Ask HN: Where is the correct data on coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> Imagine the scenario (which is likely in some countries) that most of the population contracts COVID-19 in a very short timeframe.
The most important question for most of people in the Western world is then: For a healthy person of my age, what is the chance I will require hospitalization if I contract coronavirus?
This question does not depend on R0, measures taken to prevent the spread of the disease, population distribution, ..., nothing. Therefore, it should not differ much across different circumstances.
Except, the relevant data from different countries are contradictory by orders of magnitude.
Is there a single country in the world that has a nontrivial amount of cases, and has actual data and not absolute garbage? <comment><USER2> This sheet is the best that I've found. Yes, you are right, the data is suspect. But as long as there is no mandatory reporting for this it will remain a political football because countries are comparing with each other.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1RIXWF7wCX- CihFQz...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1RIXWF7wCX- CihFQzNPfb4t26_t9NlReHj2GH2q3Euac/htmlview?sle=true&pru=AAABcPzwy1c*5pN0dR90CoNSBsAsap1HnA#gid=1520583566)

The best way to approach the figures is to look at serious cases (requiring hospitalization) and deaths. Those are numbers are a lot harder to cook than cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, this does not answer the question. In the case of overwhelmed hospitals, the ratio (deaths / serious cases) should be bounded from below by a constant close to 1.

The number of serious cases is the only useful datapoint, but this gives a very bad lower bound on the question, even if the age distribution is known. This data is similar to what Worldometer has, and that is just a mix of confused and misleading information.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could we disable paging for WhoIsHiring? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Try contacting the mods: firstname.lastname@example.com Sometimes this kind of threads disappear before the mods notice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agreed. It seems counter intuitive to promote kristopolous' javascript script to search while also having pagination.</comment>


SwiftUI with Support for WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/carson-katri/SwiftWebUI <comment><USER2> Glad to see this is still in development</comment>


My Text in Your Handwriting - <AUTHOR> http://visual.cs.ucl.ac.uk/pubs/handwriting/ <comment><USER2> Neural network based forgery is around the corner!

I believe handwritten signatures or text will soon become inadmissible as an authentication method!</comment>


Ask HN: RSS feeds for HN user comments? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to follow the comments of patio11, pg, and others - but with Google Reader. Is this possible? <comment><USER2> It should be fairly easy to write a parser for the page if one doesn't exist now.

Check out beautiful soup: [http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.h...](http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.html#Parsing) HTML

(I'll play with this for a bit, if you don't want to)</comment>


Samsung pays Apple $1 Billion sending 30 trucks full of 5 cent coins - <AUTHOR> http://thebladebrownshow.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/lawsuit-paid-in-full-samsung-pays-apple-1-billion-sending-30-trucks-full-of-5-cent-coins/

<comment><USER2> Fake. There probably aren't even a billion dollars worth of nickels in circulation.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/aug/29/apple...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/aug/29/apple- samsung-trucks-nickels-fake)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nope. [http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/samsung.asp](http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/samsung.asp)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/06/samsung-did-not- try-t...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/06/samsung-did-not-try-to-pay- apple-1-billion-in-nickels/)

Nickels may be legal tender in the U.S., but no company is obliged to accept them as payment for a debt of any size, never mind one as large as Samsung's. Besides, as Ken Tindell helpfully tweeted when the story first appeared on the Web, 20 billion nickels at 5 grams each would fill 2,755 18-wheel trucks (maximum legal weight: 80,000 lbs.).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a hoax. A bit more thought before pressing submit, please..

</comment><comment><USER6> This is what will happen. If Apple hasn't done it already, they will apply to the court for a temporary injunction preventing Samsung from delivering more coins, or they will ask the court to enter an order charging Samsung with the costs of counting and depositing the coins.

As an aside, I wonder what effect a billion dollars in coinage will have on seignorage in the Federal Reserve district for California.

</comment><comment><USER7> Apple can actually screw Samsung, get them banned(android and open source will hate it for sure) and release a special edition nickel finished iPhone.</comment>


Ask HN: Tips for getting remote work in the U.S. as a foreigner? (W8 or C2C) - <AUTHOR> I´m trying to switch work as a remote .NET / Azure developer - I already work remotely for the U.S. but I feel I´m underpaid and have already tried negotiating with my current employers (got a small bump).
I´ve been looking at LinkedIn, StackOverflow, and some job boards, but remote jobs seem to be for U.S. citizens only, and there are lots of semi-remote jobs but they seem to be tired of remote submissions (they say NO VISA, NO C2C, etc..)
I know there are a few job boards for remote-first jobs but they all seem to be frontend-focused (I guess that´s the easiest to outsource?). I´d also like longer-term engagements.
LinkedIn in particular always asks "Are you legally allowed to work in the U.S." and I truthfully answer "NO" as I don´t have a working visa.
Are there any remote-friendly boards I should be looking for? Twitter or some other social media? Make myself available to recruiters? There´s one ad of a company that says they can place me if I spend 40 hours on tests.
Should I lie and say I´m on the U.S.? Stress that I´m available for onsite interviews? How do I differentiate myself? I believe I have very good english and I´m good at what I do. I don´t want to go the H1B route for family reasons, I am willing to travel frequently and even on my dime.
I´m also willing to go personally to the U.S. to interview but I need to have a plan and goals :) <comment><USER2> You might want to look into setting up a US corporation and taking on contract work. Then the client only has to deal with a US entity, and the burden of foreign financial dealings falls on you rather than them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I might end up doing that. Good suggestion.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin has a usability problem - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/abrkn/status/911179354381574145 <comment><USER2> This is in need of a disclaimer or at least a bit more transparency.

The poll is part of an argument being made for support of the recent Bitcoin fork Bitcoin Cash

The user submitting here is OP and he also paid to have the poll promoted on Twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the submitter and author of the post. I run paid ads on Twitter to shill for cryptocurrency. Ask me anything! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The other huge usability problem is the risk of getting hacked. Everybody, even programmers, didn't write 99+% of the code on the machines they are using. Even if you manage to go years and years without issue, that 1 time you get hacked and your coins get transferred out from under you will make you lose everything and there is no way to get it back. For normies, this is an even bigger issue.

<comment><USER4> This is no different from early currency -- it was very difficult to protect from theft, and when you had lots of it, you were an easy target.

I suspect how this will go down is the masses will use banks, who will offer cryptocurrency accounts with interest and insurance, while the savvy will continue to manage their own private keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >It takes ~1 hour and $0.86 to send $1.00 from a SegWit account on @TREZOR.

The same fee will send a 1,000,000 amount which the user will be pretty happy about. Bitcoin can't be all things to all people. It doesn't really make sense to store coffee purchases on a global immutable blockchain. Use other coins to pay for coffee and let Bitcoin be a store of value.

<comment><USER6> You say that now but it wasn't always the narrative from the bitcoin community. It feels more like after-the-fact rationalization than a true objective. It just so happens that bitcoin's original architecture didn't scale and now people are trying to figure it out.

And that's perfectly fine but I feel like we're seeing the same thing now with segwit and the lightning network. It's all unicorns and rainbows until you realize that in practice it doesn't work as perfectly as you'd have hopped.

What annoys me is that all these issues could always be anticipated even using some rough "back of the envelope" calculations. But there's no place for constructive criticism of bitcoin in the community so the problems are only faced when you really can't ignore them anymore, and then everybody says "well duh, it's obvious that wouldn't work" like you just did.

I fully expect that we will see the same thing for segwit and the lightning network when it'll turn out that the pipe dream of "everybody opens channels left and right" will fail to materialize and some alternative, probably more centralized architecture will take its place. It's not necessarily a bad thing but I wish there was a place where this could be discussed without being immediately called a shill and a traitor to the cause.

<comment><USER4> > What annoys me is that all these issues could always be anticipated even > using some rough "back of the envelope" calculations.

Hindsight is 20/20\. Almost no one could have predicted that Bitcoin would be this big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a silly submission and pretty deceiving. Someone sending me $10 in Bitcoin only spent $0.06 in fees. And it was via satellite [0].

[0][https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/899410638371524609](https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/899410638371524609)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't really understand their tech yet but I believe Lightning is working on a solution to this problem: [https://lightning.network/](https://lightning.network/)

<comment><USER9> LN is years away.

<comment><USER10> LN works; integration into mainstream wallets is months away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the most significant rises in cryptocurrency will come when the user experience, including on-boarding, is made close to frictionless for the average consumer.

<comment><USER12> What, do you think, is key to on-boarding in crypto?

I rate:

1\. Basic, fundamental understanding. This is hard! 2\. Representation - i.e. education of the user through the interface. 3\. The Status-Quo'ers.

#1: The words are not commonly representable by modern human vernacular. Crypto's hard to explain, man! The basics have to be really, really virile.

#2: If I have to type in a longass number, you lost me. If I have to type in _any_ number, its a losing game. See #1.

