Ask HN: What projects are you currently working on? - <AUTHOR> A common post, but one I always find a good source of inspiration. Happy Weekend! <comment><USER2> A Donald Trump text to speech web app written in Rust:

[http://jungle.horse](http://jungle.horse)

It needs a lot of work, but the basics are there. It uses unit selection on a large sample database as well as CMU's arpabet and a few other algorithms.

I'm looking to start work on a deep learning approach to improving the quality in January.

I'm going to spend the next month working on an interactive New Years laser display to project on a skyscraper in downtown Atlanta. I have a bunch of videos of some of the older work I did with lasers in undergrad:

[http://lasers.io](http://lasers.io)

I'm rewriting my engine in Rust now and plan to use four projectors to increase the drawing complexity / capability. It'll be interactive / online, so even those that aren't in Atlanta should be able to interact with it.

<comment><USER3> Don't want that Donald Trump simulator to fall into the wrong hands.

[http://jungle.horse/#%7B%22s%22%3A%22hello.%20i%20am%20the%2...](http://jungle.horse/#%7B%22s%22%3A%22hello.%20i%20am%20the%20system%20administrator.%20my%20voice%20is%20my%20passport.%20verify%20me%22%7D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've written an introductory book on Go [http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web- dev-golang-anti-textbook](http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti- textbook), it taught hoe to write a webapp in Go without using a framework.

Earlier, it taught basic html, now I am rewriting the Tasks app, [http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/](http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/), to use the front end framework [http://vuejs.org](http://vuejs.org), using the learning of my experiment, I'm putting together anther series of tutorials, [http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to- vuejs](http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs).

Thid is because I wanted an easy to understand tutorial which doesn't expect the user to have anything more than basic html/css/js knowledge.

edit: links

</comment><comment><USER5> I have several courses on Udemy.com. They sometimes go slightly out of date as frameworks release breaking changes. Right now, I'm just about to upload some updates to my most popular course on React/Redux: [https://www.udemy.com/react- redux/?couponCode=HAOW8983](https://www.udemy.com/react- redux/?couponCode=HAOW8983)

<comment><USER6> This is quite literally the third time in the past 24hrs that while I've been on the internet looking at other things, your course has come up. Must be a sign... buying it now!

<comment><USER6> Just want to say that it's been excellent so far!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm working on a Chrome Extension for YouTube that allows you to seek at any point in a video by a phrase search that matches against the dialogue. It will also allow you to search through the video by image captions. The image captions will be computed for discerning frames of the video using a CNN-RNN model called neuraltalk2. The front end will be very minimal and so this will allow me to get my hands dirty with React + Redux.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm working on Cachet, the open source status page.

It's very much something that I wish I had more time to spend on, so progress is slow at times, but we'll get there :)

[https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.sensorama.org](http://www.sensorama.org) \-- Open Source sensor platform for data science on iOS. I wrote code and did all the design. You get the JSON file of sensor data sampled at 100ms interval (configurable). I get a copy too!. I'm slowly improving it and adding new stuff.

Install: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sensorama/id1159788831?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sensorama/id1159788831?mt=8)

Read code: [https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama- ios](https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-ios) (main repo)

Going to give a talk on it: [https://github.com/wkoszek/talks/tree/master/svmobiledev2016](https://github.com/wkoszek/talks/tree/master/svmobiledev2016)

Opinions would be welcome.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been writing this app that lets teachers group kid together based on their performance on an assessment. The idea is that you'd try putting things together in groups that answered questions differently so that they could talk about it and either reinforce their mental models (or test just how robust they are) by teaching a peer or ridding themselves of misconceptions by having a peer help them out. I wrote a GA in Python a few months ago that would take vectors of answers and would group them together and it worked surprisingly well. Now I'm designing the webapp for teachers to orchestrate the whole thing (LMS integration, seeing groups, etc.). I wrote a prototype in Angular 1.x and now that I understand what I'm trying to accomplish really well, it's become my pet project to learn React as I implement a more robust version of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been working on validating my thought that country music lyrics are all about very similar (and very cliche) topics, and I realized I needed to label all the lyrics I scraped from Genius. Since there are 5000 or so, and I didn't want to have to do all of it myself or rigged with some google doc, I built an app to more easily collect training data. It's generalized to allow for different question types and different documents other than just text as well.

It's also a front in case people want to get in contact for general data scraping or ML needs that I can help with, but the main app is the platform for training data.

I don't have a name for it, which is why it's running with a Heroku url, so suggestions are welcome!

[https://fierce-mountain-21498.herokuapp.com/](https://fierce- mountain-21498.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I got curious about how CPU-intensive it would be to run a server for a game like agar.io or diep.io. In these games there are a lot of circles moving around on a 2D map, and you have to check collisions between them.

First was a naive Python version. Test every circle against every other circle for collision, O(N^2). This way I managed only 200 circles on my playing field. I wanted to see how much faster it would be rewritten in C. That got me to 1500 circles.

Now obviously the way I was checking for collisions is silly, some kind of subdivision of space is required to avoid having to check everything against everything. I split the playing field into a grid, and only test collisions between circles in nearby grid cells. That got me to 3000 circles running in Python.

Next I want to write that in C as well, to see how fast it would go.

<comment><USER12> Look into Axis aligned Bounding Box Tree algorithms

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A Twitter bot called @AmazonArtReview that tries to find funny 1-star reviews of media on Amazon. It's using some crude machine learning and just a fun side project.

Finding humor's tough! I've read some papers on finding humor in reviews, e.g. [https://cs224d.stanford.edu/reports/OliveiraLuke.pdf](https://cs224d.stanford.edu/reports/OliveiraLuke.pdf). That's been helpful. It'd be great if I could use the Yelp review set for finding humor as they did but the humor doesn't translate between data sets. Mostly it's still manual curation, which is ok too.

[https://www.twitter.com/AmazonArtReview](https://www.twitter.com/AmazonArtReview)

<comment><USER14> What about the number of upvotes for 1-star reviews?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, that's a good suggestion. I should start storing and using that info. My hypothesis is that humor is inversely proportional to the number f helpful votes. For example, 0 of 57 helpful is probably funnier than 3 of 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm working on a command line tool that checks Python virtual environments for packages with known security vulnerabilities: [https://github.com/pyupio/safety](https://github.com/pyupio/safety)

</comment><comment><USER16> Rolling my own ergonomic back-up tools atm (implementing incremental, secure backups of MySQL dbs, IMAP Emails and Filesystem) because solutions already exist and I'm a silly person who hates himself and the safety of his data.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am re-analyzing a library of galaxy merger simulations to estimate how much of the sky is covered by debris pulled off during the tidal interactions between the two galaxies. This may have important implications for interpretation of datasets on the growth lifetimes of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. The simulations were created for a different purpose (matching observations of mergers to numerical models), but are well- suited to this sky-covering project. So I'm essentially mining those simulations in a monte-carlo fashion.

</comment><comment><USER18> Self hosted, low footprint system health monitoring for the .NET world. Which actually serves as a good test bed for a couple of open-source projects of mine. One released, one isn't yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> A multithreaded CSV parser which figures out the types of each column. It's part of a larger project, which is basically Excel, but you use SQL since the sheets are put into an actual database. It's useful for when you need to clean up, manipulate, or query spreadsheets.

I know it's probably been done before, but the goal of the project is to familiarize myself with parsers, multithreading, making a C++ project in general, and the newer features of C++11/C++14.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am working on a project (using Julia) to "learn" an efficient representation of scale invariant many-body quantum states from a microscopic Hamiltonian. The particular structure being learned is supposed to be highly efficient both in representational complexity and computational complexity for predicting physical observables. (Work in progress at [https://github.com/sivark/jumera/](https://github.com/sivark/jumera/) )

Also reading/thinking about ideas at the heart of theoretical physics and machine learning. In particular, I've spent the last several months in trying to understand the following two papers in increasing levels of depth

1\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831](https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831)

2\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02406](https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02406)

</comment><comment><USER21> Working for the amazing guys at MozillaVR, preparing our next webVR demo using A-Frame ([http://aframe.io](http://aframe.io)), to be released very soon!

Our previous one was A-Painter, a kind of tilt brush in a browser ([https://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter/](https://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter/)). Having lots of fun doing this stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Snapzu Blog Enhancement Suite: It's essentially a voting community widget that you can embed on your blog to make it a lot more social and engaging. This provides any blog with extra content, extra audience, and additional revenue (with revenue sharing). Right now there are similar widgets out there (Twitter, Pinterest, etc) but most are redundant (showing content that's already on your blog) and not really allowing your audience to participate or engage.

URL: [http://blogenhancement.com](http://blogenhancement.com)

Right now were in pre-launch mode (collecting emails of interested bloggers) and are launching all the listed features in about 35 days. This is an add-on to our core community and discussion platform Snapzu (similar to reddit/HN), which has been around for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER23> A hierarchical 'todo-list'. Aiming to match notepad's ease of use but with a bit more structure and eventual collaborative features. Still _very_ early stage but available here - [https://atlas.denchev.io/](https://atlas.denchev.io/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Been writing iii and extensions for it the past week.

