After - This sort of thing never winds up reflecting well on people involved, just getting caught up in a personal back and forth and speculating on people's motives and nonsense like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Greenwald has posted two responses to this:

[http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_1/index.html)

[http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_response_1/index.html)

(They seem to be returning 404s occasionally for some reason.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Wired doesn't need to publish _all_ of the logs -- just the bits that confirm some key assertions that Lamo made. The idea that they are restricted to publishing the whole thing, or nothing more than they already have is a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER3> Actually, they're absolutely not taking the position that it's all or nothing:

"That doesn't mean we'll never publish them, but before taking an irrevocable action that could harm an individual's privacy, we have to weigh that person's privacy interest against news value and relevance."

The specific request that Greenwald made for partial disclosure missed the fact that the information referenced had already been released, as described by Wired:

"The Times story quotes Lamo as saying that Manning described uploading his leaks to Assange via a dedicated file server, and that he communicated with Assange over encrypted chat. The story says those portions of the conversations aren't included in the excerpts we published.

"Based on that, Greenwald claims that Wired's "concealment" of the chat logs "is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do." (That's one sentence. He goes on in that vein for quite a while.) But the Times story is incorrect, as we noted on Wired.com the day after it ran. The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room."

Bottom line for me: Wired's response was well-reasoned and professional, and answered the fairly wild accusations in the original Greenwald piece.

<comment><USER10> So why don't they publish the part that confirms or denies Lamo's claims? Or just say if it does or not?

If you read Glenn's responses I think you will change your mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You don't get to the point of admitting leaking massive amounts of secret information via chat in a single step. Trust has to be built, and is built by slowly revealing more and more about ourselves: issues with significant others, problems with the neighbors, pains of serving with Don't Ask, Don't Tell, etc (I have no idea what the actual list might look like, I'm just giving examples.).

These are things that are highly personal and extremely private. These are the things Wired is saying they aren't releasing right now, and I, for one, appreciate it. Releasing them _would_ just be pandering to the masses.

You can argue that Wired is withholding more than that, but I think it fails Occam's Razor. Unfortunately, the more complex the "complex" solution, the more likely it seems that people will gravitate to it:

"Wired has released all the relevant pieces and is trying to protect an individual's privacy" - simple.

"Wired is withholding relevant information because it is part of some conspiracy involving hackers prosecuted in the 80s" - complex (but, too be honest, who didn't love Angelina in leathers on the back of a motorcycle?).

<comment><USER12> Very well said all around.

<comment><USER10> Just like Wired Magazine, he does not explain why they don't address Lamo's claims not found in the logs released so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure what to think of these articles from Salon and Wired. Greenwald did have one question, that remains unanswered as far as I know. Why did Manning contact Lamo?

</comment><comment><USER14> Greenwald's point is not so much that Wired has committed journalistic errors, but that its decision not to disclose the rest of the chat logs leaves aspects of the case open to wild conjecture.

So Greenwald, for emphasis, goes on to do some wild conjecture of his own. Clearly the people at Wired failed to recognize the irony of this and quote Greenwald extensively in their refutations, something Assange cannot do since the full logs have not been released.

<comment><USER15> If your point isn't that "Wired has committed journalistic errors", you probably shouldn't name your piece "The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired". But really, that's exactly what Greenwald was saying and I think this response pretty much refutes it.

<comment><USER14> There are allegations against Assange that he can't refute w/o the chat logs. That's my point. Wired got up in arms after a few accusations it didn't like.

<comment><USER16> "A few accusations it didn't like", including:

* That Kevin Poulsen was untrustworthy because he'd been caught hacking in 1990.

* That Wired had helped orchestrate Manning's arrest (Lamo turned Manning in; Lamo doesn't work for Wired).

* That Wired is being unprofessional by not releasing complete private chat transcripts, while other news outlets are being unprofessional for releasing _too much_ private information about Wikileaks supporters.

* That Wired had refused to respond to Greenwald's request when that request was in fact issued with a 24 hour deadline on Christmas day.