#3: Nothing beats cash in terms of usability.

On-boarding of ¥ € $ == ∄

On-boarding of web/app/&etc. == ?

<comment><USER13> > _What, do you think, is key to on-boarding in crypto?_

Convincing someone they need bitcoin.

I have no idea how to buy bitcoins. I guess I could find an exchange, or I could also go to the Bitcoin ATM at my local Thai place. (Seriously. No idea why.) But I apparently have to provide my driver's license to exchange cash into crypto-currency.

What? I'm not putting that into a random machine. That's insane. I don't have to provide identification when I'm exchanging Euros into Dollars at the airport, why do I have to send off all this valuable information to a random person through an ATM over a god-knows-what-kind of connection?

Great. I've just jumped through hoops, and for what? What am I supposed to buy with it that I can't buy with cash or credit? It seems to me that about the only thing I can do with it that's useful is move a large sum of money, relatively cheaply - and if I happened to buy the bitcoins from a guy in a parking garage, I might even be able to do it with something approaching anonymity - assuming I never, ever, ever make a mistake.

So how do you convince, say, my mother or my grandfather that they need bitcoin?

<comment><USER12> I just go to the supermarket and buy a Bitcoin card, for 20eu, and use it immediately to buy things on the Internet.

Its just there, right next to the iTunes credit, the Amazon credit, the Google Playstore credit, etc. Little cards that I get .. approximately .. 20 minutes of physical time with, before I discard them and just get the order placed.

Its hard to deal with that, usability-wise, but I guess you have to be in an "expanding market", like midde-Europe/close-to-Russia to appreciate how weird it is to just buy Btc at 7/11,Billa, and use it to ship stuff from China.

Edit: i.e. I don't really wanna do it with Euro/$ no more, because Btc. in China is a value proposition...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would really like links to twitter posts not be common on HM. How can you have a good discussion on 140 characters?</comment>


When It Comes to Success, Age Really Is Just a Number - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/science/stem-careers-success-achievement.html <comment><USER2> There's not much point posting an article here, if it's behind a paid wall ...</comment>


Has music streaming killed the instrumental intro? - <AUTHOR> https://news.osu.edu/news/2017/04/04/streaming-attention/ <comment><USER2> I do instrumental exclusively, unless you count weird vocal synths. Maybe the author of this study shouldn't have constrained it to the top 10...

There's a huge world of music out there. The most popular stuff is a tiny little sliver meant to appeal to the greatest number of people. For me, things have only gotten better since discovering a bunch of weird niche stuff in the '00s, especially since Bandcamp and Soundcloud gave indies a place to find an audience without investing in the infrastructure needed for streaming and sales.

<comment><USER3> I was going to say something similar but not as harsh. I definitely think that the internet has made finding niche music that less of difficult a thing, but when the set you normalize over is the set of popular music rather than all music, his argument is sound.

An interesting question (and more difficult one to answer) would be whether access to niche music has increased and more people pursue niches in general today than before.

<comment><USER4> I would think you'd have to argue that the answer is more. The crux being that mega companies no longer have absolute control over a limited number of distribution channels (e.g., traditional radio).

That has to have led gaps for other genres to edge in. Look at EMD a couple years ago. That, I don't think, was driven by top down marketing dollars. I think you're likely talking about less accessible genres, but I think the EMD example still applies.

<comment><USER5> EDM? The resurfacing of 90's Eurodance? Is there anything more commercial? Maybe that's my European viewpoint, so please elaborate if I am wrong.

<comment><USER4> Yes. But in the US it was never given much respect, and thus no mainstrean viability. That changed. I'm suggesting it could be because the gatekeepers lost their control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [I didn't read the article, but] I think the move to buying songs one-at-a- time has hurt the whole 'album' concept, including long intros, long interludes, and the idea of a body of work that builds on a theme.

<comment><USER7> I think that was true for the iTunes years before Spotify and other streaming services came along. Before, you had to pay for each song so you picked just a few you liked. Now, it's just as easy to play the whole album as to play one song. (In facts, it's easier to queue up an album than to play one song at a time since you have to choose what to play fewer times per time interval.)

Anecdotally, we've seen whole-album concepts become big hits in recent years: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, etc.

On top of that, almost all hip-hop songs these days have intro tags (which producers worked on the song.) Not instrumental of course, but non-song content none-the-less.

<comment><USER8> On still the other hand though, an awful lot of people these days just cue up some music style or artist as opposed to choosing what specifically to play. I know that's what I tend to do. I think it's hard to argue against the idea that the album concept has mostly declined in relevance since its heyday.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure lots of people do that, but it's actually easier with the streaming services to listen to an entire album than it was a few years ago when iTunes 99c/song was the dominant model.

Pay-per-song encouraged playlists and "greatest hits" type mix CDs, but didn't encourage anyone to purchase B-sides or interstitial tracks. At least with services like Spotify et al, you aren't paying per track, so you have the option of listening to a whole album as a single body of work.

Of course, not everyone _wants_ to do that, which is cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it comes down to personal preferences.

I love listening to entire albums. I don't have favorite songs, I have favorite artists. If I like the artist, I listen to an entire album by them. I have never once in my life paid for a single song. If and when I buy music, it's by the album and not by the song.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I've been loving Bandcamp quite a lot for this. Finally there's a truly dignified way to buy and sell copies of albums. I'm free to reencode, batch modify the tags, add replaygain tags based on EBU R128/ITU-R BS.1770, copy freely to all my devices, stream it anywhere.

It's always sad to me when a band moves off the platform, because generally speaking it means that I will not buy their album at all, except maybe on CD, or if they have a similar website which allows me to get an archive of the whole disc in FLAC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recall reading that the push for shorter intros and 3 to 3.5 minute songs was radio, pre-streaming.

<comment><USER13> This is purely anecdotal, but there are a bunch of songs I can remember hearing on the radio growing up (15-20 years ago, although the songs were much older than I was) that had extended instrumental intros that were almost always cut out; offhand, "Jump" by Van Halen and "Fly Like an Eagle" by Steve Miller come to mind, although I'm sure there are others I can't quite recall (technically the intro to "Jump" was listed as a different track on the album, but it wasn't ever played on its own, as it was only about 30 seconds long). There are also plenty of songs where the radio would play the shorter "single" version of the song, which would usually have instrumental parts cut out, rather than the album version. Although the radio format definitely encouraged shorter songs, there were plenty of workarounds already in use for longer songs.

<comment><USER14> Also from the 70s: _Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding_ by Elton John (on the Yellow Brick Road album, vocals start at 5:35) and _Foreplay / Long Time_ by Boston (on the debut album, vocals start at 2:30). Of course, each of these is really an instrumental piece prepended to a vocal song.

<comment><USER15> Yes' masterpiece, Close to the edge, has nothing but "nature" sounds for the first 57 seconds. The first human vocal sound ("aaahhhh") is at 2:00, while the first lyrics are at 4:01. But then the song, or suite, really, is 18:45 long. I'm too lazy to check their other long works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's, like, been over 50 years since "the medium is the message" popped out loud and clear out of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message) \- not bad, but the original short book also delved in classifying media as 'hot' or 'cold', which is an interesting idea in itself. Not sure I buy it, but interesting.)

Is it out of fashion at media studies joints?

</comment><comment><USER17> If you're prepared to look beyond popular music services, there is a whole world of music out there, of all genres, that is perfectly healthy and doesn't necessarily conform to whatever is in vogue this particular minute.

I haven't listened to a popular radio station in a long, long time, and I don't use any streaming services either. I find music the old fashioned way I guess, but I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no real substitute for getting your hands dirty and digging around for the gems. I found 3 excellent new (to me) bands just this month!

We all have our passions, however, and it takes considerable time and effort to dig. For some, I guess they have other hobbies that consume that time and they're happy to hear whatever comes their way on the radio (or the stream).

</comment><comment><USER18> The conclusion of the article seems a bit of a stretch. I'd guess long intros existed at least partly for radio DJs to talk over.

But maybe it's still right: the structure of music is dictated by who spins the media.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've about had it with these "Has X killed Y?" headlines. My clickbait detector is tingling.

<comment><USER3> You're missing out. It's a shitty title but the content is pretty interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I run a record label[1] and for our music that we think could have a broad appeal we are at pains to ensure there isn't too much of a instrumental intro for the reasons this article describes. It makes me a little sad that this is the case, but it is. We can watch the drop off stats after a long intro-ed song.