[https://github.com/Foxboron/iii](https://github.com/Foxboron/iii)

[https://github.com/Foxboron/wii](https://github.com/Foxboron/wii)

iii is an reimplementation of ii ([http://tools.suckless.org/ii/](http://tools.suckless.org/ii/)) with TLS support and a few misc features.

Currently adding small tools over it to make an IRC client. The plan is to have iii as the client, wii as the web-protocol-client and then write tii as a terminal app which can either communicate with wii or iii directly.

It's a neat project to learn go and write small simple programs that come together.

The end goal is to also try stream some development and see how that goes. I really enjoy it so far.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm working on an agile/kanban like web app. Similar to Trello, Sprintly, Jira etc. I feel like all of those are lacking something - Trello is trying to be too generic, and Sprintly feels a bit "busy" and not as simple as I think it can be done. JIRA is a whole other story of bloat. I'm mostly doing it to actually get to work on a site that's built using Phoenix and Elixir and so far that's been an absolute blast! Decided to throw some SPA in there as well, as that would give me a clear separation of backend and view logic. So decided to take a look at Vue.js, and that has really blown me away as well. So simple to get started with, and felt productive right away! Really having fun doing this :)

</comment><comment><USER26> About 5 years ago, I had created a bunch of screencasts around OpenGL. I recently (Nov 1st) finally started recording screencasts again.

I'm making super short daily screencasts now called ProgrammingTIL (~1-8 minutes), currently covering React, WebGL, ImmutableJS, Algorithms (CLRS), and Webpack.

So far, I've done ~40 new videos. You can check them out here:

[http://www.youtube.com/iamdavidwparker](http://www.youtube.com/iamdavidwparker)

I'm slowly building out an email list here:

[https://www.programmingtil.com/](https://www.programmingtil.com/)

Eventually, I'd like to sell some full courses for complete projects as well- not just teaching different small things.

Edi: added quantity of videos, grammar.

</comment><comment><USER27> Basic project template for compiling SDL2 projects with related libraries and Lua in C++ on Windows: [https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_mingw32](https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_mingw32)

It's a batch file that creates project directories, calls a makefile that builds the thing, and then copies the dlls to the build path. Ugly, and probably wrong in any number of ways I'm unaware of, but it works. Once i'm happy with this, I'm planning to get some basic games cloned in C++ and Unity, using it to generate projects.

Also cloning HN in Hack, but don't expect to see that anytime soon, since I can't find anywhere to host it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been teaching myself web development and recently completed a project I started on that's a website/jobs board for remote jobs: [https://remotefriendly.work](https://remotefriendly.work).

<comment><USER9> Are the current jobs on your website scraped from somewhere, or are they real customers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm writing a math book for programmers. [https://jeremykun.com/2016/04/25/book-mailing- list/](https://jeremykun.com/2016/04/25/book-mailing-list/)

<comment><USER30> As someone who recently went back and did an extensive review of college math, I got a lot out of your site. I'm looking forward to your book!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A Lua based Digital Signage tool (written in C/Lua) for the Raspberry Pi. And a complete SaaS platform (mostly written in Python) around that tool, so you don't have to understand neither of them and can get everything up and running in 5 minutes. It's commercially used and growing. And a lot of fun. [https://info-beamer.com/pi](https://info-beamer.com/pi) (the tool/standalone program) and [https://info-beamer.com/hosted](https://info-beamer.com/hosted) (the SaaS). Feedback welcome!

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm reworking my first rails project into Elixir-Phoenix & Vue.js app as a learning exercise. It's a video manager for learning resources (Vimcasts etc.). So it "knows" about parsing a number of feeds, and can download from youtube etc. (shell out to youtube-dl). Allows you to comment and export them all to a page (so you can keep track of what you've looked at and learned).

Quite enjoying reworking it, once it's in a usable state I'll be putting it up on Github and posting a link here. I'm sure there's _lots_ I'm getting wrong, but I'm definitely enjoying the process.

<comment><USER25> I really enjoy both Phoenix and Vue.js :)

<comment><USER32> Yes me too. The issue I see ahead is finding work with Phoenix.. I live in a town in New Zealand, and there's no elixir-Phoenix shop that I'm aware of, and I imagine getting remote work without a year or twos production experience won't be easy.

Still, it's fun and I'm looking forward to trying this year's adventofcode.com in elixir :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Designing research grade pH meter. It is using 24 bit ADC, feeds into Teensy microcontroller and all that jazz.

It is always interesting to get some "DIY XYZ project using Arduino" and try to make it into commercial grade product.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been working on BedquiltDB on-and-off for the past year or so: [http://bedquiltdb.github.io/](http://bedquiltdb.github.io/)

I'm also currently working on a web version of Marcus Aurelius "Meditations", mainly because I wanted a way to just randomly show single chapters. [https://github.com/ShaneKilkelly/marc](https://github.com/ShaneKilkelly/marc)

It's been fun so far, especially the process of choosing a freely-available translation, cleaning it up and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm currently writing a book on C# and XML for a publisher as well as working on my new software product Breakneck Install ([http://www.breakneckinstall.com](http://www.breakneckinstall.com)). I'm re- writing the UI in WPF so that it gives a better experience since I'm waiting on my code signing certificate to come through so I don't have to worry about dealing with the installer being flagged

</comment><comment><USER36> Building small app with a friend. It should add some features to Instapaper, Pinboard and Pocket. We are having some trouble with different APIs, but a good thing is that I extracted boilerplate for this kind of things.

[https://github.com/Stanko/react-redux- webpack2-boilerplate](https://github.com/Stanko/react-redux- webpack2-boilerplate) It includes minimal but complete set of features to get React/Redux app going.

I plan to keep it up to date, as a starting point for my personal stuff, as well as our company's projects

</comment><comment><USER37> A platform that allows Instagrammers to sell their photos to brands at a flat price of $10 per image, royalty free!

[https://brandfox.io](https://brandfox.io)

<comment><USER38> Really groovy. How do you market it? I'm considering an intstagram project myself. I'd love to chat.

<comment><USER37> Hey thanks! Still really pre-marketing atm as I'm just putting the finishing touches on it. You can ping me an email at hello[at]brandfox.io if you'd like :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Building [http://ossmetrics.com/](http://ossmetrics.com/) \- Github Analytics and Lead research platform for open-source businesses.

I started working on it in parallel with my OSS business [https://goreplay.org](https://goreplay.org) because Github literally does not give you any KPI's. The number of stars, won't tell you anything.

There is so many data generated by open source projects, and if used properly it can give you a huge bonus.

Did not launch yet, but some cool stuff coming soon :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working on and off on a HTML5 and JavaScript encrypted chat application called Quiet Message. I use the result of a Diffie-Hellman exchange to transmit a key that is used to encrypt messages by the client. It's intended use case is to provide privacy on corporate networks with HTTPS man the middle devices. It's still very basic and messy but I'm slowly making progress.

[https://qtmsg.io/login/hacker-news](https://qtmsg.io/login/hacker-news)

</comment><comment><USER40> A management game for arpgs. I don't like spending 8+ hours on a build only to have it die to something stupid in hardcore, so I'm trying to condense the experience into 15 to 20 minutes.

The core gameplay loop is making choices for your build and the ai playing out a few missions/maps at faster than human speed. After the ai's done, you make some more choices with the new loot and experience.

Basically, Football Manager for Path of Exile.

Right now I've got the combat system, DamageMods, StatMods, and status effects.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm learning Japanese and wasn't happy with Anki's interface (+ I wanted to learn about Spaced Repetition), so I decided to do Anchor: [http://francisco.io/japanese/](http://francisco.io/japanese/)

Now I'm cleaning it up a bit to allow to easily switch from courses and considering making it into an app. I also want to make a couple of tweaks to the SR algorithm, but it works great already for my needs.

<comment><USER42> That's pretty slick! I still haven't found an SR tool that I can stand to work with, but that's clean enough it might do the trick.

<comment><USER41> Hey thanks! If you're still reading this, I just soft-launched (I will get an email but I plan on automate it) a way to add new datasets

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm writing a small gravity simulator (to simulate planetary bodies). I use it as a fun way to learn Typescript.

[https://test.marache.net/projects/gravity/index.html](https://test.marache.net/projects/gravity/index.html)

[https://github.com/Blizarre/gravity](https://github.com/Blizarre/gravity)

</comment><comment><USER44> [https://hackclub.com](https://hackclub.com) \- High school coding clubs

When I was in high school I started a coding club because I really really wanted the environment and culture I found on Hacker News, but in person.

That club had such a profound effect on me, I wanted to make it easier for other high schoolers to create communities of hackers. Hence, I started working on Hack Club :-).

</comment><comment><USER45> I've been working on a 2D Physics Engine for the folks at Khan Academy to use. It's also a great way for me to learn programming and physics at the same time ^.^

[https://www.khanacademy.org/computer- programming/papercut-2d...](https://www.khanacademy.org/computer- programming/papercut-2d-physics-engine/5612588161368064)

</comment><comment><USER46> I am making a weight tracking application based off of the hacker's diet[0] using Flask and Pygal. I haven't worked on it in a few days because of school and all, but since I just learned how to process forms, I'll finish it off this weekend.

