Re-Designing the classic email client - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanschneider.com/work/mail/ <comment><USER3> Don't fix email. Fix communication.

Why, on my iPhone, do I have:

1\. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes)

2\. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems)

3\. A phone app

4\. A contacts app

5\. Twitter

6\. Facebook

7\. Skype

What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my messages (both incoming and outgoing), and -- as the writer of the article points out -- (d) manage my attachments.

On the iPhone (which is by no means the worst case) I might end up doing something stupid like looking up a contact, phone them, get sent to voicemail. Go back to the contact. Use a slightly different path to send an SMS. Discover it doesn't get sent. Switch to mail, and send a message.

Meanwhile the recipient gets a missed call, an empty voicemail, eventually gets the SMS, and then receives an email -- in three different apps on their iPhone.

Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.

<comment><USER4> <snark>

In my kitchen I have:

1\. A fridge

2\. A coffee machine

3\. A stove

4\. A microwave

5\. A blender

6\. Mixing bowls

7\. Measuring cups

All I want to do is feed myself. Why on earth do I need to have so many different things to do it?

</snark>

To...most people, having a separate "app" for things that do wildly different things is a _good_. Skype and email fill _completely_ different roles to me, and I suspect they fill completely different roles to other people as well.

You might want to send a message to somebody and not care how, but I _do_ care how.

If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't.

Being able to control this is a good thing.

Did you notice the descention of immediacy in your example of phone->sms->email? You went from the most demanding contact method "stop what you are doing and _talk_ to me!" to the middle "stop what you are doing and read these 160 characters!" to the least "eventually look at this piece of text".

If you didn't care as much about your message, you probably would have done this in a different order.

If something major in my life happened (I'm having a baby! I'm going back to school! I got into YC! Somebody is buying one of my projects!), I would _call_ my best friends to tell them, I wouldn't SMS them.

So would you.

And this is good.

<comment><USER5> > _If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I > know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't._

That should be up to the other end to determine. I should not need to say `SMS wakes me up, email doesn't' when they are fundamentally the same thing. That's an implementation detail.

The right way to do this is for the _other person_ to be able to tell the phone what they want, regardless of protocol: messages from my Nagios system at work, or family members, should awaken me. Anything else should be ignored until morning.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes I _do_ want my friends to wake me up in the middle of the night:

"I'm drunk, I need a ride home."

"Can I stay at your house."

"$emergency"

"Hey, I really just need somebody to talk to..."

etc. etc.

I don't want to have to go through my entire contact list, individually setting people who can and can't wake me up at night. There is already a mechanism for this, it's called "human interaction". My friends know who can and can't wake me up; they know this because they're my friends.

By giving them my phone number, I'm trusting them to respect that, and only wake me up if they need to.

<comment><USER6> I've been wishing there was a layer between my phone and me that said, effectively, "You've reached David's phone - if this is an emergency or he's expecting your call, press 1; otherwise, press 2 to set up an appointment for a later call, or 3 leave a voicemail message." Where 2 would talk to my calendar and ideally their calendar and figure out a time that works for both of us without my involvement. Sure, people could just mash 1, but people always have an option to be rude when there's interpersonal interaction going on, and at least this way they have a way not to be rude while still reaching out to me by phone, and a way to actually get through to me in an emergency.

<comment><USER7> with gvoice, people can leave a voicemail that gets transcripted (vaguely) and texted to me. I glance at the text and decide if I want to call them back or not.

<comment><USER6> I love that capability, but it's not quite everything I want - I do want a way for people to loudly interrupt me in the case of a genuine emergency, but I want them to have to reaffirm that most of the time. The hands-off scheduling would be nice, too. But for what it is, it's rad, to be sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it.

Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message.

<comment><USER9> Any other areas of your life where you throw the baby out with the bath water?

Someone over salt some food so you assume that everything they say or do with food is wrong?

Refuse to ever get a lift with a friend because they forgot to indicate once so obviously they can't be trusted to drive?

I'm not wild about the way he's presented his website but I'm still willing to look at his ideas about e-mail workflow with an open mind.

<comment><USER10> If someone presents himself to me as a professional cook and then proceeds to over-salt the food, yes, I do feel completely comfortable disregarding his culinary opinions from that point forward.

<comment> dorian-graph Where do 'mistakes' fit in in your world?

<comment><USER11> It's hard to accidentally turn all the text of your blog post into jpegs. It reflects a deliberate decision (and in the opinion of people here, a poor one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours.

The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client are: * HTML mail from idiots * Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode (IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for use without network, and ideally to process email more quickly than network access) * Mobile clients -- Android has K9Mail, haven't found anything great on iOS yet. The keyboard-based mail workflow doesn't translate to the tablet/phone form factor, but triggers do even more so, so there should be something there * Handling attachments well * Global directory across organizations (FB/LinkedIn/etc. integration could help a lot) * Multi-user mailboxes; you need some kind of ticketing/tagging/CRM on top of it, and these are all standalone, sometimes web based, and fairly universally suck. There are ways to tie them into plain email though.

<comment><USER13> _I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours._

I comfortably ignore _anyone_ that says "email needs to be fixed" from clients to the underlying system - it's awesome and nothing about it needs to change. People just need to learn to use it better.

I run everything through gmail, but I use my own domain (via an external SMTP server), so if gmail goes _down_ I can just route mail directly to another machine.

I use fetchmail to POP everything off from gmail and I read that in pine. It gets everything regardless of filters, except spam.

My android synchs with gmail (obviously) and using the gmail app I can send as my "real" email address (and this scales obviously so I can send as any of a number of addresses I need to). I make heavy use of filters so I only get relevant stuff on my phone.

My daily ritual is to sit down at pine and scan non-vital email (such as newsletters and mailing lists etc.) that I didn't get on my phone because I filter stuff so heavily, then for each email apply the "GTD" approach of doing anything that can be done immediately, or forwarding it to a Basecamp todo list (using mailmanagr.com) or a Highrise task (depending on whether it's sales related or actual work that I have to do).

This generally takes me less than 30 minutes and is a great triage exercise.

Instead of teaching kids how to code in schools, let's start by teaching them how to use email! We used to learn how to write letters, why aren't we doing advanced email training in schools?

<comment><USER14> Which part of email requires advanced training? The writing - covered by grammar, etc. The thinking - covered by critical thinking.

The spectacularly complex system you have set up to filter your email? That would be worth a semester or so. It's worth it for you, I'm sure, but the average person probably would collapse trying to set that up.

<comment><USER13> _Which part of email requires advanced training?_

Primarily subject line usage and interleaved replies.

 _The spectacularly complex system you have set up to filter your email_

It's basically just GTD on steroids. Basecamp and Highrise are used by millions of non-technical people. Reading email in a text based email client isn't rocket science and, I think, would be a skill on par with learning to communicate with letters. Also gmail filters aren't advanced, and Android is pretty mainstream (as is gmail). The only tricky bits there are using an external SMTP server (made simpler through things like Mailgun, Sendgrid and JangoSMTP) and configuring fetchmail to POP from gmail.

The rest of the components are all very simple and readily available. In my experience people are able to cope with seemingly overwhelming complexity as long as they were instrumental in it's creation and the bits that make up the complex whole are themselves quite simple.

<comment><USER14> I would be interested (in an academic sense) of seeing documentation on the process you've set up and how you tied it together.

I use a far simpler method, akin to a pile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that.

Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the "modern creative workflow" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to "re-invent email" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?

<comment><USER16> Thank you. Outlook 2007 and 2010 have a) flags, b) user-taggable-color-coded categories, c) an extremely usable ToDo bar, and d) Xobni and a million other plugins that attempt to prioritize your incoming mail automatically.

I'm not saying Outlook works for me (it doesn't), but it's annoying that the author pretended Outlook doesn't exist, and essentially proposed his version of Outlook as a solution to the "problem".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Uh, let me see. Attempt nº 5712 to revolutionize the way we use email. Tell me more.

"Mark as read" is useless? I thought nowaday we had "archive", "search" and such from gmail... no mention of that. OK then, let's see what you offer...

"Clutter-free interface", "clean typography" and the mystery option "what you really need"? Are you (f) kidding me? This can't scream "I'm thunderbird but made by graphical designers" any louder.

Oooh Actionsteps! I have NO idea what you are, but you must be "what I really need"! Scroll, scroll, still no idea... Aha! I have Favourites (why didn't I come up with that?), and Actionsteps, which "organize" my stuff. So like, categories, but with a mysterious name.

And, it can handle attachments! What year is this?

Plus facebook etc integration like that's something I'd ever not want to disable.

Attempt nº 5712 archieved.

