De-Googling: My Progress - <AUTHOR> https://geekgonecrazy.com/2020/04/28/de-googling-my-progress/ <comment><USER2> I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical:

\- there's less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I've only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me)

\- not as SEOed (still not great though)

\- the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads

\- on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omnibox experience

[0]: [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

(Edited formatting)

<comment><USER3> As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very new languages like Unison are a lot better at Google) I unavoidably have to use !g to turn to Google. To the point where when I am at work and cannot afford wasting time, I use Google by default.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone know of a Firefox plugin that automatically adds a "!g" upon a gesture on mobile?

I'm asking because adding the "!g" takes about 6-7 screen touches so it's quite inefficient, and it basically keeps me from using DDG.

<comment><USER5> When I use a mobile I usually type G! instead of !g because of autocorrect, and it works just the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

<comment><USER7> I wish this were true but certainly on Linux I don't find this to be the case. I periodically try switching to Firefox and always end up back on Chrome for performance reasons.

Features wise I prefer Firefox (containers are amazing, extra privacy features/blockers by default nice, the new picture in picture for video is nice, dev tools have a lot of cool extra features etc), but Firefox often struggles and stutters for me, whereas I rarely have issues with Chrome.

The devtools are a good example, sometimes just having them open on a page I am developing slows everything down. Closing/re-opening the tab seems to fix it for a bit but then it just starts to happen again, Chrome's devtools are always snappy. Similary if I want to inspect an element on a page Chrome never has a problem doing it instantly, Firefox has to think about it for a while.

In general everything that uses the GPU I find far faster in Chrome. The other day for instance I was working on a d3 SVG visualization that strained Firefox but was no problem for Chrome, canvas performance is similar but not as bad in my experience. The most common offender is trying to watch a video: in Firefox everything slows down and the fans spin up, in Chrome no effect.

It is also true that all Google services that I am unfortunately tied to (GMail, Maps, Calendar etc) are snappy in Chrome and like molasses in Firefox...

<comment><USER8> My experience is exactly the opposite. When forced to use Chromium on Linux, I find it slow. The dev tools are lacking basic functionality that I came to depend on, and they are unreliable (missing requests in Network tab). When testing CSP protections about a year ago, Chromium allowed many of the requests that should have been blocked (and were, in Firefox).

I think it comes down to what one is used to. We probably learn to sidestep problems with any browser we use, but using a different browser inevitably leads to frustration.

Of course, this is not true if you are using Google services. Google seems to put an extra effort in making sure that their pages are as slow as possible in Firefox... I don't care much myself as I don't use them, but it's a good reminder of how (non)non-evil they have become.

<comment><USER7> Interesting... It has gotten a lot better over the past few years. The Google issue is not a deal-breaker for me, want to move away from GMail/Calendar for my personal account anyway.

Will probably try to make the switch again at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been de-googled (and de-facebooked) for over a year now. I wrote about it here [https://tombh.co.uk/deleting-facebook-and- google](https://tombh.co.uk/deleting-facebook-and-google)

My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the very least we all need readily available choices.

Interestingly, although I went through all the steps to delete my Google account I got stuck at the point of wondering what to do with my Youtube videos. Although, since last time I checked, it seems now I can actually move them to another Google account, I'll look into that.

<comment><USER10> > I opt for Signal now, hardly anyone uses it and the UX isn't as nice, but it > uses state of art in encryption.

Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?

And doesn't it use the same "state of the art" encryption as WhatsApp?

<comment><USER11> The problem with WhatsApp is that the other participants in a given chat are likely to back up the conversation to Google Drive of iCloud which defeats the purpose of E2E encryption. And, of course, the metadata.

<comment><USER12> Also it's owned by Facebook, so you just _know_ there's some backdoors built in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Moving from Google cloud to Apple cloud, from Google messenger to Facebook messenger... What's the point honestly?

<comment><USER14> Apple is not an advertising company, they are a product and service company. Google gives free services in exchange for your data.

Facebook Messenger I don't get, I'd use Apple Messages over Facebook, or Telegram, etc.

<comment> _-david-_ >Apple is not an advertising company

Except when they are

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT205223)

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202074)

<comment><USER15> Apple protects your data.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202303)

Yes they advertise, but you are not the product on services such as cloud. They often cannot physically read your data intentionally.

<comment> _-david-_ They sell ads based on intrests and location. This makes them money. How are you not the product?

They actually can read your data. They abandoned plans to do end to end encryption [0] on icloud backups. When you get a new iphone you can view all your old messages which means Apple in all likelyhood has access to your private key.

[0] [https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/21/apple-reportedly-abandoned- en...](https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/21/apple-reportedly-abandoned-end-to-end- icloud/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My De-Googling process:

      *Search(1)   -> DuckDuckGo
      *Gmail(2)    -> Fastmail
      *Android     -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/)
      *Maps        -> OpenStreetMaps
      *Youtube(3)  -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds
      *Drive       -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing
      *Calendar    -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar
      *Chrome      -> Brave & Firefox

(1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs.

(2) Accounts still exist and forward to fastmail as I'm slowly changing my subscriptions etc.

(3) Youtube I feel is the toughest to get rid of, but nowadays I hardly ever go on the website as I hate all the clickbait that the algorithm tries to stuff into my face.

<comment><USER17> Concerning Youtube, you may be interested in [https://www.invidio.us/](https://www.invidio.us/) which is an alternative front end. There are also extensions for Firefox which will automatically redirect any Youtube links you happen to come across to open on Invidious.

<comment><USER18> Invidio.us seems unusable.

I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).

1\. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?

2\. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" \- no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.

3\. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: " _The uploader has not made this video available in your country._ " Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?

3\. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: " _The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported_ " ...

4\. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.

5\. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)

OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, " _Download is disabled._ " Why?

To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting " _Rate limit exceeded_ " error just trying to open front page.

<comment><USER16> Ugh, sounds painful. Luckily my Youtube habbits are only watching videos, so I don't need playlists or other functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really tried giving DDG a chance but I always found myself having to go back to Google to find the right information. This would especially pertain to technical matters. The 'average-joe-browsing' (e.g. amazon, movies, songs etc.) worked fine, but when it came down to research papers or solving software problems, I was too often left disappointed.

A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical- matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.

[1] [https://about.qwant.com/](https://about.qwant.com/)

<comment><USER20> DDG is nowhere close to google scholar, much less pubmed. If you don't want to use google scholar, web of science is good too.

<comment><USER21> I find it easier to access GOogle Scholar via DDG with !scholar than I do with Google Search.

<comment><USER22> I use !gsch for that.

<comment><USER23> !gsc is even shorter!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage.

I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.

For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.

My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's [https://www.libimobiledevice.org/](https://www.libimobiledevice.org/) but it looks like it only works for images.

For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.

The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.

<comment><USER25> When DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it, which IME is not often, then Google is always easily available with !g query

<comment><USER26> My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.

This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).

I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.

<comment><USER24> > My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when > using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp > results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a > dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was > searching for.

I've had this same experience. Looking up businesses is pretty much the only time I use Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The trouble with de-Google is you have to replace a highly integrated suite of apps with separate bits which lack integration.

Also, if you have hundreds of accounts where you used gmail to register and hundreds or thousands of contacts which might send you mail, it's hard to switch.

<comment><USER28> Somewhat true. On the other hand, if/when you lose access to your Google account, lack of integration might seem like a life-saving plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Iphone: But I think this really helped cut my reliance on Google and I feel > a lot less reliant on any particular phone OS.

You just became reliant on the iOS system instead of the Google on. Hardly an improvement.

<comment><USER30> You can use an Apple phone without using a lot of Apple services and contributing a lot to a cloud profile of you. Given how many apps on the Android ecosystem depend on Play Services to function, it's nearly impossible to do this with Android.

I have a Brave Heart Edition PinePhone, and I'm hoping to switch to a real Linux phone soon, but for now, carrying an iPhone as a pretty basic phone is still a big privacy improvement.

<comment><USER31> I'm planning to get a PinePhone to play with. I think has a ways to come. But i'm really excited that an affordable phone like this can land in the hands of more developers to work on mobile OS's.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, it's really neat. I got the iPhone 11 because I need something reliable for now for work purposes, but my hope is to switch to my PinePhone when I feel it is ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Although I agree with the actions this person has taken, and I agree that privacy is an excellent reason, his webpage describing adwords and adsense was not that scary at face value.

I think it is much more scary if you realize that google works very hard to identify who you are accurately, and even matches it with things like offline purchase data.