[0] [https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/)

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm building [https://bandgap.io](https://bandgap.io), which is a platform for computational solid state physics. It computes band structure, Fermi surfaces, and someday, I hope, we can get to computing topological properties. It's done in Django for the backend, Three.js for the visualization, and C++ for the compute.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on improving my server-side JavaScript - Node/Express etc and basically taking a break from client-side frameworks, React/Angular etc. I miss the simplicity of just building a server-side website.

Anyway, I made a little job board [https://wehire.io/](https://wehire.io/) Nothing fancy, but fun to build.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm building a robot. Since I've never actually done any hardware work, I'm finding it a mind-expanding experience.

</comment><comment><USER48> I am working on a Universal Banking app called NuBank. It was previously called giveapenny at [http://www.giveapenny.co](http://www.giveapenny.co).

Right now I am in closed beta working on some on cleaning up the interface and also planning on giveapenny.co business app that will help business bank more easily.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wanted to make some project in Go for a long time. Finally decided to create a 12 factor log router - [https://github.com/agnivade/funnel](https://github.com/agnivade/funnel). Progress has been going good and learnt a LOT of stuff along the way. Its been fun !

</comment><comment><USER50> I've been working on [http://www.indeals.co.uk](http://www.indeals.co.uk) for a couple of years now, a side project that lists food & drink deals for independent venues in 3 cities. We're UK only at the moment but want to keep on growing to cover more places soon!

</comment><comment><USER51> Got my programming friends doing codewars.com problems, and hacked together a Whatsapp bot that keeps letting the group know everytime someone solves a problem, if someone solves the current problem, and let them know when everyone has solved the current and what is the next one. It's fun! :)

<comment><USER52> Just out of curiosity, how did you create whatsapp bot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Created this recently: [https://github.com/adtac/climate](https://github.com/adtac/climate)

Climate provides a huge number of command line options for developers to automate their Linux system. Learnt a lot about shell script and various unix tools.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm making a widget engine using angular material [https://github.com/rajeshvaya/angular-material-widget- engine](https://github.com/rajeshvaya/angular-material-widget-engine)

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm currently working on a real time path tracer for games.

It's pretty neat what a simulation of physically-based lighting enables you to do in terms of lighting and visual phenomena. Needs fast hardware but we're getting there!

It's implemented in Vulkan and Rust.

<comment><USER2> Awesome that you're doing this in Rust! How's your experience been? (Would you be able to write a blog post about it later?)

I'm very interested in seeing how Rust evolves as a video game design language. It's certainly shaping up as a language for building servers.

<comment><USER55> Yes, I'm planning to do a series of blog posts about it. In general, Rust is shaping up to be a great language for video games. There are some things that are known problems and that are hard to work with (such as recursive self- referencing data structures) but those are corner cases.

There general tooling of Rust is really nice. Much less so about Vulkan: It has a very limited compiler ecosystem with few optimizers and in general programming GLSL shaders in Vulkan is error prone, hard to debug and you'll be doing a lot of manual loop unrolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> In my personal time I'm building a nice way to have all my "watch later" videos on youtube in one list, for fast access. At work I am building a react native application that does video streaming. Both nice and challenging. :)

</comment><comment><USER57> Going back through history and trying to 'spice it up'. Wars take longer, bigger death counts, longer rail travel rides, Waterloo with dragons, etc. It's fun, if only to read history and then see how to turn it up to 11.

</comment><comment><USER58> Too far out for a forecast? Get average weather data in one search: [http://www.averageweather.io](http://www.averageweather.io)

</comment><comment><USER59> Not really working on, but just did this yesterday : [http://canyoumakeanappfor.me](http://canyoumakeanappfor.me) , to reply those startup guy who keep bugging me

</comment><comment><USER60> Something simple that I can work on when I have 20 minutes here or there: an argv parser.

[https://github.com/sailormoon/flags](https://github.com/sailormoon/flags)

</comment><comment><USER61> Java Task Parallel project: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacse](http://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacse) Android Task Parallel project: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacand](http://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacand) Java Data Parallel project: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacdse](http://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacdse) Java Reactive Stream Builder project: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacrse/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/tymeacrse/)

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm open sourcing one small component from one webapp we have: the pull to refresh feature. It is vanilla javascript, super light and fast, and it won't require you to modify the markup.

</comment><comment><USER63> Tech/Finance news aggregator. Still a work in progress. [https://quantumsheep.herokuapp.com/](https://quantumsheep.herokuapp.com/)

<comment><USER64> is this open source? I'm working on a similar project but aggregating bloomberg

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Building JobRudder [1], an app to help anyone prove they deserve a job, raise or promotion.

[1] [https://jobrudder.com](https://jobrudder.com)

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm improving my blog in Elixir/Phoenix [https://playforitsownsake.com](https://playforitsownsake.com)

</comment><comment><USER67> MetaWeather - a weather forecast aggregator. [https://www.metaweather.com](https://www.metaweather.com)

</comment><comment><USER68> [https://harf.io](https://harf.io) Harf Videochat

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm working on a GitLab CI tutorial. :)

<comment><USER70> Nice!

<comment><USER69> Thanks! I appreciate your encouragement. =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Working on a Software Modem using AFSK written in Python. Delving into DSP for fun and giggles!

<comment><USER72> Have you seen _iaxmodem_? I ran a 30-line digital fax system on it years ago and it worked really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Investment comparison tool

[https://senzu.io](https://senzu.io)

</comment><comment><USER74> Parsing horse racing PDFs with Java.

<comment><USER75> Link? I'm working on a new PDF reader that can reflow text and maintain beautiful fonts and graphics from the original</comment></comment>


Tsunebaro Makaguchi – Education Through Interest - <AUTHOR> https://www.tmakiguchi.org/geographer/asgeographer/geographyhuman.html <comment><USER2> I went to Soka University of America ([https://www.soka.edu/](https://www.soka.edu/)), which was founded based on Makiguchi's principles of value creation. It's a liberal arts private college that was founded on the Buddhist principles of respecting the dignity of life.

Very cool to see this posted here.

I'd love to know who you are! Contact me: rememberlenny at gmail!

<comment><USER3> Equally very cool to see someone who went to SUA on HN. Fascinated by Makiguchi's principles and it's definitely play a part in our startup's values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The name is butchered (I thought it sounded psuedo Japanese). Please correct the title. The correct spelling:

Tsunesaburo Makiguchi

<comment><AUTHOR> Eeek...sorry.</comment></comment>


The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/mobile-apps-will-disappear-soon-4b4e54f46eb8 <comment><USER3> This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store.

The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying.

Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread, so any heavy lifting is serverside, which means latency in anything other then decent bandwidth areas (so no travelling for you....)

Secondly, and possibly most importantly, the GUI language of the native OS doesn't exist, which means everyone re-designs every thing, making things much much harder for end users, old people and hard of sight.

Consolidation has a point, but I suspect its the OS that will provide these apps/function.

The data I have seen from the old company was this: people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged than the people who used our uber mobile friendly and fast news site. Apps can be faster, handle offline/near offline far better.

Apps are here to stay, until mobile web changes from a inefficient presentation layer to something more like a windowing toolkit.

<comment><USER4> Sorry to say but from my perspective you seem to live in a bubble as well, to use your words.

What apps do is add eas of install (app store), and usability (cache, use device sensors, do some offline tasks)

For a webapp the installation is "Add to homescreen" on a webpage. It then behaves like a native app, no address bar. Usability is tackled by modern browsers that allow webapps started like this to: \- cache the entire webapp, and some/all data it requests. \- run webworkers in background, (get push notifications, etc) \- provide sensor access via APIs, (camera, etc) And to conclude, todays webapps respond FAST. They do everything the same way a native app does.

Ofcourse if your webapp does video transcoding or uses some specific OS feature it might profit from being native. But even then, its unbelievable easy to wrap your webapp in a shell that adds these functionality.

How do you think FB and other popular content consuming apps work nowadays? You are basically looking at webapps rendered in a shell that provides the _few_ APIs a browser doesnt yet have, like share button and contact/calendar integration, to get/set data specific to/on your device.

<comment><USER5> Almost nothing you said here is true. Add to homescreen is a horrid broken mess on iOS, caching is broken/bugging as hell on chrome and safari, webworkers are really horrid battery drains and again don't work on iOS. Wrapping a native HTML5 mixed with native code results in a buggy, spaghetti code mess of an app.

Also literally NONE of the biggest most popular apps are HTML5/native. FB, Twitter, Uber, etc... are all native apps.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Apple is good at keeping their web stack good enough for "regular" web browsing but not feature full enough to compete with their native toolkits. And of course, doesn't allow alternative implementations of the web stack on their platform...

<comment><USER7> That will be irrelevant in 7 years (time horizon in the article) since Apples's device share will continue to dwindle relative to Android. It will be the same as the historical OSX/Windows ratio. They already signaled that by focusing on pushing up the price per phone versus the number of phones as their stock price driver.

<comment><USER8> Arguing "market share" as a headcount instead of, say, disposable income share or % of mobile spend, is like arguing the 1% is irrelevant because they're only 1 in 100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Basically every flashlight app on Google Play contains adware or malware and wants non-negotiable (thanks, Google) access to my contact list and files and network. Same with many task managers and qr code scanners and other random little apps and utilities.

Fuck that. I'll install Uber and an IM client or two, but that's it. No more "that looks like it might be cool" apps for me. I've said this before - <USER2> app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000.