<comment><USER18> I still maintain we should ignore the "problem" with email and instead focus on making it easier just to share stuff. As it stands, it's always a crap shoot when I send a file to someone as to whether or not they'll actually be able to read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> holy shit just write your web pages in html, not everything needs to be a crazy javascript abomination where the _body text fades in slowly_

<comment><USER20> If it falls back gracefully, why not?

As pointed by others, the site just is a bunch of JPEGs, which is a very bad choice indeed (accessibility, search engine access, speed, etc).

But aesthetics do matter. If done properly, you could just grab the content and use your favority reader with a click of a button in case you desagree with the author's taste.

<comment><USER21> >If it falls back gracefully, why not?

It doesn't. Content doesn't load here on a FF with js disabled (not that i do this normally, disable JS, just tested it because of your comment).

I think it kind of matters in this case. The "mail has to be repaired" is such an overused term, and seldom the people claiming that even try to give reasons for this ruling. Mail is an asynchronic system for letting people send messages (with attachments) and it works really well. If someone fails to see that, claiming something is broken which most probably isn't and is doing that from a technically broken site, it weakens his point even further.

So mentioning the observation isn't totally out of place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking at <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1072027/Screenshots/1z.png>, I find the comment about "perfect spacing and clean typography" almost laughable. I also prefer design that incorporates smart typography to convey importance and structure. His app mockups seem to show an understanding of this, but the site layout in general (especially this section) does not.

(1) why is the "We spend a huge amount of our day..." text in red? (2) why is that text smaller than the previous chunk of text? (3) why is that entire previous chunk of text italicized? (4) how is "Mark as read is useless..." at all related to "Emails aren't just emails anymore"? why are these in the same paragraph? "Mark as read" seems like it should be the beginning of a list of complaints about email, not the supporting sentence for "Emails aren't just emails anymore" -- this just comes off as extremely bad flow of thought, and the typography makes it more confusing. (5) why is the heading for each of the boxes split into all-caps tiny text and no-caps large text? the idea in itself isn't terrible, but the tiny text is too tiny, and the splitting into tiny and large text isn't consistent -- clearly it's meant so that the large text can be read on its own and the tiny text adds to the experience upon closer inspection, and so putting the "and" at the end of the "A clean and" tiny text for the first box makes sense, but then why is the "and" at the beginning of the "and clean typograhpy" large text in the second box?

</comment><comment><USER23> Sparrow is so close to this. All it's lacking is the all-attachments view and the prioritizing, but you can hack the prioritizing easily enough with Gmail labels. Even then, I don't think that's enough, though. I think e-mail nowadays needs to be more of a TODO manager and less about messaging.

<comment><USER24> Agreed, 100%. I saw the screenshot and thought, "Oh, it's Sparrow with some red colors and a new little organization feature. Neat."

Sparrow is literally this exact client design, minus the cute "Actionsteps" or whatever. They could easily add some more color coding to Sparrow and it would fill this need pretty easily (well, that and fix some annoyances, which as is usually the case, is the larger usability problem—simply not being annoying).

More importantly, you're right: e-mail is no longer just communication. Our e-mail clients are how we organize incoming tasks and work. This is why GTD and the like focus so strongly on e-mail, because it's become our primary means of incoming information. Organizing that is the problem, and it does need a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> MS Outlook has had something along these lines for years - they call it something else ("Quick Click" or something) but it allows you at least one- click colorization + task creation. It's not quite like he lays out but it's the basic idea of his "Actionsteps". I don't use it, and I would consider myself an Outlook power user. I have learned techniques that, quite frankly, just work better for me.

<comment><USER26> I use Outlook every day too, but don't really bother with the task tools that are built into it (even if it might (might!) integrate better with my email).

It's too general-purpose. It's like giving me a full toolbox, and the only limit is my mind! I'd rather have a tool that is more purpose-built to handle my needs.

These days I track todo-s in Trello and make sure my Inbox unread count stays at 0. That's it.

The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management, but that's just a nice-to-have. It's not a problem I personally run into very often. I could imagine though if your workflow involved lots of attachments it could be frustrating that they're treated as second-class citizens.

<comment><USER25> I use the heck out of the appts and tasks - appts are "things that I have to physical participate in" (phone call, lunch) and tasks are "reminders". I would not survive long without those. I use Trello but only to manage a small team of tasks.

You said, "The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management" - <USER2> me, the worst part about Outlook is the search functionality. It's just awful IMO. I can deal with the crappy attachment handling/saving/etc but when it takes a week for the "Instant Search" thing to index my 2gb Outlook file, I get pissed haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem is that this approach helps _his_ workflow and it does absolutely nothing for _mine_. I understand what he describes, I just can't relate to it.

</comment><comment> saint-loup The layout of the page (or lack thereof) makes it hard to know what portion you must focus on. The flow is really messy.

<comment><USER28> This was my hangup. My eye was going towards all of the heavy red and black shapes and not the screenshots themselves.

<comment><USER29> Phew, thought I was the only one. Like I was getting old or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Leave email alone. It's doing it's job 95% alright. Just use a reasonable client (e.g. <http://mail.google.com>, Sparrow) and there is really almost nothing to complain about.

The problem is that we are using email for _everything_. Since Facebook, people rarely send pictures to each other anymore. Since Blogging, people rarely send long personal stories to 100 friends. Etc', etc... Slowly and carefully we find the right alternatives to the default, which is email.

If you need task management, use Asana or something. It's really good, and it integrates with email quite well. Also, Trello is excellent as a flexible Kanban board.

It's all about finding and using (rigorously) the right tool. Don't force everything you need in computing into email, and you won't have to reinvent email.

I really doubt email will change at all. Maybe it will die, or be less common. But it will not change.

It's so simple, why change it anyway?

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there anything out there right now that handles email attachments like described in this pitch? I would love the ability to see all the attachments ever sent to me, organized by date/sender/filetype. Or clicking on a contact and seeing all attachments I've shared with that person.

<comment><USER32> The mail client built into the Opera browser has an Attachments filter which allows you to see all messages by attachment type. After that, you can sort the messages by 'From', 'Subject', 'Size', etc. No thumbnails as in his example, though.

As with everything in the Opera mail client, it is all handled through two panes - filtering on the left (Unread, Received, Labels, Attachments, etc.) and the email messages themselves on the right. All email accounts are aggregated together. I've been hugely enamored with its simplicity and elegance for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Many of the facile assumptions designers make about email are wrong.

The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the problem is spam and unimportant emails.

The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week, I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the other party.

Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in my box at any time.

Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally delete an email that I shouldn't.

</comment><comment><USER34> I love this concept.

I'm curious how well this would work for multiple projects, a blend of personal and work email, and high-volume inboxes. Seems like it'd really need some type of labeling in addition to the actionsteps.

Hopefully I get some free time this week, I might look into building some of this. Looks like fun.

<comment><USER35> Labeling would definitely be a key feature set especially if it's heavily integrating with email service providers like gmail. What were you thinking of building it in?

I've been working on something similar in the past year and I'm considering bringing it back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a designer, the OP should know better than to design webpages as a giant <img> tag... It's unreadable on my Retina MBP.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like the idea of creating actions from within your email client. Integration with some project management tools like pivotal or trello would really smooth off this part of my workflow.

<comment><USER38> Both Evolution and Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin has right-click → convert to task. Lots of room for improvement, but it works.

<comment><USER39> Even Outlook has it. Right click, Follow up to create a task; right click, Categorize - to assign category. Out of the box, no plugins required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Immediate thoughts:

From a business perspective, 3 steps like that isn't enough. What I really want is email completely integrated with a CRM/Project management tool & a calendar - I have tried Googl Apps and the whole Email / Tasks / Calendar separation just doesn't work. From what I've seen Exchange comes close, and I believe one of the others (Zimbra?) does too.

The problem with email is everyone uses it differently. The email client that works for my work emails won't work for my personal email account and vice versa.

Minimalist for GMail is nice, it starts to improve by removing clutter: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek) and I wouldn't be without it.

I totally agree about typography - it would make a massive difference. But not just here, everywhere.

Grouping email is another problem - I've tried folders (one per email, not enough), tags/labels (unmanageable). This is symtomatic of our whole digital information management issue - how do we deal with so much flexible information? Hence my need for a CRM/tasks/todo app on top of email.

[Background: I run a small company, it's growing, and managing projects/developers/clients/email is a headache. If you've found a way to reduce the pain, say!]

<comment><USER41> Am working on this. Please leave your email at <https://ronomon.com> and I will let you know when it's ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I take the point about clutter and typography, but the _best_ email client I have ever used is nmh <[http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/>](http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/>), largely because I was able to hack together this kind of work flow effortlessly. I'm always marveling at how modern clients lack the capabilities I have in a piece of software that has changed little since the RAND Corporation put it together decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think it's an interesting UI design and concept and has some strong visual appeal to it. I realize a lot of the concepts in this design have been tried before in one way or another. However, just as important as the design is seeing how if actually feels. I think it certainly looks good in photoshop but the trick is executing in a way that makes it feel "right" too. Any plans for development?

