A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2020/01/17/a-brand-new-browsing-experience-arrives-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ <comment> geek-advised Is it me or this article is really vague? What's the new experience, exactly?

Also, I started using Firefox on my Android phone because of 2 reasons: block ads and Google seems to be more and more for-profit and not for-users. And I love Firefox with one exception: when I press a link on another app Firefox doesn't open but gives me a small notification on the bottom the screen saying the tab opened in Firefox. I find this really annoying as I wouldn't press a link if I didn't want to browse it right away.

<comment><USER2> That feature is called tab queue, and it can be disabled in settings.

<comment><USER3> What is tab queue? Is that the new feature or is that the old feature that gp was complaining about?

What are the new features?

<comment><USER4> It's the feature they were complaining about. It's useful if you're in some other apps (e.g. a feed reader) from which you want to open several links in a row, which you then work through in order afterwards within Firefox.

Disabling the tab queue means tabs get directly opened again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If Firefox pushes this before implementing support for extensions (namely uBlock or other ad-blocking / privacy extensions) then Firefox is well and truly toast on Android.

Correct me if I am wrong but the only reason non-tech people use Firefox on Android is to block ads.

Perhaps this is a push from Mozilla to try and get some search revenue flowing again?

<comment><USER6> For me personally, uBlock (and other extensions) is the _only_ reason I am using Firefox on Android. If this feature is removed, I will either go back to Samsung Browser or check something else.

<comment><USER7> If you are checking something else, I recommend Brave. I've switched from Firefox to Brave and I am mostly satisfied.

<comment><USER8> HN mods should investigate the systematic downvoting of pro-Brave comments. It happens on every discussion of browsers.

<comment><USER9> I "systematically" downvote comments that exist solely to advertise an alternative to the software being discussed. I would do the exact same thing to "hey, use firefox" comments on a Brave-related article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quite a lot of negativity from HN so far, so I'll add some counter.

I've been using the Firefox preview since it was announced and overall have found it to be a vast improvement on the previous incarnation. Tab management is much more intuitive and easier on the thumbs, the URL bar being at the bottom is jarring at first but soon becomes much easier to use, the performance is similar to the Firefox Focus which I had previously switched to from the main Firefox app.

Between this version of Firefox and the improvements to servo and webview brought in with v57 on the desktop side, we've seen a massive leap in terms of user experience across the Mozilla portfolio. Granted, addons and notably adblock is an omission, but really when I reflect on what I felt was missing from the Firefoxes of yore, I would always come back to 'look and feel' and 'performance' and I feel like these new releases go a long way to redressing the balance with the competition in my books.

<comment><USER11> > Tab management is much more intuitive and easier on the thumbs

It's worse if you have many tabs and the compartmentalisation feature is not flexible enough to be used with many tabs. Oh and the missing preview image is annoying when I'm looking for a site, because it's easier to look for a tab by looking at it then reading every title

> the URL bar being at the bottom is jarring at first but soon becomes much > easier to use

yeah I love the idea and it kind of works. problem is that _it doesn't stay down_ when I want to edit an url I first have to click on the bottom and then at the top as well. I really often want to edit the url I have in my browser and this is so annoying I can't even describe it.

> the performance is similar to the Firefox Focus which I had previously > switched to from the main Firefox app.

No it probably isn't. For me firefox preview has the same slow downs as normal firefox for android. A few seconds to open and then a few seconds to show my tabs (oneplus 5 + ~150 tabs).

If I just wanted a fast browser with adblock I would use "Lightning" (available in fdroid), but I want addons. Every other feature is available in every other browser.

<comment><USER12> > when I want to edit an url I first have to click on the bottom and then at > the top as well.

Another annoyance is how it never disappears. I get that it would be less intuitive to have a bar at the bottom disappear when scrolling down a page and reappear when scrolling up, but the way it is now, with the bar always there, some websites are simply unusable in landscape mode on a regular phone.

All in all, a great and brave decision, but poorly executed.

<comment><USER13> As this release is nightly, feedback like yours will go a long way to fix these annoying UI issues

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I am pretty surprised by this decision. I've been using Firefox Preview for a while, and while I do enjoy the new approach, I still regularly encounter bugs, including those that make me lose open tabs or other regressions for which I need to keep Firefox ("regular"?) installed.

Not to mention the lack of addons (ad-blockers) and the fact that this announcement is completely useless and void of information. ("Brand new experience", whoa.)

What is happening, Mozilla?

<comment><USER15> Note that this is about Firefox Nightly, not Firefox regular:

> A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android _Nightly_

So related to this decision I would say: nothing special, as far as I can see. They're just moving Firefox Preview to Firefox Unstable.

> _while I do enjoy the new approach (...) this announcement is completely > useless and void of information. ( "Brand new experience", whoa.)_

You're mentioning this yourself: Firefox Preview _is_ a very new experience compared to the current mainstream Firefox for Android browser. You and I may be aware of Firefox Preview's existence, but for those out there who are not this is not a post that is useless and void of information.

<comment><USER16> But they're not stopping there:

> As for next milestones, the brand new Firefox for Android will go into Beta > in Spring 2020 and land in the main release later in the first half of this > year.

What state it will all be in by then remains to be seen, of course.

(Aside: ugh, "Spring" as though everyone lived in temperate and subarctic northern hemisphere. Most of the world doesn't. This is a very American/European way of expressing things.)

<comment><USER17> Imagine they forecast their release "During the harvest" or "when the bushfires stop" or something. It's just weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is much concern about what's happening with extensions, and I share it, but I want to say this much: Fenix really is _way_ faster than Fennec. On my low-end phone, I used Fennec so that I can use it as a minimal browser, with fonts disabled, NoScript installed, uBlock Origin installed; also for ideological reasons. I always knew that on pages where I needed to enable scripting it was mostly still a _lot_ slower than Chrome, but I use it anyway.

I've just tried Fenix out now, and yeah, it's going through stress tests like loading Reddit's web interface much, much faster (like, at least twice as fast and five times as interactive).

I'll wait for the extensions story to be polished off. There's clear progress and intent. I have confidence they'll pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER18> A few screenshots would be nice… Really, it's a "new browsing experience", and what we have is just a wall of shitty corporate text saying how great it is. Fuck that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Given [https://github.com/mozilla- mobile/fenix/issues/5315](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5315) and [https://github.com/mozilla- mobile/fenix/issues/5630](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5630) are still open, does this represent a regression in supported functionality for nightly users?

<comment><USER20> Definitely. I don't understand how Mozilla doesn't understand that extensions, particularly content blocking (and specifically Ublock Origin) are definitional of what Firefox is and should be.

<comment><USER21> No this is definitely not a regression. Firefox launched a new app called "Firefox Preview Nightly", so as of right now both Nightly and Preview Nightly exist side by side; regular nightly users are not impacted at this point in time.

<comment><USER19> I don't understand why you've brought up what the current state of affairs is, the article says:

> For current Nightly users, it'll feel like a big exciting upgrade of their > browsing experience once they update the app

Which sounds to me like Fennec is going away and the update will replace it with Fenix.

>as of right now both Nightly and Preview Nightly exist side by side; regular nightly users are not impacted at this point in time

Is anyone disputing this? What will happen when the "new experience" the article talks about is launched?

<comment><USER22> > What will happen when the "new experience" the article talks about is > launched?

Can't people use the stable version then? I fail to see the issue here.

<comment><USER23> The issue is that their roadmap has the stable version being replaced automatically in early 2020 with one that doesn't support extensions (full support of which is late 2020), unless you pause updates on your mobile device and had an unsecured browser.

So that means for at least most of 2020, I won't have the option for the browser experience I like and will have to go use brave mobile or something.

As someone who wants to avoid a Chromium hegemony, this is pretty disappointing. I would like to support Mozilla on mobile, but they'll leave me no options to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If the nightly beta is like firefox preview then it's too early for it.