I don't know what the story is in Apple-land, but Google did this to themselves, and they deserve the oncoming fallout. Google Play has been a neglected disaster for years.

<comment><USER10> > I don't know what the story is in Apple-land

The walled garden is great and protects my privacy.

<comment><USER11> Please mark sarcasm at least with a ";)" otherwise many people might think you mean what you say becaise they don't know that it's a ridiculous idea that a big corp will come and protect each users privacy.

<comment><USER12> Google's business model, in broad strokes, is selling user data to advertisers.

Apple's business model, in broad strokes, is charging consumers premium prices for hardware.

As long as Apple thinks the market values user privacy, they are economically incentivized to provide privacy- and security-focused software features that get people to buy their hardware over Android equivalents.

Is that an irontight guarantee? Of course not. Is it a (current) alignment of incentives that means Apple is categorically more likely to protect privacy than e.g. Google? Absolutely. That's also played out so far in practice, between things like app security sandboxing and Apple's historical unwillingness to help law enforcement decrypt encrypted backups — see e.g. the San Bernardino shooter case.

<comment><USER13> More accurate description, with fewer words:

Google's business model, in broad strokes, is selling advertisement space.

Apple's business model, in broad strokes, is selling hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been around for some time and have not proven compelling.

Points 1 & 2 were invariants from the start. On the contrary, excellent and fast on device search has enabled me to keep hundreds of apps, as long as I remember their names or keywords. I have always argued that pure information is better served as a single page website, and I have always told my clients so.

Point 3 is interesting, but at some point the OS vendors will take steps against that to maintain control. I also cannot see how shipping an app in WeChat is fundamentally different from shipping it on the App Store, bare technical details like programming language.

Point 4 is the one-sided observation of the centralize-decentralize circle that is happening in all ecosystems. Once FAANG have purchased all the startups and apps, people will crave for new ones. Governments will even incentivize that.

I think the only thing that can kill on-device apps in the next years is PWAs with WASM and friends (IF a central market place for PWAs develops). But Apple and Google will have it let that actively happen; and development paradigms might not even change that much, with Swift/Kotlin to WASM compilers in the works.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have two points on this.

1\. The end has been here for some of us. But only for the apps the author is talking about. And these apps are the whitelabeled generic restaurant menu apps. If an "app" like that is not useful, who cares about it. If I need to order from that restaurant, why not just use the ordering app that includes that restaurant?

2\. He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max 30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying. I don't agree. We might have 100 and use 30. But I bet I have and use a different 100 and 30 than you, and you from the person next to you. That doesn't mean the apps are dying. That means there is diversity and choice. To me that's a plus for the platform. Of course we can get to extremes, but I don't think apps are on the way out.

In conclusion, I felt the post was "controversial" just for the sake of it.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but these metrics web is dead already. I mean there are billions of the websites and I only have five in my favorites.

The apps are dying and the year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner. (I wonder what's the ration of Linux desktops in use vs. Android phones in use, which are running Linux after all).

<comment><USER17> I always find ironically that these type of articles mention how hard apps are to find and monetize and we should all go Web, as if the Web was wasn't that in an even bigger scale.

Even PWAs and WebAssembly adoption means that the Web stack is getting more app-like and less hypertext documents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Poor Lance Ng. He has an article with a lot of attention, but it's this silly piece.

BTW, no one needs to read the article, but if you're here I guess it's probably too late.

He's actually arguing with his six-years-in-the-past self, who thought people wanted lots and lots of pointless shovelware apps. He's now realized this isn't the case, but has swung too far the other way and now sees no reason for apps. I think most people realized all along apps weren't good for everything. That doesn't mean they aren't great for some things.

My favorite part is where one of his reasons the end is near is that people only have 100 or so apps on their phone and only use ~30 regularly. Right. Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

</comment><comment><USER19> You know what rocks, and which doesn't get nearly as much attention these days, vis a vis mobile app development?

Using a single game engine for real business apps, and then shipping those apps on every platform the game engine supports.

Sure, you maybe have to do a bit more work to get a data entry field up on the screen - but you only have to do it once and you've got the same, consistent, agreeable (assuming you design it right) interface across all supported platforms.

This isn't the same as using browser-based frameworks to accomplish the same thing. What I mean is, a game engine that provides equal access to the rendering and input event pipeline across the board.

Its the native-framework dance that is killing mobile apps. The time spent grok'ing one Android SDK release, only to have to do it all over again just to keep your app current and constant on the platform. To a lesser degree its the same with iOS.

But, if you take sufficient responsibility for the engine such that you're really targeting GLES and an event queue, you can produce amazing apps that run everywhere.

This is the promise that needs to be fulfilled going forward. We don't need more apps that just look the same, yet take up infinite resources and attention just to stay in place. With a game-engine approach, app developers can actually differentiate themselves again - and the good ones, the really good ones, produce really good apps.

Think about this some time: the most-shipped, most-used apps on any of the mobile platforms are those that, pretty much, eschew tight integration with the vendor-provided frameworks and instead bring their own to the party. This will get traction as more and more devs start to understand just how far you can take your modern engine these days .. and those engines are becoming their own OS in their own right, anyway ...

<comment><USER20> Unity is a very good tool for this.

<comment><USER21> How much of unity's runtime is optional? Bundling an entire game engine in every app install sounds heavy

<comment><USER20> Well, you can just use Unity's 2d engine if you want to make a flat application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For years I haven't installed any apps but the absolute minimum. I don't have an app for news, Facebook, Amazon, airlines, this, that, because of all the reasons mentioned in the article. I read news on the mobile optimised websites, I retrieve my flight ticket as a PDF in my inbox, I never like to shop from my phone anyway (best done on a desktop when having a mental break at work) and don't think Facebook offers anything that requires my attention more than maybe once a couple weeks.

<comment><USER23> Completely agree. I do the same thing and even uninstall or deactivate unecessary apps installed by default. As a result I have less app than my phone can display on a single page of the app drawer even with good sized icons, which is actually very convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto _platforms_ such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for the sub-apps.

Eventually these platforms will bloat and bloat until they basically become their own operating system.... then _tada_ we're back at the beginning...

<comment> EZ-E > So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms > such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new > requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for > the sub-apps.

This is actually happening in China to some extent.

I'm blown away that Apple and Google actually approves apps that run a mini-OS inside them like WeChat/Alipay. I initially thought they would have rules to kick these apps off their store. These mega-apps are able to run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control from Apple/Google, the loss of control on their end is maddening.

Google and Apple have no control over whether WeChat mini-apps respect their respective App Store rules and guidelines for example. Also, WeChat got so big that I wonder if they would even ban it from the app store if transgressions are found. WeChat literally took control away from them.

Example : people install WeChat, from there install mini-apps that aren't controlled by Google/Apple, and even can pay though third party apps : Google/Apple don't get a piece of the cake like they would if you used their IAP system.

<comment><USER24> It is amazing how they are allowed to run these apps through the Play Store. I remember a few years ago Google removed thousands of alternative "app store" apps for the Play Store... Not sure how these are different...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Too many apps slow down your phone. They take up memory space, run > background processes, and constantly check for push notifications even when > not in use.

This is provably false on iOS, yeah? iOS's backgrounding model means apps that aren't actively doing work don't "take up memory space". Apps that you never open are quickly throttled from all forms of background processing on a pretty aggressive timescale (I know this firsthand, it's been a major pain for one or two specific apps I've worked on). Push notifications are, as the name implies, a push service rather than a pull/polling service.

Unused apps _do_ take up storage space, but iOS 11 and newer automatically silently delete apps you don't use, keeping the user's data and the app icon around for when you open it again. In the settings UI where you can disable it, this is explicitly framed as only saving you storage space, rather than having performance benefits.

<comment><USER25> Most users aren't on iOS, but even the ones that are probably have the _perception_ that apps do stuff in the background that drains battery.

<comment><USER26> I've seen probably most of my iOS friends open the app switcher and kill every single app after they're done showing me something. It's not worth it to try to explain it to anyone because it's such an ingrained muscle memory now.

<comment><USER27> My coworker, who is an iOS Developer, does this fully understanding it's counterproductive. He just doesn't want to see any apps in the app switcher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _The idea was to make it easy for individuals and small businesses to create > their own personal apps for social or marketing purposes._

> _The vision was that, one day, every legal entity (human beings and > companies) would have its own mobile app. These apps would be dotted all > over the internet, like physical properties on a map. Unfortunately, it > didn't happen._

Er, thank $deity that didn't happen. This is a vision that exemplifies the sales-level delusions I've seen some times, of the "we'll sell lots of useless shit and make boatloads of money" kind. It doesn't stop to consider that apps need to provide value _to the users_ , and the technology context of a smartphone puts constraints on what form that value can take. Gross. I'm happy I've never heard of this vision in the past, as I wouldn't be nice to the people preaching it.

</comment><comment><USER29> To be honest, I wouldn't like mobile going the html/js way at all. Html/js has moved to desktop with electron and the results aren't that great. They take up huge amounts of memory ( gmail web on chrome takes up 500mb of ram on my machine, also slack is a noteworthy mention). Native desktop apps take up a fraction of that memory. For the sake of accessibility we have significantly sacrificed performance. I can't wait for webassembly to be widely adopted so that the browser can move away from html/js. Google has a nifty tool called ArcWelder which allows android apps to run in chrome. Apple has already announced support for running iOS apps on Mac. I actually believe that the reverse will happen and for more popular apps like fb, gmail etc people will move back to using native , less memory hogging applications once they are out.