[1] Records On Ribs - [http://recordsonribs.com](http://recordsonribs.com)

<comment><USER21> Yep, I hear it all the time. "No, that song is boring! No, not that one either!". Daughter with friends trying to find good hardrock songs, listening to Nightwish and such. They are 9 years old. Parents cringe and have a lecture in intros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> New Model Army, Vagabonds, around 1.15M hits:

[https://open.spotify.com/track/41bdgBL7tjwQOl7RpwubKU](https://open.spotify.com/track/41bdgBL7tjwQOl7RpwubKU)

The "real" version, with a fantastic build-up violin intro that to my ear at least, makes this a truly great song. Not sure how many hits, but it doesn't make it into their "top 5", so presumably below 350k hits:

[https://open.spotify.com/track/3WBwyZLd4hzMibFg6tVqh9](https://open.spotify.com/track/3WBwyZLd4hzMibFg6tVqh9)

Just one datapoint perhaps - but a great sounding one :)

</comment><comment><USER23> intros have been poorly done by many artists. When Pink Floyd does it, wow. When The Tea Party does it it's gimmicky.

I could not imagine VH's Hot for teacher without that intro.

<comment><USER24> 5 year old: "Daddy, what's that??!?!??!"

Me: "A drum solo"

Two minutes later: "Daddy, I want to play drums!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If anything there's more purely instrumental music now.

</comment><comment><USER26> Contrarian view: Instrumental intros weren't ever that popular, we just didn't have an easy way to skip them 2 or 3 decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER27> What? This is absurd. Trends in music change over time. New instruments, new musicians and new styles.

<comment><USER28> ... and new formats

<comment><USER24> And the last change really changed music itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Radio DJs have been cutting out intros for at least 50 years. When I was a kid I didn't have enough money to buy albums and got all my music from the radio. When I finally _did_ start buying music I heard all sorts of intros I never knew existed.

</comment><comment><USER30> Simply put the long musical intro in a separate track. A lot of albums do this.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's no wonder that Fela Kuti (though legendary) and Antibalas have never gone mainstream with most songs being purely instrumental for a good five minutes or more before the vocals start.

<comment><USER32> I love Fela's long intros! They're long enough that you start to think they're the song. And then here comes this whole other groove and THAT'S actually the song.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> people not wanting to here intros killed them.

<comment><USER34> "Don't bore us, get to the chorus!" :) [https://youtu.be/YFHD7kuAqu4?t=2m0s](https://youtu.be/YFHD7kuAqu4?t=2m0s) (D.Grohl on writing a hit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stoned Jesus - I'm the mountain

</comment><comment><USER36> The music business as we knew it died. It has been replaced with this streaming content business. We're lucky we get any new music at all.

<comment><USER37> You have not spent much time on soundcloud or the like then?

Most of it lacks polish, but there is still a lot of good, fun, stuff being made in many genres.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I haven't bought a physical album or digital song in years. Most of my friends haven't either. I am always shocked whenever I see an album sell over 1 million in the first week. These labels have to be buying their own music, there is no other explanation.

<comment><USER39> I've started buying CDs again for my car. I have bluetooth on my phone but don't want to be distracted by it and I find the built in controls on my player nicer to use. Also I see it as a way to more directly contribute to the artist vs streaming on spotify.</comment></comment>


Dtrace Conf 2016 Event Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.joyent.com/about/events/2016/dtrace-conf <comment><USER2> The talk on finding vulnerabilities in dtrace to escalate privileges seemed to be the most interesting/terrifying to the attendees. Definitely worth watching: [https://www.joyent.com/about/events/2016/dtrace- conf/videos/...](https://www.joyent.com/about/events/2016/dtrace- conf/videos/dtrace-exploitation)

<comment><USER3> I've made the slides for this talk available here:

[http://slides.com/benmurphy/deck](http://slides.com/benmurphy/deck)

<comment><USER4> Can you please re-check the link? It seems to be broken, and your user profile lists only the Property Oriented Programming from 2013

<comment><USER3> sorry. it should be public now :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here [1] is the conference wrap up by Bryan Cantrill.

[1] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/dtrace-conf-16-wrap- up](https://www.joyent.com/blog/dtrace-conf-16-wrap-up)

</comment><comment><USER5> Dtrace is a great tool to dive in and understand the internals of an operating system without being a systems programmer per se.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bryan Cantrill's Delicious Lipoma would be a TERRIBLE name for a rock band.

However, I now am very excited for Cantrill's Usenix talk. That will be... interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> Was waiting for this!</comment>


GitHub adds a dashboard showing all issues for all your projects - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/941-issues-dashboard

<comment><USER2> I'm consistently impressed with the steady, incremental and elegant improvements github keeps making to their service. _This_ is how you delight your users.

<comment><USER3> exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great addition. i would like to know what's preventing them to show organizations issues for organizations I belong to.

<comment><USER5> +1 for this. Rather frustrating that "Assigned to you" includes those from my organization's repositories, but "In your repositories" does not. It's not that the language is that hard to follow, it's just not quite the functionality I was hoping for

<comment><USER6> From my experience with the organization apis, it appears as though there is a completely separate structure behind it's management, and as such adding support for organizations to new features might actually be a bit haphazard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is a good step in the right direction for getting a quick glance. also, it would be nice if they added attachment support (if just images) to issue comments, too.

on a related note, my team is working on <http://inboxissues.com/> \- a browser extension that bridges customer support emails with issues in github. it helps you easily triage issues without leaving your inbox. and once a bug fix or feature gets committed, you can effortlessly notify customers who were waiting on that feature.

<comment><USER8> ...and the ability to prioritize issues, burn down, and a standup report would be nice. This is definitely in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any chance of being able to delete issues?

I've previously opened issues as a test, assuming I'd be able to remove them afterwards. They're now permanently attached to my repository.

<comment><USER10> You can probably delete and recreate the whole repository.

<comment><USER9> True, but I'd lose my watchers and things if I did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Up to now i've only used svn...perhaps it's time to try github

<comment><USER12> Github actually supports SVN read/write support.

<https://github.com/blog/644-subversion-write-support>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> FINALLY! Been waiting for this for ages!

</comment><comment><USER14> Woooohoooo, they've heard me!! :D</comment>


Ask HN: Have you created paid wordpress plugins? - <AUTHOR> If so, please share the revenue details.Just curious to find out whether wordpress is still a hot platform with the advent of modern blogging platforms like medium. Also, please share how your revenue has changed in recent times after the popularity of medium and such stuffs. <comment><USER2> I launched my Kanban for WordPress plugin last fall ([https://KanbanWP.com](https://KanbanWP.com)). I've made a few thousand dollars, with almost no marketing. As I'm relatively new, I can't speak to growth. But WordPress powers more than 25% of the top sites on the internet ([https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm- wordpress/all/al...](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm- wordpress/all/all)). It also goes way beyond publishing content, now being used as an app framework. So there's a chance that Medium might make a dent, but a small one.

If you want more responses, you might look at the Advanced WordPress Facebook group ([https://www.facebook.com/groups/advancedwp/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/advancedwp/)).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm also interested in this topic.

Is there any room left in the Wordpress plugin space?

It seems like pretty much any use case is fulfilled with a big-name plugin so I imagine you'd have to go extremely niche which would have a tiny audience.</comment>


The Markdown Mindset - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiltmon.com/blog/2012/02/20/the-markdown-mindset/ <comment><USER2> If you like markdown you will LOVE using pandoc. I can't stress how wonderful things have been since I moved to pandoc.

<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

<comment><USER3> My favorite thing about Pandoc is its LaTeX transparency. You can just throw some TeX in there and it will pass it through.

Of course doing this bypasses the possibility of easily converting to HTML, but I've started many research papers writing in Markdown, which has less, let's say, "markup overhead" than LaTeX, previewing the results using pandoc's markdown2pdf utility. Then later when I'm ready to use the proper article template it's an easy step to convert to tex and insert it in the template. It's a nice way to initially not worry about formatting while writing the draft, but pandoc's TeX transparency allows to you insert figures and math- mode markup and still keep the rest of the document in markdown, so it's brilliant.

Also with a little regex script to change "section" into "slide" it's trivial to use markdown and pandoc for generating Beamer presentations, which is _way_ nicer than writing them directly in tex, because of all the enumeration/itemize sections.

<comment><USER2> With a little script? Have you seen the recent pandoc+beamer integration?

<comment><USER4> To elaborate: in pandoc 1.9 you can just do:

        pandoc -t beamer -o presentation.pdf

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd feel a lot better about Markdown if it had an actual spec apart from a pile of perl regexes and a maintainer that hadn't abandoned it. I still use it because it's the lowest-common-denominator, but I have a hard time feeling good about it.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. I was one of the "six active users" of Infogami before it was shuttered, so perhaps I have a unique perspective…

If Markdown were just a single language, then sure, it'd be nice to have a more precise specification, and a cleaner Word-of-God implementation. But with all the slightly different implementations that now exist, Markdown has become less a language and more a language family. It's just not useful to talk about standardisation, because it isn't possible now, and we can't go back to 2005 when it might've been.

Besides, the Daring Fireball implementation is hairy _only_ because it's designed to "just work". The handling of "special" cases is the very thing that made the original Markdown so user-friendly and tolerant to variation. That is what Markdown is all about, and why it has become so popular in the first place.