The opposite of privacy is identification, and google is arguably the most capable and well-funded identification service on the planet.

I also think we as tech people should set a good example.

We could map the path for the less technically adept folks around us to take steps in the right direction.

We could provide support instead of ridicule when people make inconvenient choices instead of giving in.

And we could BE people who care about privacy, even if it is just to read the privacy policy, or block some trackers.

<comment><USER33> Hmmm... I did give in :) Google locked my account and I was like "okay.jpg", no google for me anymore. Uneventful story, not even enough for a blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > I probably just lost 99% of you

Yeah, moving from Google over to Apple is just cheating. It's better for privacy, but I'd rather thinker with my system to remove the spyware than remove the spyware and largely give up the ability to easily tinker with my system.

<comment><USER35> I don't know. I'm a tinkerer but if we think about phone ecosystem, then I just want my phone to work and not spy on me. I'll tinker with my other devices, but after bricking one phone, I won't do it again.

<comment><USER34> The tinkering doesn't have to be invasive or risky. I share your worry and am rather scared of breaking anything because of the amount of work I put into the configuration. My solution is to root very early on, just after testing everything and making sure I don't want to make sure of my 14 day return right, so if something goes wrong there I don't lose data. After that, I use root for all sorts of things, but after configuring everything I don't do invasive things like installing different ROMs or removing system apps or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I still don't understand why people are moving from G products and use Apple+self-hosted? The author is saying he is hosting the e-mail server but, for example, not an iCal server.

<comment><USER37> Google has no problem browsing through your data to serve you "better" advertisement, while Apple claims to respect your privacy (I would be tempted to believe them).

<comment><USER38> Note that Apple respecting your privacy only applies in countries where they can continue to do business after refusing government requests.

<comment><USER39> A good summary here for anyone doubting you: [https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-apps- flag...](https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-apps-flag/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder what people have to think about Outlook (M365) for many of these things (email, calendar, storage, photos)? Assuming people are fine with paid subscriptions. The author himself is using paid services from apple.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Cyanogenmod but it was always so buggy

Huh? LineageOS has been rock stable for me for years as long as I go with stable builds. Maybe the author meant using something like microG to replace all the google frameworks?

<comment><USER42> For some phones, proper hardware support is iffy at best, and things constantly crash at worst. The stability of LineageOS seems to correlate roughly with how popular that phone is with LineageOS devs, so if you have a phone with only one maintainer, chances are that some things might not work super well. (It also depends on how committed to open source the manufacturer is, but these days, the answer is "not at all" for the vast majority, so it doesn't really matter.)

Source: I've been using Cyanogen/LineageOS for years on various phones, and even tried getting it working on an officially unsupported phone (without luck).

<comment><USER41> Ah, my last 3 phones were all OnePlus and I think those are pretty popular ;)

<comment><USER42> Yes, and I believe OnePlus is one of the few manufacturers that is fairly welcoming to open source and third-party ROMs (which makes sense since their original phone was based on Cyanogenmod). My current phone, the Sony Xperia XA2, is similarly very stable, even with microG, because Sony provides open device configurations for most (all?) of their phones. But almost all of my past phones (mostly Motorola and HTC) have had various stability issues that didn't exist on the built-in ROMs. It's still worth it for me, but I would definitely not recommend it to anyone that isn't willing to roll the dice and potentially put up with some pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've made similar progress too:

Replaced Chrome browser with Firefox

Replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo

Replaced Gmail with ProtonMail

Replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap

Replaced Hangouts with Telegram

Replaced Google for news with Feedly

Replaced Google Translate with DeepL

<comment><USER34> +1 for Deepl. Google Translate's quality is _very_ close to Deepl and for a long time I couldn't tell which is better, but I recently discovered that Deepl does German brainfuck sentences correctly and Google and Microsoft Translate both mess it up. (In German you can say "the ball has the dog" and by conjugating "the" correctly ("der ball" and "den hund", iirc, or the other way around, I can never remember) it can mean "the dog has the ball" despite being in the wrong order.)

Aside from self-hosted email, my list is very similar to yours, I just wanted to highlight Deepl because few people seem to know it and it's a German company so I trust that a whole lot more from the outset.

<comment><USER44> Is there a reliable DeepL based addon for Firefox?

<comment><USER34> I just go to their website so I don't know, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I started degoogling when they killed Inbox. I would have happily paid for that, it was the first time I'd ever been able to maintain 'inbox zero'.

So, I've switched browsers (Edge), switched search engine (DDG), but I don't know an email system that's as good as Inbox was, so I can drop gmail?

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm surprised by not seeing more comments against the OP moving from Google to move almost everything to Apple & Facebook. I've also started a similar process but haven't managed to ditch Google completely yet, mainly for convenience. Because my concern was mainly privacy, I started by adding a pi- hole in the home network and that allowed me to block an infinite number of tracking codes and ads. This improved the overall internet experience for everyone. I've also attached a HDD to the raspberry pi and created a network drive. With the help of a good script the backups are automatic and silent.

For messaging, Telegram FTW, but can't seem to convince a lot of my friends to move over.

<comment><USER47> Why do you use Telegram if you're concerned about privacy?

<comment><USER46> Telegram changed in the last couple of years. You can choose between secret chats (e2e encrypted) and normal which are just user-server storage-user encrypted. End-to-end voice calls is also a feature. If you ask me between the Google / Facebook messaging apps (Whatsapp, Messenger, etc) and Telegram, today I'd say Telegram has an advantage because it has a good UI, works across devices and the desktop client works like a charm. For someone that wants to ditch the Google / Facebook environment and be sure their grandmother can use it, I don't see much better options.

It's not as faulty as it used to be, but I see the old times made a reputation for it.

<comment><USER47> > You can choose between secret chats (e2e encrypted) and normal which are > just user-server storage-user encrypted.

I am aware of that, though I think in the second case it's better to pretend messages are not encrypted at all on the server side since mere storage encryption can be circumvented all too easily.

Anyway, having the choice between encryption and no encryption is exactly the problem. How many Telegram users _choose_ e2e-encrypted chats? AFAIK you have to enable this for every conversation separately, right?

<comment><USER46> Yes, you would still have to create a new "Secret chat" to have the e2e. The reason for that is explored here: [https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End- to-End-Encrypted-by...](https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End- Encrypted-by-Default-08-14)

It's their approach and I'm personally ok with it. Due to my friends I use FB messenger a lot and they say it will take years to be e2e encrypted, so I believe it's a fair compromise from Telegram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I started a similar journey a couple of years ago. Honestly the biggest challenge was getting people to use my new email address instead of my Gmail.

I made mostly the same choices, but swapped in:

      * Email/Calendar/Contacts: Fastmail
      * Docs: I don't use a hosted solution for this
      * Messaging: iMessage/Signal/Discord
      * Music: local music library

While I lived in Seattle I was using Apple Maps, but since moving to Sydney I have switched back to Google Maps.

Oh, actually I am a Google Fi customer as well -- it's the cheapest way I've found to keep my US number active.

<comment><USER49> Try looking at a VoIP service like voip.ms for parking and forwarding numbers. I think I pay less than a dollar a month to maintain and forward each one of my phone numbers. Flowroute is another provider to look at as well. I've used both for years and don't have much to complain about.

<comment><USER50> sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 77869806 : GNggaHF7HKde Line 1471: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 00811050 : MJwCnW3b4wzn Line 1472: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 05012270 : rXaRN6yK9NYz Line 1473: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 08094747 : pGtxg6ymPK4G Line 1474: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 08352915 : 9p6DmcDXhpGz Line 1475: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 08595647 : XJKTXEJgTwqD Line 1476: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 09162079 : q7ePqchJHXnD Line 1477: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 10959234 : fdgbqNJRWGnE Line 1478: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 13714708 : aPRYMAkzdmEb Line 1479: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 17504284 : Md3HA4Mgwp7b Line 1480: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 20772225 : DHMNGbMpdqbt Line 1481: sip.flowroute.com:5060 : 25614372 : PhTTKNhYfeD9

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> A lot of people praise DDG and I'm also one using it as a default search engine, but it's not exactly clear how much independent it is. I've started to consider using Cliqz ([https://cliqz.com/](https://cliqz.com/)) as an alternative or at least a parallel experiment; they claim to be totally independent and to care for user privacy at least as much as DDG does.

Does any other HNer have experience with their search result ? I'm still not using it enough to have a reliable conclusion of my own.