1) addons don't work yet

2) sharing of media files doesn't work [https://github.com/mozilla- mobile/fenix/issues/3621](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/3621)

3) you can't add exceptions for ssl certificates [https://github.com/mozilla- mobile/fenix/issues/1168](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1168)

And it's all in all more buggy then firefox for me....

I really welcome a new approach, but since in my extensive testing it performed as bad as firefox and had more crashes it will more or less force me either to stick to an older firefox release (mask updates) or use a different browser (maybe install gecko as html framework and use lightning or something)

Edit: formatting and added conclusion

<comment><USER12> > And it's all in all more buggy

I've used it as main browser for a while and have the same impression. For instance it simply crashes when logging in to certain websites, even after a clean install. Probably some bug with cookies.

Edit: it also still uses more battery than Chrome for me. Apart of that it's a top browser.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I got similar problems. I stopped using it a while and always come back to check out if it got more stable or if my bugs where fixed/features implemented and nothing really changed (I think one or two bugs I reported got solved)

I don't really want one of the main applications I use on mobile to crash on me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is in Nightly. I know people often times do _not_ expect breakage, because Nightly has been pretty stable for a long time. But that's not a guarantee.

Most people will be concerned about lacking Web Extensions support. It's indeed not there yet and this is why this blog post is your heads-up to move to a more stable channel.

Web Extensions are being worked on as you can see dependent bugs linked from this meta issue in bugzilla: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582185](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582185)

And FYI, for me personally the built-in tracking protection has been a decent replacement for my favorite add-ons, so I'm personally quite fine with this change :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> Lots of comments in this thread about why they have implemented this before implementing addons. Based on Mozilla's public project board it looks like they are well underway on implementing add-ons:

[https://github.com/orgs/mozilla- mobile/projects/44](https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/44)

Check the done column

<comment><USER26> The comments here re. "why before addons" is because the marketing-speak (tm) blog post leaves everyone with the impression that this new version is just about to replace the existing FF for Android that does support uBlockOrigin.

And as many comments here indicate (and I am with those who feel this way), for a huge swath of FF for Android users, the ability to have uBlockOrigin is _the_ critical reason why they have FF for Android installed in the first place.

As in, if there is no uBlockOrigin, there is no remaining compelling reason to run FF for Android. This is a failure of the mozilla marketing droids to understand their customers.

<comment><USER25> > the ability to have uBlockOrigin is the critical reason why they have FF for > Android

Me too

Agreed that the blog post is dross. I still hold out hope though that Mozilla is not as dumb as their dumbest blogpost :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For those complaining there is no adblocker, support for uBlock Origin is already implemented upstream. [https://twitter.com/FirefoxPreview/status/121564800555626496...](https://twitter.com/FirefoxPreview/status/1215648005556264962?s=20)

<comment><USER28> What is "reference browser" in this context ? Is this the repo for Firefox Preview/fenix ? Or an upstream version of Firefox preview ?

<comment><USER29> [https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/reference- browser](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/reference-browser)

"A web browser reference implementation using Mozilla Android Components.

The Reference Browser is not a product intended to ship to end users. Instead it is a Technology Preview for many new mobile components that multiple teams at Mozilla are currently working on

It includes the Mozilla Web Platform via GeckoView, a new modern Firefox Accounts and Cloud Sync implementation and the new "Glean" telemetry library. All these components will be foundational for Mozilla's existing and upcoming Android products.

The Reference Browser can also be a starting point for your own new browser- like applications. It depends heavily on the Android Components project where most of the actual implementation lives. That project also includes many smaller sample applications."

<comment><USER28> My question was more among the line :

What is the relation between

[https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/reference- browser](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/reference-browser)

and

[https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix](https://github.com/mozilla- mobile/fenix)

That Readme does not really answer that question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have Firefox Preview installed on my phone and it is set as my default browser, but I still keep the original Firefox for Android, because:

\- Preview is missing support for Add-ons. This was a huge advantage of Firefox for Android (for me this means, that I cannot use uBlock.. the built- in ad blocker is good, but uBlock is better)

\- There are limited settings available in Preview. (e.g. what I am missing a "download images only over wifi" option.)

<comment><USER17> I also have Firefox Preview installed on my phone. It's set as default but I basically don't use it, because:

* Preview lacks support for ad blocking.

* For some reason, every time I open a link in Firefox Preview, it goes into "Private" mode and there's no option to stop that from happening. I think it used to ask me, and one time I said "Private" and ever since then it's been in private mode - it asked me every time till I said "Private" and thereafter it's never asked me again. This means I can only use Preview for the links that transiently get opened, because I can't even find the normal tabs without closing Private browsing.

<comment><USER31> Settings - Default Launcher - there's a checkbox that you can uncheck to not open random links in private tabs.

<comment><USER17> For clarity, that's Firefox Preview Settings not Android Settings. I would probably appreciate being asked since I tend to forget to close things - better to say "i want this tab only transiently, close it some time in the somewhat distant future (but, preferably, keep both transient and permanent tabs available)". Being asked to open it private is almost that.

Still leaves me with ad blocking which is probably the third most important feature of a web browser after the ability to parse and render HTML.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's intended behaviour by default: I've never set this up, and links open in my regular session.

<comment><USER17> I've always assumed that, at some point, I must have fumbled and pressed "set as default" one time when it asked me. I regularly drop my phone, and fumbles that get me into settings I don't want happen occasionally. But it definitely used to ask me every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ugh so what is what and what's the news? There are (among others like ff klar) for android:

\- firefox (firefox) > old

\- firefox for android beta (firefox_beta) > old

\- firefox nightly for developers (fennec_aurora)> old (maybe this one will move to fenix and that's the news?)

\- firefox preview (fenix)> fenix rewrite

\- firefox preview nightly for developers (fenix.nightly) > fenix rewrite (app also shows up as "firefox nightly", but with an outline logo)

I brackets is the end of the package name (org.mozilla...). They really should get a naming convention on the road.

all mozilla apps here: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/cluster?clp=ig...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/cluster?clp=igM4ChkKEzcwODMxODI2MzU5NzEyMzkyMDYQCBgDEhkKEzcwODMxODI2MzU5NzEyMzkyMDYQCBgDGAA%3D:S:ANO1ljKzdK8&gsr=CjuKAzgKGQoTNzA4MzE4MjYzNTk3MTIzOTIwNhAIGAMSGQoTNzA4MzE4MjYzNTk3MTIzOTIwNhAIGAMYAA%3D%3D:S:ANO1ljKOMZI)

Fenix is nice, but still lacking add-on support (which is a dealbreaker for me)

</comment><comment><USER33> Add-ons are the only reason i am using Firefox on android. It is slightly slower, and more cumbersome than other alternatives - but add-ons(especially ublock origin) make up for that heavily.

<comment><USER34> > It is slightly slower, and more cumbersome than other alternatives

Except that Firefox Preview in my experience is not. It's even quicker than Chrome or Bromite on my FP3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use Firefox Preview as my main browser on Android, but I think pushing adoption by deprecating the regular Firefox for Android is the wrong approach. How are they going to compete with other browsers if they can't even get existing Firefox users to switch to Preview?

In particular, Nightly users are already deliberately accepting bugginess to help test new Firefox releases. If they're not using Preview, there's probably a reason for that.

> For current Nightly users, it'll feel like a big exciting upgrade of their > browsing experience once they update the app

... is a very optimistic prediction. Add-on support is missing, there are various strange bugs that are no deal-breakers for me personally, but still annoying, and the URL bar at the bottom is confusing to get used to. Forcing the transition before Preview is ready doesn't look like a smart move to me.

</comment><comment><USER36> Firefox preview is an interesting experiment with decent speed and a nice layout.