More than a language, it's a culture—a culture of _getting things done_ without worrying about all the details of formatting. And that, I think, is the point of the article.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. Markdown is meant to be very straightforward and simple, especially since it can be augmented with HTML. MultiMarkdown[1] and GFM[2] exist as variants of Markdown that can do much more, for those who want more... and I'm sure there are other flavors.

[1]<http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/> [2]<http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only quibble I have with Markdown is that it shows its web-oriented origins by making it difficult to insert page breaks. That's largely the reason I still use LaTeX for a lot of things. Other than that, though, I fully agree with the author. Plain text is great because 1) it'll always be readable and 2) it forces you to focus on the writing first and the formatting second.

<comment><USER4> In pandoc you can just use `\newpage`. This will create a page break in LaTeX/PDF output but be ignored in other formats, such as HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Markdown _everywhere_. Including places that don't even support it. My goal is to use it so much that it just makes sense for web-developers to implement it everywhere. Ideally replacing BBCode and such for forums.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the article: useful. Until recently almost all of my writing has been plain text (really plain text, and plain text with bits of Latex for documentation and writing books).

I have reverted recently to using RTF a lot for writing work notes, not feeling great about it, but there is a real convenience factor because OS X plays nicely with RTF for Finder instant view and using TextEdit. The bulk of my day to day (non-programming) writing is simply writing out copious daily work notes documenting everything that I do for my customers. I have found that being able to lightly style especially important notes is a large enough advantage to forgo the simplicity of plain text. Also, RTF pastes well into GMail if I want to send a styled text email (which I seldom do).

Based on reading this article, I may try the experiment of keeping my work notes for a single customer in plain text + markdown. The Marked OS X app looks pretty nice, but I am concerned that having two windows open (for editing and for viewing) might slow down what is now a very low ceremony activity.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have also moved to markdown for nearly everything, using pandoc much of the time for output to HTML or PDF. It handles a few things (like citations) a bit better than multi-markdown, although I find multi-markdown tables to be more convenient.

</comment><comment><USER12> My only problem is that I have no way to do easy footnoting. I had to add my own special HTML code at the bottom of the page, manually verify the link, and so on. Too much work.

<comment><USER13> There's always reStructuredText/sphinx as a bigger markdown, it has extensive support for linkage including footnotes: [http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#...](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#footnotes)

Without even delving into Sphinx's extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i'm going to do a shameless plug for my github project here because it's quite related but not large enough to dedicate an entire thread to it. it converts DOM > markdown on the client.

<https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js>

the stated goal is to integrate into existing WYSIWYG html editors to produce markdown output. kind of like Markdownify, but on the client.

yay markdown! :D

<comment><USER15> I ended up writing a Markdown plugin to a client-side WYSIWYG editor. I needed the ability to store formatted text in MS SQL without either uploaded a binary blob (.doc/.pdf) or using a WYSIWYG with HTML output.

Markdown is exactly what we needed but there weren't any good JS WYSIWYG editors available, so I hacked one together.

<comment><USER14> yep, same requirement here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are the benefits of LaTex - logical rather than physical structure. But LaYeX, strikingly beautiful though its output is, has not taken off outside computer science journal articles.

Two opposing points: (1) on reddit, I'll often check the markup result, going back and forth (esp checking URLs - probably less important for other writing), and that _seems_ inefficient. I did the same with LaTeX; (2) when I read the text in the rendered format, I'll pick up different typos, perhaps because the line-spacing and font are different and so my eyes parse it differently (like that trick with "of" doubled at end and start of a line).

For a year, I used a homegrown markup language for uni notes. It was fun to use, seemed helpful, but I think was primarily self-indulgent. Maybe I should try it again - I'm currently using either plaintext for documentation (which isn't really clear enough); or open office Word (which takes forever to startup, doesn't _feel_ accessible (can't just cat or head or tail or more or less or grep it), has non-vi keybindings and generally is a pain (though I complement their job of copying MS Word).

Finally - I'm kinda surprised at markdown's success (and it really is successful). I would expect WYSIWYG to be more user-friendly. I think one factor is that markup is optional in the context where it's been successful (like reddit). In other words, it may be "successful" because (1) it's not actually needed or used much (I mean, typos/grammos are endemic online, right?) (2) it has the gentlest possible learning curve if you do want to use it. Does this mean it would be terrible at more serious uses? Or that it is ideal to disrupt incumbent formatting methods? ( _disrupt_ defined: "initially worse at key features, but has features appealing to different users such as convenience/price/accessibility").

It would be interesting to measure the percentage of reddit comments that actually use any markdown at all. I think it would be very low, something like 1-2%

BTW: You had my vote at ZX81 is that wrong?

<comment><USER17> For Reddit, you should check out the Reddit Enhancement Suite[1]. It shows you a realtime preview of the post as it'll show up.

[1]: <http://redditenhancementsuite.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like markdown. I dislike the use of brackets () to delimit links. I would have preferred angle brackets <> for links.

Brackets are reserved delimiters in RFC3986 (etc) whereas angle brackets are recommended for delimiting URIs.

<comment><USER19> I think Markdown avoids angle brackets because angle brackets are frequently used for inline HTML. Sure, Markdown could look at the content of each pair of brackets and try to figure out whether it's a link or a valid HTML tag, but that would introduce a lot of complexity and it won't always work given the diversity of tags and URL schemes.

<comment><USER4> Since angle brackets are used for "automatic links" in markdown (<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink>), a markdown processor already has to look at the contents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a detailed comparison of pandoc and multimarkdown here: <https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-vs-Multimarkdown>.

</comment><comment><USER20> I really dig Markdown. But this nasty voice inside my head is saying "5 years from now, you're gonna wish you just did this in troff." Or for better and worse, it will evolve into troff.

<comment><USER17> Well, apparently pandoc can convert Markdown into groff. I don't know if it's troff compatible or if it has diverged, though.

<comment><USER20> Actually, I'm more concerned with the Markdown syntax and not about how pandoc (nice tool btw) converts it. The issue I see is unchecked feature creep, especially with the variants of markdown we're starting to see.

Reluctantly, I agree that plain text documents are the way to go. I used to be a FrameMaker user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I totally agree. I just converted my blog to Markdown and Jekyll to be published on GitHub pages. It's awesome to be able to edit blogs in a programmers' editor with all its power and features, integrate code snippets and just push my changes when done.

While much of this was possible before, Markdown is _so_ much easier for writing a programming/tech blog.

</comment><comment><USER22> Markdown and Restructured Text are pretty nice. One Markdown annoyance is having to use two spaces at the end of a line to indicate a line break. In some text editors, you can't see the spaces at the end of the line so when you visually scan your Markdown you don't see the line breaks.

<comment><USER19> There are "extra" versions of Markdown that can be configured to respect literal line breaks. But if you rely on that, your text would not be compatible with other Markdown parsers.

Markdown's default behavior of disregarding line breaks has two benefits: (1) you can keep your lines short without breaking paragraphs apart, and (2) putting each sentence (or long clause) in its own line plays very nicely with version control systems.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, respecting literal line breaks would break some things, but simply replacing the two spaces at the end of a line with something visible (maybe two underscores if that doesn't break something else) should work.

<comment><USER4> Pandoc's extended markdown allows you to use a backslash at the end of the line to indicate a line break. (Think of this as a backslash-escaped newline, if you want.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shameless plug: we go through HTML + CSS with WeasyPrint to make PDF from Markdown: <http://weasyprint.org/>

CSS is so much more designer-friendly than LaTeX stylesheets...

</comment><comment><USER24> Anybody use textile here?

<comment><USER19> I used it before I discovered Markdown. The syntax for code was very annoying:

. But I still miss the easy distinction between emphasis (underscores) and strong emphasis (asterisks). Markdown makes both symbols behave identically, which I think is wasteful.

<comment><USER25> We use TextPattern as a lightweight CMS from time to time, and it's Textile. Code just requires "pre." at the start of the first line of code, like so:

        A *simple* example.

        pre. 10 print "hello"
        20 goto 10

        And that's that, except for @inline@ code.

Paste that into <http://textile.thresholdstate.com/> with no leading spaces. If one is fluent in Textile, Markdown can feel limited in its access to _readable_ HTML style indicators. For example, I appreciate the %(class)this is a styled span% feature.

I find Markdown best for generating documents/documentation, and Textile best for generating styled web copy.

<comment><USER19> > _Code just requires "pre." at the start of the first line of code,_

The last time I tried Textile, the "pre." prefix didn't produce the desired effect. But maybe that was a problem with that particular website's CSS. Thanks for correcting me there.

> _Markdown can feel limited in its access to readable HTML style indicators._

Fair point. Textile seems to be optimized for producing styled HTML, whereas Markdown tries very hard to make the user forget about the fact that they're using a markup language at all. Even its name suggests that it's meant to be an anti-markup-language markup language.