<comment><USER52> I've been using DDG pretty exclusively for over a year, and I have no complaints. It also handles pretty tough searches reasonably well. Maybe I'm not a power user or whatever, but DDG works so well for me I'm not even enticed by Google's search (especially w/ the redesigns). I think of it less as a "real" search engine and more of a data gathering trap--meaning that aspect of it is more significant than its search result quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'd recommend trying these Google Alt's: Protonmail or Fairmail for email. DuckduckGo or Bromite for low-ad/tracker browsing, or button down your Chrome with Umatrix/UBO and a host of other extensions (Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, etc.) Been using Protonmail beta's Calender feature with success, can't wait for their Android App. Have begun pulling all my photos off Photos and moving to both local drives and PCloud, and considering encrypting them at rest there too. DDG/SearX for Search. NextDNS for secure and adfree DNS mimicing PiHole (which I have at home) when away. If you want to keep your awesome Android hardware (OnePlus6T here), you can disable Google Services Framework and neuter everything at will using NetGuard, with the paid version allowing individual link granularity, so you can stop that Facebook link Spotify spawns upon launch, among all others. This allows you to fine tune each app to comm with only links you allow. FB is particularly pesky..once it fails to connect to it's obvious servers, it spawns other numerical IP's that you have to do lookups on to see where/who they are...often returning to FB, so it's an ongoing task, recommended only for those most commited. I was on this path well before Shoshana's book, but her presentation was reaffirming. EDIT: of course...Signal, how did I forget that..most used app of all.

<comment><USER54> Formatted:

I'd recommend trying these Google Alt's:

Protonmail or Fairmail for email.

DuckduckGo or Bromite for low-ad/tracker browsing, or button down your Chrome with Umatrix/UBO and a host of other extensions (Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, etc.)

Been using Protonmail beta's Calender feature with success, can't wait for their Android App.

Have begun pulling all my photos off Photos and moving to both local drives and PCloud, and considering encrypting them at rest there too.

DDG/SearX for Search.

NextDNS for secure and adfree DNS mimicing PiHole (which I have at home) when away.

If you want to keep your awesome Android hardware (OnePlus6T here), you can disable Google Services Framework and neuter everything at will using NetGuard, with the paid version allowing individual link granularity, so you can stop that Facebook link Spotify spawns upon launch, among all others.

This allows you to fine tune each app to comm with only links you allow. FB is particularly pesky..once it fails to connect to it's obvious servers, it spawns other numerical IP's that you have to do lookups on to see where/who they are...often returning to FB, so it's an ongoing task, recommended only for those most commited. I was on this path well before Shoshana's book, but her presentation was reaffirming.

EDIT: of course...Signal, how did I forget that..most used app of all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've done a similar thing, qwant, protonmail, firefox (4 different profiles and scores of containers), privacy badger, ublock origin, decentral eyes, but I'm convinced it's not possible to stop tracking. My browser finger print is unique and it doesn't seem possible to change that.

Also I have an android phone with google apps, facebook, twitter, scores of other apps tracking me. There's not much I can do about giving google my location data atm. I like waze and fitness apps too much.

<comment> dao- Have you checked what factors make your browser fingerprint unique?

<comment><USER56> If you're using firefox, you're already in a bucket of only 4.42% [0]. But even without that, just take your screen resolution, browser + os version, font list, your time zone, and you're almost already unique.

[0] [https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share/](https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/)

<comment><USER55> having my timezone set to utc was probably the most annoying thing about the firefox anti fingerprint setting. I never got quick and efficient at doing quick math to know what the local time was in my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I posted a similar post on my own blog yesterday([https://sharitt.com/2020/04/28/practicality-vs- purity.html](https://sharitt.com/2020/04/28/practicality-vs-purity.html))

Oddly one of the few things I actually kept is Google search itself after noticed that I basically add !g to every DDG search, and I've tried to firewall it off as much as I can.

<comment><USER58> Having used DDG for several years now as the default on all my devices, i can say that since December the results are completely useless. Not sure what happened.

I had never to use "!g" before. Now it is required for 1/3 of my regular searches, and "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches.

<comment><USER34> > "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches

I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field.

Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for their license selection feature, but I figured I should double check, and whaddayaknow? Bing can do license filtering too. Not sure how good it'll be, but I'll definitely be trying this.

Note that instead of typing !something (which I find quite annoying), you can just bind your browser to a keyword. I type "bi test" in my address bar for Bing Images "test" search, instead of having to type a bang and some by-ddg- defined shortcut and giving DDG the data (not that I distrust them, but need- to-know...). Wiki searching is also super convenient like this: wi for wikipedia, dwi for deutsch wikipedia, owi for openstreetmap wiki, etc. Right click in the search field and choose 'Add keyword for this search' usually does the trick.

<comment><USER58> i naively like the ! shortbuts on DDG because i like to think they use this as data to improve their results.

<comment><USER34> That's an angle I hadn't thought of, that it might contribute to DDG's attack on Google by supplying them more data, particularly the queries one goes to Google for. Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Amazingly how similar my path is to Aaron's. I use paid for Google services (GCP, buy lots of movies and books) but I have mostly moved to DDG, combination of FastMail and ProtonMail, (sort of) trust Apple walled garden, and rely heavily on FireFox containers to separate data for all web properties that I visit and use.

I do still use Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive for secondary backups for my photos on iCloud (my iPhone auto exports to all three when I am on WiFi) and I sometimes use Google Search in a FireFox container (I use one container for all Google web properties).

Respect to Aaron for running his own email service. I think about doing that but never do. My problem is that I enjoy spending time writing, and designing and writing code, and I don't make time for some things that I would like to try. Time management is a pain sometimes.

EDIT: something I forgot to add: when following a web link, copy the URI and then open the appropriate FireFox container for the domain and copy the URI to a new tab in the correct container. Good hygiene.

<comment><USER31> right click->Open Link in New Container Tab is great! Can easily pick which container to put it in.

Email was the hardest for me. But felt the most freeing also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> After seeing similar threads on HN, I've also started a similar journey. I managed to migrate to Firefox with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. But I've also added a shortcut for Google search: if I feel like I am missing something I open a new tab and type "go [keywords]".

<comment><USER61> You know you can prefix your ddg search with !g to use Google?

Useful for technical searches, where ddg is sadly, not good enough.

<comment><USER62> You can actually use !g anywhere in the search strings. It's useful when you finish typing your query, you can change your search engine at the last second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I understand the reasoning and I applaud the effort. As the author correctly identified he loses people by switching from Google to Apple, since ,when it comes to cell phones, it seems like choosing a lesser evil at best.

edit: clarity

</comment><comment><USER64> I've been using DuckDuckGo since it launched. But are we down to two search engine choices now? Google or DDG? What other alternatives are there?

De-Googling services is quite easy for the most part as there are many competing alternatives including good self-hosted options.

As a web user, I block all Google JavaScript that gets embedded in 99% of sites using a combination uBlock, NoScript, and my own DNS. Most sites load fine but some that use the Google API fail to show anything—which is silly when most of them are plain text and image articles.

</comment><comment><USER65> Fastmail is really nice alternative, not just for the email but because it comes with a calendar and contacts.

You can sync contacts via CardDav and your calendar via CalDav.

Even better, if you have a work Google account like I do, you can import your calendar as an overlay on Fastmail's calendar using OAuth2.

If you'd like your calendar without the pesky forced management profiles, it's a neat workaround while still remaining relatively secure. It also doesn't break when your arbitrary forced password rotation kicks in every 90 days ;)

</comment><comment><USER66> de-googling: appleling

<comment><USER67> Yes, there are just two generally usable mobile OSs - ios and android. The only way to not share you every living moment with google while still having a snartphone is to have an iphone.

It's fucked up that's the way world is, but it is the way the world is.

<comment><USER27> >The only way to not share you every living moment with google while still having a snartphone is to have an iphone.

Not really. You can install LineageOS an many Android phones.

LineageOS is a de-googled Android.

And the latest Huawei Android devices are also Google-free.

<comment><USER67> That's what I meant by "generally" usable. You can install Lineage. I can as sell. But most people can't.

But the worst thing is that to get most use of Android, you have to have Play store and attached surveillance services. There's a lot of cool stuff on fdroid, but your city's public transport? Your bank's app? Your local taxi's app? Your city's meal delivery app? You're not getting that without Google Play.

You can get some stuff from sites like apkmirror, but that's at the risk of getting malware (again, the two of us can see what's malware and what's the actual apk, but most can't) and at the cost of automated security updates.