However there are some big blockers for me before I can use this browser. One is bypassing TLS errors (or preferably finally allowing me to use my own certificate authority for some internal services). Right now the issue is on hold and nobody from the Firefox team seems to. Be working on dealing with certificates.

The other is the addon issue, but I have faith thst those will work once the preview goes mainstream.

If Firefox goes live without those two points, I'm going over to brave. I like Mozilla and I want a second browser engine for the web, but basic functionality like this should not be foregone for the sake of "bringing new experiences".

</comment><comment><USER37> So... Should I keep using Firefox Preview or from now on Nightly is considered more stable? I really don't get this.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've just gave it a try but nightly is still on the older version here. Anyway Firefox Preview is my default browser with Firefox Beta as a backup on Android. Preview is much faster but lacks extensions and many settings. Moreover I'm not sold on the new UI: address bar at the bottom is fine as long as it goes on top for some tasks, history is hard to find and I miss the favorites sites start-page (have to create groups but it's not the same).

I use Firefox over Chrome because Google - you know... there's a submission a day about that - and I trust Mozilla much more to be-not-evil and such. So it's kind of a political-ethical thing. On PC performance is on par so it's not a compromising choice. On Android Chrome still has an edge.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm a happy user of Firefox Preview for a while not, and I just want to say to all developers: THANK YOU!

It's pretty stable in my experience, and in fact much faster than the main version.

Link for those who want to try it: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix)

</comment><comment><USER40> As much as I love Firefox, I have quit preview because of a bottom bar. (And this is from someone who had always used bottom tabs in desktop Opera in 00s)

It is poorly executed and often obstructs input on websites.

</comment><comment><USER41> Annoying for nightly users, but reasonable for Firefox team to clean up the number of releases out.

Though the reason I used nightly was fewer rules around custom extensions, not to be on the bleeding edge.

</comment><comment><USER42> The bottom placed nav bar is a major ux improvement, I love it!

</comment><comment><USER43> "If you're on an older version of Android (pre-5), you will won't be able to download Firefox for Android."

I wonder if it will or won't.

</comment><comment><USER44> Firefox preview crashes on my 2019 Android phone when I attempt to upload a file to the web. I hope this is no longer the case...

<comment><USER45> It would be great if you could file an issue at [https://github.com/mozilla- mobile/fenix](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix) if that still is the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Can somebody please remind me why the mobile firefox is stuck at version 68.x whereas other platforms have moved on to 72?

<comment><USER47> Because mobile Firefox is now ESR until the new mobile Firefox ("Fenix") is ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Uhh why does everything have to be an experience nowadays?

</comment><comment><USER49> maybe anybody who decides to try it can comment here what if anything is new?

</comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't work in my (widely used) Android version. I'm a long time Firefox user and feel abandoned.

<comment><USER50> "Requires Android 5.0 and up" according to the Play Store listing. Android 4.x is from 2013 and had its last update in 2014. It hasn't received security patches since October 2017. Why should Mozilla continue to support such an ancient version?

<comment><USER51> "2014 - Ancient version" Sorry, but this mindset doesn't make a lot of good for the technology. It's not 90s anymore in terms of performance growth. The reason a smartphone from 2014 is considered obsolete is not technical.

<comment><USER52> If 2014 isn't an ancient android version and okay without updates, then why do you need updates for Firefox? You can just as well keep using the 2014 version of that, too.

<comment><USER53> Apples to oranges and no i won't be using Firefox when Chrome, Brave and Edge still support the "ancient 2014 android version"

<comment><USER52> Why is it apples and oranges?

What makes using a 6 year outdated OS so much different from using a 6 year outdated browser? Both long stopped being supported by many websites and apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I use FireFox Preview on Android, I think its great compared to Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER55> no ublock, firefox is dead</comment>


The TED commandments - rules every speaker needs to know - <AUTHOR> http://www.timlonghurst.com/blog/2008/05/16/the-ted-commandments-rules-every-speaker-needs-to-know/#more-317

<comment><USER2> I believe there is, or at least was, also a rule about not bringing up politics.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm judging by the dearth of comments here that these rules are considered excellent (hence the upvotes) but obvious (so no discussion). Which makes me wonder how valuable they are, especially to the kind of people invited to speak at TED...

<comment><USER4> The real message is not contained in the content.

It's a fucking stone tablet personally delivered. The medium is the message: Your TED talk is a big deal. We're serious about it. Make it good.

<comment><USER5> is that true? photo?

<comment><USER6> <http://www.shopliftwindchimes.com/0206archive.html> scroll to 20 feb - or you could follow the links from the article yourself. I have to say that it doesn't _look_ like a stone slab to me, without an angled photo, but they clearly say it is one.

Even without the message of the medium brilliant people are notorious for getting lost in the details, and forgetting how things look from the outside. It doesn't hurt to be reminded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't just for great speakers. It's how I'd like to live my life.

</comment><comment><USER8> These TED Commandments are terrific. I've organized conferences and recruited speakers for large events before, and I wish I had had this list to distribute.

You'd be surprised how many people willingly violate #7 ("Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness"). These people don't get that you actually add get MORE value in return by talking LESS about yourself/company/service. Instead of gaining respect and people's attention, it just makes you look amateur and low-class.

Respectfully, I would also like to suggest adding an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt respect the moderator and not attempt to flout speaker rules just to make you look like a 'rebel.' It makes thine self appear as an ass.

...Michael

\--- Michael E. Rubin firstname.lastname@example.com // 847-370-3421 // twitter: merubin

<comment> a-priori I find a great deal of irony in a comment that opens and closes with self- promotion, and in the middle talks about how futile self-promotion is.

Since you seem to be new to HN, you should know that people here do not add signatures. If someone wants to contact you, they can find your contact info in your profile; otherwise it's just noise.

<comment><USER9> Are you sure that he didn't do it on purpose? Along with his "eleventh rule" and the fact that you're repeating something stated in the HN guidelines, it seems on-the-nose enough to be absurd. I laughed when I read it.

<comment><USER10> Given that this was his first comment I doubt it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is your Big Five personality score? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-humans/what-is-your-big-five-personality-score-96a6e40e743f <comment><AUTHOR> I found this to be pretty helpful as an explanation of what helps me and hurts me as an entrepreneur.</comment>


Ask HN: What is going on with downvotes (lately)? - <AUTHOR> I Know that this might be a contentious issue but I've seen this happening too much recently where factually correct comments are downvoted to the point of a flag kill without any discussion.
Some of them may "violate" the rules of courteous discourse or be antagonistic, but often they are not, they are simply correct factual statement with merit to the discussion and for some reason they are killed pretty quickly.
What brought this up is this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625479 in a recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12623738 and I while on many other occasions I could some how convince myself of a reason for for the downvotes I could not find a reason for why anyone would downvote this one other than a few intentionall but misguided or even unintentional downvotes and a herd mentalitly then taking over to "clean up" the thread.
If anyone is wondering the poster is 100% correct, you can buy lab and machine shop equipment on the cheap, these can be bought at a penny on the dollar rates and sometimes even for "free"/Tip as the sellers just need some one to take it off their hands.
A lot of sellers are also clueless about what is being sold, it's not hard to find listing of "misc equipment HP" and see 5,000$+ worth of old HP electronic testing equipment going for only few 100's $ on some lot on Ebay or a local listing (bankruptcy/disposal auctions are quite a commonplace to find those).
It's not hard to find machine shop gear like Lathes, Press Drills and other heavy duty stuff that while might be old is still functional and fit for purpose for pretty much the transport costs.
I don't know if this actually "qualifies" for "Ask HN" but I just felt that this needs some discussion, while HN isn't reddit it has evolved into a discussion community and as a community there needs to be an internal discussion when something appears to be wrong. <comment><USER2> The comment is [dead] not [flagged]. I guess that some automatic system killed it. The previous comment of the same user is also [dead] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625432) , and some of the previous comments have many downvotes. My guess is that one of the previous comments triggered some filter that autokill all the newer comments.