</comment><comment><USER44> If you are into GTD, an email workflow for handling email could be much more flexible. Example when going through your inbox:

1\. Respond to/do anything that can be done in two minutes and archive the email. (It helps if you are maintaining your inbox at zero.)

2\. If it takes longer than a few minutes to do, send it off to your GTD app for processing as an action step, waiting for or something else, and archive the email.

</comment><comment><USER45> Is anyone else seriously disturbed by the layout?

The whole page is a big giant JPEG full of unscalable, unsearchable text.

Google doesn't read .JPEGs. Kiss your SEO goodbye.

I can't zoom into a page like this. When I do, it's pixelated and you've somehow managed to screw up the horizontal scrollbar so I can't even read the text on the left and right sides.

This also makes the site completely unbearable under any screen resolution smaller than 1280x1024.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've been through mail clients for a while now, and I've even written one. The thing I realised is, even when it does exactly what I want I'm still burdened by the fact that for my needs email sucks, so I've managed to move a lot of work stuff to things like Asana for project management, and the email side of it is pretty much for junk and occasional correspondence.

</comment><comment><USER47> Nevermind classic email clients, let's begin with the method the author used to make his point. It's a verbose mish-mash of disjointed text flow and pseudo-infographics. It does not flow well at all.

From what I can tell, you can achieve his vision of an email client by changing preferences in Mountain Lion's Mail.app client, so his vision is here today (well, soon).

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm not going to take design advice from a website that thinks it knows better than I do how wide my browser window should be.

</comment><comment><USER49> Horrible site. The text is served as jpg image. This guy can't get the basics right but it's designing "experiences"....

</comment><comment><USER50> Wow, haven't read such a vaporware article in awhile. The author promises a "I'm going to change 30+ years of email UI/UX" and instead proposes 4 different labels and a workflow that works for him. Yup, you revolutionalized email alright.

</comment><comment><USER51> Looking through the article, I found most of the changes to be superficial, other than 'actionsteps,' which I'm not convinced will solve any problem. Instead of trying to stop mail from becoming a separate to-do list, actionsteps encourages you to keep some to-dos in your mail client and the rest outside of your mail client in a third party app.

Also, I tried the social thing with emails, and what it looks great in theory. However, I really don't get a lot of emails from people I'm friends with on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER52> Postbox does everything he mentioned, and has for quite some time. It might behoove this guy to do some due diligence in the space, or maybe take time to explain how his designs are better than current apps.

Also, while his designs look "nice", they are over-designed and would start looking stale very quickly. When you're building a product that is used on a daily basis, less "design" is more. But I'm sure as a result of this post, he'll find some clients and make some money from it, so good for him.

</comment><comment><USER53> Email nor anything related to core email protocols do not need to be fixed or redesigned. It's doing what it was supposed to be used for and still doing it very well. Over the years desktop and web mail people have added too much and its 70s design idea of anyone can send mail to any other's inbox (btw, creative idea at the time worked till 2000s) have cooperatively decreased its usage.

We still need this universal and mature protocol but we should do a different thing for communication. period.

</comment><comment><USER54> Just going to pimp a startup working out of Sydney called ZeroMail.

zeromail.com is a real product looking to shake up the traditional email client. Best of luck to them!

</comment><comment><USER55> at the risk of sounding like a broken record, when I read the 'actionsteps' section I immediately thought of TSW. <http://www.thesecretweapon.org/>

the idea behind it is is that we don't rely on the inbox for our todo list - which is what we all tend to do! because, email isn't designed as a todo list and neither are any email clients I've used :P

</comment><comment><USER56> The take away here should be, if you're going to spend time redesigning email clients, you should take an equal or greater amount of time laying it out on your website. So much for sharing ideas. When half the comments trash your WordPress template before they even get to the subject, you know it's a tough crowd.

</comment><comment><USER57> This looks almost identical to Sparrow with the exception that Sparrow simply uses a star as an action item.

</comment><comment><USER58> LOL, this looks identical to Sparrow!

<comment><USER59> My exact thoughts when I first saw his screenshots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Please, please, please - for the love of all that is good and grammatical - change "noone" to "no one" as quickly as you can possibly photoshop in mail2.jpeg. This single error tainted your argument (for me, at least) for the rest of the page.

</comment><comment><USER61> Title should be _Redesigning Sparrow_ :)

The design is clearly inspired in Sparrow, which already does the facebook pictures thing, nice typography and all. It's only missing the "action levels" (you can only mark as favorite/important).

</comment><comment><USER62> Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I already have this with my Thunderbird email client, which allows me to assign tags with customizable names and colours and to sort my emails into an arbitrary set of folders.

</comment><comment><USER63> At first I was going to commend the author on being a UI/UX reincarnation of Dieter Rams (I know he isn't dead yet, so that's not quite logical). Then I realize the entire page was all images. Why???

</comment><comment><USER64> Slightly unrelated but your portfolio webpage is absolutely gorgeous!

</comment><comment><USER29> Dont know about any one else, but I couldn't close the window fast enough after the page loaded. It just assaulted my brain. I have no idea why. It literally repelled me. Quite strange.

</comment><comment><USER65> Mail-Pilot is awesome for email as an inbox. Take a look at Mail-Pilot.com and how it has read later, tasks, connections to people, and more. Disclosure that I'm one of their backers.

</comment><comment><USER66> Microsoft (Outlook+Exchange+Lync (formerly Office Communicator))

</comment><comment><USER67> Yeah. So why you didn't earned bilions of dolars on new, great e-mail clients? Maybe it's not what people needs, huh?

</comment><comment><USER68> I feel sorry for the author here. Its very easy to criticise and hard to create. There are a lot of people here trying to tear him down. If you know better - stop sitting around on Hackernews and go make it. If not, then stop whining when someone is trying to do something constructive - or at the very least provide some points you think he can fix and be nice about it, not like a petulant 12-year old...

</comment><comment><USER69> So have you heard of www.mail-pilot.com?

</comment><comment><USER70> There are chrome extensions that solve these functional issues. ActiveInbox and Attachments.me

UI/UX is still up in the air.

</comment><comment><USER71> Have you taken a look at the code? It's disgusting, seriously.

</comment><comment><USER72> GNUS already supports _all_ of the features proposed by this article (including personalized pictures) and it has been around since the early 90s.

edit: s/early 90s/late 80s/

</comment><comment><USER73> to much text for a "disruptive" idea

</comment><comment><USER74> cufon+a lot of jquery and look what happens...

</comment><comment><USER75> Like PostBox only online.</comment>


Pyro 0.2 is released: a deep probabilistic programming language - <AUTHOR> https://forum.pyro.ai/t/pyro-0-2-is-released/180 <comment><USER2> (Site is blank w/o JS.)</comment>


I Want You to Want Me - <AUTHOR> http://therumpus.net/2009/05/i-want-you-to-want-me/

<comment><USER2> This was a beautiful written and very compelling essay. I enjoyed every word of it and thank HN for sharing this with its readers.

I recently experienced a little dust-up online, where a blogger posted my Tweets and Twitter profile in order to retaliate against me (long story). I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear - shut down my Twitter account, remove my photo from my blog, and change my privacy settings on FB.

After a week, that blog post was buried on the second page and the RTs stopped. Suddenly, I felt comforted by a false sense of anonymity again. Back to my old habits, I guess... but perhaps with a temporarily heightened cautiousness in what I share.

</comment><comment><USER3> I loved The Lives of Others, enjoy photography and the smell of skunks, and toy with technology as well. Am I going to wake up as a curly-haired artist some day? That'd be interesting.

All that aside, this is a great article and I Want You to Want Me looks awesome — technically and conceptually. Maybe it'll come to the browser some time.

<comment><USER4> The likelihood of that greatly depends on whether or not your hair is curly now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a very good essay about online privacy and our social relations in the virtual world.

It's written by someone who understands it.

</comment><comment><USER6> we don't nearly have as many of these kinds of posts on HN as I would enjoy seeing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great essay, but I really, really wish the author had some guts and stopped missing opportunities, both online and offline. Even when she finally got some courage at the end, the result was (at best) "awkward."

<comment><USER8> that was one of the points of the essay, though. the intersection between personal space and online, duology of self in a way, the artist as voyeur behind a closed door. breaking those boundaries loses something. and y'know, I'd have been way too scared to talk to him at the first coffee shop incident too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw a really good and somewhat disturbing play by Neil Labute called "The Shape of Things" that you might find of interest to watch (it was made into a movie) if you like this essay.