I lived like that for a while, and it's not worth it. Maybe if you don't mind you're smartphone is actually a dumbphone - which is a good thing for some people who want it that way because of minimalism and somesuch, but most people don't.

<comment><USER68> Lineage OS has auto updates. As well, APK Mirror does test the checksum, so it will contain no malware that isn't on the play store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've been slowly de-googling/de-large-corporationing.

\- DuckDuckGo for search mostly, trying out qwant

\- Runbox for email, I like the service and its incredibly cheap and have my own domain

\- Youtube -> miniflux for subscriptions & newpipe on my phone

\- I cant delete facebook but I've mitigated it to using matrix + a facebook->matrix bridge

\- Using osmand~ and open street maps for directions, i dont have a way to get public transport directions, I helped write a program that does this in college but,, its not very good

<comment><USER34> > I cant delete facebook

And people ask why I have su on my phone. I want ownership, nothing more...

Anyway, for public transport directions, have you checked the apps available in F-Droid? The main ones that come to mind are Transportr and Öffi, I don't know if they work (well) whereever you're located though. Newer versions of OsmAnd can also do this to an extent, but doesn't pull the schedules (let alone realtime delays) so it only shows you "you can take bus 6 and then train 9" without knowing anything about their schedules, so that's largely useless at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'm actually in the slow process of this as well. Moving to DDG is the easiest starting point; in the beginning it's tempting to type g! with every search until you start trusting the results. Next I changed from my Pixel 2 to a SailfishX on a Sony phone. I'm planning on moving to Owncloud for contacts/storage/docs next. It's surprising how I've paid for Google to deeply invade my life.

<comment><USER16> I bought an used Xperia and installed Sailfish on it. LOVE IT! The gestures feel so natural way to use phone, ambients make it look badass and the program management is really creative.

Android app support is what allowed me to transition because of banking apps etc. It's not 100% polished (especially the Android app usage) but at its worst works well enough and at it's best, the experience IMO tops any other phone OS that i've used.

Wish it had more native apps though.

<comment><USER70> Agreed, if I could have Sailfish on a Huawei P40 I'd be ecstatic. As it stands using Here maps, built in browser, and basic phone tools get me 90% of the way. I'm cheating a little in my transition -- I've moved my _must use_ apps over to my iPad pro. 2FA, Instagram (a drug habit I hope to kick later in the summer), Keybase, mobile check deposit, etc.

I need to find a replacement for Google Keep (love how easy it is to move text/urls/photos between devices, jot down ideas / record thoughts) and Hangouts Dialer still.

<comment><USER16> For files/photos I recommend self-hosting NextCloud. The new version of SailfishOS containts native Nextcloud services(!!!). For 2FA you can install Android app Authy. Foil Auth is a native one, but haven't tested it though.

Feel you on Instagram habit. I de-social-mediaized (?) in late 2019 and haven't looked back, but it was tough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> > I've already pulled down my 2-300GB Google Photos archive

How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.

<comment><USER72> Takeout doesn't work in practice for bigger collections (archive creation routinely fails, timeouts while downloading, 50GB max size results in many splits)

I've used this 3rd party tool and it worked OK: [https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos- sync/](https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/)

<comment><USER73> Thanks! Quick question, does gphotos-sync download the images in the original resolution? One of the limitations of tools like this in the past is that they could only download the "high resolution" (compressed) images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I have Fastmail and other private email services but I've been unable to really move over because of all the integrations that Gmail has. Automatic email scanning for trip details, calendar integrations, searches from the web also surfacing details from emails, google voice, tons of other apps and extensions.

It would be a nice if there was a way to get all this functionality beyond Gmail.

<comment><USER75> I use a private Searx instance which includes searches over my own document archive in its results. To achieve this I made a new Searx 'engine' [1] - which is essentially a proxy between the Searx instance and another search engine - which connects Searx to a Recoll instance. Since Recoll can also search email it would be fairly trivial to include results from there as well although I have never used this. The 'engine' would need to be extended in such as way as to communicate the (logged-in) username to Recoll so it returns results from the correct email account (or no email account for anonymous users) but that is a fairly trivial change.

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I am surprised that nextcloud isn't cited in this article.

It could effectively replace iCloud, hackmd (maybe) and has calendaring features too.

<comment><USER77> The author mentions it twice: under Contacts/Calendar "I'm thinking about using nextcloud." and under Docs "Nextcloud might fill this gap. But I don't feel a void to fill right now."

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Since this place, at this time, seems to be as good as any to ask for recommendations:

Is there a paid service that's similar to Google Voice where I can get an extra phone number and have calls to it routed to my normal phone? I'd like to have a phone number that's "out there", so to speak, but not my real number.

<comment><USER31> Twilio I think you can do this right from their UI.

Calling out might be a bit more tricky though

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> For photos storage and sharing you may want to check pCloud. They offer lifetime plan at $350 for 2TB. I'm in no way related; just a happy customer.

[https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing- plans.html](https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans.html)

<comment><USER80> After having n photo startups (paid and free) disappear into the mist, along with my photos and videos, I decided self-hosting was the only thing I could trust. I couldn't find any software that would reliably scale to my library and fix my mess of duplicates and bitrot files, so I made it. I'm providing access to the beta for free in exchange for feedback, if you'd like to try it. [https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/](https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/) is dropping this week.

<comment><USER79> Kudos to author! Seems like lots of hard work and dedication went into your software. Respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> One thing to add to the list. Signal rather than Whatsapp. It's the best. Protonmail isn't bad too.

<comment><USER29> Signal does not play nice with other protocols and centralizes everything. Hardly an improvement. Better go for real alternatives that will likely survive way longer like Riot/Matrix.

<comment><USER75> Or 'plain and simple' XMPP with OMEMO [1] encryption. This is easy to host yourself using Prosody or Ejabberd or another XMPP server, Conversations (or one of its forks) on Android, Monal or Siskin or iOS, something like converse.js in a browser, etc.

[1] [https://omemo.top/](https://omemo.top/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> They do have lineage OS now. Not that buggy. Have been using it in my Samsung S5 for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER83> >Then force Thunderbird to fully download all of my mail and then push it all back up.

I didn't know it's possible to upload mail (without actually sending it) with IMAP.

Do hosted providers allow that? Looks like it's additional cost with no benefit if you don't data-mine email.

<comment><USER31> So far I haven't seen any limitations by providers. I can see potentially rate limiting. But I've done this before even helping move client emails via outlook to another provider. The client just happily syncs any email you toss in

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> If everyone did this, google wouldn't exist, a lot of the open source google software wouldn't exist. Isn't the main point of de-googling, is that everyone does it. Because you can be influenced indirectly even if you do de-google, and that the benefits of de-googling should emerge with popularity. I'm sure some people are de-googling because of personal privacy, but most people aren't targets so this doesn't matter. One of the benefits I can see is that it reduces the quality to the users, and the value to the large companies. That way, data/ power is not consolidated, and we have privacy by segregation.

In summary, I don't see the purpose of de-googling as an individual. And if de-google collectively, we're all worse off. And yet I de-googled last year.

PS: I use Brave, Android, flutter & duck.com, which only exists to its quality today because of Google.

<comment><USER85> > but most people aren't targets so this doesn't matter

What do you mean? Everyone on the planet is a target. They want data on everyone so they can target ads to everyone.

<comment><USER84> Oops, by 'target', I meant on the receiving end of exploitation (governments/ politics/ free speech). You might consider targeted adverts exploitation, but I didn't include that in the use of 'target', because I think people prefer targeted adverts and can just turn them off anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Maybe this for backups and GPhotos alternative? [https://www.jottacloud.com/en/](https://www.jottacloud.com/en/)

</comment><comment><USER87> For photos, I've been liking mylio. Private, local, encrypted on cloud services if you want to use them and it syncs with your mobile phone too.

</comment><comment><USER88> Do de-googlers consider Startpage to be acceptable? The results are from google but they claim that your privacy is protected.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty questionable.

A listing of search alternatives, including Qwant (French-based, so EU/GDPR), SwissCows, SearX, and others, with good rationales:

[https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search- engine/](https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/)

<comment><USER89> Hi - Startpage person here. Maybe I can clear some stuff up.