* That Wired had concealed material details of the supposed Manning leaks when in fact the details they were alleged to have concealed were in fact referenced directly in the the chat logs they released.

* That Wired is responsible for Manning/Lamo/Assange stories they themselves didn't report on.

* That Poulsen is Lamo's "personal media voice" despite the fact that Lamo received significantly more coverage outside SecurityFocus (Poulsen didn't meet Lamo while working at Wired) than in it.

* That Mark Rasch prosecuted Poulsen for computer hacking when in fact he left _federal_ government service in 1991, before Poulsen was tried (by two unrelated state prosecutors).

* That all the time Greenwald accused Wired of bias, he was using Jacob Applebaum (Wikileaks' US spokesperson) as a primary source without disclosing the affiliation, was privately trying to hire an attorney for Manning, and was carrying on daily off-the-record conversations with Assange.

Yeah, I can see how Wired might "get up in arms" about this.

<comment><USER17> Greenwald has been talking about this since Manning got arrested, this is not the first article he has written about Wired.

One of the issues Greenwald brings up is that the logs are the only evidence to understand what happened in the Manning case.

Greenwald that Lamo makes statements to the press, regarding his interactions with Manning. He points out that some statements made have even contradicted themselves.

The only evidence are the chat logs themselves, which are not available.

<comment><USER16> I think we can all see how much more straightforward Greenwald's job would be if he had all the chat transcripts, but their release is Wired's prerogative, not his.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's one thing missing in this response: do the non-public portions of the chat logs support the public statements that Lamo has been making or not?

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a pity they didn't clarify some of the contradictions of Lamo's statements. It would be nice to know for example whether Manning did claim to use a dedicated server or not. And Poulsen actually confirmed he was talking to Lamo even before Manning arrest.

On the other hand it is quite surprising indeed that Greenwald didn't check the basic facts about Rausch and Poulsen

</comment><comment><USER20> > his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy

That's a bit surprising. I have multiple copies (one offsite) of family pictures, code and documents. I don't think I would have only one copy of the log if I was the hacker guy.

<comment><USER16> He would have been asked if he had copies and would have been criminally liable had he lied. He's already been convicted of crimes in the past. Would you fuck around in a case like this one if you'd been in his shoes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> TL;DR. Are they releasing the full logs or not?

</comment><comment><USER22> We need more people like Glenn Greenwald and fewer talking heads spewing talking points.

<comment><USER15> What specifically separates Glenn Greenwald from all the other talking heads except for your own personal political view? I mean, he's pretty much the definition of a pundit.

<comment><USER23> How about having 10x the intellectual rigor, more integrity, and being right a lot more often? Oh, and having the cojones to stand up for Wikileaks, too. That takes some guts in the current political environment.

Glenn's pretty impressive, most of the time. If he proves to have called this one wrong, so be it. But he sure isn't on the same level as your average hack pundit.

<comment> brown9-2 The definition of "pundit" from Wikipedia:

 _A pundit is someone who offers to mass-media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable._

Greenwald seems pretty clearly to be offering commentary on these events, and not just straight fact/story-reporting.

How much you like him or find him honest doesn't change what you call what he does. You can set him apart from other "pundits" but it's hard to say he isn't commentating or offering his opinion.

<comment><USER23> What was asked was, what sets Greenwald apart from OTHER pundits? I attempted to answer that. I didn't attempt to say he's not a pundit. I happen to think he's a particularly good pundit; others might disagree.

As an aside, there certainly seems to be a lot of downvoting based on disagreement in this comment thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> DanI-S _This is nothing more than a despicable smear campaign based on the oldest misdirection in the book: Shoot the messenger._

Sounds familiar...

</comment><comment><USER24> Wired: How about you just post the fucking chat logs and let the tubes decide right and wrong.

Edit (added): Wired just sounds like that a-hole kid on the playground that you just want to punch in the freakin' nose.

<comment><USER25> "Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time."

How can the "tubes" decide right and wrong in a situation like this? Once the chat logs on the internet, it's not like the internet can collectively decide that Wired was right, that the remaining logs are personal and meaningless, and erase them forever.