> In a modern version of Adam's seduction by Eve, The Shape of Things pits > gentle, awkward, overweight Adam against experienced, analytical, amoral > Evelyn, a graduate student in art...The Shape of Things challenges society's > most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love.

<http://us.macmillan.com/theshapeofthings>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things>

</comment><comment><USER10> Great essay; love how the author walks in the shoes of both stalker and stalked, emotionally explores every possible angle, reports back and leaves the conclusion to us. It just went and changed my opinion about "researching" specific people online. I will try to do it a lot less from now on.</comment>


The most advanced jail-break tool. Coming soon to all devices on iOS 13.5 - <AUTHOR> https://unc0ver.dev/ <comment><USER2> Huh haven't jailbroken my iPhones since my iPhone 5 back in 2014. Back then I feel that iOS was severely limited in functionality and jailbreaking allowed for custom solutions to problems Apple wasn't addressing. Since then iOS has seen a plethora of features and I feel there's little reason to jailbreak anymore. Does anyone know if there's any good reason to jailbreak anymore? Any killer functionality that would make it worth it?

<comment><USER3> Run a server on that powerful arm?

<comment><USER4> That can't be cost efficient compared to alternatives can it?

<comment><USER5> 2nd hands with broken glass cost peanuts, as weird as it sounds he may be onto something fun; ie. if you have working mic/speaker/camera you can also bump it to cctv/whatever.

iphone cluster would be fun to see, but probably better with apple tvs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The make or break is whether this one is finally untethered or not. I miss the days when the jailbreak community was abundant both in users and developers. Unfortunately it seems like its days are (have been?) numbered. A shame, because reverse engineering iOS[1] was a hell of a lot of fun.

[1] [https://github.com/GN-OS/Bloard](https://github.com/GN-OS/Bloard)

</comment><comment><USER7> This includes the iPhone Xs and 11 (and presumably all A12 and A13 devices). Was there a new exploit found on these chips? Last I checked only devices with chips older than the A12 were vulnerable to the checkra1n exploit.

<comment><USER8> new exploit:

> using a 0day kernel vulnerability from @Pwn20wnd

[https://twitter.com/unc0verteam/status/1263260302713524225?s...](https://twitter.com/unc0verteam/status/1263260302713524225?s=21)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The baity title and the coming-soonness are two strikes against this submission. Does anyone want to argue in its favor? and if so, what should we change the title to?

<comment><USER10> The actual news here is that an iOS 13.5 kernel 0day is going to be released publicly. The exploit was paid for by a phone case manufacturer.

It isn't a great source, but the original tweet actually has more detail than the website: [https://twitter.com/unc0verTeam/status/1263260302713524225?s...](https://twitter.com/unc0verTeam/status/1263260302713524225?s=20)

Edit: I'd suggest pointing here for context - [https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/20/jailbreak-for-all- ios-13-5-de...](https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/20/jailbreak-for-all- ios-13-5-devices-expected-soon-due-to-new-kernel-exploit/)

<comment><USER9> Doesn't it make sense to wait until it's released?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are iOS exploits becoming more common? Feels like a few years ago they were rare but now they're being released more often.

<comment><USER12> Apparently they are, Zerodium has even stopped accepting new iOS privilege escalation exploits: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_flaws/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_flaws/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Jot – a terminal note taking app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/int3rlop3r/jot <comment><AUTHOR> A terminal-based note taking app I use everyday.</comment>


Underscore vs. lodash - <AUTHOR> http://benmccormick.org/2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/

<comment><USER2> or skip both and use [http://ramdajs.com](http://ramdajs.com)

(I'm not affiliated with the project, I just think it's really good.)

<comment><USER3> lodash v3 ([https://github.com/lodash/lodash/releases/tag/3.0.0](https://github.com/lodash/lodash/releases/tag/3.0.0)) introduced lodash-fp for auto-curried iteratee-first lodash methods.

See [https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash- fp](https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash-fp).</comment></comment>


Wordpress to Jekyll - Everything you need to know about Jekyll - <AUTHOR> http://vitobotta.com/how-to-migrate-from-wordpress-to-jekyll/

<comment><USER2> The only reason I'm still using a dynamic blogging engine instead of a static site is that I want to be able to post new articles to my blog, and edit posted articles, using a web browser. The perfect solution, to me, would be a simple site or service with a management interface just like Blogger's or Tumblr's or Posterous's, but that instead of hosting a dynamic blogging engine, simply has a big _Commit_ button that generates a new static copy of the site and writes it to a specified S3 bucket/commits and pushes it as a git repository/whatever else.

Is anyone working on something like this? If not, would anyone else be interested if I scratched this itch?

<comment><USER3> I'm working on exactly this but specifically for photoblogs. It will be a hosted service that picks up new photos from a Dropbox directory, generates thumbnails, uploads to S3 and creates a draft post based on the EXIF data. I can then use the web-based admin interface to publish the post on S3 which will do all the heavy lifting of actually serving the blog pages.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, thank you very much for your so nice feedbacks! I am really glad since it took quite some time to write, so it's nice to hear people find it useful.

@albedoa, I haven't paginated category pages yet since I don't have that many posts yet, but I think it is possible to do with a plugin that would generate those pages from a custom hash / data set, rather than what Jekyll makes available. I don't know if what I mean is clear but I will look into making an example.

@aw3c2, _any_ web host will be good for Jekyll, since it's just static files that any web server can handle. As long as you are happy with the different workflow, you can switch without any problems. Actually, since your host has PHP you could use it for the contact form, as mentioned in the post.

</comment><comment><USER4> For anyone interested in using Github to host their Jekyll-based site, you don't even have to install Ruby and Jekyll locally -- just "git push" and Github runs Jekyll server-side and hosts the generated HTML on Github. You can then set up CNAME records so that traffic to yourblog.com is served by github.com. All for the low low price of free:

<https://github.com/blog/272-github-pages>

<http://pages.github.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Hugely impressive piece of work. I migrated a Wordpress blog to Jekyll a few years ago and was surprised how nice it was working with a flat file system.

However, things do tend to get a bit slow when you regenerate large sites, especially if you are using the "related posts" feature.

I also found myself endlessly hacking Rakefiles to generate tag clouds, embed twitter etc etc. You should ask yourself what you want from your blog before jumping off into Jekyll.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an incredible and thorough amount of work. The SEO optimization was the next stage of my transition, and I was sort of dreading the research :P Thank you for this. It is invaluable.

I've been looking for an answer to the following question if you have any insight. I have a suspicion that it is not possible without tweaking the code:

[http://groups.google.com/group/jekyll- rb/browse_thread/threa...](http://groups.google.com/group/jekyll- rb/browse_thread/thread/84f628525f50b1ea#)

</comment><comment><USER7> For those who want to have some choice in how they write their source content and have the option of pretty math via eg mathjax, the haskell tool hakyll <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hakyll> is worth checking out.

you get the full power of pandoc and some other awesome tools in the toolchain, such as (if you like) syntax highlighting for __any __language, several different ways of doing templates, a fairly permissive range of input formats coupled with a easy to modify tool for how to take your organizational schema of documents to put together the static site.

It recently had an api rewrite and its become quite nice (i'm in the midst of rewriting my tool chain for its v3 api)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome! I recently moved my blog from wordpress to jekyll and had to figure most of this stuff out on my own. The hacker in me enjoyed it - but it sure would have been nice to have such a good reference at the time!

</comment><comment><USER9> I found Stacey as a nice PHP alternative to Jekyll: <http://staceyapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Thank you for this great reference.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds good but sadly I can only use PHP on my cheap webspace.

<comment><USER12> You run jekyll locally and send your compiled site to your website (I'm assuming since you can use php you can also serve a static website.)

<comment><USER13> If I do that, can my blog still have replies?

<comment><AUTHOR> As I suggest in the article, you can outsource your comments to Disqus, Intense Debate, Facebook or other service.

So you won't need any server side technology and you'll give your users a much better commenting experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Molecular Genetics I (Lecture by Robert Sapolsky) (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o <comment><AUTHOR> An accessible explanation of how genes "work". Came across this when looking up stuff after having read about the novel Corona virus.</comment>


The recurring Facebook privacy hoax - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-30716493 <comment><USER2> The resurgence of the hoax shows that some of our FB friends are gullible and don't understand TOS, copyrights, etc. This is obvious and we probably knew who would fall for it because we used to send Snopes links to them.

I think it also shows a deeper unease with the pervasive and fast moving technology and surveillance in their lives. Rather than learning what rights they have, what protection the law does and does give them and what they might be able to do about it, they're happy to imitate what they see others doing in a cargo cultish sort of way.