1) Startpage provides Google results, but Google never sees you. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. For more info on we keep your search private: [https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does- st...](https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-startpages- private-search-engine-work). 2) Startpage is HQ'ed in the Netherlands, meaning we don't have to comply with US government or law enforcement and comply with EU/Dutch privacy laws such as GDPR. Also, we're not likely to receive requests by governments to hand over user data – simply because we don't have any. 3) In 2019, Startpage announced an investment in Startpage by System1 through Privacy One Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of System1. With this investment, the plan is to further expand privacy features and reach new users. (Lots of new privacy features in the works!) The Startpage founders have control over the privacy components of Startpage. And! After conversations with the privacy community, Startpage was recently relisted in PrivacyToolsIO. More info on that: [https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...](https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/1275/0/what- is-startpages-relationship-with-privacy-onesystem1-and-what-does-this-mean- for-my-privacy-protections)

That's a lot of text, but I hope it helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I switched to Bing first for all queries that can result in non-PC content, and then discovered that technical search is better on Bing also. I first switched to Firefox because I wanted to read newspapers. I find it hard without Bypass Paywalls Firefox add-on, that is banned by Google Chrome. As a result, Firefox with Bing default search is my browser. Things like deletions of alternative viewpoints (e.g. Dr. Erikson Covid19 briefing yesterday) and unbearable ad load are making me switch from Youtube. Unfortunately there is no good alternative to Youtube yet.

<comment><USER27> I've found that if you aren't using Chrome while signed in Google account you are punished by annoying recaptchas triggering often and when trying to use Google search, clicking on second on third results page will trigger anti-bot response.

That's not very friendly behavior.

<comment><USER91> As someone who has been using Firefox for years and is always signed into his Google account, that has absolutely not been my experience at all.

Perhaps it's something else, like your IP range, that's triggering it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Why not vCard and vCal instead of Apple ?

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow on hackernews this is a first for me

</comment><comment><USER93> For email I just use the email plan that comes with my very cheap blog hosting plan.

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm a little bummed out that I just switched back to Chromium after several months on Firefox, but Firefox has some very annoying bugs that were driving me crazy.

On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.

<comment><USER95> What bugs specifically have you encountered?

<comment><USER96> The amount of random crashes on the Youtube pages is crazy

<comment><USER95> I'm not sure what you mean, I haven't experienced that behavior. Maybe try with a clean profile?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Also, if you get a new laptop (or any installation) keep it free of google. Avoid it from the start.

Also, I have a website which isn't precious; I'm going to reject chrome requests, with a message recommending firefox.

<comment><USER34> Nice one. Similarly, I removed my sites from the Google search index by blocking their crawlers. Someone wants to find my content, they better use a different search engine. _Anything_ but Google will do. Their favoring AMP results and forcing websites (the ones that rely on people coming from search for income) to implement that crap ticked me off just a little too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> So he moved from Google to Apple and Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER99> Aren't we revisiting [https://prism-break.org/en/all/](https://prism- break.org/en/all/)

</comment><comment><USER100> Interesting!

Your first concern and reason for De-Googling was privacy, so I'd say moving to iPhone, iCloud, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and the like doesn't help you much.

I also think you forgot video-conferencing/video chat. I'd go for Zoom, but there's a bunch of alternatives. Most have their drawbacks.

Lastly, move to Europe where we have GDPR. I actually can not read some news articles that are hosted in the US since the site might not have bothered to implement Privacy features and thus chose to just block EU visitors. Tells you something about the 'issue'.

<comment><USER101> What privacy issues do you think the iPhone has?

<comment><USER102> Perhaps most of the apps that you install from the store, which are just as riddled with analytics and tracking as their Android counterparts.

<comment><USER30> iOS provides a lot less ways for third party apps to dig into the OS and interact with other apps. The same thing Android fans hate about it, the lock- in and lack of customizability, offers it a lot of additional privacy protection.

In general though, regardless of your phone ecosystem: Remove as many apps as you can from your device. Only install the ones you need and remove ones you don't frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> What are you using instead of Google maps?

<comment><USER104> I'm using Here Maps[1] since 2013, both on PC and mobile.

[1] [https://wego.here.com/](https://wego.here.com/)

<comment><USER105> Wow, this is the first time trying this. Very responsive, and has real-time traffic information, which was the killer feature of google maps for me.

Maps and youtube are the two google features I routinely use. I'll have to install this on mobile and see how it goes.

Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> I've done this a couple years ago now for anyone interested in the subject, hope it's useful to compare: [https://medium.com/@rdallman10/degoogling- eb3709bdfd4c](https://medium.com/@rdallman10/degoogling-eb3709bdfd4c) (I will get my blog off medium, promise!)

It's great to compare with people who have done similar, thanks for sharing your journey. It is an inordinate amount of work that non-computer-interested most likely aren't interested in. I do wonder what it takes (restoration of privacy rights enacted through judicial interpretation enforced upon companies like e.g. GDPR?) to have default UX that is E2E across most services, probably widely used companies like Apple doing it (which may compel Google, et al, to?). It surprises me to some degree that companies seem to _want_ the liability involved with associating people with their data? This seems odd, as the data is just as useful assigned to some random identifier that can be carted around the internet that can't be tied to our person, and I wonder how the cost of liability remains worth it when technologically it's unnecessary. The human aspect of social networking seems like the weak heel for removing names there, but still things like chat seem like things companies wouldn't want to store (who knows how strongly gov is compelling them to do so to make it worthwhile, maybe, with $$$ or threats). Even things like imessage, most people use icloud to backup and in this case the messages are recoverable by Apple (for law enforcement as it is or their own purposes maybe, more cynically) - this is heavily marketed E2E but in practice isn't, Apple says so on their security page even (this is nice of them): [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202303) \- I hope that as an industry we can work towards pushing ephemeral UX that users can adjust to but it will take adjusting, nobody needs a message from Nonna from 2014 and if it was the prized bread recipe, save it somewhere else! In any event, I hope this continues to get better for the lay user.

I haven't changed most of my choices since making the switch. I do use mullvad with wireguard now and I consider moving off of 220.127.116.11 for similar reasons to leaving google (see recent news about large gov partner here). I don't have many complaints. In the past year, I've also stopped reading twitter/reddit and moved to reading the news once a week in some attempt to rewire my brain, I'd say it's mostly good, I spend more time thinking and reading more interesting things and it gives me some perspective, the trade offs are being more disconnected from society (not up to date on memes, miss seeing what friends are cooking!) which has pros/cons. I'm rethinking this, it's all about values really, I do think social media can be used in a privacy preserving way to still keep in touch with friends/family (fingerprinting is slight issue) that doesn't have to constantly fight for your dopamine receptors. Anyway, it's interesting to discuss with like minded people, I know very few who aren't constantly plugged in now and it can be hard to relate (ie talk about more interesting things imho).</comment>


Tell HN: I got sick of people procrastinating. Now I tell them to Finish Shit. - <AUTHOR>

I got sick of my friends complaining about not finishing small projects. Some of them claimed they were too busy to finish writing that novel they've been thinking about for the last few years (They told me this when we were wasting time in a bar, no less). One friend told me that he wouldn't be able to start his own company because he ran out of time.
After hearing all of these people bitch and complain, I finally snapped and told them to stop talking and just "Finish Shit"!
Something strange then began to happen. People actually started to get motivated, and were finishing their shit! Books were being worked on, papers filled to form LLCs.
This exclamation turned into a mini web app idea for me. What if people could submit things they were procrastinating on, and get yelled at by complete strangers until they were motivated enough to do it?
I built a rough version of the the app at finishshit.com. To submit something you need help with, just message @finishshit on Twitter. If you're not a procrastinator, check out the site anyways. It's very therapeutic to yell at procrastinators that deserve/want it. <comment><USER2> Make it like awesomereminders.com and people get called and bitched at until they finish their project...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea. Do you have any more info about the technical side of awesomereminders?

<comment><USER2> I am pretty sure he pays people to go through a list of numbers and call them to tell them how awesome they are.

At 1 call per minute (which I figure is pretty liberal for a "Hey, have you finished your shit yet?") a single person can clear 400 people per day easily.

But of course if you paid someone $10/hr to call people, your sweet spot for break even is somewhere around 350 customers before you hire someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Funny and novel, why not adopt the loseit or loseit model and make people put up money? If they complete their task, they keep the money. If they don't, it goes to charity. (Might be kinda complicated and more than you're willing to do).

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on a "Pro Version" of the app that will be similar to what you're describing. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should also mention that I'm adding features over the next couple of days, so you're not looking at the final version just yet.

<comment><USER4> Does anything ever reach a _final version_? :D

<comment><USER5> Just as an example, once an offline console game goes gold master, it usually doesn't get updated any further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great idea, and I've been thinking of something similar. Some people, including me, work better when there's someone waiting for the work with some deadline. This works out badly if you're working on your own thing, but people like this can be very productive under a good "boss".