For this kind of questions it's better to ask the mods firstname.lastname@example.com , they usually answers very soon by email, and the threads sometimes are unnoticed.

Meanwhile, I vouched the latest comment, and now it's undead. But for a permanent solution contact the mods.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen this too. I find myself frequently highlighting comments to read them. Usually they are not trolls, which is a signal something is going wrong.

My guess is that the hivemind is becoming too strong, strong and filled with sensitive animals. Any hint of disagreement or negativity attracts censure and this has the potential to kill the forum. There has to be a middle ground for any sort of constructive debate.

My sincere belief is that geeks aren't likely to be like this, I suspect we typically have a higher pain threshold and it is another cohort that are responsible for a more touchy-feely atmosphere.

Perhaps there should be some kind of fizz-buzz test? Like a capcha for emotion!

</comment><comment><USER4> The |vouch| link next to dead comments allows people with sufficient karma to correct what they feel is unjust.

The |contact| link at the bottom of most pages allows anyone to bring issues to the attention of Hacker News moderators. They tend to be responsive.</comment>


Google I/O 2011 T-shirt puzzle solved - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/14/google-i-o-2011-t-shirt-puzzle-solved-reveals-the-droid-youve/ <comment><USER2> Is Morse Code really a puzzle? That's the first thing I think when I see dots and dashes, specially if there are "..." or "---".</comment>


Confirmed: Obama gets his BlackBerry, no Sectera Edge in sight - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/22/confirmed-obama-gets-his-blackberry-no-sectera-edge-in-sight/

<comment><USER2> I don't quite understand how this could happen. Doesn't Blackberry send all their email via Canada needlessly, when all Blackberry's competitors don't suffer from this flaw?</comment>


Former Facebook employee sheds light: never going to make money on apps. - <AUTHOR> http://okdork.com/2008/04/02/the-money-problem-with-facebook-myspace-hi5-apps/

<comment><USER2> I think one of the issues with Facebook Apps, and Facebook in general, is that too many apps are there "just for fun"--sure, people use them for a little while, and heck, they might even keep them on their profile after they ever click through to an application page (I think I have 4 or 5 apps installed, but never use any of them). They're all short-term proposals. Some of that I'm sure was the rush to get to Facebook first and build a user base quickly, but so few folks have actually focused on the "killer app" that provides a great deal of utility based on what Facebook offers through their APIs (which is a LOT of valuable data). Some also, I'm sure, is the fear that once you develop a truly useful app that people find value in, there's still the risk that Facebook will create their own bigger, better version (most recent example is IM). If you want to have lasting value as a Facebook app, you have to provide something valuable enough to drive traffic TO Facebook, not just THROUGH it, because while total pageviews and users are increasing, the initial fascination is starting to wear off and Facebook itself is become more of a tool (meaning everyone uses it, sometimes) and less of a cool new traffic- driving site that people spend hours playing on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Normal banner impressions are not worth the space on Facebook, but there are various sponsorship opportunities which show potential. Many of the top apps make quite a bit in revenue, even if they do not rely on canvas pages. In general, any app that is being used has potential to make money.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can use profile boxes to send people directly to your own site - as long as it's the "application" itself, not just an ad.

</comment><comment><USER5> it's not that i disagree with making money it but as a long-term business it's unlikely.</comment>


Analyzing Julia's issue counts over time - <AUTHOR> http://iaindunning.com/blog/juliaissuecount.html

<comment><USER2> no doubt the size of the codebase has grown as well during the span you target; would the curves look any different if you normalized issue counts, let's say per 1000 loc?</comment>


YouTube TV now available to 50% of U.S. households - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/17/youtube-tv-now-available-to-50-of-u-s-households/ <comment><USER2> It's obvious why nobody's pulled off something like Youtube TV before. There's a huge mess of red tape when dealing with live TV broadcasts, everything from sports blackouts to local channel affiliates.

Cable TV is obviously on the way out. This is just going to push people to use less than legal methods to watch things until the broadcasting industry gets their shit together. See: Netflix, Spotify

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll stick with MythTV...free DVR.</comment>


Planktos: Serving Websites Peer-To-Peer in the Browser - <AUTHOR> https://xuset.github.io/planktos/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I'm one of the creators of this project. I would love to get some feedback or answer any questions y'all might have!</comment>


Will Your Facebook Friends Make You a Credit Risk? - <AUTHOR> http://m.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2015/08/will-your-facebook-friends-make-you-credit-risk/118972/

<comment><AUTHOR> _" There is an ongoing debate on whether more data is helpful or harmful. This technology is just the latest aspect of that debate. But it does bring about more anxiety. It's not just your behavior, it's your friends' data."_

Algorythms will make these decisions through inference.

</comment><comment><USER2> The messed up patent system might inadvertently prevent this scenario. Assuming Facebook doesn't license the patent to banks, then the banks won't pursue this out of fear of the patent system.</comment>


Skeletal Tracking Beta - <AUTHOR> https://developer.leapmotion.com/

<comment><USER2> I hacked the Leap controller at the SF Music Hack day. My team and I built an app called leapJ: multiplayer DJ'ing with your body. ([https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day- san-f...](https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-san- francisco-2014/hacks/leapj))

Leap is a great little device. My main complaint is that the API is too low- level. We would just fire events roughly every 20ms, in a markovian (stateless) way. For this reason, the instrument control was somewhat janky, because we didn't have the time to de-jitter hand paths / infer a tracking spline.

My wishlist for leap is:

* Higher level APIs, that apply the sort of sophisticated filtering and tracking that many people are liable to roll themselves.

* Multiple leap devices per computer. Needing a separate computer per leap is a big barrier to working with several leaps at once.

* ARM support. I'd love to have a RaspberryPI for each leap. Then they would be truly mobile. For right now, I think I'm going to have to get a mini ITX motherboard,

<comment><USER3> You need a smoothing library. I welcome our low level access, you can always pile what you need on top, the converse is not possible.

What would be nice is some intelligence pushed down into the Leap, like the ability to run Lua or JVM code directly so that realtime multidevice is possible.

<comment><USER4> I think he meant _augmenting_ your API with higher-level stuff, but not removing any of the low level access. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing! I bought the LeapMotion a while ago and forgot it soon enough because the hand, finger and gesture recognition was very basic and didn't feel natural (at least to me and my friends who tried it). Now they push the boundaries of that small, old piece of hardware with a software update and show what it's really capable of. I can only imagine how impressive this must feel when you use it with an oculus rift and interact with a virtual reality environment. The sticking-blocks-together example is just the beginning of what's possible.

EDIT: Okay, I tried some of the examples and am excited! The recognition part is excellent, I can throw things up in the air and catch them again, all very natural. What's missing though are good physics. Objects glitch around my hands, wiggle mid air, get stretched even when they should be solid. But I guess that's Unity's problem, not LeapMotion's.

<comment><USER6> Yeah it's basically a holodeck. Exciting stuff. It's funny how on the shows the holo-deck was always something that took a whole lot of electricity so they could only have one or two on the ship, and you'd have to book time on it. It looks like in real life holodecks are much less power hungry than faster than light starship engines, and that more people desire their own holo-deck than want to go to space. Makes sense. Entertainment has historically been much more popular than exploration.

<comment><USER7> A holodeck is just another means of exploration. Spatial exploration (be it space, underwater, etc) is not really that interesting. If we went to Mars right now, we'd be really, really, really bored. There's nothing there except rocks.

Using the Oculus Rift (and associated VR technologies like the Leap), I can experience all sorts of amazing things that I've never experienced before. Like fighting aliens for the survival of humanity. Or jumping through floating sky scrapers. And I can create new experiences for others.