I posted a snarky rewrite [1] of the hoax to my FB feed and got predictable responses. First was a predictable 'its a hoax' from someone that stopped reading at the first sentence. A few lulz and one person who wanted to persist in the disbelief "What if the hoax is a hoax?".

[1] [http://pastebin.com/m3nkq98N](http://pastebin.com/m3nkq98N)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is how it should be done, ideally. Facebook and similar services behave unilaterally, changing their agreements at will while keeping them dense and obscure, and intentionally make it impossible to communicate with them. Therefore, it's reasonable and valid to simply type into whatever text input Facebook provides "I hereby alter our agreement in the following way" and this should be considered valid.

<comment><USER4> ...and it's reasonable and valid for them (or in fact either party) to have a blanket "We don't accept your modifications and therefore terminate our agreement."

Your move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't Facebook detect these posts from their keywords and insert a box above or below the post reminding the reader of Facebook's actual copyright terms? Such as:

"We wanted to take a moment to remind you: when you post things like photos to Facebook, we do not own them. Click here to read our full terms and conditions for more information."

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing is - almost everyone lacks any sort of critical thinking skills. You see this everyday with all types of stuff that's why these things spread... Perhaps humans are just bad at critical thinking and skepticism or it is cultural. I'm leaning towards the former.

</comment><comment><USER7> "People think Facebook and Google are sucking up all their personal details so even people who don't have anything to hide get quite worried. "

[https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/you-may-have- not...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/you-may-have-nothing-hide- you-still-have-something-fear)

</comment><comment><USER8> I understand why this keeps recurring, but the part I can't get my head around is how it started. Who was the first person who posted all that fake legalese? As hoaxes go, it doesn't seem funny enough to have been done for the lulz, so somebody actually wrote all that thinking it would work.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a post on this, mainly to give to my friends and explain why posting the status doesn't work.

[http://joshschreuder.me/owning-what-you-do- online/](http://joshschreuder.me/owning-what-you-do-online/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Including this link on HN and a few friends on facebook linking to the same article, I've seen five people talking about this hoax. And zero people actually spreading the hoax.

Is this a hoax hoax?

<comment><USER11> I saw it posted today. Another friend commented, "you know this isn't real, right?". He responded "Meh. It doesn't hurt anything".

<comment><USER12> I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek's story about Niels Bohr having a horseshoe above his door:

"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[0]

[0]-[http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology- st...](http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology-stupid.html)</comment></comment></comment>


The Best Part of Grand Theft Auto V is the Stock-Trading Platform - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/gta-vs-stock-trading-platform.html <comment><USER2> _I...bought...twenty shares of Augury Insurance (which sells auto insurance — a good bet, considering all the cars I 've been wrecking)_

I'd argue the opposite, no? The 100-year-storm of destruction that we, as Player 1, unleash upon the poor Liberty City automotive world would probably make any insurance company run screaming and crying in the opposite direction of profitability.

"We had HOW MANY claims yesterday afternoon??"

:)

<comment> a-priori It doesn't matter to an insurance company how likely car crashes are -- that just determines what the company charges in premiums. All that matters is that the likelihood is well understood and that the company has enough customers to stay solvent.

Insurance companies essentially work by the Law of Large Numbers: that in a large enough number of trials, the average value should approach the expected value. In real world terms, if the chance of a house burning down in a fire is 1 per year per 1000 homes at an average cost of $200k each to repair (totally bogus numbers), then an insurance company can break even by charging a homeowner $200/year to insure the home against fire.

Over a large enough number of homes, that should be reasonably close to the actual amount they have to pay out. Tack on a profit margin, and you have a business model.

 __Edit: __Fixed numbers a bit. Thank goodness I 'm not an actuary.

<comment><USER3> Insurance makes money on float and usually loses money on insuring something over the long term. I can't remember the exact numbers, but GEICO might payout something like 103% (or 3% MORE than you paid them) over the term of your policy with them.

How do they make money? [http://seekingalpha.com/article/419731-buffett-on- insurance-...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/419731-buffett-on-insurance- and-investing-its-about-the-float)

Basically they invest your premiums during the time you are paying them and make money off of holding your money. Then the other insurance agencies might lower their costs and end of paying out 104% (or whatever) of what you've paid in. This competition pressures the market to close the gap between what you can make on the float and what you can charge your customer, but there is going to be some gap and that is the profit margin.

If the insurance company can make a high ROI on the float, they can charge less in insurance rates and still make money.

<comment><USER4> Insurance companies usually lose money on underwriting.

However, GEICO is not a good example, because it is the exception to the rule. GEICO usually makes an underwriting profit -- often a very large underwriting profit.

In fact, all of Berkshire Hathaway's insurance operations make a long-term underwriting profit. Unlike GEICO, the reinsurers do not make a profit every year, because hurricanes and earthquakes are unpredictable. (Whereas car crash statistics change very slowly from year to year.) But averaged out over a long period of time, they make a profit.

This is the secret of Warren Buffett's success as an investor. He is essentially buying stocks on margin, at a _negative interest rate_.

Data collected from Berkshire Hathaway annual reports:

      2012: $680 million profit on $11,578 million float
      2011: $576 million profit on $11,169 million float
      2010: $1,117 milion profit on $10,272 million float
      2009: $649 million profit on $9,613 million float
      2008: $916 million profit on $8,454 million float
      2007: $1,113 million profit on $7,768 million float
      2006: $1,314 million profit on $7,171 million float
      2005: $1,221 million profit on $6,692 million float
      2004: $970 million profit on $5,960 million float
      Not broken out separately prior to 2004

This profitability streak is truly exceptional. As Warren Buffett pointed out in his 2012 letter, State Farm has made an underwriting loss in 8 of the previous 11 years. The insurance industry as a whole has made an underwriting loss in 37 of the previous 45 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The BAWSAQ is by far the most interesting market. The BAWSAQ is an online market driven by the buy and sell orders of all 15M+ players.

Early on, before people started to realize how the market worked, I did some pump-and-dump schemes and made >$400M. That's a lot of money, even in GTA. Now that I have that much money I can drive stocks up or down and milk the market for all I want. GTA isn't just for blue color crime anymore.

I know that a few other players did equally well, I suspect they are doing similar market manipulating schemes.

<comment><USER6> "The BAWSAQ is by far the most interesting market. The BAWSAQ is an online market driven by the buy and sell orders of all 15M+ players."

I'm surprised no Scots have popped up to point out how hilarious that market's name is ;)

<comment><USER7> Care to enlighten the non-Scots?

<comment><USER8> Put on your best Scottish accent and say the name out loud. Think the Sean Connery character on SNL Celebrity Jeopardy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One game that, like GTA, is not focused around making tons of virtual money, but has some neat emergent lessons, is Escape Velocity Nova: [http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/](http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/)

You have a small starfreighter, and one way to make money is by buying goods where they're inexpensive, loading them up in your cargo hold, and flying somewhere where they're expensive to sell them.

Eventually you realize that it makes sense to pay other freighters to help you carry stuff so you can make more per trip---but since they charge a daily rate, at what point is it worth it? And does it make sense to risk it all ('cause, you know, space pirates) putting your life savings into a load of expensive opals which will make you a ton once you arrive, or should you play it safe and stick to inexpensive but barely-profitable foodstuffs? If you've got an appetite for risk, you can carry drugs or illegal biological weapons, both of which will make you a ton of money, but will cause law enforcement to attack if you're scanned.

It's a sort of mini-version of EVE this way, in that it's the only game I've made a spreadsheet for.

<comment><USER10> Isn't Ambrosia the company behind the amazing turn-based RPG series, Exile; with Exile I, II, III, and Blades of Exile being some of the most critically- acclaimed independent RPGs of all-time?

 _edit:_ nope, that would be SpiderWeb, who has apparently renamed the series to "Avernum" (???): [http://www.spidweb.com/](http://www.spidweb.com/)

<comment><USER11> Ah man that Exile series was awesome. Awful, but awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pro tip: wait to do the assassination missions until after you've completed the main storyline. That way you can invest the players' ~25 million in the stocks you are directly affecting and make bank.

You supposedly can also game the market by investing in competing companies (like Cluckin Bell and Burger Shot) and just destroying a bunch of the opposite companies. Then after the drop, reinvest in the opposite as they equalize and come back (or just keep going back and forth). Haven't tried this yet, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> World of Warcraft's Auction House is similarly interesting. It can get really complicated trying to corner the market on different goods, although it's less integral to gameplay over all. It's more like an embedded minigame at times.

One thing I learned in that game is that while one _can_ make a lot of money being the middle man, the real value is from labor (as far as WoW is concerned) -- but grinding for materials can also be monotonous and not so profitable if you don't go about it in the right way.

So, there are lots of addons (Auctioneer being the most popular) to help one track data throughout the market.