For example, if you use "pre." in Textile, you're saying that the text should appear exactly as entered (because HTML ignores whitespace by default). Similarly, class attributes are only meaningful in HTML+CSS. On the other hand, when you indent a code block in Markdown, you're not saying anything about presentation, you're just making the code block look nice in plain text while also making a semantic point that the indented block is computer code. Gruber has consistently vetoed any feature that would make Markdown look less like plain text and more like HTML. You would think it odd if a plain text document contained things like "pre." and "(class)".

This makes it easy to compile Markdown to non-HTML formats like LaTeX and even ODF, which MultiMarkdown does. But I can see how Markdown's obsession with plain-text purity can be a limitation if you're trying to add style to a document that you know will be compiled to HTML.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Pitchforks Are Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014_Page4.html#.U7b7yI1dUi4

<comment><USER2> This is the 18th post of the same article:

[https://hn.algolia.io/#!/story/past_month/prefix/0/The%20Pit...](https://hn.algolia.io/#!/story/past_month/prefix/0/The%20Pitchforks%20Are%20Coming)</comment>


Twitter Blog: Small Settings Update - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html <comment><AUTHOR> I give it 24-48 hours before the setting is back. This seems like the Facebook method for releasing changes to me. It's a 3-step process:

      - Take away or change features users like
      - Withstand PR storm while increasing awareness
      - Change it back and look like the good guy</comment>


Report on Government Information Requests [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/131105reportongovernmentinforequests2.pdf

<comment><USER2> They are clever, they do what Bobby R. Inman suggests NSA should do too:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too- minusc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-minuscule- for-all-consuming-nsa.html?pagewanted=7&_r=0&partner=rss&emc=rss)

"Bobby R. Inman, N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his hyper-secret former agency a radical suggestion for right now. 'My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself,' he said. 'It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But _bad news doesn 't get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild._'" (emphasis mine)

BTW: I believe in the table 1 instead of "Percentage of Account Requests Where Some Data Was Disclosed" should be "Percentage of Accounts Where Some Data Was Disclosed." Otherwise Hong Kong numbers don't have sense.

<comment><USER3> What's the bad news they're getting out before somebody else outs it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. > We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.

Didn't somebody propose hanging a sign up that says "we've never received a FISA court order" and taking it down when it's no longer true? Apple appears to be equipped to do so.

<comment><USER2> That statement is still specifically about [https://www.eff.org/foia/section-215-usa-patriot- act](https://www.eff.org/foia/section-215-usa-patriot-act)

"Section 215 allows for secret court orders to collect "tangible things" that could be relevant to a government investigation – a far lower threshold and more expansive reach than a warrant based on probable cause. The list of possible "tangible things" the government can obtain is seemingly limitless, and could include everything from driver's license records to Internet browsing patterns."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer the standard business-customer relationship, which is increasingly rare nowadays. It ensures that the user experiences will be great, because if it slips they lose my business and it directly impacts their bottom line. That kind of alignment of interests isn't really required for an ad company. Not trafficking in information in the first place and thus having very little to share is just a bonus.</comment>


Wufoo customer service - <AUTHOR> http://kzo.net/log/amazing-customer-service

<comment><USER2> The Wufoo guys seem great all around - business approach, design, technology (their PHP profiler from today), and customer service.

I egotistically wish their main product was different, because I want to use what they make, yet I don't need HTML forms.

<comment><USER3> I wish they were more visible, would love to chat to them.

<comment><USER4> Hi pclark, while our physical presence and interactions are limited because we're not in the valley, we're easy to get a hold of...just send a message through Wufoo's contact form. We do our best to answer anyone interested in what we're doing to the best of our abilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> WuFoo is awesome, they sponsored our community startup site in Austin Texas and were (still are) extremely friendly and responsive during our exchange. Nothing but respect for those guys, love their product. Pure class.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wrote them a message yesterday -- got a polite and helpful response in under an hour. Great CS....

</comment><comment><USER7> We got a letter from them a while back -- it got a bunch of comments here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325904>

</comment><comment><USER8> Marketing disguised as customer service?

<comment><USER9> No, customer service is part of marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wufoo will even do ecommerce for you... so much awesome.

<comment><USER11> How does that work?

<comment><USER12> I assume that he is talking about payment processing:

<http://wufoo.com/docs/payment-settings/>

We use it at Antiwar.com for donations...great way to create consistency in data across payment types.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple crushes earnings, sees record holiday quarter - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/apple-earnings-2505521867.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic <comment><USER2> Yet again, analysts crying doom were touting nonsense.

iPhone selling less than expected as people wait for iPhone X? Nope, turns out they sold a half-million more than expected.

It's the same story almost every quarter. Almost like people make money on depressing the stock before the announcements or something.

<comment><USER3> iPhone X isn't included in these numbers as it just went on sale for pre-order this past week. We'll really see where it goes once the next quarter rolls around.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, and yet Apple has issued guidance for their highest quarter ever next quarter, and says that pre-orders so far are exceeding expectations. I'm guessing they aren't likely to be wrong on that score.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just switched to an iphone and swore off google. Feels good to contribute.

<comment><USER5> I really want a full-stack libre device :(</comment></comment>


How the iPad will change the construction industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.plangrid.com/blog/ipad-will-transform-construction

<comment><USER2> Guys, I'm not trying to pooh-pooh on the parade, but it looks like none of the founders have ever touched the construction industry.

A) There is no organ for document submittal or review from the limited options here B) You assume that this will supplant printing costs. At $700/per (assuming iPad and case) + $30/month for cellular data, you're looking at ~$1,100/year/iPad. They're fragile and small compared to printoffs. Construction sites are rough places. Dust, dirt, sand, rain, idiots, you are dealing with everything here. If an iPad lasts 6 months on a construction site, you're doing it wrong. C) Printing costs of $3500/$1munit means that to break even, you need only 3 iPads per $1million job. That's 3 sets of plans, aka 3 supervisors. Highly improbable.

Again, as a field construction engineer, I'd love to have a rugged tablet that would be useful, but in terms of idiot-proofness and reliability, nothing's going to supplant a full size plot or clutch of 11x17s anytime soon.

The big construction companies are the same ones that require 4 signatures to activate a corporate cell phone. Please consider the path before sinking too much more time and effort.

You're in the SF Bay, so get Granite or Teichert on board, and see if you can move from there. A pilot case study showing how often they're broken, etc would be a good plan.

I'd personally pivot into rentals. Rent the iPad + plangrid package at a rate of $100(?)/month/iPad. Construction companies are much more open to rentals even if they don't save money than capital expenditures.

If you'd like more background or insight into a field engineer trying to bring his small corner of the industry into modern times, feel free to shoot me an email: tommytgt <at> gmail.com

<comment><USER3> Its funny, that construction personnel have this awful stereotype of ignorance and clumsiness, who will break their ipads at first chance.

We construct your buildings, bridges, water treatment plants in sometimes harsh conditions, but still go home safe to our families everyday. We can also hold onto iPads just like everyone else.

<comment><USER2> It's not a stereotype - I guess it depends on who you're working with. Most of the supervisors I know don't tend to break things out of clumsiness but more out of stress, and many of them aren't so good with computers, even the guys that use them fairly often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be really interesting if you could do technical facilities documentation as well (hospitals, datacenters, satellite earth stations, etc.). There, it's not just the as built configuration, but subsequent modifications -- and it's not just the people building it who need access, but various auditors, operations staff and engineers, equipment vendors, etc.

<comment><USER3> One of our first adopters was Lawrence Berkeley Lab's facilities management team. PlanGrid is for anyone who looks any type of drawings at all, which includes configuration diagrams and technical maintenance data.

<comment><USER4> Another interesting thing might be easy markup for HAZMAT or disaster planning -- having the actual plans as a background layer and then overlays with specific emergency information. Given the ~infinite DHS money for local police/fire/emergency forces for counterterrorism, you could probably get some good adoption.</comment></comment></comment>


Ash HN: Would you pay for a monthly magazine with step-by-step growth hacks? - <AUTHOR> Yes? How much? No? Why not? <comment><USER2> No, but I'd read the web page while blocking ads. :)

Tongue in cheek pointing out that it's hard for the bigly publications to collect money.

Are you an expert in growth hacks? Do I need growth hacks? I think a lot of people just write these things for their own personal development, or as a way to attract people to the larger moneymaker behind the publication. Like, your consulting business.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a pretty generic question, not really targetted proprerly. Why don't you put up a landing page with some basic info and start collecting email addresses from people who are interested?

</comment><comment><USER4> The idea is interesting but I think the execution needs work. It's going to be a hard sell to convince people to pay for a monthly magazine subscription.