So my idea was a web app where people could sign up to be "bosses", and you'd have some karma system to figure out who the good bosses are, matching them up to the "employees" who sign up to get bossed around to do the tasks they've set for themselves. Now, you'd have to put in measures to make sure bosses don't get abusive (make it part of the karma system I guess), ways to match up people with their boss, etc. But it seems like a neat idea that might just work. I just don't know if you could find enough people who like being a good boss (or at least like getting the karma points associated with good bossing), as well as enough people who'd sign up to be bossed around.

</comment><comment><USER7> You forgot the URI:

<http://finishshit.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Below is the link to the twitter account:

<http://twitter.com/finishshit>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You could offer a counterpart to <http://www.awesomenessreminders.com/> where procrastinators pay you to call them and say "Finish shit".

</comment><comment><USER9> I think it would be better just called 'finishit' - but having both domains would be the best option.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not only do you yell at other people to Finish Shit, you yell at yourself to Finish Shit too. Now that's dedication, and not at all crazy.

<http://twitter.com/finishshit/status/25282475677>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. Just made it a little bit more clear how to show up on the procrastinator list (on the web site). You just have to tweet @finishshit if you need to be yelled at.

</comment><comment><USER11> rescue time helped me well. I went from 0.16 to 0.7 in 3 months. I really don't know how it measures my productivity but I cared about rising the number. This month, I may get 0.8.

I finished lot of work comparing to the past, rescue time was a reminder that "Hey, a month just gone, what did you do? Oh, sh*t there wasn't enough time!". It turns out to be false, my productivity just wasn't at top. Now I'm starting to run out of time, really!

</comment><comment><USER12> A related rant: <http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/>

</comment><comment><USER13> I would occasionally post on the Twitter profile without @replying to anybody to remind us you exist.

</comment><comment><USER14> A literal 'whack on the head'... Inspiring!

</comment><comment><USER15> finishshit.com is redundant fini(sh)(sh)it

just kidding</comment>


Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages - <AUTHOR> http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> If mail goes to spam while using Postmark, it's almost ALWAYS related to the content. So we built this very simply tool to help you test the headers and contents of your emails to make sure that they're scoring as well as possible to go one step further in avoiding the spam folder!

We decided to offer it as a free API to make the world of email just a bit better. We also built a simple single-page scoring tool for anyone to use even if they're not API savvy.

Ideas and feedback are welcome!

<comment><USER2> This is great — now I can test my spamminess without needing to have an expert look at it first :)

Update: would be nice to see a legend with the whole scale ratings possible.

<comment><USER3> The scale is actually just the SpamAssassin score. _Usually_ anything over 5 can cause delivery problems as the SpamAssassin daemon will mark it as spam. keep in mind though that this is configurable and other people's servers can set a different value. but from my experience, five seems to be the average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Help me out here: What is the target audience?

1) I don't know your app, but ran SA in the past. You can configure the hell out of it. How is this test setup representable for the (that's the thing you want to archive, I guess) spam filter configuration of the final recipient?

2) Aren't you basically offering a way to ~somewhat easily~ avoid being flagged as spam, even for people with dark glasses and the tendency to sell potent drugs over the internet? I somehow think that you're offering a nice test setup to people that want to 'tune' their unsolicited emails first?

No offense intended, I guess I'm just too negative here? Would love to get feedback on those things nevertheless.

<comment><USER3> Hey Benjamin,

1) This test is representative of our system. I realize that other systems can be set up different with different settings. given that users of the Postmark app send email through us, they might be interested to see what _we_ might consider as spam.

2) The thing is that there are a lot of tests that spamd does that they can't defeat, even if they're aware of them. security by obscurity isn't really how spamd works anyway :)

and no, you're not at all negative. by all means, please feedback at us :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for getting back - and looking up my profile is - special. :)

1) Agreed. So it's ~accurate~ really only for recipients that would use your service/the same configuration/classification, right? For everyone else this is an approximation. With a nice api and some UI love, but still.

2) Agreed, a lot of things are unbeatable. But you yourself market this as 'most often the _content_ leads to classification as spam' solution. Everyone can change the content, good guy and bad guy.

I'm not saying that the idea sucks and quite frankly someone involved into a business that sends unsolicited mail should know the deal already, but I still think that you're offering yet another testcase.

Security by obscurity is not the problem, the thing is: Can I create a client for your API that randomly appends/prepends/inserts meaningful text into my crap content and evaluate your opinion on my crap x times per second? You commented elsewhere that you're not keeping my content, so - how are you going to notice this abuse?

Okay, _NOW_ I'm too negative. Still - rate limit that stuff. :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot. Now I'm going to spend half the evening writing a script to grab random spam out of my gmail and using this API to try and automatically turn spam into ham.

I bet siri can already do this.

<comment><USER4> I'd expect her to answer with "I'm afraid I can't do that, Oren" - but give it a try and good luck :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It could use a short privacy policy. Do you keep the email contents at all - even in a log?

<comment><USER3> not in the live version, but you're right. I'm adding this to the todo list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very interesting, but I can't figure out how to use this in Bash, when I try:

      xargs -I % curl -X POST "http://sa-api.postmarkapp.com/filter \
       -H "Accept: application/json" \
       -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
       -v \
       -d '{"email":"%", "options":"long"}' \
      <message

It seems contents of my email message file are processed one line at a time, instead of the entire message passed in place of %

I'm using GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

EDIT: added indentation to fix display

<comment><USER7> Please, man xargs if you aren't joking.

EDIT: Sorry if that came off harsh.

<comment><USER6> No, I'm not joking. I guess I'm just really dense. I've also tried passing -L 100 in addition to -I, but the result is the same.

<comment><USER7> Why are you using xargs to read to an entire entry? Why not set it as a var and place it in the comment or take it as stdin?

<comment><USER6> I've also tried this:

       msg=$(cat message)
       curl -X POST "http://sa-api.postmarkapp.com/filter" \
        -H "Accept: application/json" \
        -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
        -v \
        -d '{"email":"'"$msg"'", "options":"long"}'

But sa-api.postmarkapp.com returns "error"... :-(

<comment><USER3> oh no. I'm sorry! that's the previous url which we moved last minute.

I'm going to go through the doc again to make sure there's nothing else out of place :/

<comment><USER6> So I see you've updated the doc with a new hostname, but I still get an error, so there's something obviously wrong with my method:

      msg=$(cat message)
      curl -X POST "http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/filter" \
        -H "Accept: application/json" \
        -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
        -v \
        -d '{"email":"'"$msg"'", "options":"long"}'

      * About to connect() to spamcheck.postmarkapp.com port 80 (#0)
      *   Trying 126.96.36.199... connected
      * Connected to spamcheck.postmarkapp.com (22.214.171.124) port 80 (#0)
      > POST /filter HTTP/1.1
      > User-Agent: curl/7.21.7 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.21.7 OpenSSL/1.0.0e zlib/126.96.36.199 libidn/1.22 libssh2/1.2.8 librtmp/2.3
      > Host: spamcheck.postmarkapp.com
      > Accept: application/json
      > Content-Type: application/json
      > Content-Length: 5229
      > Expect: 100-continue
      >
      < HTTP/1.1 100 Continue
      < HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
      < X-Powered-By: Express
      < Content-Type: application/json
       < Connection: keep-alive
      < Transfer-Encoding: chunked
      <
      * Connection #0 to host spamcheck.postmarkapp.com left intact
      * Closing connection #0
      {"error":{}}

Wonder if you've got any pointers on how to do this at the shell...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> nice work. would be a great add-on to have a permalink to the score + results. for example, client asks me to make his HTML newsletter, i cringe, create it, test it and have a link to send him the score when he insists we use SA negative words, and so on.

<comment><USER3> oh, I like this.

edit: would you want to see the _same_ results, or have it re-run every time the link is loaded? because you could technically just copy paste the report into pastebin…

<comment><USER8> Probably the results at the time of processing, mainly for the purpose of sharing. Any further processing makes sense to re-run with a new email. That also holds true to the fact you dont store the email contents. Agreed with pastebin, just as easy to email the results as well, however might be a nice feature that comes with some value to the site's purpose.

Enjoying the api, I may work on a little tool using it similar to the feature request. thanks for sharing this with us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice! I have created something similar, called Konstati (<http://konstati.co>), focusing on email marketers. So far it only tests emails against Spamassassin, providing useful tips about each SA rule (still only in portuguese, though).