<comment><USER14> I remember a simple tactic that I used in the WoW AH to make some money:

1) Buy bulk of item X.

2) Divide item X into single units and post on AH with a markup in the price.

People would then buy it because they would need only 1 or 2 of X instead of 10. It only worked for some items and under the right market conditions, but when it worked, it was a simple way to make money. From this I learned some important lessons:

1) Convenience == profit. This is the basis of a lot of business and industry. Why do people use and pay netflix instead of downloading shows? Convenience. Why do supermarkets exist? Convenience. And this is just a specific form of a more general rule, time == money. If you can save people time (convenience) then they will pay you for that service.

2) It made me appreciate and respect more how difficult this must be in the real world. In the WoW AH, I don't have to worry about things decaying or transportation or other things. But the supermarket down the street with shelves full of food? How do they know how much to buy in bulk and sell in units before the food expires? What do they do if they're wrong? I realized that just managing the inventory at a store could be an interesting computer problem. Models, simulations, even some AI could be used to try to figure out the best decisions. And companies already do this and those that do it well have a massive competitive advantage.

<comment><USER15> Former buyer for Whole Foods Market in the dairy department; arguably the most volatile of all -- Almost any decision I made to order was based on data of last week / last year / seasonal data, etc --

It got pretty instinctual after a while -- Holiday? Better get the baking materials ready! Martha Stewart mention something on her show? Better have 10x available the next day! -- Those scanner guns you see clerks wandering around with from time to time have all that data (well, not the Martha stuff) right there at our finger tips. It even alerted you if something was well out of the norm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had a similar fascination with the stock trading component of the Railroad Tycoon games. I am almost ashamed of the number of times I tried to make myself a virtual fortune by destroying my own virtual railroad company.

<comment><USER17> It was almost always more effective to gobble up debt and then invest the money in productive capability if you were looking to earn a real fortune though.

The balancing act was to not overdo it - depressions was not fun if you were overly indebted.

Shorting the stcok of _competitors_ were always good fun though, but mostly since they were so horribly bad at building which resulted in that it was sometimes a good idea to shorten stock.

Sigh - how I wish for a spiritual successor to Railroad Tycoon 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Emergent gameplay is always fun. For all of the huge space battles between armadas and great train robberies of EVE Online, that MMO supports a flourishing economy of many different roles that one wouldn't expect:

[http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/07/14/eve-evolved- freeform...](http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/07/14/eve-evolved-freeform- professions/)

Makes sense that in a open sandbox crime simulator, players would try to make a killing in the stock market. Too bad you can do insider trading to get involved in white collar crime.

</comment><comment><USER19> What this article fails to mention is the most interesting aspect of the GTAV stock market.

You can buy stock in a company and then accept missions to assassinate a competitors keep employees!

<comment><USER20> One thing you can do that I enjoy is invest in the AuguryInsurance (AUG) then start destroying a ton of cars. It actually causes their stock price to rise.

<comment><USER21> A few issues with this:

1\. My understanding is that this has been widely theorized and fairly well researched, and most people have concluded that there's no relationship.

2\. I don't understand why a rampage would cause the stock price of an insurance company to go up. You could argue that in the long-run, living in a town with regular rampages might encourage people to buy more insurance, but one would think that in the short term all of those payouts would be really bad for the insurance company.

<comment><USER22> Not that I've played the game, just skimming comments but here's a possibility:

although the game focuses on a single character and thus makes the actions of that character carry supreme importance, in the larger context the actual effect isn't that great compared to the average.

However, the media effect in the context of the game would probably be pretty fantastic, in effect creating free marketing for the company.

At least, that's how news media plays into things like that where I am living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Incidentally, there are already a multitude of subreddits which have formed for the express purpose of manipulating the public markets. This is a really interesting interaction, though it's somewhat skewed by the fact that a player can simply revert to a saved game if the stock they've purchased tanks.

<comment><USER23> Do you have a list of a few of the larger ones? I usually glance through /r/grandtheftautov every day or so but this is the first i've heard of subreddits organized for manipulation.

<comment><USER24> Try /r/gtavstocks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The author needs to login to PSN or XBOX live, and create a Rockstar Social account. That unlocks the BAWSAQ market which is based on other players trades.

<comment><USER26> I don't have a Rockstar Social account and I've managed to use the BAWSAQ market, it opens during some of Franklin's assassination side missions given by Lester. It's not under maintenance throughout the entire game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If anyone here wants to play a game about building a business, that includes a better stock market simulation, Capitalism Plus [1] and its sequel [2] are really good.

[1] [http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_plus](http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_plus)

[2] [http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_2](http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_2)

<comment><USER28> They've also released a new standalone expansion for Capitalism 2 called Capitalism Lab [1].

It's a combination of updates to make the game work on modern systems/resolutions and a bevy of new features/usability improvements.

[1] [http://www.capitalismlab.com/index.html](http://www.capitalismlab.com/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Calls to mind "Wall Street Kid," a stock-trading game released on the good ol' NES back in 1990.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Kid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Kid)

The premise of the game was fairly ludicrous: if you could earn a decent return on a $500,000 loan, you stood to inherit a $600 billion (!) family fortune. But the stock market in the game, while randomized, was pretty innovative for its time. (It's been awhile since I've played it, of course, but I vaguely remember that there was _some_ sort of internally consistent logic behind the stock pricing movements that seemed to be randomly seeded at the start of each game).

As far as I can tell, the entire game revolved around getting rich off of stocks, wining and dining an increasingly high-maintenance trophy wife, and making a series of very conspicuous consumptions (a yacht, a penthouse, and even a castle). But the mini game in GTA V seems very similar.

<comment><USER30> Oh I hated this game! I was so bad at it and made no profit in the week I had it rented.

Turns out I did about as well in the real stock market. gg.

The game was really fun though

<comment><USER29> I sucked at it for the longest time, but every now and then, I'd have an incredible run of luck. A 10-year-old Gordon Gekko, I crushed it on Wall Street, bought the boat, the houses, and even the family castle (why I bought the castle from my own family trust, I'm not really sure; in retrospect, I assume it was some sort of complex inheritance-tax-evasion mechanism).

Lots of fun! Unfortunately, I grew up to be considerably less successful and, at least for now, castleless. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ha, one thing I love about GTA is the witty puns they have in there. Krapea, Life Invader, nice.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting. I could see this as the intellectual genesis of an entirely different game. Imagine tying the virtual market to Bitcoins!

One comment on being able to short... Based on how the game is described (I may be the only one the planet not to be an active player) it should be possible to short a stock. Every time you get new money, split the purchases evenly between all stock. (Can do a weighted average if you want) Then when you have information (like you're going to kill the CEO) then you have shares to sell on the bad information. It's not a concentrated bet, but you still can effectively short it.

<comment><USER33> That's not a short, though. You don't profit on the difference between prices, you only get the chance to buy again at a lower price, but not sure if the stock will go back up.

<comment><USER32> Let's oversimplify for the sake of showing the calculation...

There are 4 stocks in the world, A, B, and C, and D, all trading at $25. I invest $100, buying $25 in each.

Now lets say that I know for sure that stock D will go down because I'm going to whack the CEO. So I sell my $25 of D, and put it in A, B and C (A stake of $33.33 in each - let's assume fractional shares are ok.) If Stock D goes to 0, while the others all double. I have a net gain of $100 - $75 from the stocks I already held, but $25 from the new investment, and I've avoided $25 as well.

Let's say you lived in a world where shorting was ok. If instead you invested $25 in A, B and C, and shorted $25 on D, you would gain $75 in A, B and C, and $25 on your short of D. In essence it's the same $100 profit.

Now this only works if A, B and C are also going up.

Let's say that D does move on the event, but A, B and C don't. If you do buy back D after the event, you ultimately are in the same position in both cases. In the shorting case, you have $100 in securities ($75 original, plus $25 of D bought near 0) and in the "sell now buy later" you sell back $25 of A, B and C to buy at the bottom.

Net - you create the effect of shorting.

This falls apart if you want a very concentrated bet, but it's a way that long-only professional money managers who compete against indexes find a way to effectively short.

<comment><USER34> All of your profit in this scenario comes from the market going up, not D going down. That's not a short (or synthetic short) position.

<comment><USER32> The math still holds if you assume buying back after the drop.

Think of it this way - in both cases you're selling today, and buying later. The only difference is the "hold the whole market first" strategy requires more capital. (There are market technical differences too, but for short time periods these aren't as significant)

<comment><USER34> _The only difference is the "hold the whole market first" strategy requires more capital._

That's not the only difference. It's not even the biggest difference. The _major_ difference is that in your scenario you have a big unhedged exposure to the market (your p&l depends on the performance of A,B,C) and in the case of just shorting D you don't (doesn't matter what happens to A,B,C). That's a pretty big difference.