Consider writing an ebook or self publishing a book instead. Maybe publish some hacks for free on a blog to build an audience and that you can market your book to.</comment>


Ask HN: What obscure corner of the web do you frequently visit? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I like [http://www.graficaobscura.com/](http://www.graficaobscura.com/) a lot, obscure and historical collection of computer graphics experiments and other thingies

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if obscure, but MeFi gets multiple visits from me daily:

[https://www.metafilter.com](https://www.metafilter.com)</comment>


Most common words unique to 1-star and 5-star App Store reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/1111087530

<comment><USER2> It would be useful to separate the common words into two buckets (paid and free). Freeloaders reviewing free apps can be merciless...

<comment><USER3> I think it is the opposite. There is nothing like an user scorned for wasting their 99 cents.

<comment><USER4> While this does happen sometimes, the more expensive the app the higher the app rating (in general).

Free apps, people will download haphazardly and then delete, leading to many 1-star reviews.

With more expensive apps, people are much more likely to appreciate the app as they do the research before spending their money.

Source: taking a look at the App Store plus my own apps.

<comment><USER5> There might also be an effect of people wanting more badly to like the app and "deluding" themselves... if I pay $0.99 for an app, I don't care too much if it works or not, but if I pay $29.99 I'm going to _want_ to like it for reasons of self-validation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The words that leap out at me from the five-star list are "never" and "always". If ever a piece of data underscored the value of consistency, it's that.

<comment><USER7> The words that leap out at me from the one-star list are "actually" and "says", words indicating that real behavior differed from expected/advertised behavior. The app says X but actually does Y, and therefore sucks. This strongly underscores the value of consistency between what your customers think they're getting and what you actually deliver.

<comment><USER3> If only this was based on any kind of logic. The problem with the app store users is that they often just look at the picture, and do not read the description. There are lots and lots of cases where people are asking for something that is specifically mentioned not available in the app store description.

<comment><USER8> It goes back to understanding your users. If you thoroughly understand what problem they're trying to solve and what they normally do when solving it, you can design completely around that and make them happy.

<comment><USER9> I agree that this is a good design philosophy. But I also think that the problem of "the user not reading the app description" (as described by the parent) is a separate issue.

For example, I found that there were several problems to be solved that were all related to the same domain. Apps existed that do a decent job of solving problem X. So I wrote an app to solve problem Y. I have received numerous 1-star reviews because the user is disappointed that my app does not solve Problem X. In my case, I am pretty confident that I clearly described the problem solved by my app. I even explicitly say that it is not meant to solve problem X. I have also received many positive reviews from users looking for an app that solves Problem Y. So in my case, I don't think it was a problem with understanding the user.

<comment><USER10> This might describe a supernatural level of user-understanding; but it must be possible to create an app description which gets past the barrier of what the customer _expects_ your app to do, and actually communicates to them the true capabilities of your app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As I guessed, the words used by those writing 1-star reviews suggest bitterness and idiocy on the part of the reviewer. Most nice people grade on a curve.

The words used in 5-star reviews aren't bad, though, except for the word "perfect". It's often misused when describing software.

<comment><USER12> > Most nice people grade on a curve.

I don't understand this, could you explain?

<comment><USER11> What I mean by grading on a curve is that, rather than give as many 1-star reviews as 5-star reviews, nice people almost always give between 3 and 5 stars. Even if they find an app to be useless to them, they often give the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it will improve in a future version, or be more useful to someone else.

<comment><USER13> By doing so, of course, they make the whole system roughly 1/3 less useful[1] for everyone; that isn't _my_ idea of "nice".

[1] log 3 / log 5 ~= 0.68.

<comment><USER11> True. It's mitigated somewhat by having half-stars in the reviews (not sure Apple does this but Yelp does), but it still makes it a pretty slim margin between crappy and excellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In my experience the #1 cause of "crashes" is being killed by the memory watchdog. An app I publish deals with photos, and I ran into such a problem with people trying to load in massive photos that I had to enforce an artificial pixel-size cap to stop it.

The iPad has a memory fragmentation problem. The longer the unit is up, the less you can guarantee that a request for a large amount of memory won't be met with a watchdog kill. What works once when it's from a fresh boot may not work a few days or a few weeks later.

<comment><USER15> Why do apps get killed for _requesting_ memory? Can't malloc return NULL and the app act accordingly ("your picture is too big, so i am not going to edit it").

Now, it seems most people never handle malloc returning NULL, and "you can't do this today" is a bad user experience. But crashing is what happens in the first case anyway, and being auto-killed is a bad experience too.

<comment><USER16> Apps _don't_ get killed for requesting memory. They get killed when they're running in the background and _other_ apps request memory.

 _Can't malloc return NULL and the app act accordingly ("your picture is too big, so i am not going to edit it")._

Thats exactly what happens. You're free to run:

      void *foo = malloc(INT_MAX);

foo will be NULL. The rest of the app will continue to run without any problems.

// edit: Here's what happens when you do run that (the last line is a NSLog() to show the address of foo):

      Malloc(4972,0x3e088868) malloc: *** mmap(size=2147483648) failed (error code=12)
      *** error: can't allocate region
      *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
      2010-09-12 19:44:59.154 Malloc[4972:307] malloc: 0x0

// edit 2: Here's the code: <http://thisismyinter.net/misc/hn/Malloc.zip>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The word "useless" has been popping up in my free apps' reviews too. I don't know how to interpret it.

I'm wondering if this is a new word among young people now. Kind-of the new "sucks" maybe?

<comment><USER18> "useless" is more extreme than "sucks". I think it is dismissive in the same way as describing something as "FAIL". People are being exposed to more options and are being asked to make more and more judgements. I think making a gray analysis like "It's good at this but bad at that" is hard to keep track of with the quantity of options. It is far easier to simply lump things into black and white buckets of good and useless.

<comment><USER17> But ultimately what's "useless" is the comment itself. It does nothing to better anything. It leaves the developer in a void of wonderment. What's useless? Is it lacking a feature? Is it not working at all? What void were you looking to fill?

I also get an overwhelming amount of 5 star ratings with well thought out reviews. So when one of these "useless" comments pops in, it throws me back to high school days, when everything "sucked" - which is why I wonder if the word is the new "sucks".

Thinking back, saying "sucks" so often was quite useless.

<comment><USER19> I don't think the 1-star reviewer is thinking of "you" (the developers), at all. They want to bury the app so that no other user will have to waste their time in the same way they just did. It "sucks" but I don't know how you could change it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting how the negative list seems to be heavily-populated by unigrams from a phrase something like "doesn't actually do anything". The app store must have a significant misrepresentation-of-functionality problem.

<comment><USER6> It may well be a usability problem - the app does what it says on the tin, but the user can't figure out how. In my experience the usual meaning of "It won't do x" is in fact "I know it does x, but I can't figure out how to make it". Rightly so in my opinion - I think it's part of the great cultural divide in computing, where developers see software as a toolkit but users expect appliances.

<comment><USER21> Marco also notes that the app has to contend with the user's expectation of what it should do. Which might not have any basis in reality. If an app doesn't do what a user expects, regardless of where that expectation originates, it earns the 'useless' designation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The biggest problem with App Store 'reviews' is that iOS asks for a rating on uninstall, this leads to many '1 star' ratings, with no review at all, leaving the developer in the dark as to what the user's issues are.

<comment><USER23> This was a problem, but it was fixed with the release of iOS 4.0. Now users have to go to the app store to rate an app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It would be fun to expose this data (perhaps with a few additional dimensions?) and hack up an extension/greasemonkey script to rip out reviews that fit a certain criteria.

<comment><USER25> Would you pay money for this?

<comment><USER24> Me personally, no, but it raises an interesting point. I could see a market in "scoring" reviews using models based on data sets similar to the one examined here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Another great thing to measure would be the common words in the app descriptions. I would love to find out why people still download 1- star rated apps.

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be interesting to see such list for the app descriptions (may be gauged by sales, not by the app score). It might be that some harmless-looking words trigger positive or negative reaction. Freaconomics has interesting chapter on words used in house advertisement - some word like "wonderful" send negative message.

</comment><comment><USER28> Someone should do this for the most upvoted posts/commented on Hacker News. I'm too lazy for that :)

Surely, we will find content with a lot less use of subjective terms like "awesome" but I'm curious by how much. That's one way to get a sense how objectively critical the posts/comments mostly are.

</comment><comment><USER4> What I am going to be doing immediately: composing mock 5- and 1-star reviews based on these words, and running through my apps' future updates to make sure they are much more more readily described by the former.

</comment><comment><USER29> Surprisingly appropriate works to describe the best and worst people, as well!

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting that "Apple" appears in the one-star list. In what sort of contexts does this appear? Are people actually blaming Apple for the crappy apps?

<comment><USER31> I would guess it is along the lines of "I am surprised Apple allowed this app in the AppStore"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> haha, it matches my app's 5 star and 1 star reviews surprisingly well.