Exploration has never been more popular. It's just moved from the spatial to the conceptual.

<comment><USER6> Honest question? Why is the first example use case always killing? I'd probably be a lot more into video games if there was anything beyond Mario maturity games that wasn't a murder fantasy.

I don't want to fight aliens. I'd love to interact with real aliens though. That's an exploration that you could never have virtually.

<comment><USER7> I wish it wasn't, but that's just what's already there. Two reasons why:

1\. Killing is a very easy interaction to implement. It's much simpler to make an AI that tries to kill you than one that tries to engage you in meaningful conversation.

2\. The intensity of violence compensates for the disassociation that resulted from the interface. In other words, you were just watching the game on the monitor. You didn't real feel "there" like you do with VR. What I find, is when I'm playing violent games with VR, it's less enjoyable and more stressful. Fighting becomes an unpleasant necessity.

I think as the technology progresses, we'll see more games focus much less on violence. Like that Voyager bridge demo for the Oculus Rift. If someone made the whole ship with the same level of detail, and had no people or enemies or violence, I could still spend many hours just walking around and exploring, and I would probably enjoy it more than shooting things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wrote a case about the Leap for my MIT Entrepreneurship class and interviewed a bunch of the founding team.

These guys are great -- but they still havent found their killer app. Thats partly because the tech is ahead of its time -- but the vision is clearly excellent.

David Holz the founder is the brains behind this, has been working on a better UI since he was literally a kid in Florida. See: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/david- holzs-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/david-holzs-leap- motion-wants-to-kill-the-mouse)

Their CEO is the founder of Quattro Wireless founder, an ex-Apple exec Andy Miller who is a really smart guy. SO they do really have a good team, and lots of VC backing.

Perhaps this new skeletal tracking stuff will help this really catch on. Best of luck to LEAP!

<comment><USER9> It seems like the type of company that _needs_ to be acquired for its technology, by someone with not just the vision for the technology, but also the funds, and perhaps the _platform_ for it, to really take advantage of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like it is time to literally dust off my leap motion.

<comment><USER11> I'm wondering where I'll find mine...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just updated my LeapMotion library for Processing [0] with support for the new LeapMotion SDK. Mine provides a thin wrapper over the SDK; there are several other libraries for Processing with higher level APIs (e.g. additional gestures).

[0] [https://github.com/heuermh/leap-motion- processing](https://github.com/heuermh/leap-motion-processing)

</comment><comment><USER13> The new version is really a step up. Props to the dev team for being responsive as well. I sent them an issue during the beta, and they had pushed a fix a few days later. There's still glitches here and there, but those usually result from one hand being on top of the other or something similar.

I'm excited to see where they go with this. I'm not sold on using the leap for my everyday computing tasks, but I think there are some great applications for it.

</comment><comment><USER14> People who have a Leap: does this work as well, in terms of tracking the hands, as it appears to in the demo?

If so, I may have to buy a Leap...

<comment><USER7> Yup. It works just like that. Now, keep in mind that it's not going to work perfectly ALL the time. If you get into complex occlusion cases it may not be able to reconstruct the skeleton perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Big props to Leap Motion on the skeletal tracking. It was very easy to use. Took me around an hours to dust off my 3d trig and build this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX7pQlB6-IY&feature=youtu.be

So easy to use...

</comment><comment><USER16> How is this technology so much more accurate than Microsoft's Kinect? That's awesome! I love seeing the new guy develop a better product than a old giant.

<comment><USER17> Very, _very_ different problem domains and technology.

Consider: how much variation is there between bodies and hands? How much larger is the work envelope of the Kinect vs the Leap? How much more information do you get from the Kinect vs the Leap (depth buffer, positional audio, etc.)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow. Could this be used as a form of biofeedback when trying to learn (or improve) complicated movements in sports?

<comment><USER14> It's hands-only, so there's a limited range of movements it can track.

However, if you apply the same question to a Kinect 2 or, say, another full- body mocap suit, then the answer is _definitely_.

One of these days when I have free time (no time soon, then) I shall write a routine for my mocap suits to track and give realtime feedback on various martial arts techniques.

<comment><USER18> > to track and give realtime feedback on various martial arts techniques

Hehe, that was exactly the application I was thinking of :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wondering if this would be useful for 3D level editing/navigating - or simply for our model browser... hmm...

</comment><comment><USER20> This looks like it would be fantastic for teaching sign language...

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if there's a PHP library?

<comment><USER16> You could use JS to make AJAX calls to PHP, since it has a JS library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> don't your deltoids get tired?

<comment><USER5> If I am sitting, my hands get tired very soon. However, if I stand up it works very well for me. I guess you get used to it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Meh.</comment>


Node OS - <AUTHOR> http://node-os.com/ <comment><USER2> The main benefit they're giving is that you can use `npm` instead of `yum` or `aur` or whatever the package manager you use is. IMO, you're better off using Nix if you are tired of your package manager.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is disgusting, it's not even native (not that you'd want it to be), not to mention that NPM is the most unreliable package manager out there.

<comment><USER4> Why do you think NPM is "the most unreliable package manager"? I don't use Node, but I thought the general consensus was that it's one of the best out there. I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER5> No offense, but where on earth did you get that impression from? I have a feeling whoever told you that has either never used npm with a non-trivial project or was messing with you.

I've had more issues with npm in the last month than I've had with pip, gem, and apt combined over the last two years. "most unreliable package manager" is an apt descriptor.

<comment><USER6> If you've used it for anything non-trivial, then you probably should've been using a private registry - in which case you get the decentralized benefits of npm sans npmjs.org availability issues.

source: a number of non-trivial node deploys

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping that this would be about a unikernel for node.js, ala MirageOs, which would be quite interesting for running node directly on VMs, Xen, Raspberry Pi, and such.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think calling it an OS might be a stretch. "Linux distribution" is perhaps a little more accurate.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, it might be time to put the pejorative term "Linux distribution" to death. It was pretty true when there was Slackware and Debian, but the we're not talking about two stalks off of the same evolutionary branch anymore, but an entire ecosystem of different animals.

Modern "distributions" ship with vastly different libcs (bionic, newer vs older glibc, muslc), different userland runtimes (busybox, "GNU/Linux" with core utils, etc), different compilers (various branches of gcc, llvm increasingly), different init systems (SysV, upstart, systemd, etc), different security frameworks (AppArmor, SELinux), different display servers (X, Wayland, unfortunately Mir and SurfaceFlinger) and vastly different UIs (from Android, to GNOME and its fragmentations, to KDE and its fragmentations, LXDE and XFCE, and so forth). You can't even bet on the file system hierarchy being the same anymore, with aberrations like NixOS running around. The saddest part is that Linux is the most some of these operating systems have in common, and these days it can easily have the least overall impact on most of the users. These things are completely different animals, loosely bound by design contracts like FreeDesktop.org's various specs and Linux Standard Base specs which everyone violates in new and unique ways.

Not treating these operating systems as entirely different entities is being at best dishonest, and at worst is costing millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars in effort across the industry. You can't honestly target "Linux" as a platform because it's _not_ a platform. If you've maintained, or especially if you've distributed any piece of software on "Linux" these days, you've seen the horrors.

<comment><USER10> >unfortunately Mir and SurfaceFlinger

I don't know anything about SurfaceFlinger, but why do you call out Mir here after referencing a vast amount of other components of a Linux distribution that all essentially do the same thing? Who knows, Mir could turn out better than Wayland.

Weird how everyone's happy for an abundance of choice, except when it's a display server or init system. Those two generate so much hate and I don't really get why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not to say that the project doesn't look valuable, but I'm not sure if the project is still alive. See: [https://github.com/NodeOS](https://github.com/NodeOS) Latest commit was 4 months ago.