<comment><USER32> Fair enough, though perhaps we're going too deep down the rabbit hole for a video game. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Bill Cosby calls Grand Theft Auto Entrance Exam for Prison [http://nativenotes.net/bill-cosby-calls-grand-theft-auto- ent...](http://nativenotes.net/bill-cosby-calls-grand-theft-auto-entrance- exam-for-prison/)

<comment><USER36> An out of touch older individual slagging on video games? How totally unique and unsurprising. /s</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why so many meat industry lobbyists on HN? - <AUTHOR>

There have been a few topics posted lately on the topic of nutrition.  In some of these, various people have cited the work of researchers such as T. Colin Campbell and Michael Pollan.
In each of these threads, comments citing Campbell's work have been modded down mercilessly (and anonymously), and there have been very few comments articulating reasoned opposing views.
I would guess that it's because this issue is very emotional for people -- it's very hard to believe in something that is broadly rejected by most consumers and the food industry itself.
As a hacker I'm interested in figuring out what is the optimial diet for maximum vitality and longevity.  Both because I am working on an entrepreneurial project along these lines, and also because I find that what I eat impacts my mental state and my ability to write lots of good quality code, etc.
Thoughts?
p.s.  I'd be happy to discuss issues related to nutrition with any skeptics :) <comment><USER2> I haven't seen the comments you mention (nutrition threads bore me) but:

 _As a hacker I'm interested in figuring out what is the optimial diet for maximum vitality and longevity_

As a hacker, I'm interested in the optimal trade-off between effort and reward. My life expectancy is about 78 years of age. I am willing to engage in behaviours that would stop me dying at 50 (eg. I wear my seatbelt) but I am less interested in sweeping and often poorly substantiated claims that would make me live to 80 (eg. live on raw foods).

Also, as a scientist, I find many of the claims made in support of great nutritional benefits dubious and overrated.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Many scientists can't even agree on the health benefits/drawbacks of foods like (cow) milk that we've ingested for centuries/millennium. Every other year for decades it's been called good or bad.

I have no interest in following health fads, until something is conclusive it's far too much energy (and indeed far too expensive) to try to play along. Most have a lifetime of a few months to a few years before they're discovered to be well-nigh worthless.

I'd rather invest time, energy, and money in my projects rather than trying to follow a diet. There's a lot of things to like in vegetarian diets, there's also a lot to like about meat (bacon anyone?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. I was of the same opinion as you until I read The China Study... which is a large scale epidemiological study of nutrition.

I think it's worth reading b/c it could have a fairly drastic impact upon one's health.

And yes, the constant hubbub of opposite ideas is also frustrating. Sadly most of it is (in one way or another) intended to help sell a food product that someone hopes to make money on.

<comment><USER2> Re: the China study (of which all I know is what I just read on Wikipedia).

I don't want to tell you what to believe, but for the record the correct scientific measure for morbidity is "all-cause" mortality. For example, suppose I say to you that eating M&Ms halves your chance of death from liver cancer. Your response should be "What are my overall chances of dying"? For example, while it halves your chance of death from liver cancer, maybe it doubles your chance of death from pancreatic cancer. It is not enough to say that diet X "lowers the instance of Western diseases" - the realy question is, does it genuinely stop you from dying. Of anything.

Once you have shown that an environmental factor is indeed correlated with a reduction in all-cause mortality, then the next thing to do is try to prove causation (since we all know correlation is not causation). For example if you told me that the average life expectancy in China is 100 and in the west it is 70, I would say "so if you parachute a bunch of Westerners in China, would they live to be 100?". It may be that Caucasians, exposed to the "Western Diet" for millenia, are actually well adapted to it.

These are very hard questions to answer to a high level of scientific confidence. I also don't like the implication, as reported in Wikipedia, that if lots of animal protein is bad for you, 0 is bound to be better. Every single substance known to man has a poisonous dose and a safe dose. There's a safe dose for arsenic. The burden of proof to say that 0 of something is meaningfully safest is very high.

I'll give you a well-researched example. Mercury is a neurotoxin. In certain quantities it causes terrible mental decline. There is mercury in fish, mainly in the fish that are high up the food chain (eg. swordfish, marlin, the big tunas etc). So, in the US it is standard to advise pregnant women not to eat fish, so as to avoid exposing the foetus to significant levels of mercury, which from experience with industrial workers can cause low IQ levels and other problems.

You would think that is cut and dry? It turns out that if you go and study Pacific Islander populations where all they eat (three meals, 7 days a week) is fish, then there's nothing wrong with their kids.

Why? I don't know. The point is that even with one single chemical compound and one well-known effect, it is really hard to understand what goes on inside the body. So doing so when you have something as complicated as nutrition on one hand, and longevity on the other, is really _really_ hard to do, and in principle I distrust anybody who claims to have a simple answer.

I mention all this because you seem to have good motives and say you are building a business on this. I suggest you look a bit further than one or two best-seller books before you commit yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suggest you actually read The China Study b/c it addresses your concerns... I think you'll be satisfied with the level of scientific rigor used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well I guess if I call vegans who eat fake steaks "crypto-carnivores", it's fair to call me a "meat industry lobbyist", so I'll bite.

It's not really a burning issue for most people I think. If the XYZ Diet works for you, use it. Trying to persuade other people on a hacker forum doesn't really make sense. The claims of "vitality" and longevity are not provable in any reasonable amount of time (right?), and quickly goes off-topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no interest in persuading people to eat a certain way... I just find it odd that the subject of nutrition does not seem to be one on which people enjoy rational discussion...</comment></comment>


The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City - <AUTHOR> http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-games/2010/05/10/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city/ <comment><USER3> I am truly in awe.

It routinely amazes me the lengths to which many people go to in their chosen domain. Some people choose physics, or medicine. Some people choose Rubiks cubes, train sets, or Sim City.

I find it hard in my day to day life to decide I will work on something for three years to truly and utterly dominate it. Especially something such as Sim City. I would say that I wish this gentleman had worked on curing cancer, or rubinius, or financial modeling, but I am beginning to think that that level of passion is non-transferable, and not something that can be taught or imbued.

Of course, this guy is an architecture major, so maybe we will see that same level of skill, dedication, and attention to detail come out in the real world.

<comment><USER4> "Of course, this guy is an architecture major, so maybe we will see that same level of skill, dedication, and attention to detail come out in the real world."

God help us.

<comment><USER5> I believe that the following quote from the guy himself might indicate that he does not want it copied in real life: "I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The city reminds me of the Caves of Steel from Isaac Asimov. There are no roads in Magnasanti, only hyper efficient subways. The population density is extreme, nearly seven million people piled into such a small area, every building is like a sky scraper from Manhattan. And did anybody else notice how every building is a historical landmark? All utilities are shipped in from neighbors.

This city is precariously hanging on the edge of destruction. I feel something as simple as a Sim moving to a dinner on the other side of town could upset the careful balance of food supply, but yet the city is 'perfect'.

And that is exactly what the game creator wanted. :D

<comment><USER7> Try "The Concentration City" by J.G. Ballard. Fire and brimstone may be a lesser hell.

<comment><USER6> That will be next on my list, I don't read enough anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone explain to those who've never played Sim City before what exactly it is that is so remarkable about the video?

<comment><USER9> He basically found a way to build a more populous city (presumably) than anyone else, ever. He also found a pattern that seems to keep the city crime- free and educated with full employment and no apparent pollution. This would take quite an investment of time without using any cheats.

Obviously the video is pure melodrama though.

<comment><USER10> Well, no. He has a perfectly stable, high-population city, but it has none of those things except crime-free status

"There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle - this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It's a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind- controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time."

edit: I knew I should have refreshed...

<comment><USER11> I don't know how the game works so this may not even be part of it, but it's incredible if such a high density population was able to keep growing for 50,000 years without being constantly devastated by disease and epidemics, despite not having any hospitals.

<comment><USER12> Flush toilets, mosquito control, not coughing on people and washing your hands after pooping are much more important for preventing epidemics.

All a hospital will do is cure a small number of people in a small scale epidemic. But lets face it, if Mangasanti is your goal, you are probably willing to let 20 people die of preventable diseases at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting article, if a little heavy in possible-subtext, and I loved the video from the very first time I saw it.

Favorite quote by the creator:

 _As for The Sims, I enjoyed that too, although sims usually turn insane and die horribly under my hands after a few minutes._

Dx xD

<comment><USER14> my favorite quote: _'If anyone's wondering, I am not autistic, or a savant, nor suffer from OCD, or suffer from any other form of clinical mental disease or illness for that matter.'_

hehe sounds a bit defensive to me ;)

<comment><USER15> Or simple observant of how other people might look at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone please invent a game where people like this can play obsessively, and yet the results are useful?