Most apps settle into the 3 star range for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER33> Funny to find "open" in the 1-star list. (not saying that that actually means anything)

<comment><USER34> Probably along the lines of "...as soon as I open the app it crashes..."

Most likely due to the memory manager issues mentioned above. I've seen some quality apps get massive numbers of one star reviews for this type of problem.

The star rating system really irks me for this reason. Something that could be fixed to perfect condition in less than 24hours permanently carries the baggage beyond its relevance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> really really this analysis is so lame, if you take any product review and applied this analysis it would give similar results.

This is equivalent of all those spamfographics</comment>


Entrepreneurial DNA Transcends Context - <AUTHOR> http://jordancooper.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/entrepreneurial-dna-transcends-context/

<comment><USER2> I think this post brings up a great point that programmer types tend to overlook: relationship management.

I had a professor in college who taught business ethics, and also an entrepreneurship elective. He would always call everyone in his address book on their birthday and wish them well. It didn't even matter if he hadn't seen them the entire year.

I can't say for sure if it helped him succeed, but for such a small investment of time, imagine the goodwill generated by giving someone a quick 'happy birthday' call.

<comment><USER3> Really? If I got an arbitrary call on my birthday from some business contact whom I hardly knew, I'd be wondering what was wrong with that person. Relationships aren't a bag of tricks.

<comment><USER2> It's not like he's calling to pitch anything. He legitimately wants to wish them a happy birthday and catch up with them. I guess some discretion is used when deciding to call someone. (He obviously had to know them well enough at some point to get their birthdate.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >(p.s. i don't use spell check…deal with it)

PS, I flagged your story about when you decided to "by" some chocolate and then "through" it away...deal with it.</comment>


Labor in the U.S. now cheaper than labor in Brazil - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/05/14/labor-in-the-us-now-cheaper-than-labor-in-brazil/ <comment> daniel-cussen The dollar has fallen a lot recently. That's a legitimate macroeconomic reason for this kind of shift.

But there are a few confounding factors, too. First, from an employer's perspective, it is hard to deal with Brazilian employees from a legal standpoint (firing, hiring, etc). Second, the difference in costs between skilled Brazilian workers and skilled Floridans might be smaller than the difference between unskilled Brazilians and unskilled Floridans. Third, since Embraer produces for the Brazilian government, this might be an arrangement between the US government and the Brazilian government to improve the trade balance between the two countries (Brazil makes cheap steel, and only a few US producers, like Nucor, can compete with it).

</comment><comment><USER2> Blog posting doesn't add much to the original story which is here: [http://www.aero- news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=fb1b93e6-3...](http://www.aero- news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=fb1b93e6-313f-452c-902e-5d5104df7bd3&);

</comment><comment><USER3> I looked up Brazil's per capita income and it's just under $5k a year. The jobs mentioned pay $50k a year. I posted that in a comment at the blog, it has not exited moderation yet :-(

<comment><USER4> One should not copy Greenspun's headlines casually from venue to venue. Greenspun has a particular style, one which thrives on irony, drama, and the occasional dollop of literary exaggeration. :)

In fact, the linked article does _not_ argue that Brazilian labor is more expensive than that in the U.S. All we can conclude is that, taking all factors into consideration, cheaper foreign labor isn't driving Embraer to avoid the USA. Given that aviation is a heavily regulated, litigated, and taxed field, that doesn't tell us much -- maybe building jets in the USA for US customers saves a bunch of tariffs, or takes advantage of a tax loophole, or saves delivery costs or supply costs.

 _I looked up Brazil's per capita income and it's just under $5k a year. The jobs mentioned pay $50k a year._

Well, to be fair, "aviation assembly worker" might be a relatively high-paying job in Brazil. The cost of "workers" and the cost of "skilled workers suitable for careers in your aircraft factory" are two different things. But, again, the article gives us no clues whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> I would argue that this is trolling/linkbait and not much more. And that's isn't coming out of ignorance of Philip's writings, I've read most (all) of his stuff and once bought extra copies of Philip and Alex's Guide to give away as gifts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone try hiring offshore dev or designers lately? Some of these guys want more than I would have to pay someone locally from craigslist. Are Americans the new Indians?

<comment><USER4> The Indian outsourcing trend was operating at unsustainable rates, fueled by the overvalued dollar:

[http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dean_baker/2007/11/down_...](http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dean_baker/2007/11/down_with_the_dollar.html)

Unfortunately, while the dollar is finally falling in a way that will help reinvigorate the US industries that the strong dollar helped to injure or kill over the last decade, the sharp fall in the dollar's value is also a big pain -- higher inflation, higher interest rates, and all at a time when the _real_ cost of oil is shooting up.

I'm certainly not surprised to see developers in foreign countries demanding comparable salaries to developers in the USA. Are they supposed to be _altruists_ , cheerfully working for less than their market value just because their local cost-of-living is so much lower? ;)</comment></comment>


The Y chromosome is disappearing – so what will happen to men? - sahin-boydas https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/05/11/the-y-chromosome-is-disappearing-so-what-will-happen-to-men/ <comment><AUTHOR> Ultra click-baity title. The Y chromosome isn't going anywhere. This smells like a man-hating "toxic masculinity" argument wrapped up in the pseudoscience of one person's opinion.</comment>


Ask HN: When was your last time you used "Feeling Lucky"? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The last time i used letmegogglethatforyou.com because 90% of the time when i need lmgtfy.com it's the first result that I need.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not since Google cleverly hid the feature by implementing automatic search as you type for that AdSense $$$

</comment><comment><USER4> 2001</comment>


Apple plans mystery "product transition" before September's end - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/07/21/apple_plans_mystery_product_transition_before_septembers_end.html

<comment><USER2> My guess is a transition to only iPod touch models with much larger storage capacities. The increase in memory will increase the cost but Apple will likely sell it at price points comparable to what the large capacity ones are now. This would lead to the mentioned decreased margins. Also sales of these would likely be high to help make up for the decreased margins, especially around the holiday shopping time.

Apple is giving away the old touches now with the purchase of a macbook. They also like to announce iPods at the beginning of the fourth quarter to capitalize on the holiday shopping.

This transition seems like one they could be referring to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wild guesses:

 __* Bigger-but-still-pretty-cheap iPod Touch -- falling somewhere between today's 'TechCrunch Tablet' and the foldable OLPC dual screen [1]. Perhaps cheap because of some sort of non-AT &T carrier subsidy (Sprint/Verizon?) or built-in adware (Google).

 __* A true Apple TV -- big screen flat TVs with Mac innards. (I thought this was due earlier this year. [2])

 __* Some massive Mac/iPod/iPhone 'switcher' cross-promotion -- like rebates or bounties on your old Windows/PC units when you go fully Apple.

 __* Something which brings MacOS to the legacy PC world -- not quite licensed clones like the 90s Power Computing experiment, but maybe a VMWare MacOS appliance that runs on PCs, or a MacOS lite, providing a way to siphon off even more of the business and low-end markets.

 __* The iSteve, a digital upload of Steve Jobs onto a custom "Go Chip" created by Apple's new PA Semi subsidiary, giving Apple an immortal CEO and an early lead in the posthuman platform race.

[1] [http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/20/new-olpc-revealed- olpc-...](http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/20/new-olpc-revealed-olpc-dual- screen/)

[2] [http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2008/01/appletv-thats-really- tv-a...](http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2008/01/appletv-thats-really-tv-and- really.html)

<comment><USER4> If they mass produce Steve Jobs clones, i will buy one, or two. Just think of the uses. Cheap business consulting from an immortal entity in a microchip, thats a killer app for the CEO market :D

<comment><USER5> I bet Apple would also make quite a bit of cash from support. The Genius Bar would probably have to be renamed though....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An Atom-based laptop, maybe? I don't think that the Eee or Wind are proper competitors, but even the most expensive versions cost around half what a basic MacBook costs. People are willing to forgive a lot for that sort of price differential.

It's nice to dream, anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Two assumptions:

A) The profit margin will stay at 35% until this new product is released.

b) This product won't be announced until August 19th at the earliest.

That means if the plan is to have a 30% unit margin at the end of the quarter, they are going to have something like a 25% margin for the second half of the quarter. Now since they are reducing the margin, we know they are planning to increase the volume. An atom laptop, while it would be cool, just doesn't have the potential to move several million units within the first month, which is roughly what it would take to lower the margins by that much. In fact, there is literally no new product that Apple could introduce that would sell enough units within the first month to lower the per unit margins by 10%. So the change must involve some existing product.

I think there are two realistic options here. First, they just reduce plain reduce the price of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. A real possibility. Second, they add an expensive component to one of their existing products. While Blueray or DDR3 would cost enough to make the numbers add up, there is no way either of those would generate enough excitement to create the extra volume Apple is looking for. So I think if they add a new component to an existing product, the only real option is SSD. Either they make SSD standard in all MacBooks, or else they replace the normal iPod with an iPod touch with way more SSD than it currently has. At least to my thinking, either a price cut or SSD are the only ways I can see the numbers adding up for Q4.