<comment><USER12> I thought the same thing, then noticed the only files in the repository are the readme and info for contributing. I'm not sure where the actual project source is.

<comment><USER13> It's here: [https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS- Docker](https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker)

EDIT: Nevermind, seems this is all meta and dockerfiles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> npm frustrates me to no end, so my knee jerk reaction to this is "No!"

Interesting idea though. However it's not an OS, it's using NPM as the OS's package manager.

[http://node-os.com/blog/introduction/](http://node-os.com/blog/introduction/)

<comment><USER15> Nice blanket negative statement "NPM IS BAD". Maybe you'd consider expanding on why npm frustrates you? and leaving a comment with more value.

<comment><USER16> I don't see why codereflection needs to spell it out. The problems with npm, and JavaScript in general, are quite apparent to anyone who has used them. And if you haven't used them, a quick search engine search will turn up this information many times over.

It'd make sense to ask for such clarification if the information truly wasn't available elsewhere, and accessible with a quick search. But that's obviously not the case.

It's pointless to rehash this obvious stuff over and over and over and over again.

<comment><USER17> It'd be good if there were a canonical "Why npm sucks" article, like the "fractal of bad design" one for PHP.

This one seems like a fairly reasonable candidate: [http://www.jongleberry.com/why-i-hate- npm.html](http://www.jongleberry.com/why-i-hate-npm.html) (though the "nested dependencies" bit needs much more swearing, and I disagree with the last paragraph suggesting things in Ruby and Python land are just as bad).

<comment><USER18> In the last paragraph there, is he saying that Golang is 'bad' because it doesn't have a package manager? Does it need one? I always assumed 'go get' was enough.

Honestly curious here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What benefit does this approach bring?

It reminds me of Chrome OS and Firefox OS. These all are based upon the Linux kernel, so they could potentially offer a very rich user experience like so many more traditional Linux distributions do. Yet they intentionally cripple themselves into being limited, JavaScript-only platforms.

This would be understandable if, say, storage space was expensive, like it was in the 1980s, and the software had to be kept lean and limited. But that's clearly not the case today, even when it comes to low-end smartphones.

The same goes for runtime performance. It'd be one thing if software written in JavaScript was consistently and significantly faster than software written in C, C++, and other commonly used languages. But that just isn't the case. Unless we're looking at highly tuned and highly unrealistic benchmarks that even the JavaScript VM authors have focused on making run fast, JavaScript's performance is quite bad.

It would be understandable if perhaps the user experience could be improved in some way by them providing superior alternatives to the traditional userland software offered by Linux distributions. Yet this isn't the case, either, because some of the biggest complaints with Chrome OS and Firefox OS are that the bundled software is awful, and users have no real recourse due to the very limited environment that both offer.

As far as I can tell, users just can't win with a system like this. The kernel is powerful, but this power is isolated and kept inaccessible. The userland experience is much worse than what one would get if just using a traditional Linux distro, and running the JavaScript software on top of that. The benefit to the user just isn't apparent.

<comment><USER2> Well, with FirefoxOS, you don't have Android's Dalvik nonesense nor iOS's restrictive marketplace. They needed some userland language, since the isolation keeps security high. These mobile computers aren't used in a security conscious way, and many developers are unscrupulous in the environments. Give them the power to install rootkits, and they will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This link seems to have detail than the homepage. [https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS- Docker#introduction](https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker#introduction)

</comment><comment><USER20> As a concept, I guess this can be called an OS, but at the present moment, it is pretty far from one. Right now it seems like this is basically a work-in- progress replica of BusyBox built on Node.

</comment><comment><USER21> > 83 points by dhruvarora013 4 hours ago

I'm guessing there's a hundred neckbeards on 4chan who've been laughing hysterically for ~3.5 hours

<comment><USER22> why would be they laughing? It's a hoax?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> npm gives you dependency hell in a medium sized project, with a node_modules folder 10 times larger than the project.

This on a OS level ... interesting

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm generally pretty open about using web technology outside the web, but come on guys, why do we need this?

<comment><USER25> No doubt JavaScript's past, present, and future is intertwined with the web, but really it's an independent programming language. It's not like there are primitives for divs and tables.

And by an accident of history, it also happens to be the world's most popular programming language and overall a decent scripting language, so I can't see why its web association should make it any less OS-ready than any other language.

Plus, Node's async model lends itself implementing lower-level OS features (not that they are present so far in NodeOS).

<comment><USER26> We are forced to use poorly-designed legacy languages on the "open" web, but why would you torment yourself with them when you are not limited outside of the "open" web?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> npm as your package manager:

        npm install -g

node as your shell:

        node

An actual minimalist kernel booting to node might be interesting. But this isn't that. This just looks like plain node and npm, except locked down and made complicated for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER28> I haven't dabbled in Node yet; my main source of hesitation was I've been told npm doesn't cryptographically sign packages. If npm as a package manager is a selling point, I would hope this has been corrected (or had been all along).

Otherwise, enjoy your MITM trojans.

<comment><USER29> So then you can't host a mirror?

<comment><USER28> Sure. But if anyone wanted to use your mirror, how would they know you didn't make changes to the base package without crypto? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The main repo hasn't been updated since February: [https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker](https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS- Docker)

<comment><USER31> This is not necessarily a bad thing, right?

I've written Dockerfiles before that don't need updating and are useful months later

<comment><USER30> Is your dockerfile an OS?

<comment><USER31> Yes? Sort of .. is your distribution an OS? (Should the distro's source repo change every time the installer is rebuilt from new upstream packages? I don't think so)

Someone has been working on this repo for the last 22 days and they merged their changes back in #12. Possibly in response to allegations that the Node- OS project is dead.

I would expect most of the active development to be in the upstreams of this project (npm, linux kernel), it doesn't seem to be dead at any rate. Just not very fast-paced or popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How is this useful exactly? I suppose there _are_ JS bindings for GNOME (if I remember correctly) so getting a GUI stack wouldn't be that difficult, if that's where they want to go.

I just don't see how using NodeOS would be an advantage over any other *NIX distro.

<comment><USER33> It isn't useful at all. It is an experiment and a hobby. For those of us who use javascript everywhere we already can, it is natural to want to push it further and see what we come up with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Atwood's law continues.

</comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

</comment><comment><USER36> I am an outsider who is starting to touch javascript but I have my history in scripting and numerical sims. Is all this stuff about node.js really something revolutionary or is it hype?

<comment><USER28> My experience with node-webkit leads me to believe it could, once ironed out, actually become a popular way for web developers to get their start with client-side apps.

As far as Node.js as a server-side scripting language? Idk. I'm a PHP guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> First submission of this link a year ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519671)

</comment><comment><USER38> A similar project in perl: [http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/](http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/) (2005)

</comment><comment><USER39> what is the purpose of this OS anyway?

</comment><comment><USER40> No.

</comment><comment><USER41> The npm / node bubble has begun.

</comment><comment><USER42> Operating Systems written in JavaScript, Webframeworks written in C.

It sure is a strange world we live in.

<comment><USER43> nah.. its still Linux.. much like Android or Firefox OS

<comment><USER44> Wonder why you're downvoted. I think your point is valid.

<comment><USER28> Yeah... Anyone who makes a valid point or say something possibly humorous gets downvoted by overly sensitive HN readers. (Like this comment inevitably will, too.)

<comment><USER28> (I wonder how many people downvoted it because they disliked what I said, and how many downvoted it as a proof of concept?)

<comment><USER45> It was downvoted because it was manifestly false and destructive.

<comment><USER28> Destructive? In a literary sense, or in a "10 tons of TNT" sense? I'm no literary critic if that's what you're implying.

<comment><USER46> Destructive as in the opposite of constructive. Your comment added no value to the discussion.