<comment><USER30> Never mind Electron. Soon it will become normal to install web apps on desktop, directly from the browser—it will be basically a website rendered in a separate window without any browser UI. That system will not have Electron's memory problems.

<comment><USER29> Memory problems aren't inherent to electron, they are inherent to html/js apps and you can also see that in chrome by opening up your task manager. Even small websites with minimal content end up taking 100+mb in memory. It has always been possible to install web apps from browser, chrome has supported it since a number of years but they haven't caught on as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _" The vision was that, one day, every legal entity would have its own mobile app."_

Yes, that was a classic bad idea. There were magazine apps which simply contained JPEG files of all the pages. In both orientations, even. That was both unnecessary [1] and annoying [2].

The successful apps are now all from the big players. We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1367/](https://xkcd.com/1367/) [2] [https://xkcd.com/1174/](https://xkcd.com/1174/)

<comment><USER32> > We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era.

I think you've summarized the heart of the article here and I totally agree with you.

When OP says "the end is near" I think we can interpret it to mean that it's the end of the big growth era, the end of the era where that technology and demand for expertise in that technology _dominates_ other technologies, the end of the era where new companies and their technologists are wise to invest their time in apps and learning apps.

The vast majority of apps (esp. android) make too little money to justify the expense required to create and maintain. They're not profit centers. They're loss centers.

</comment></comment><comment> EZ-E I only agree with the third point the author makes

> Smaller apps will become part of social media and mobile wallet ecosystems.

I find actually unbelievable that Apple and Google didn't crack down on it yet as it takes considerable control away from them. Through iOS's WeChat for example, I can install and run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control or review scrutinity away from Apple. Not to mention about how all payements are processed thru these mega-apps, fully bypassing the in-app purchase system.

Could Apple even ban some of these big offending Mega-Apps like WeChat at this point? Probably not, as that would cripple their marketshare in China. So meanwhile they effectively host a third party app store competitor... in their app store.

<comment><USER25> WeChat in China is more important than Facebook is in the US. That's why they get away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The question isn't solely about tech, but how the mobile OS' wrap and deliver the experience. Even with attempts like progressible web apps, we still have the same approach and behavior to navigate on our mobile home, a central place to launch a specific problem-solver. I don't think that we are going to change this, but develop the pattern above this concept. That is what we already see with the evolution of iOS on iPad or Chrome OS. Apple and Google respectively could be inspired by different analogies, but instead, they are doubling down on the new conceived standard brought the mobile phone.

</comment><comment><USER34> This was obvious 10 years ago, so why have mobile apps been successful? What has changed?

<comment><USER35> Awareness?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is shortsighted to me. Is it the end of mobile apps? No of course not, webapps are gaining features of native apps and will run more like a native app. The real difference will be the app delivery method. Is it the web or an App Store. An App is an App, if it's written in Dart, Js, Swift, and C++ it doesn't matter it's still an app experience. That experience is fundamentally better than the web page and still has all the downsides of an app also. How we deliver the app experience may change but I don't think it will. Is there are difference for th emend user if they have 100+ shortcuts vs 100+ apps from the App Store? What we are seeing is a competive market where you have to offer real value to attract users. No much different than the current indie game market. It's completely overwhelmed with numbers of options and users are sticking with the top level of apps/games. Maybe the delivery of apps changes but honestly I doubt that as discovery is much better in the App Store.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Chances are, if you take away the manufacturer's pre-installed apps that you > can't delete, you have, at most, 100 apps.

I don't see how this can be the first point in arguing that the end of mobile apps is near. Imagine saying, "The end of desktop apps are near, people will only put up with 100 third-party apps on their computers these days!"

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm convinced that mobile devices are useless for anything but the most trivial usages. Just last night I sat and watched my mother-in-law flail for the better part of two hours trying to look up and then purchase some replacement filters for her vacuum cleaner. What should have been relatively simple on a real computer was torturous on a smartphone. Between the tiny display, awful on-screen keyboard that is flaky and obscures most of what you are looking at, clunky apps and busted mobile websites, it's just a rage- inducing disaster.

Not to mention that if you are not on absolutely perfect WiFi, everything is so slow and janky to load. It's just not acceptable that the bar is so low for usability; I'm convinced that we've gone backwards to a significant degree, and I'd much rather go back to the web that we had in 2008 than the one we have in 2018.

<comment><USER37> These kinds of apps is exactly what the linked article is arguing against. However, if a mobile app has worse usability than desktop then the company failed to redesign their product experience for mobile. That or, their product is simply not meant to be used on small screens at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What the author doesn't mention is that apps have become increasingly easier to write as time has gone on. Not only do we have better native languages that you can write apps with (Swift and Kotlin) but we have incredible cross- platform tools as well in the forms of Xamarin and React-Native.

I've personally been working with React-Native over the past year and it's just as easy as writing React code for the web (if you're using expo), once people understand this it'll only be a matter of time before web-dev teams adopt it. Historically the problems with app development is that it was a lot harder than web development and often required you to learn a new language and framework in order to get anything functional, this is no longer the case.

I'd actually argue that there will be more apps going into the future as the technology needed to build them simplifies.

<comment><USER32> They're easier to write now, but still not easy enough: the vast majority of apps earn too little revenue to justify their dev cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Author seems to have missed a big reason for why apps will continue to persist: they obscure data access permissions far better than browsers do. If you install FB messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever, you will be asked one time which permissions (location, microphone, contacts) you want to grant it, and most people won't even review the list before hitting Install.

On the web, the browser dialog will ask you each time the app wants to access any of these things, whereas on the app, it'll quietly continue the use the permissions you granted it, and eventually you'll forget you signed off on them in the first place.

Not to mention some particularly shameless actors will gimp their mobile web functionality to ensure you use their app at all times (FB, Airbnb, others).

</comment><comment> oh-kumudo One thing this article gets right is that it is just going to be harder to persuade users to download an App that only brings in marginal/augmented functionality. I have about 1.5 screens of Apps installed, probably somewhere near 30-50 apps in total, and use barely 10 of them fairly frequently as far as I can recall.

Maybe it won't be too surprising that Google/Apple will announce something similar to Wechat's mini-program, a lightweight application distribution system that doesn't require a browser, nor installation to work. In fact, Google's Instant App aren't that far from the above description, it is just a matter of marketing effort to push it closer to users.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't agree with the overall premise that native apps will disappear. I agree that certain apps, such as the static content Wix example, don't need to exist.

I found the article unconvincing. The core argument is that native apps will consolidate into larger social media apps as part of an in-app app? That may be the case for China, but not the US. Even if that did happen in the US, that means you are still building mobile apps (with another abstraction layer).

As long as native apps provide a better UI (as expected of native apps) & continue to have access to OS APIs that the mobile browser does not, native apps will continue succeed by providing a better experience.

<comment><USER41> So it would be like myspace but a mobile app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Here's the thing: a webpage will never be able to do a number of privileged operations, for a very simple reason - visiting an arbitrary web page is not controlled by a user, as any webpage can cause an automatic navigation to another.

Installing an app acts as a user intent driven security boundary. Dialogs coming up on random webpages is a buck-passing technique, as users cannot discern a "safe" request from an unsafe one. This applies to technical users as well - dialog fatigue, incorrect script inclusion, ads, etc. eventually you can end up accidentally saying yes to the wrong dialogue and a random website gets to download your contact list, etc.

</comment><comment><USER43> The end? No.

But PWA websites will most likely kill many native apps. I use the Twitter PWA and it works perfectly fine on Android.

</comment><comment><USER44> Working with IoT (i.e. Beacon technology) HTML5 and even React Native, nothing beats native code responsiveness. The need for "White label" apps may start going away, but emerging technologies that rely on efficiency and speed should be utilizing mobile app native environment.

</comment><comment><USER45> I remember when people were saying that the end is near for web apps since mobile apps are going to eat everything. No one knows what will happen in the next three to seven years. Best we can do is observe the market every year and adjust course as necessary.

</comment><comment><USER46> There are domains of problems that can be solved with the WeChat model. Money, shopping, paying utilities, ordering food, etc, make sense to have in one app. I don't know if I'd want my task planner or email/cal app in there.

<comment><USER47> Congrats, you have then moved into a walled garden inside another walled garden.

<comment><USER48> For Mini program in WeChat, they are independent with iOS or Android. So it just inside one broader walled garden

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Functionally yes, most apps could be mobile websites except for one thing: Mobile users don't use bookmarks. Mobile users use icons on the home screen. It is easier for users to add an app to their home screen than a website.

<comment><USER50> But you can add a website to your home screen too, and it will act like app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Blizzard would like a word....

</comment><comment><USER52> TLDR: Betteridge's law applies.

Fact is mobile apps will remain useful for as long as mobile devices occupy the same space they do now. Maybe you don't have more than 100 apps installed, but that does not equate to all apps being deemed useless. Different people find different apps useful enough to install and continue using. I don't ever see myself using a web-app alternative over my security camera app, or my email app, and so on.