I'm currently working on it to support W3C validation, link and image checkers and email previews.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another tool to use for figuring out spam rules is always helpful. I actually got hit by the Gmail spam filter with my Hacker Newsletter (<http://www.hackernewsletter.com>) project last week. Checking that specific email in the tool however shows it scored a -0.1. :) So, as with anything... use this resource with care and make sure you do a lot of other testing as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> My Perl module WWW::Postmark now supports this API. The new version (0.3) should be up on CPAN within a few short hours, as the CPAN servers sync.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would you consider putting some kind of resource on the site for explaining some of the common results? For example, why the Text to Image ratio matters.

Also, I've tried a few emails: 1 of them ranked a 1.0, 2 of them a 0.4, but all three times the little white dot was in the same position (at about 2:50, if it were the face of a clock). Not sure if thats a bug or not.

<comment><USER13> SpamAssassin score could be in range from -1 (best) to 25 (worst). 0.4 and 1.0 is almost the same, so it's normal for white pointer to stay on the same position.

<comment><USER12> Oh, no kidding.

Thanks for that update

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The tool is nice but unfortunately it would miss the key spam score components tied to IP reputation.

AWL (auto-white-list) is the most obvious rule, but many actual Spam Assassin installs include plugins that rely on all kinds of 3rd party service.

Is the IP you are checking against the same as IP used to send your transactional emails?

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool guys, thanks for providing this. Would love to see some stats along with the service over time.

<comment><USER3> what kind of stats would you be interested in seeing? how often people's tests result in spam vs ham scores?

because while I can't see what people are testing, given that it's friday afternoon, I'm betting there's a lot of "asdfasdf" going on :)

<comment><USER15> I'd be curious of stats via the API as well as stats you guys are processing on postmark as well. Not so much to change my life, but an impressive view into the life of a processing system.

Starting with the type of stats you mentions is great... rates at which the API is being called throughout the day overlapped with rates at which that volume is spam.

I could envision a nice looking bar chart (green) for every hour showing the standard volume bell curve ramping up at 6 am and back down around 4pm and then overlayed on that is another set of bars (red) that show how much of that mail was spam, and how much was (orange) ham or something like that.

Would just give a nice pizzaz to the service and by extension postmark I imagine.

I suppose if you throw what I'm saying into a pot and boil it down, I want you guys to become like Akismet. Every WordPress user knows what it is, everyone uses it and when you find yourself in a non-wordpress environment you reach for the Akismet APIs to help you out anyway.

I figure you guys can popularize postmark via a similar route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find this API to be "0.0 excellent"

Cool idea, but what do the scores mean?

<comment><USER17> <http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/HowScoresAreAssigned>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, cool -- compared my setup to this and figured out I was missing razor -- apt-get install razor and I should be rejecting more spam as we speak ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone else have trouble reading the API? There is no contrast between the text and the background.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for feedback! I already fixed this and it would be deployed soon.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Alternatively:

      apt-get install spamassassin
      cat email.txt|spamc -R</comment>


What part of speech is "the"? (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002974.html <comment><USER2> I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all.

I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article.

For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best online reference I found: [https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english- grammar/d...](https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english- grammar/determiners-and-quantifiers/definite-article)

<comment><USER3> As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems.

And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification. So unless someone goes Archeresque and says "I saw the movie -- in which I of course mean 'the' to be an adjective", there's no sense in which that mistake is common either.

With that said, I think there is a substantive, common misuse of "the", but it's not what the article describes. Rather, it's when people say eg "I went to the store", when the speaker and listener don't have a common reference point that would justify "definiteness". I've always felt these should be "a store", since there are so many they could be referring to. (It's fine when there really is only one store they could be referring to.)

<comment><USER4> Other modern languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and others get by perfectly well without the qualifiers 'the' and 'a', which according to Wikipedia are the first and sixth most frequently used words in English respectively, so they don't seem cognitively compulsory for understanding. And juxtaposing British English with US English 'the' has throw-away status in assertions such as 'I am going to university' (Br) vs. 'I am going to the university' (US) but not in 'I am going to the store' so you're also dealing with local conventions. Plus in common usage 'the' and 'a' can be used in their technical sense in EG, 'not a [any old] car but THE car' with suitable prosody added for effect. With all the spins that can be imposed on articles 'the' and 'a' trying to formalize their use with precise definitions would seem like a lost cause. (and of course definitions use words which themselves remain undefined but please don't go there)

<comment><USER5> It should be noted, however, that while many languages get by without explicitly marking definiteness, there are other linguistic techniques that can provide similar contextual clues that are required for understanding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. Topic-comment structures[1] are often used to convey a sense of what is assumed as new versus known information. For instance, Russian's relatively free word order allows it to rearrange the constituents of the sentence so that the topic (what is being talked about, usually familiar to the listener) precedes the comment (what is being said about the topic). Japanese has this baked-in with particles that mark the topic (see [2]).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Topic.2C_them...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Topic.2C_theme.2C_and_subject:_.E3.81.AF_wa_and_.E3.81.8C_ga)

<comment><USER4> Good observations. It's also interesting to look back 2K years at the kingpin Eurasian languages for evidence of definite/indefinite articles. From right to left, ancient Chinese (probably) lacked the qualifier but was exposed to its existence via the silk road (which used the lingua franca Aramaic which had them) and also through exposure to the Greek Buddhist colonies in North India (ancient Greek had a definite article). Same holds for Sanskrit in ancient India, which lacks any definite article. Same for old Latin. And Greece was subordinate to Rome, which only tolerated Greek as a language of the intelligentsia. Curious how an appendage in ancient secondary tongues became so mainstream in so many dominant contemporary languages.

<comment><USER6> In Homeric Greek, the definite article is more of a demonstrative adjective, isn't it, more "that man" rather than "the man"? And Greek hung on as the language of administration in the eastern part of the empire.

<comment><USER4> True. The Wikipedia page on 'Article (grammar)' brings up the same points. Meanwhile, back in Greece,the European Union, and the OXIclean vote (a stain remover product in the US :) ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These days, in Quebec, French (as a first language) is taught using a more-or- less linguistically correct approach, with articles called determiners, dividing sentences into groups and using transformations to understand interrogative sentences. In my days we used a more traditional system, and the time we spent doing grammar analysis was very tedious; we only approached the subject in secondary school. These days they are taught to analyse sentences in 3rd-4th grade and up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification.

The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.

<comment><USER9> Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good.

Don't leave us hanging!

<comment><USER8> I'll be perfectly honest, I'm half-serious, half-drunk-posting.

But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories.

Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of living things used by biologists to organize living things.

There's not really any reason why words, a biological artifact, have been correctly classified all along. Hell! A copy-editor neighbor and I have minor quarrels over the capitalization of college subject names.

Trees are a specialization of graphs, and they're usually wrong. Just assume graphs to start with and your data will organize much better, even if the properties of the organizational metaphor aren't quite as nice.

<comment><USER9> Well, I share some of the instinctive scepticism about tidy theories of syntax/semantics.

But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).

<comment><USER11> Climate science, evolutionary biology, ...

<comment><USER12> I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language.

Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...

<comment><USER11> Spot on. Disdain for Ebonics is one of the last remaining ways in which it's considered acceptable in polite society to be blatantly racist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The deeper problem is the school tradition itself. It's a TRADITION, after all"

Interesting point and I agree. Why are we identifying metalinguistics with words anyway? Why not just use symbols so we can actually compare them across languages?

Is the tradition so inherently rigid and stuck to the written/spoken languages - rather than moving beyond words and use a system of symbols?

The tradition obsufcates the universality of grammar and semantics by adding words atop words rather than simple symbolism.

Doesn't this make internalization harder? You don't teach math just by numbers but also with symbols and real-world references.

As for internalization and understanding what and where 'the' belongs...There has been astounding success in identification and understanding when metalinguistics is entirely removed and replaced with simple symbols like _grmmr_ ([http://green-bridge.org](http://green-bridge.org)). I've seen results upfront and it seems a non-word approach eases and solidifies linguistic understanding in ways far more profoundly than metalinguistics ever can. Teachers and students alike have said this system has taken away all the cloud of uncertainty in language grammar and semantics.

If you are a linguist and you are interested in helping grmmr become a standard in the studies of metalinguistics, please do let me know! I'm the design partner of the company. We are eager to open source this knowledge into a simple but reliable notation.

This system has been in use for over 20 years in classrooms, colleges, and adult education programs. It has been redesigned from bottom up in order to be as accessible and consistent as you would expect from a grammar categorizing system.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just because you can point to "the" and identify it as a complement or article doesn't mean you understand it and you're doing linguistics!