<comment><USER28> Adding no value to a discussion makes a comment neutral, not negative.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What technology do you use in your startup? - <AUTHOR>

What technology do you use in your startup?<p>(Programming language? Libraries? OS? Chair/desk setup? Editors (No religious war between vim and emacs please.. as we all know vim win :p) etc.) <comment><USER2> VS 2010 /c# asp.net , ANSI C, Notepad++ Mac:xcode: objective C, Clang

I bought a new Logitech MK550 Wireless Keyboard and mouse. I can work for hours with this ergo keyboard. Very good boost in productivity for $70

</comment><comment><USER3> C. OpenSSL (grudgingly), zlib, and libarchive. FreeBSD and Ubuntu (grudgingly). Mostly kwrite, sometimes nano.

</comment><comment><USER4> Python, Django, Node.js, MongoDB, CoffeeScript. I use Vim, co-founder SubEthaEdit.

</comment><comment><USER5> Language: PHP; Framework: CodeIgniter; OS: Linux / Windows; Editor: PhpED</comment>


What it's like to work at Snapchat - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snapchat-2016-10 <comment><USER2> When I read this article, I could replace the name of "Evan Spiegel" with almost any other Silicon Valley executive and get the same result:

> While other Snap employees and executives sit next to each other in an open > floor plan, Spiegel's office towers over the building's old lobby at the top > of a flight of stairs. The door to the office is locked and protected by a > special keypad."

In every company I've been in that uses open offices, the executives get closed door offices.

> To the group's surprise, the meeting was in the security room, where Snap's > security guards are stationed, according to one person familiar with the > matter.

Isn't this a matter of safety? I remember this historical story at one large company I worked at: after a layoff, the employee returned to his manager's office with a gun. Thankfully, the situation was defused.

> Beyond vague statements like "building the world's best camera" and making > "communication more real and authentic," there's little-to-no communication > inside Snap about what's in the pipeline.

Just about every company...

> "There were times when we would do PowerPoint presentations, and you > literally would spend 50% of the time formatting it," one of the former > executives Business Insider spoke to recounted. "What shade of yellow, that > sort of thing."

Just like any big company!

I have nothing for or against Snapchat. It reads like a poorly crafted hit piece against the CEO.

<comment><USER3> At most companies I've worked for, the CEO didn't even really have a desk because they never used it anyways. They're always in meetings or out of office, so they had a regular old desk assigned to them, but it was usually empty. (and they were all open plan)

But I agree with your assessment.

<comment><USER4> My current employer (Life360) and former employer (Flywheel) both had the CEO and all other executives working at desks in the open floorplans.

I think that there comes a size of company where that gets impractical, and Snap is probably at least that size. But it's by no means crazy for execs to work in the open floorplan.

<comment><USER5> According to a LinkedIn query, admittedly a coarse metric for current headcount, Snapchat has 1290 current employees (includes founders, etc as well) [1]. Crunchbase says 101–250. They seem to have somewhat intentionally disappeared off of AngelList with just 3 employees listed.

Edit: LinkedIn is not too far off from what's mentioned in the article:

> The top-secret Snap Labs group overseeing the Spectacles is such a priority > that the group earlier this year set a goal of hiring 200 people in just > sixty days, according to the staffer who left. The hiring plan was > especially aggressive for a company whose total headcount is just above > 1,000 employees.

[1]: [https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=3186630&trk=rr_conne...](https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=3186630&trk=rr_connectedness)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Business Insider is a pretty trashy "news" website, and to me most everything the article says could apply to modern Silicon Valley culture in general—Snap[chat] just happens to be in LA instead. In fact, I see a lot of HBO's "Silicon Valley" in Snap.

I'm not trying to defend Snap, but these are criticisms that are broadly applicable to many tech companies. The stupid open offices. Executives isolated from ordinary people and reality, on retreats that sound like a "Silicon Valley" punchline. Pretending your company is making the world a better place when you're mostly just building yet another lucrative advertising platform.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I got a chuckle out of the author being offended that Snap wouldn't confirm the Spectacles project when Business Insider asked, and then it was announced officially by the Wall Street Journal later that same day.

Sounds like a good strategy to not confirm leaks by a notorious content mill when you have an official announcement prepared by one of the most respected news organizations in the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Employees can flash their badges to get a free meal at local restaurants, > ..._

The main takeaway I gleaned from this article is: if you ever find yourself homeless in the Venice Beach area, just fashion a fake Snap employee badge and dress to look the part. Why use a SNAP card when you can use a Snap badge!

If circumstance has it you're chit-chatting with real employees in line at a restaurant, just tell them the reason they've never seen you at any of the offices is that you're working on a _super secret project_ at an undisclosed neighborhood location.

<comment><USER9> You don't even need a badge.

Maybe it's how I dress, look, or the conversation we're having, but several times I've been on Abbot Kinney and the barista (or whatever) working the register has asked "Oh, just put this on the Snapchat account?"

(I've never said "yes." Maybe if I did they would then proceed to ask for an ID, but I doubt it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone else find it odd how many articles point out that the CEOs all want to be Steve Jobs.

Snapchat, Theranos, etc.

I understand that Steve Jobs was very successful and changed the world and all that, but his biography also implied he was a pretty big asshole and very arrogant.

<comment><USER11> Jobs' success justified his controlling jerk persona. These guys generally have huge egos and wish they could get away with being assholes too like Steve did. His personality is what they aspire to, not his success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a lot to be said about a charismatic, detail-oriented, and conventionally attractive leader who maintains an air of celebrity, mystery, and untouchability about themselves. Spiegel projects the image of someone who's 'made it', which compares favorably with the sort of founder who displays those traits but hasn't yet executed, or the sort of person who executed but lacks that aspirational relatability.

To me, this didn't seem like a hit piece -- one person's hit is another's hype, and I think Snap understands the power of hype (-> excitement).

For a while now, their Android product has been atrocious, while iOS is thriving. For a platform that famously shunned Windows Mobile as uncool, is this intentional, or just a byproduct of their haphazard management and either lack of skill or dreadful luck?

I feel Facebook's relentless copying of Snapchat will cause them to pivot more and more into being a media-like company. In this article today, I learned they were already staffed in a way to enable such a transition.

However, this article is absent about how this company culture affects morale of the staff, and we are left to speculate.

<comment><USER13> I just got an iPhone for the first time after many years of Android. I was sick of the Android versions of most popular apps being much worse/buggier than their iOS counterpart. It's not just Snap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll take what might be a contrarian perspective to say that I don't necessarily think this is bad. Apple has always been very secretive internally pre-launch of a major new product too. Seems like it's worked out okay. There are tradeoffs of course but top-down information opaqueness seems to be the norm more than the exception at companies this big.

> Compared to the "dogfooding" tradition in many tech companies, where > employees try out their products before releasing them to the public, most > Snap employees don't know when a new product is coming — regardless if it > would affect their team's long-term metrics or goals. When the company > launched Lenses, its famous filters that morph people's faces, most > employees learned about it for the first time on the company blog post > announcing it to the world.

> This strategy has been somewhat effective at quelling leaks, but has also > alienated people from knowing the direction the company is going in.

<comment><USER14> Was Apple secretive only to the public or to all the teams that worked on the products as well?

<comment><USER5> I've only been on campus once, so take me with a grain of salt, but I've heard there is still a lot of secrecy between teams internally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For some reason over the past few years I've been waiting to hear that Snapchat has gone under. Never really thought they would execute.

I still think they're one slip up away from disappearing, but I've got to give them credit for building the way they did.

<comment><USER16> Last week, there was a HN discussion on how Instagram's latest moves have successfully reduced the need to use Snapchat: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166882)

<comment><USER17> I mean, if it helps. the snapchat app for android is complete garbage

<comment><USER18> You don't get to Snapchat's scale with a "garbage" app. Yes, the UI is... nontraditional, but I've heard it argued this is on purpose and finding out about its hidden features becomes like a game.