Fact is, native apps have their uses, but not all native apps are useful to all people.

</comment><comment><USER53> "Betteridge's law" comes to mind when reading this.

We have some in-house apps, and it comes in handy to have control over the device you are using and developing for.

In general though, I do think apps (from the app stores) are not installed as much anymore as they once were. Anecdata, but I hardly install anything anymore on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER54> App ecosystems help perpetuate oligopolies.

</comment><comment><USER55> How can I read that article? Even web link gives me the paywall.

<comment><USER15> It opened on the medium app on iOS for me, and I could read it.

<comment><USER55> Do you realize how ironic that is considering the title of article...

<comment><USER15> I do. I just haven't taken the time to delete this app from my phone, as one of the 70 I don't use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is a very Western centric point of view. Even if most of the RN like apps become "good enough" there will be a market for those apps that want to differentiate with the sluggish good enough apps.</comment>


Moving from Basecamp to ActiveCollab - <AUTHOR> http://allinthehead.com/retro/347/moving-from-basecamp-to-activecollab <comment><USER2> Interesting little aside in this post, where he talks about hitting a license threshold on the number of projects and this triggering an evaluation of whether they really like Basecamp enough to pay more for it. I'm wondering if this would have happened if the pricing model was a much smaller increase per project. If adding a project is just a small additional cost there is no "threshold" you hit where you have to jump to a noticeably more expensive license.

</comment><comment><USER3> pivotal tracker is the best.

pivotal tracker site: <http://pivotaltracker.com>

my own blog post on initial reaction to using pivotal tracker: [http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/project-management-and- moti...](http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/project-management-and-motivation/)

a follow-up post: <http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/retrospective/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on finding a way to move off Basecamp. Despite the 37 Signals halo- Basecamp was, in my opinion, a pretty crummy user experience from the start.

<comment><USER5> Clearly you haven't tried out ActiveCollab.

<comment><USER6> What is bad about the user experience with ActiveCollab?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to admit Basecamp is really underfeatured, no matter how they want to sell it. But the cost having my own hardware installing and managing it, even if its just 1-2 hours of my time is more expense then a year of Basecamp or one its competitors as a hosted. service.

<comment><USER8> I absolutely understand the principal there, but the reality is that it took me less than 30 minutes to be fully up and running with aC, using hardware that was already online running our subversion server. A light bit of tinkering for a Sunday evening - I don't anticipate any further ongoing investment in maintaining it. It's just PHP, so it should run and run.

That said, this wasn't directly a cost-saving exercise for us. That's just a nice by-product.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, only 30 mins. And just pray that you wouldn't need backup, that you did not set up. Or that nobody breaks in through hole that you did not patch in php, web server and whatever else you had to install.

Self-hosted solutions requires maintenance even if you don't anticipate it. It's not "just PHP". It feels like a zero cost (you have got the spare capacity server after all), but only until you hit a problem.

<comment><USER8> ActiveCollab has built-in daily backup to dump everything to disk in a recoverable form, and then the server itself is backed up. If I wanted to go crazy I could spend another minute adding the files to the cron job that syncs data up to S3.

Of course there's a chance that it'll involve a bit of maintenance at some point, and that'll soak up a bit of my time. My experience with hosted solutions is that they have far more frequent hosting issues resulting in lack of access to data (be that scaling problems, being offline for maintenance, bad deploys etc) which soak up lots of time for everyone on the project.

When I'm in control of the situation I know that at least in a bad case scenario I can spin up another server, grab the last good backup and be up and running again within the hour. That has a lot of value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Business Pundits "Top 10 Biz Collaboration Web Tools"

[http://www.businesspundit.com/the-10-best-collaborative- web-...](http://www.businesspundit.com/the-10-best-collaborative-web-tools- for-business/)</comment>


Show HN: The Rose League – Live Bachelor in Paradise Fantasy App - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-rose-league/id1247208543 <comment><AUTHOR> All,

I built this app using the third party React Native WkWebView component ([https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview)), but serving a mobile-optimized React website from it so that it can also be accessed on Android via [https://www.theroseleague.com](https://www.theroseleague.com). The app itself is 4 MB as a result, yet still feels native due to modern webkit optimizations.

The back-end is .NET Core 2.0 from a docker image on DigitalOcean and SQL Server as the db. I am using .NET Core's memory cache heavily.

Of note, for the live scoring during the episodes, the latest CI dev package (last Friday) of SignalR Core is used. With over 1500 users at this point, so far so good (knock on wood).

App feedback in general, or any questions at all are welcome! And if you personally do not watch Bachelor in Paradise, but could share with people you know that watch the show that would be fantastic.

<comment><USER2> I'll share this with my GF. I'm a bit amazed how much of a dedicated fanbase the bachelor/bachelorette series has. And most of it is enabled by newer apps. For every hour my gf spends watching the bachelor she probably spends another 3 or 4 listening to podcasts, watching youtube, and watching snap stories about it.

If you haven't already, you should try advertising with one of these snapchat users. As I understand it, they use their snap chat stories to provide commentary on the bachelor with some paid product advertisements. They get hundreds of thousands of views.</comment></comment>


Archive.is still using Chrome 52 - <AUTHOR> http://archive.is/p89x1 <comment><USER2> The user agent string they provide is probably irrelevant to what software they use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any idea what they are actually using?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I expected them to use puppeteer by now running on linux.</comment>


Lowering the Risk of Web Development - <AUTHOR> http://doriantaylor.com/lowering-the-risk-of-web-development This is something I've been working on for a while. A friend suggested I post it here. The basic idea is that while there have been developments in improving the product (UX) and improving the development process (Agile), I haven't seen much talk or action about attacking the rigid nature of the (commercial, legal) deals struck to achieve them.
About two years ago I began working on the technical infrstructure that makes it possible to even consider incremental contracting for incremental development; now I'm working on project controls, and later this year I expect to do the legal stuff.
Anyway, have at 'er. <comment><AUTHOR> This is something I've been working on for a while. A friend suggested I post it here. The basic idea is that while there have been developments in improving the product (UX) and improving the development process (Agile), I haven't seen much talk or action about attacking the rigid nature of the (commercial, legal) deals struck to achieve them.

About two years ago I began working on the technical infrastructure that makes it possible to even consider incremental contracting for incremental development; now I'm working on project controls, and later this year I expect to do the legal stuff.

Anyway, have at 'er.

</comment><comment><USER2> Stopped reading instantly at doge heading.

<comment><USER3> Ha! Made me look. Until this moment I had never seen a doge meme. I was only aware the the word was big. And you know I didn't find it offensive at all. So I don't understand your negativity.

The rest of the article that you didn't read was thought provoking. Maybe you'll check it out.</comment></comment>


Why Biofuels Are the Rainforest's Worst Enemy - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/03/why-biofuels-are-rainforests-worst-enemy <comment><USER2> Their enemy isn't biofuels, it's cash crops. If it wasn't palm trees for fuel, it'd be sugarcane or tobacco or something else. Of course, that doesn't have the same shock factor, that sensation of calling out the sacred cow.

Hopefully in ten years or so there will be more people, especially in the professional media calling out trolls. I think it would be good to do more public analysis of news stories, where they come from, why they look the way they do. (Slate.com does that on a semi-regular basis, which I enjoy)

<comment><USER3> Immense subsidies for biofuels have probably put marginal land into cultivation that otherwise would not be.

<comment><USER4> Where?

The US penalizes imported methanol. It subsidizes domestic corn.</comment></comment></comment>


Enterprise HTML - <AUTHOR> http://enterprise-html.com/ <comment><USER2> I guess this is supposed to be a joke. I'm having trouble telling.

"NEVER LEAVING AN IMG TAG UNCLOSED" - For instance, this one... I agree with. Why would you write bad/lazy HTML/XML when you don't have to? Just close it.

The comments one is another. It can get ugly trying to determine where tags begin and end in any decent-sized site. Commenting them starts to make sense at a certain level of complexity.

<comment><USER3> Not closing an img tag is not lazy HTML; it's actually _correct_ HTML. HTML _bans_ closing img tags! (At least some versions still in use, I haven't exhaustively checked them all.) See <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC- html40/struct/objects.html#h-13.2> , right below the declaration of the tag: "Start tag: _required_ , End tag: _forbidden_ " Of course, including them doesn't do anything bad, but they're still not supposed to be there. (Nor should you <img src="..." />, that's an illegal empty attribute called "/".)

There are a lot of misconceptions about what standards-complaint HTML is. For example, before I went and looked up the link I just gave, I thought they were _optional_. Nope.

 _X_ HTML is a different story, of course, but you didn't say XHTML. Probably because you're not using it. Nobody sane does.</comment></comment>


What happens when you're #1 on Designer News - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pexels.com/what-happens-when-youre-1-on-designer-news/

<comment> neon-gu > 0% IE

Nice</comment>


Microbrowsers Are Everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/ <comment><USER3> I think Google is the original inventor of link previews. It used to have them in the SERP pages if you clicked the magnifying glass. I think it was called "instant previews".

I actually created and launched an API on hacker news about 9 years ago which does this, you can check it out here: [https://linkpeek.com](https://linkpeek.com)

My service makes one request and caches the result. Using Pyramid (Python) and Nginx. Lots of the code is open sourced in various libraries.