<comment><USER26> But whose sensitive personal information is it? BradAss87 or Lamo's? Does it shed light on why BradAss87 would admit to treason to some guy on IM? Does the sensitive personal information identify Manning as BradAss87? Also: will Manning's lawyer get to see the entirety of the logs?

I agree that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but a enormous genie has already escaped.</comment></comment></comment>


Web browser versions are dead – automatic updates is the future - <AUTHOR> http://robertnyman.com/2011/04/14/web-browser-versions-are-dead-automatic-updates-is-the-future/ <comment><USER2> My big problem with this is that many web service vendors (particularly in education) do not play well with the latest version of any browser. I currently need to keep IE8 on the lab machines for all the student online class software. We actually delayed our WinXP to W7 jump because it took so long to clear anything over IE6.

For consumers, this is fine, but for IT this is a nightmare. I really don't want to come into work and find all of the machines updated and none of the software working.

<comment><USER3> The problem, however, is not the browser but web service vendors.

If workarounds for buggy web services become more painful, there will be more pressure on those vendors to fix their software.

It's not that the pain isn't real, but the pain already exists and you can either choose a future where more browsers are better leading to more web services being less buggy or a future where browsers stagnate because web services are buggy and their vendors unwilling to fix them.

<comment><USER2> I think I want a future where we get to choose when to upgrade so as not to disrupt the lives and education of people. I don't want to tell a classroom of people (who pay for our service) that they cannot have class today because of an upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The vast majority of non-technical users, if asked, would say "all software should be like that."

</comment><comment><USER5> What happens when the latest version _is not_ the greatest? With automatic updates you don't get to decide when to upgrade and you usually have no way back.

See the latest version of Skype. Google chrome also had a few less-than- perfect versions (for OS X, at least).

<comment><USER6> The user interface for FF4 sucks, I had to uninstall it and re-download FF3.6. Most of the differences were merely irritating - like the right click menu changing the places of Open in New Tab and Open in New Window, which was totally stupid, but I could have gotten used to that. The one change I could not do without and could find no way to restore was their eliminating the Recent Pages button - some sites take forever to click back through with the Back button alone.

<comment><USER7> Click and hold on the back button brings up the list. This works in chrome too.

<comment><USER8> Right-clicking on the back/forward buttons also works, as it did in Firefox 3.6.

I wish Chrome supported middle-clicking to open a previous page in a new tab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article: "But with the advent of IE10, Firefox is the only web browser who haven't reached a two-digit version..."

Safari, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER10> That's a great idea in general. Not so much in a corporate environment where there may be a piece of older software that is still in use but that no longer requires active development.

In that case, you want to lock the version - you don't want it to suddenly break because of a browser update and don't want to devote additional dev time to a finished product that was working just fine.

It'd be nice if browsers automatically updated but could also be forced to run as a specific version (e.g. IE8's Developer Tools lets you run as IE7). Like version control for software (when loading website X, run as browser v2).

<comment><USER11> I think the compatibility with older browsers has always been a cheap excuse. It shouldn't be too difficult to have a setting that forces certain URLs to run as a specific browser version as you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I installed both Chrome and Firefox from their respective dev channels and they're on auto update. A few hundred thousand alpha testers could really help.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a new Windows user, the hassle of updating software often make me sit on older versions and I can see why people use older versions of internet explorer for example, which makes my work writing html/css a pain some times.

I'd welcome automatic updating. Should make the web more up to date.

</comment><comment><USER14> At least make sure users can turn it off.

There are a plethora of reasons why someone would not want the absolute newest version of a browser every time a developer releases a single patch to the code.

Users should have control over their own computers and what they install.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll take automatic updates IF there is an option to prompt before update.