See this recent submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769) [Richard Feynman on the difference between being able to name something, and understanding.]

Native-English-speaking children already know how to correctly use articles, without requiring a theory of what they are.

Teaching English learners that "the" is an article will not by itself result in correct use; they will be able to name it as an article, yet continue to use it in ways perceived as incorrect by native speakers, and do so for decades to come, possibly.

It doesn't matter whether we "the" a _determiner_ , or whether we call it a _blunx_. If we don't know where in a sentence a particular English _blunx_ must be used or else must be omitted, then we don't actually know what a _blunx_ is! And if we don't know that, we probably don't even understand why certain words are classified together as blunxes and others are excluded from that category; we are just demonstrating rote memorization.

 _Without using the word "determiner" or "article", tell me where to use 'the', where to use 'a', and when not to use them._

</comment><comment><USER15> This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open- class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb.

Closed-class words are treated like keywords in programming languages. The list seldom changes, and it's necessary to know the closed-class words, but not the open-class words, to parse a sentence. (At least in formal English.) While there are taxonomies of the closed-class words, modern thinking is that they're all handled as special cases.

[1] [https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list](https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list)

<comment><USER16> I would argue that "the" is a determiner, and the class of determiners is mostly closed. A determiner is the root of a determiner phrase. A determiner phrase can consist of only the root, like "the" or "a", but it can also be more complex like "every other", "uncomfortably few", or "90% of".

(This is all from chomsky's x-bar theory [0], which dates back to the 60s. I'm not aware of another model of syntax that better captures reality, but I'd love to hear about such.)

So the class of determiners is probably closed, but the class of determiner phrases is not (because phrases like "fewer than five of", "fewer than six of", etc are "generative" i.e. you can generate as many as you like).

I could absolutely conceive of a situation where a certain determiner phrase gets used so much in a community that an abbreviation becomes accepted as a new determiner. Perhaps parliamentary procedure buffs, who (say) care about 2/3s majority just as much as simple majority ("most"), come up with "tooths" meaning "at least two thirds of", and it becomes accepted as jargon within that community. Could totally see it happening. In fact, if anybody knows of any such instances I'd love to hear about them.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory)

<comment><USER17> Well, you've got [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head- driven_phrase_structure_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head- driven_phrase_structure_grammar) which are both model-theoretic grammars (see [http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Dis...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Distinction_between_Model- Theoretic_and_Generative-Enumerative_Syntactic_Frameworks) ). In short, grammar rules are constraints that have to unify in order to describe a grammatical utterance, instead of phrase-structure rules that generate sentences.

And there are newer theories that are much more compatible with a probabilistic / data-oriented outlook, even combining this with the model- theoretic grammar: [http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg- dop/](http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/)

People into semantics seem to like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar) which I never learnt much about. Oh and there's also the Meaning-Text theory, Relational Grammar and various dependency-based frameworks, Optimality Theory applied to syntax, … it goes on and on :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author of the submitted, um, article (blog post) didn't cover all the ground that could be covered on this issue, because it was an off-hand post. The previous comments here on Hacker News prompt me to bring up one more issue: even if we follow tradition and call "the" an "article" (as I was taught at some point in my schooling), we have the interesting situation that some languages, even in the Indo-European language family, have no expressed definite article at all. Latin didn't have one, and Russian doesn't have one. Definite reference in Latin, in Russian, and in many non-Indo-European languages (all the various Sinitic languages that are jointly called "Chinese" immediately come to mind) is indicated by means other than a dedicated word such as "the." Because languages can do perfectly well without words like "the" and "a" as those words are used as articles in English, perhaps it is not so shocking that modern grammarians prefer different category names for those words.

My eighth grade English class was innovative in that it used a textbook based on phrase-structure transformational grammar to teach me a lot of my English grammar. I would be glad to see books like that (modernized based on further linguistic research since the 1960s when the book was published) used in classrooms today. The "traditional" grammar poorly taught in the United States is based on an Indo-European grammatical tradition that is not completely lousy for teaching native speakers of Latin how to read and write Greek, but it has never been well suited for teaching analysis of English to native speakers or foreign-language learners of English. English has many grammatical features that are poorly described by the grammatical traditional of school lessons in English-speaking countries.

For further reading on this point, see Steven Pinker's excellent new book _The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person 's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century_.[1] For a better than average treatment of this point on Wikipedia, see the article "English language,"[2] which was updated to "good article" status during the most recent Wikipedia Core Contest, and is actually pretty decent for a Wikipedia article, with lots of references to good-quality reference books about the English language.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking- Persons/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking- Persons/dp/0670025852)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language)

</comment><comment><USER19> >(If you have pronoun as a part of speech, that would be a very clever answer, but you're going to have a lot of trouble convincing non-linguists of that.)

Can someone elaborate on that?

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this.

 __Go public school system! __

<comment><USER21> You never covered articles?

<comment><USER20> Not in the depth that it should have been.

<comment><USER22> I don't think there's much you can say about them at high school level. All we were taught was that "the" is the definite article and that "a" is the indefinite article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The purpose of "the" is to reset the vocal tract to a neutral configuration, allowing the subsequent (and more arbitrary) word to be resolved more readily.

<comment><USER24> Are there words that function the same way in Chinese, Latin or Greek?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it inadvisable to re-apply to a company that rejected you? - <AUTHOR> I recently went through an interview process at a company I like, in which I made it to the very last round before being turned down in favor of another candidate. It's a moderately large company, with many teams, and there's now a different opening that I might be a slightly better fit for.<p>Is it weird to try again without giving it some time (and gaining some experience)? Will I look desperate? Is it a general faux pas in any way? <comment><USER2> Talk to whoever you were working with on the recruiting side and ask them when you can reapply. Most larger companies have some fixed time, like after six months. If you can get feedback on the rejection that'd be helpful but don't expect it.

</comment><comment><USER3> What harm to you could possibly come from re-applying? If you like this company, then give it at a go. If they say no again you are no worse off than before. Who knows, they might say yes, if you give them another chance.

edit: Re-applying for the same position right after the have rejected you will not be successful i my guess. I have been in my current job for 17 years now. My first interview was not successful. I reapplied after 1 year and got the job, so yes, it is possible to get the job the second time around. Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> I may not have been clear; when I said "different opening" I meant a somewhat different job title

<comment><USER3> Then go for it. The application might be handled by people that are looking for a completely different skill set etc as with the first application. Go for it and best of luck!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Enter market with a well-funded competitor? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, i am just looking for a quick unbiased opinion.
Without giving too many details, a few weeks ago a friend of mine had an idea for a SaaS application, targeting a market of small to medium sized companies in a variety of industries.
After some research it turns out there is already a company doing this and they are set up pretty good 300k+ funding, 8 team members, decent sales network and have been around since late 2013. However, we think their product is rather shitty.
We both have a technical background and we are sure we could get a MVP together that is at least on the same quality level as their product within 2-3 months (coding in our free time).
This would be our first entrepreneurial adventure, but i have worked in several startups as a developer before, so i know the mindset and have a pretty good understanding what we need to prioritise.
They have a big headstart but we believe the market is large enough for two or even more competing companies.
So, should we give it a shot? Any advice is appreciated <comment><USER2> 300k funding for 8 developers is less than a year of runway at $40,000 per year and with no expenses (or income). That's not very much and they're probably a disproportionate amount on SEO/marketing rather than product which is why you heard about them after a little basic research.

The difference is perhaps in their commitment to execution, i.e. it's a company with working code for some definition of "working" as opposed to sitting on the fence worrying about competition. Therein lies the critical question, "Does it matter that there's competition?"

Good luck.</comment>


Why did I wake up just before my alarm clock went off? - <AUTHOR> http://joearms.github.io/2015/03/02/Waking-Up.html

<comment><USER2> I do wakeup before my alarm in the morning. I have my alarm set at 7:30 and I wake up at 7:29.

So I'm sure it's not about signals getting sent. It's about conditioning.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a common explanation to the "deja vu" moments we sometimes experience.

Although this does not at all explain the times where I wake up a few seconds/minutes before my alarm goes off and proceed to disable it before it does :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not a single data point in this theory. The reason you sometimes wake up just before the alarm (at least I wake up before my alarm because I actually check the time) is because of conditioning. Our biological clock is pretty accurate. An example of that, in university I could easily sleep on the week ends till noon. Now that i've been working for many years and waking up regularly at the same time during the week, I wake up naturally around the same time during the week end (unless I went out late the day before of course).</comment>