The problem with trying to sell this tech is that all the biggest players build their own in-house solution, so the target market is really smaller sites, but they have a hard time paying, and also there is a lot of competition in this space now.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny little anecdote: When I was at a hackathon, I was sending my team members, over WhatsApp the hosted ngrok link each time I accidentally closed the tunnel. The WApp microbrowser didn't store cookies and as such would get stuck in the redirect loop from the index (yeah, yeah, it was a hackathon). This would lead to my WhatsApp Web client crashing _before_ the message was even sent. It would only happen when I sent my badly programmed auto-login URL, and no time else, so I'm quite confident it was aggressively failing when it didn't manage to get the information it needed and straight up crashed the web client.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting, sounds like WhatsApp Web loads the preview client-side?

<comment><USER6> Yes. To be specific, if you are using the Web based WhatsApp (or the 'Desktop' app), it will _not_ load the preview until your phone has pinged that it's online. There are many times when I wait for the preview to load (because if you send the message without the preview, no-one else gets one either), only to have to wake my phone and voila, the preview then loads on Web WhatsApp.

<comment><USER7> Aha! I wondered why the appearance of previews was inconsistent, now I know what to do to make them appear, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's almost 2020, advertise one favicon size. Remove all the other <link > rel="shortcut icon" and <link rel="icon" references.

Which one should we keep?

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately all of them since there is such a mess of support across browsers. SVG should be king by now but it's not.

<comment><USER10> Latest chromium does support svg favicons

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Finally, many platforms - particularly Facebook Messenger and Hangouts use centralized services to request the preview layout. This is in contrast to WhatsApp* and iMessage where you will see one request per user.

Wait, does this mean you can get the IP of most people you can contact on whatsapp by just sending them a link and waiting for their phone to check that link?

I can think of plenty of ways this could be abused!

<comment><USER12> No. It is still the WhatsApp server making the request to your website - <USER2> you only see the server's IP.

Facebook makes one request and then caches the result. Other servers may not store the result.

<comment><USER13> [Here's how signal does it]([https://hub.packtpub.com/signal-introduces- optional-link-pre...](https://hub.packtpub.com/signal-introduces-optional- link-previews-to-enable-users-understand-whats-behind-a-url/)).

TL;DR, the app establishes a TLS connection directly between your phone and the site, but routes it through a proxy on Signal's server, thereby hiding your IP without being able to view the URL. I imagine Whatsapp works in a similar fashion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So you remember the way we used to prevent people from linking images from our websites, we'd show a different image.

That means I can do the same with `og:image`, give a nice middle finger when linking my website (hey, a bit of 90s fun here)

</comment><comment><USER15> Something that downloads information from the web is called an "agent". A browser is a specific type of agent called a "user agent". Calling agents "microbrowsers" creates an odd curvle circle: user agents are browsers which are agents which can be microbrowsers which are user agents, etc. Just thought it was interesting

<comment><USER16> I can't tell if common things getting redefined is mostly from clueless journalists or clueless tech workers that think they are inventing everything for the first time in their first year on the job.

<comment><USER17> I think there is a lot of both, but there's also so much churn and so little historical knowledge propagated through the profession that people just keep reinventing wheels because they don't know they've already been invented. Every revolution of the hamster wheel does seem to get us a few inches ahead, but refighting the same battles and redoing the same work gets very wearisome. And I'm not even that old; I don't know how the people twice my age that are still in this business can avoid being hopelessly jaded.

<comment><USER18> I keep thinking that we might see a second "information age" the day we can reliably find something in the large ammount of data we have been piling up recently (is there such a thing as the "data age"?). Neural networks might be the beginning, but if we stop reinventing wheels, we could become a whole lot more productive.

Are there good documents regarding "capitalism" (I guess; constantly reinventing better wheels) vs other systems (reusing already designed wheels, however square), in domains other than financial: what the tradeofs are, how much worse your existing wheel can be before you start to feel it, potential for innovation, etc. Free software might side with the later, but I'd like an analytical exploration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anybody knows what to do with an SPA that, without js, only displays "loading..." and doesn't generate any preview on any platform (whatsapp, telegram...)?

This is for a hobby project, so rewriting it to do server side rendering etc. is not an option.

<comment><USER20> > _This is for a hobby project, so rewriting it to do server side rendering > etc. is not an option._

Rewrite it to do server side rendering.

Sorry if this seems facetious, but if you want it to be accessible, it needs to be server-side rendered.

Some crawlers have some (limited) JS-rendering abilities; notably Googlebot; but it's not full. Some crawlers may use a fully-fledged Chrome-headless but latency would make this uncommon.

In general, JS-dependent SPAs have always been a terrible terrible idea for anything _public_ facing that needs to be crawled (they're fine for web applications, not for web pages).

<comment><USER19> Sorry I didn't mention: it is a web game. Accessibility without JS is not possible.

<comment><USER20> In that case, JS-only is fine, but presumably you're talking about serving fallback content (bots/crawlers are unlikely to be playing your game)

<comment><USER19> Yea, I will try some better fillers than just "loading...", and the metatags stuff.

I also might consider serving some other non-game pages statically, like the leaderboard, user profiles, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not a big fan of apps automatically initiating connections to any 3rd party website. If this leads to an increase in sites that remain functional without javascript and won't complain about a lack of a referer header I'll be glad, but I suspect that while 'microbrowers' today aren't usually running javascript and try to protect user's privacy, eventually we'll start seeing website previews being used to hack devices and steal user data.

<comment><USER22> The request is made on the back end so I'm not sure any of your comment holds up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is something that I implemented in Swift while working iOS engineer at XING.com 2 years ago, it was really a fun widget to work on, that recognized the link and loaded title/body/descriptions along with their `og:image` for the image preview.

Now in my own product [1] I was a long time without implementing the right tags on my landing / marketing page, and blog posts. I wish I would have done this since I launched, but just started doing this 2 months ago since I switched to Gatsby for our marketing page. They have a very easy to implement SEO component [2], that allows you to focus more on the content than on tweaking the meta tags for social.

[1] [https://standups.io](https://standups.io)

[2] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/add-seo- component/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/add-seo-component/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I installed unity 3D and it wanted me to sign in to get my free license. Sure. So I picked Google sign in from the list. This opened a little browser inside the Unity launcher that immediately complained that it was insecure and would not allow a Google Sign in attempt.

Sure felt silly.

</comment><comment><USER25> Lots of solid tips for web developers in this article.

</comment><comment><USER26> Very useful and solid info, now if we had a tool for generating and testing these link previews locally for our stuff... There's some APIs and various libs/WP plugins for generating link previews, but nothing that covers the functionality of major messagers and websites. Any takers?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm wondering if having a bit more of a preview results in fewer "headline is misleading" disputes?

</comment><comment><USER28> " However, the real gold for marketers is from word-of-mouth discussions. Those conversations with your friends when you recommend a TV show, a brand of clothing, or share a news report. This is the most valuable kind of marketing."

That's saying quite a lot.

</comment><comment><USER29> Not sure I've ever heard the term "microbrowser." It makes for an interesting headline I guess but it'd just as well be fine if it focused solely on opengraph and friends.

</comment><comment><USER30> Didn't Microsoft Calculator used to have a browser built into the help menu somehow? I remember it being exploitable to get around stringent GPOs....

<comment><USER31> Not just the calculator but any app that used the Microsoft Help system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> TLDR: Article describes how link previews are rendered by various social media / chat sites and provides useful tips for web developers on how to optimize the preview experience.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know of any open source microbrowsers?

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm just here to say I read that as microbrewers and I was much more excited about that article. The brewing boom here in Colorado is outrageous. I would love to learn about the confluence of technology and brewing, and what if any tech small breweries are leveraging to give them an edge.

<comment><USER35> Here you go:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693944)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614957)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18857255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18857255)

<comment><USER34> Thanks for digging up those links, I'll have to read those articles later!

The top comment on that third article about the brewery explosion in Vancouver could just as easily be about Denver - the story is nearly the same. As I understand it here in Denver, a change of law make it much easier for breweries to operate tasting rooms which can be quite profitable and spurred massive growth.

<comment><USER35> Yay! I just used the search box at the bottom, then skimmed through the results:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=microbrew&sort=byPopularity&type=all)

HN is perhaps _the_ website where I find whatever I'm trying to, if it exists.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Best bad idea ever? Why Putin's nuclear-powered missile is possible… and awful - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/best-bad-idea-ever-why-putins-nuclear-powered-missile-is-possible-and-awful/ <comment><AUTHOR> Make me wonder, why we can have decentralized grid with 'personal' powerplant ?

</comment><comment><USER2> Technically feasible, practically worthless. This is a weapon that in no way alters the balance of geopolitical power, it isn't an effective first strike, and it would be an insane vehicle for a conventional payload. This is posturing, dick swinging, whatever you want to call it, and possibly cronyism depending on who did the R&D.

Unless Russia has airtight missile defense or a means to track down every nuclear sub in the oceans, nothing has changed. The one thing this might do is further terrify their regional enemies, most of which were already terrified.</comment>


Uber vs. Laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/07/uber-vs-laws-000172?hp=b1_c1

<comment><USER2> In giving only a partial account of eBay's rating system, this author learned exactly the wrong lesson.