I get daily builds of Chrome (under Ubuntu) and 1 day there was an update that caused Chrome not to start up. After that day I don't blindly do updates if I really need the browser to work.</comment>


Faster sites mean users do more stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.drunkenfist.com/304/2008/12/29/why-front-end-performance-matters-to-everyone/

<comment><USER2> I remember a study, can't find it at the moment since I'm on the phone, that showed that slower sites have much higher engagement than fast loading sites. Fast loading sites also have a larger bounce rates than slower loading sites. I have no idea why that is but the data was conclusive. So maybe fast loading sites are great for transactions (shopping etc) where the speed is important but maybe not so when you're loading someone's profile. My best guess is that by waiting, people are investing time into a page and they want to check it before they hit that back button. (ping me if you want the source and I'll dig it out).

<comment><USER3> This can be another facet of the "uncanny valley" of web applications [1].

When you are in the "web" mode, you operate asynchronously - click, do something unrelated, return to see the result.

When you are in the "desktop" mode, you expect instant reactions. If it's just a tiny bit slower, you feel something is broken [2].

Now as you make your site more ajaxy and faster, user expectations change, instead of perceiving fast website, they perceive slow desktop application.

[1] [http://billhiggins.us/weblog/2007/05/17/the-uncanny- valley-o...](http://billhiggins.us/weblog/2007/05/17/the-uncanny-valley-of- user-interface-design/)

[2] <http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have the exact numbers on hand, but the game I worked on saw a similar 10-20% increase in daily pageviews as an immediate result of making the site faster. I would optimize a few core pages or add more capacity and, like magic, traffic would jump the next day.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. And it comes after I realized how slow Salesforce was (for my dev account at least).

What would be the things to work on to increase the performance? The article mentions mostly the size of the files. I also understand that the lower the number of different files is, the better. What else should be taken into account on the front-end? For example, if I were to use jQuery only for a couple of things, would it be better to have a bigger but simpler JS file? (as in: I rewrite what I need myself but can't match the file size)

<comment><USER6> Front-end performance is a compound problem. You need to consider everything that sits between your customers and your data because it all has an impact on the actual and perceived performance.

In regards to browser rendering performance, YSlow is a good place to start: <http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/help/.> The 13 performance rules is a succinct and accurate list of things to look out for.

Steve Souders (creator of YSlow, but now works at Google) does a lot of great work in this area:

<http://stevesouders.com/cuzillion/>

<http://stevesouders.com/ua/report.php>

[http://stevesouders.com/blog/2008/09/30/hammerhead-moving- pe...](http://stevesouders.com/blog/2008/09/30/hammerhead-moving-performance- testing-upstream)

Some more good stuff:

[http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average- web-p...](http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/)

<http://wtr.rubyforge.org/>

<http://seleniumhq.org/>

<http://sahi.co.in/w/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The quote about the 30 results sounds tenuous at best.

Did the user search 20% less often because of an imperceptible page load time, or because they became overwhelmed with the number of search results and decided to quit?

User experience drives more activity than performance. Perf is important, but that particular example sounds totally bogus to me.</comment>


Twitter doesn't server-side check the length of gender descriptions - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/e_amusemement/status/1254699270449639425 <comment><USER2> Is this visible to other users anywhere?

<comment><USER3> no</comment></comment>


Bruce Sterling: The Last Viridian Note - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009061.html

<comment><USER2> I like to read Bruce Sterling's works, fiction or non-fiction. I own every single one of his published works except the first, which is rare. Sometimes he is cheesy or stupid, but overall he's probably one of top sci-fi writers now living.

I once saw him eating lunch at the southern Threadgill's, I ignored my dinner partner to watch him from afar. He switched between talking and listening too intently to eat, and some point dove into his backpack to haul out an Apple laptop. I'm not sure he ever ate any food.

I like science fiction that is a genuine and credible attempt to describe the future as it will be or could be, not the swords and dragons or physically impossible faster than light travel or such nonsense. I think Bruce Sterling comes to the closest to actually guessing at and describing where we are going, and I wish he would write more. During the last year, 3 or 4 times I have read news stories about the election or economy and felt a chill go down my back because I recognized stuff from Sterling's "Distraction" and "Heavy Weather", which are years old at this point.

If you are doing a startup or business that in any way is involved with the intersection of technology and law enforcement - and with privacy issues and secret supenoes, who isn't - I highly recommend you read Sterling's non- fiction book "The Hacker Crackdown".</comment>