<comment><USER6> Granted, there are bound to be other price reductions, but the article makes explicit mention of a new product. Also, unless they plan to take a significant loss on the SSDs, I don't see how making them standard will make their hardware _more_ price competitive.

The Atom laptop is a total shot in the dark, and is likely wrong, but it seems like there must be something more significant in the pipeline.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the conf call mentioned a "product transition", not a new product. They are changing something in their existing lineup, not adding a new product to the lineup.

<comment><USER6> From the article: _The new, unnamed product will continue to have "technologies and features that others can't match," according to the CFO._

I took that to mean that it's entirely new, but it is a press release, so maybe they're talking about some minor change like it's something new and wonderful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hacker news digest by email? - <AUTHOR>

I have all sorts of ideas for improving HN for myself, but maybe one simple quick fix would be to get a daily mail with the best of HN of the day. Possibly that could end the compulsion to check for news all the time.
I just wanted to ask if anybody has implemented this already by any chance?
I suppose tools for mailing RSS feeds exist, but something more sophisticated might be called for, taking into account the votes. <comment><USER2> Start at <http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks good, I'll try that for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's the Hacker Newsletter ( <http://www.hackernewsletter.com/> ) , which is weekly, and the Hacker Monthly ( <http://hackermonthly.com/> ) which is monthly and paid.

</comment><comment><USER4> Or you could just use <http://twitter.com/newsyc100> .</comment>


Deepfake pornography, with videos of popular actresses having millions of views - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepfake-porn-websites-videos-law <comment><USER2> I don't see how you can fight this. You can try to ban the videos, but the technology is eventually going to get so good and spread so much that you will be able to do this on demand. No video uploaded to a website necessary.

<comment><USER3> I think you can fight it becoming mainstream or easy to find, kind of like other types of illegal porn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a drag, and I'd hate to have this happen to someone, however regarding this:

"Non-consensual deepfake videos, that humiliate and demean women... Nothing is being done about them"

the cynic in me suspects that the outrage to "do something" would be abused by Hollywood to push for even more laws, restrictions, content analysis and distribution blocking of non-porn, independent content.

<comment><USER5> Well the whole thing is not only a moral panic but a clumsily pushed one that moronically invokes rape for tasteless art by invoking it for what is at best essentially an intellectual property issue.

I recall hearing about voice actor guilds limiting or barring synthesized voices for job security so obviously they fear being replaced with machima essentially (which shouldn't be a problem if they can actually act and provide a better response than what the director initially imagined).

</comment></comment><comment> matt-attack I'd be curious to know if the actresses who are being faked, would have a similar problem if I were to, say, make a life like painting of them being naked. Artists sell images of actors all the time. People know they're paintings.

I'm struggling to understand the distinction here. The digital creation is just a painting. It's a digital painting. It's 1000s of digital paintings being showed in sequence.

You may be tempted to think the issue is that when consumers view an oil painting of a naked actress they know it's fake. Where as deep fakes could leave less knowledgeable viewers under the impression that the actress in question actually performed in pr0n. Ok so mandate that deep fakes are labeled as such.

Clearly it's ok to do it in oil on canvas so when does it become wrong when done digitally? There's simply no victim here.

<comment><USER6> The crime here is called libel, and the victim is the person being faked, who could sue to recover damages caused by a loss of reputation.

<comment><USER7> Since libel is "a published false statement that is damaging to a person's reputation", what if the videos were titled appropriately, clearly indicating it is not _actually_ the celebrity in the video.

Instead of "<Celebrity Name> <Sex Act>", it could be titled "DeepFake Rendering of <Celebrity Name> <Sex Act>".

While videos could still damage the reputation of someone (only in the eyes of those who disapprove of porn), there is clearly no "false statement" being made.

<comment><USER8> This is not about false statements. Is about lotta money.

The body, image and look of famous people is their brand. Is why actress are generously paid to sell parfums, anti-age potions and lipstick and is the reason why lots of families take their children to cinema.

Linking this image to porn (or racism, or anything nasty) in the previous week to a expensive film's premiere can damage seriously their investment and turn an innocent people into poison for box office

In the same way, a deep fake porn of a candidate can destroy the lucrative source of business that represents being elected or not.

My bet is that would soon be detected as a major treat for a lot of huge companies and will be crushed, nuked and drown in a lawyers tide before 24h from the release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> late to the party but I'm wondering if deepfake could be used by the pornindustry to make more content

like you got 1 high visible actress, 10 lookalike-ish , less paid, but you deep fake the high visible actress on same, so that you can create more content at cheaper rate ?</comment>


Reverse Engineering the YouTube Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.tubefilter.com/2016/06/23/reverse-engineering-youtube-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. Didn't know that starting a YT session on a video boosts that channel.</comment>


Budget breakdown of a couple that makes $500k a year and still feels average - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/budget-breakdown-of-a-couple-that-makes-500000-a-year-but-cant-save.html <comment><USER4> I can see two areas where they could save some money:

      1) Cars
      2) Vacation

Drop to one vacation a year (probably more than most people do) - bam, an extra $12k per year (assuming each vacation is a $6000 luxury outing - <USER2> could probably drop that to $2-3k and gain some more).

Purchase their vehicles outright - and more importantly, buy used, and keep them for 5-10 years. Don't go for "high end" (BMW? Land Cruiser?) - <USER3> that translates to "high end maintenance". Instead - stick to something that requires little maintenance and is reliable - Toyota would probably be best here; a late-90s Camry and a late-90s 4-runner would probably work well to meet their needs. Once purchased, then gone over by a mechanic (which won't be cheap that first year) - after that, saving another $9k per year (maybe more, since there might be better mileage and lower insurance).

There's potentially $20,000+.

Other possibilities? Well - there isn't much left that wouldn't mean sacrificing some real stuff. Maybe a cheaper home, but for where they are living that may not be an option.

But I think the first two basics identified would be the best place to start. Ultimately it comes down to not living within your means, but living below your means. But that a decision each of us has to make, based on what is wanted from life.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Both max out the 401(k) per the article and then the article adds (disingenuously), "only $7,300 left each year to go towards other savings goals, investment accounts or retirement funds." Boohoo.</comment>


Ask HN: Cheap E-ink panels for Home decor - <AUTHOR> Does anyone here know of places I can get cheap E-ink panels? I'd love to hang some around the around the house showing around some pictures/motivational quotes/weather displays/vector graphics etc.<p>I do not want to use full color LCD/LED panels because of its power needs. I'd prefer a battery-operated wireless solution. <comment><USER2> Cheapest e-ink you can get is probably buying used kindles or other readers :/ (Some kindles have been hacked, Sony made some with root-able Android, so you can even use the other parts of the hardware)

Individual panels are still expensive, and large sizes are even more expensive, if you can even get them.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really interesting idea. Probably the older Kindles are the single largest users of (black and white at least) e-ink panels. To what extent are they rootable and reflashable? If you do get this working please do write up your experience and follow up with some after photos.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

I found a very recent hack for E-Ink Kindle. I might try this next weekend on a Kindle I can buy off Craigslist. [http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275877](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275877)

I was hoping more in the lines of cheap panels themselves off eBay or alibaba that can work with Rasp pi/Arduino.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about projectors?</comment>


1 in 10 Americans uses stalkerware to track partners and exes, poll finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/1-in-10-people-uses-stalkerware-to-track-partners-and-exes-poll-says/ <comment><USER2> If those stats are even vaguely close then heaven help us.

<comment><USER3> Since the poll was commissioned by NortonLifeLock, and they don't tell us what the questions asked were, I think it's pretty safe to ignore the results as bogus marketing.

Particularly since they seem surprisingly high.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I reckon you must be right. Sure, I agree that such things happen but if those figures were actually that high then I fail to see how society could even continue to function.</comment></comment></comment>


Nigeria's game designers fight for their cut on mobile - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/0d4a9852-17df-11e8-9c33-02f893d608c2 <comment><USER2> This works for me: [http://archive.is/H5vGz](http://archive.is/H5vGz).

</comment><comment><USER3> FT has a hard-stop paywall with no workarounds. Why are their links allowed to be posted here, and how do they make it to the front page, considering that the vast majority of HN readers do not have a paid subscription?

Edit: Apparently the Facebook workaround works for FT if you haven't been cookied there before. Open their links in an incognito window, and then use this bookmarklet - works on all WSJ articles as well.

      javascript:window.location.href='https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

<comment><USER4> Click the "web" link on HN and then click the first Google link. Worked for me.

That being said, FT is worth subscribing to.

<comment><USER3> The google workaround has never worked for me on FT, even with cleared cookies. Maybe they're going by IP address.</comment></comment></comment>