The original two-way eBay rating system _did_ work well. However, ratings became meaningless (except to see in aggregate a long history of transactions by a party, which gives a veneer of stability).

The modern failure is twofold:

1) several years back, eBay made it _impossible to leave negative or even neutral feedback for any buyer_ under any circumstances. Never paid? Try to extort a lower price? Phony claim of non-receipt? Damaged the item and then blamed it on the seller? NO PROBLEM, says eBay, and future sellers are none the wiser and cannot protect themselves.

2) A dishonest eBay _seller_ can void any transaction simply by refunding the payment. So, if she didn't like the winning price on an auction, she gets a do-over, and the buyer gets hosed. Or, the seller can try to change terms (I experienced this just last week, where the seller tried to extort 250% of the winning bid price, then cancelled when I balked).

Policies like these have made eBay no longer a safe place to sell, and their squeezing of sellers for every possible fee became relentless, to the point that you _cannot even say the word "cash" in a listing_ any more.

So, modern eBay is a _joke_ , and much of that commerce has moved to Amazon and elsewhere.</comment>


Teach Yourself Logic 2020:A Study Guide [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.logicmatters.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/TeachYourselfLogic2020.pdf <comment><USER2> tl;dr Teach Yourself Logic 2020: A Study Guide by Peter Smith

This book discusses what I would describe as "formal logic" or philosophy. In my opinion that is for those interested in pure math or philosophy. This book is a study guide but not a text book. In other words you are not going to learn this kind of logic from the study guide.

My guess is many programmers and engineers would be better served first learning what I call "symbolic logic" or "digital logic". It is not hard to learn. I taught myself from a book. However, I think it would be more interesting and more fun to take a class, given the opportunity.

<comment><USER3> What book did you read?</comment></comment>


How Iteration-itis Kills Good Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2011/07/is_iteration-itis_killing_your.html?cm_sp=most_widget-_-blog_posts-_-How%20Iteration-itis%20Kills%20Good%20Ideas

<comment><USER2> There are some good prescriptive ideas in this article about how to avoid "iteration-itis." However, any leadership that implores their employees to give them more 'raw' ideas needs to be prepared to actually act on it.

I was once in an organization that identified this problem and did the "science fair" equivalent (we actually called it "Hack Day"), and the whole company launched into it with a fervor. It was incredibly rewarding and exciting to work on our out of the box ideas and present our various visions of the future of the company to the highest level executives. They reacted incredibly pleased, talked constantly about making sure some of these ideas would become reality... and then... nothing. We had a down quarter in revenue/profit so it was back to squeezing juice from the lemon.

It's common for employees to joke about management dysfunction, but whenever that Hack Day was brought up, it's pointlessness wasn't just joked about but attacked with bitterness even months and months later. I realized that when we pitched ideas that had gone through iteration-itis, it the process ended up tempering our own expectations as well, so by the time we pitched to the execs, our emotional investment had been whittled down to mostly nothing. But doing this -- asking us for our unfiltered ideas and thus, our unfiltered enthusiasm, and then not acting on them -- was probably the worst thing they could have done to destroy morale aside from layoffs.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if those ideas would have needed a lot of funding to fly or risked the company if implemented. Probably what company should have done is let the employees implement one of those good ideas and have it implemented during a "20 percent time" like Google and make it grow organically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There appear to be two different senses of the word "iteration" in play here.

There's the sense common on HN, where it refers to getting the idea out in front of real customers, and then making changes to it in an attempt to improve it. HN folks generally think this kind of iteration should be done as rapidly as possible.

The article uses "iteration" in a different sense, to mean repeated cycles of discussion and rethinking the idea, _before_ getting it in front of real customers.

The first kind of iteration can be measured by the number of successive versions of the software, website, product, whatever get shown to real users. The second kind (as the article describes) can be measured by the number of meetings held to discuss and refine the idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> When did "iteration" start meaning "talk the idea over as much as possible before anyone who can make a decision sees it"? That sounds like the exact opposite of iteration.

It's totally a problem, but "iteration-itis" makes it sound like this is the result of too much iteration.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are some good general ideas in this article, but they will not work...

The problem with ideas in big corporations are the following: \- Something vaguely similar is already planned to implemented by some other group in the company. So VP of that division will fight against it. (i.e., suggesting to implement something like Heroku in SalesForce - isn't Force.com doing that already?).

\- The idea might cannibalize the existing market (cloud? are you crazy? we sell software licences.)

\- The idea will not generate significant revenue in short term (hey, the idea is great, but feature X is needed by our customer which pays with gold bricks)

\- The idea might expose some incompetence in the organization (i.e., that something was actually easy to do).

\- The idea might require that you actually talk to customers and then legal will come in picture and that require additional approvals from legal

\- The idea might cause more work for your manager and his manager. And with two kids and corporate job nobody wants more work.

And even the idea gets pass initial phase (you hired team, doing customer interviews, started coding), the (E)VP which sponsored the idea might leave the company and everything will be killed.

<comment><USER7> SO basically its a scale thing? Small companies, less chance of tripping over these issues?

<comment><USER6> Correct: that is what I learn from my experience. Of course even small companies might have issues with "innovations" for low level employees, but big companies have people, processes and revenue structures in place which are essentially incompatible with innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The other thing that kills good ideas at big companies is an inability to execute and build support around it (even if the top dogs give it a nod). Can the idea be built and implemented in-house, and if it is, will there be buy-in to support it?

Over time, the negative feedback loop can lead people to aim low during the ideation phase -- submit smaller ideas that don't have to go through a half- dozen committees, are easier to implement, and are easy to build support around.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's not just design by committee (though it amazes me how many companies still think they're somehow able to design with any sort of integrity using this method). It's also the fact that it's quite common to have a manager who lacks the sort of vision needed for their job (as management is the default route up the ladder), yet manages people who are generating new ideas and ends up stifling them, perhaps inadvertently.

It galls me, because it seems so simple. I'll get out my thick brush here, and say that over time, institutions seem to only ever be good at perpetuating themselves, rather than tackling the problems they were originally formed for.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Iteration-itis" is going right next to "analysis paralysis" on the shelf of business jargon that I actually don't mind because it's useful in illustrating a point.

</comment><comment><USER11> OR "How to many chefs ruin the broth".

Makes me wonder about the level of academics at Harvard when they are promoting articles as useless as that one.

<comment><USER12> Thats actually a paper by a professor from Northwestern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A possible cause of this could be that in large companies (with a few rungs of management), people think they need to sound impressive to be listened too. Thus they try and make the idea sell-able. This dumb's it down and you get the lowest-common-denominator stuff this article is talking about.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's called design by committee

</comment><comment><USER15> "Iteration-itis" suggests inflammation of the iteration. "Iterationorrhea" would be more appropriate to what is described.

</comment><comment><USER16> Iteration-itis is also known as "change management" in academia, which boils down to "before you change, you must consult." Academia and Information Technology are particularly prone to this disease. A good take on change management in academia is [http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/22/university-a...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/22/university- administration-change-jonathan-wolff)</comment>


R6RS Ratified (Let the complaining begin) - <AUTHOR> http://www.r6rs.org/ratification/results.html

<comment><USER2> About time. I hope it isn't another decade before R7RS.

A lot of people are complaining because R6 is so much bigger than R5. While a clean, tiny spec is a beautiful thing, it is empirically not a recipe for being able to get real work done without compromising portability. If you care about minimalism more than you care about that kind of portability, R5RS isn't going anywhere. This isn't Windows; there's no end-of-life schedule that's going to force you to upgrade.

My gripe about R6RS is that it doesn't go far enough: any sufficiently large project is still going to require non-portable extensions. But it's a leap in the right direction and we've been waiting long enough. As long as we'll eventually see an R7RS, I'm glad this revision was ratified.

<comment><USER3> The question might be, "Was R6RS ratified simply because a change is needed or because R6RS is the correct solution?"

On the comments, one of the very first complaints is that R6RS's library system is still inadequate. That seems like a grave sign for any programming language. As far as I can tell, all popular languages have a well-defined library system and popular frameworks have a well-defined plugin system, so needless hassles in terms of crafting those will only dampen popularity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think they should hold out to R5.98RS personally, fix a few more of the things that people complain about and perhaps hit 75 YES votes. There's obviously still room for improvement.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of votes, isn't this classic "design by committee"?

<comment><USER4> No, this is design by coup d'etat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scheme wants to be Common Lisp.

<comment><USER6> There are certainly good ideas in CL that can help Scheme. Many of the differences are a matter of taste. For those who like small languages, R4RS isn't going away.

<comment><USER4> _Many of the differences are a matter of taste._

Precisely! :)

 _R4RS isn't going away._

But any newcomer will consider the most recent version the default, and assume the others are obsolete. In other languages you seldom ever have a reason to start with an older standard unless you have legacy code to maintain. And that is the reason why they called the whole scam R6RS.</comment></comment></comment>


Wubi - Trying Linux on Windows - <AUTHOR> http://wubi-installer.org/

<comment><USER2> get the free vmware player and a free ubuntu image.

<comment><USER3> As Wubi is running as a native Linux it's definitely faster than VMWare and it's also free.</comment></comment>