Can we invent a game, say, where (even if the participants don't realise it) what they produce is a hyper-dense, hyper-efficient CPU? Or RAM? Or parallel architecture?

<comment><USER17> > Can someone please invent a game where people like this can play > obsessively, and yet the results are useful?

In terms of making productive output? Maybe not. But there's plenty of games that'll give you a deeper appreciation of how to think and will help you develop your character. Civilization IV will teach you a lot about how the path of technology generally went, historical buildings and achievements, and is good for thinking about constraints and balancing. Darklands (a DOS game from 1992, can be downloaded for free and run on te emulator Dosbox) is a very hard, very enjoyable game that gives a pretty good idea of the superstitions and beliefs of medieval Germany. It's really, really hard too, you're likely to killed a lot and have to learn how to play.

I thought Planescape: Torment was incredibly well written, as well written as most books, and makes you think on some interesting philosophical questions. Very original sort of game.

I play Conquer Club online a little bit, which is a Risk clone. Lots of math and strategy. Also you get some knowledge of geography playing on the different maps.

I try to make my consumption a little productive when possible - <USER2> books, watching movies, and playing games that teach me things in addition to being enjoyable. So I'm not sure if you could make a game that caused people to produce explicitly, but there are a fair few that you'll teach you things of more or less value.

<comment><USER16> Yes, there are games that genuinely benefit the player. I'd like to see more of them, too. They take a lot of work, and it's hard to make them have very wide appeal, so the benefit to society is genuine, but small.

The idea I'd like to see gain traction is for someone, or several someones, to write a game that may only get a small audience, but to get a truly hardcore audience, and to have the results of the game-play to be the benefit.

To quote Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear: How hard can it be?

<comment><USER18> You're elected.

Let us know what you come up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He is not a "totalitarian Buddhist". The fact the he borrowed the concept of Buddhist Wheel of life doesn't make him "totalitarian". The topic is misleading,inconsiderate, ignorant and offensive.

<comment><USER20> "No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper- efficient police state keeps them in line"

<comment><USER21> I think it is important to realize that he's saying this in the context of a _game_.

Unless you claim that everyone who has ever revelled in magmaflooding a colony of dwarves is literally a racist/totalitarian/sadist...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm confused. Why are macros cheating? A 'hack' that simply saves you time sitting at the keyboard doesn't seem like a cheat, it seems like a wise life- choice. Unless there is a time/skill factor to Sim City. Is there?

</comment><comment><USER23> not _another_ Steve Jobs thread. sheesh!

<comment><USER5> You just made it one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me of the interesting ways the SNES Sim City has been exploited: <http://incise.org/advanced-sim-city-strategies.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> OT, perhaps, but I didn't like the subliminal messaging/subliminal effects in the video, which were totally unnecessary.

Did anyone else notice them?

<comment><USER26> I think that you were supposed to notice them.

<comment><USER25> do you not think it was a bit weird?

BTW: I'm at a bit of a loss as to why my original comment got downvoted so much... would someone care to help me out with explaining what was wrong with what I wrote?

<comment><USER27> Subliminal messaging has largely proven to be a hoax and the downvoting is probably the result of a heavy aversion to pseudoscience most users on this site ostensibly possess.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli>

<comment><USER28> I don't think it's quite that clear cut.

I suspect that product placement in moves is both effective and somewhat subliminal. The real issue is the limits on effect. Flashing messages is not going to get someone to kill some dictator but:

"Subconscious stimuli by single words is well known to be modestly effective in changing human behavior or emotions. This is evident by a pictorial advertisement that portrays four different types of rum.rocks The phrase "U Buy" was embedded somewhere, backwards in the picture. A study was done to test the effectiveness of the alcohol ad. Before the study, participants were able to try to identify any hidden message in the ad, none found any. In the end, the study showed 80% of the subjects unconsciously perceived the backward message, meaning they showed a preference for that particular rum.[2]" (From your link:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli>)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: What does your resume say about you? - <AUTHOR> http://www.trystackup.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN - I'm working on this more as a project than an actual startup, and would love to get feedback. It's similar to other sites that will grade your resume, except that it's tailored specifically for programmers. Right now it only handles resumes in English. Try it out and see if you learn something useful, thanks!</comment>


New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/asia-pacific-sydney-region-open.html <comment><USER2> Looks like about a 30% price premium over EC2 instances in North America. 60% for traffic. Which isn't so bad at all compared with other local options. I think this will become the default hosting choice for a lot of Aussies.

IMO nobody's comparable to the likes of AWS / Linode / Rackspace Cloud in Australia. There are some bigger players, but if you're not at the "several racks" stage, you're usually dealing with 2-3 man shops, or with a retail DSL provider which has a 2-3 man "business hosting" team off on the side. My friend spun a VM up at Australia's second-largest ISP and the customer service people told him they'd fix it within 14 days after it "ran out of space" (it was a "20 gig disk" VM which he'd barely touched).

Did I mention expensive?

Several people are selling white-label VMWare cloud stuff, so I guess you could get a persistent API before today, but in all other regards someone both as accessible and competent as Amazon is a big win for us down here.

EDIT: 30% premium over Eastern US (Virginia) for the standard instance types. 23% for a reserved instance you'll run for a year. Other instance types range from 12% - 30% over Virginia.

<comment><USER3> Rackspace has opened in Australia too though right? They launched it a few months ago.

It's s necessary thing since you can't store any customer-identifying data offshore without explicit permission (see National Privacy Principles).

<comment><USER2> EDIT: Awww.. Rackspace's support chat person tells me they don't do cloud hosting in Australia. The cloud links on rackspace.com.au subtly point to the US site and US pricing. And the only way to get their non-cloud pricing for AU is for a sales rep from the AU office to call me back.

<comment><USER4> They are opening their DC in Sydney in Q1 next year. Cloud servers wont be there at launch but will come "in the months to follow".

I'm looking forward to that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple of interesting points about Sydney's prices:

\- EC2 prices are the same as Singapore and Europe (apart from Spot Instances obviously)

\- EBS prices are the same as Singapore except EBS Snapshots to S3, which are more expensive in Sydney

\- S3 prices are the same as Northern California

\- RDS prices are the same as Europe, Northern California and Singapore

\- Data transfer prices are cheaper than South America but are, on average, more expensive than Singapore and Tokyo. It's strange as some of the tiers are more expensive but some are identical or cheaper.

With the addition of Sydney's new prices to PlanForCloud, we now have over 10K price points from AWS, Rackspace, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine and SoftLayer (login as a guest to try it: <https://my.planforcloud.com/?guest=true>)

</comment><comment><USER6> Definitely great to have this as another local option.

Our preferred onshore hosting provider in recent times has been OrionVM. They are awesome in terms of customer service and raw IO performance, but they don't seem to want to augment their VPS offering with other essential components (eg: backups, DNS, S3-like file storage).

I definitely, for once, don't feel like we're at the end of the earth in terms of "developer love"*

*(I'm looking at you, Stripe).

<comment><USER7> It's a good feeling.

There's also Pin - <https://pin.net.au/> which offers an alternative to Stripe for us in Aus, unfortunately it's still not live but they are saying 'soon'..

<comment><USER8> PIN are in danger of becoming a vapourware joke

<comment><USER9> With what evidence? From what I've heard PIN seems to be doing very well in private beta.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I've heard good things too. It _has_ been a long time since Pin was first announced but I'll bet it's no easy task getting all the legal and financial stuff sorted out, as far as I know they're the only company in Australia attempting this kind of disruption.

As a side note, I sent them an email at around 1.00am on monday and got a response within 10 minutes which was a nice surprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Getting about 80-100ms from Perth to Sydney on a EC2 micro instance.

<comment><USER11> Out of interest, how does that compare with Perth to AWS Singapore? There are direct fibre links in both cases and there's not much in it distance wise.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure about Perth, but from AWS Sydney I'm seeing pings of around 400ms to AWS Singapore.

<comment><AUTHOR> People who understand these things a lot better than I do always tell me that pings aren't a reliable measure of network latency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2012/11/12/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2012/11/12/announcing-the-aws-asia-pacific-sydney-region/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like they failed to negotiate better bandwidth charges with Telstra.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone got an IP they wouldn't mind sharing for ping/route testing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not just sign up for an AWS account and launch a Linux or Windows instance using our Free Usage Tier?

<comment><USER16> This requires a valid credit card however, doesn't it?

<comment><USER17> and an iPhone

<comment><AUTHOR> Credit card, yes. iPhone, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess it's finally 1984 in Australia.

Now they can enforce more totalitarian DRM¹, with less latency!

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

[1] "Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle" [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)

(Don't mind the down-voters, they're just Ministry of Love slaves)</comment>