<comment><USER19> > _I 've heard it argued this is on purpose_

I've heard that argued too. I wonder if that's true or if it was an accidental, but apparently fortuitous, side effect of having a confusing UI.

But apparently part of the issue with the Android app is excessive lag, which can't be explained away as a UI decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> obviously a biased piece to make snap and spiegel look bad. the product is great, even if it's garbage on android.

but it's really no secret that spiegel is arrogant and it shows. He pressured his rich parents to buy him nice cars in high school to fit in better, his leaked college emails, kicked out the founder who came up with the snapchat idea, etc.

I went to a hackathon in college when he was like 22 or 23, showed up wearing a suit and gave a speech with JFK quotes like some 20 year F500 executive would. comes off as a tryhard but his strategies are obviously working really well so who cares. keep at it, love the product.

<comment><USER21> LA Hacks? I got the same impression when he spoke there back around 2013/2014-ish

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >"Evan Spiegel, the 26-year-old cofounder and CEO, moves across the company's network of Venice Beach outposts in a black Range Rover, flanked by his security detail."

Security detail? Why would he need or want this?

This piece is pretty horrifying. Is it possible that this is just a hatchet job designed to hurt Snapchats image as an employer?

<comment><USER8> > _Security detail? Why would he need or want this?_

Given his worth it's not hard to justify. The world has plenty of criminals and mentally unstable people.

Interestingly, the satellite office model that the article decries strikes me as a huge boon in physical security for both him and his employees.

That said, if I were a Snap employee I'd probably have a field day with the jokes anyways.

 _" The Emperor's coming here? We shall double our efforts!"_

<comment><USER22> >"Given his worth it's not hard to justify."

His net worth exists only on paper until theres a liquidity event.

I've spent time in both Unicorns and hedge funds and none of the founders have had body guards, at least not at the office.

<comment><USER8> > _His net worth exists only on paper until theres a liquidity event._

Point is he's high profile and has a lot to lose.

If I were on track for being a billionaire many times over, I'd probably be a little paranoid too.

Besides, for all we know he could have received specific threats and his security arrangement is completely justified. Granted, secrecy and paranoia often do go hand-in-hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> No mention of free La Croix. Can anyone confirm?

</comment><comment><USER24> sounds pretty toxic, however there was a pretty clear bias to the article to give that impression

</comment><comment><USER25> The article said they are going to make $350M this year.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like a demoralizing nightmare not to be emulated.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you happen to be browsing with Safari, you can still use Safari Reader mode here without having to disable your ad blocker.

<comment><USER27> Alternatively, Google has it cached.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> so... exactly like apple that's been a thriving growing business for decades?</comment>


The xonsh shell - <AUTHOR> http://xon.sh/ <comment><USER2> Interesting but I haven't seen any killer feature yet that makes me want to get accustomed to this shell. Command level completion for arguments has existed in zsh, aliases being a sort of dictionary is kind of interesting but not too useful (just some familiar syntactic sugar). Mutliline input isn't new, csh can do it, bash can do it, so can zsh. Admittedly the ability to duck type and evaluate numerical expressions with "let" is kind of nice but nothing too special. Regexes for globbing files might be a new one, certainly a useful one that I'd otherwise be writing special awk or python to handle.

<comment><USER3> I think the big plus is that you can use a proper programming language in the shell.

<comment><USER4> I've longed for a language that can run both pipelines of commands with the conciseness of UNIX shells and have control structures and arithmetic as elegantly as Python...

<comment><USER5> Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but you may be interested in concatenative programming languages. They're a variety of stack-based programming languages with a functional flavour, in which the default style is a sort of data pipeline. For example, in Factor[1]:

        ! Just some imports.
        USING: accessors smtp ;

        ! Create a new email object.
        <email>

        ! That object is piped implicitly to these setter words.
        ! E.g., >>from: ( email new-address -- email )
        "email@example.com" >>from
        { "firstname.lastname@example.com" } >>to
        "Coffee?" >>subject
        "You pick the time and place." >>body

        ! Pipe that object on to the "send-email" word.
        send-email

Note how no local variables are necessary for simply plumbing data around—although of course you can use them if you want.

The weirdest thing is probably that arithmetic in most concatenative languages is written in postfix, which you may find off-putting. But it's no worse than Lisp's prefix notation, and has some other benefits.

Factor also has an excellent interactive environment; the whole thing feels like a Lispy Smalltalk.

[1]: [http://factorcode.org/](http://factorcode.org/)

<comment><USER6> >arithmetic in most concatenative languages is written in postfix

Postfix? I'm assuming a typo here but not sure what you meant.

Edit: Ah, I'm guessing it was supposed to be postscript. Makes more sense now.

Looks like an interesting language style though, I've been looking for a language that has the bash style piping baked into the language.

<comment><USER5> Prefix/postfix/infix refer to the order in which you write operations and their operands—equivalently you can think of preorder/postorder/inorder traversals of the syntax tree.

        AST          +
                    / \
                   *   5
                  / \
                 2   3

        Infix    2 * 3 + 5
                 2 times 3 plus 5.

        Prefix   + * 2 3 5
        Lisp     (+ (* 2 3) 5)
                 The sum of the product of 2 and 3, and 5.

        Postfix  2 3 * 5 +
                 With 2 and 3, multiply. Then with 5, add.

<comment><USER6> Ahh, understood now. I figured postscript as it's also a concatinative programming language.

I read postfix as in the mail server not as a synonym of suffix, thanks for the clarification.

<comment><USER7> > synonym of suffix

Antonym, actually. Prefixes are literally on the other end of things than suffixes are ;)

<comment><USER4> He's talking about postfix, not prefix. It's closer to being a synonym of suffic.

<comment><USER7> Oh shit, true. My mistake. Sorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be fair, the flattering comparison table should come with things like "Natively supported by the OS" or "Large community support", for which xonsh would obviously be at a disadvantage compared to other shells.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree that the comparison table is flattering. The purpose of the front page for a project is to make it look good. This is one of the few places a project has that opportunity. Happy to update it if you notice any thing wrong or would like to see additional rows or columns.

<comment><USER10> Zsh has a plugin for syntax highlighting: [https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh- syntax-highlighting](https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

Also nice to see it respects XDG basedir.

I'll be trying it out today. I've been using zsh for a very, very long time and it's been really hard to get me to switch off it. This looks exciting.

My only concern is with ease of installation, especially on eg. debian servers. But that's out of the hands of the project :/

<comment><USER12> Ditto. Using backticks for Python regex globbing is immediately appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks good, but can you take more time in the asciinema showcase? The typed variables section for example goes so fast that I can barely read the results, never mind get into the process behind it!

I've made a lot of use of the pause button, but it would be great to just be given a little more time to think.

<comment><USER14> On the other hand - it's a fast homepage intro. A rapid showcase to get you interested and make you want to investigate further.

I also used the pause in a couple of places (which is OK, that's what it's there for), and I almost certainly wouldn't have bothered watching it if it had been any longer.

I personally think this is an _excellent_ example of a landing page. It contains a brief text summary of what the thing is and why you'd want to use it, a quick demo of what it does, and then links to further information.

<comment><USER15> > On the other hand - it's a fast homepage intro. A rapid showcase to get you > interested and make you want to investigate further.

But does it work? Here was what happened for me:

\- The first section disappeared too fast.

\- I thought that was odd and waited for the second section.

\- The second section disappeared too fast.

\- I closed the tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The domain at the end of the video ([http://xonsh.org](http://xonsh.org)) doesn't seem to point to your site ([http://xon.sh](http://xon.sh)) (and doesn't work, either…). Just FYI, that if you share the video, you might want to share the link, too.

(or, for xon.sh, it may be time to update the video. I presumed you moved to the fancier domain at some point.)

</comment><comment><USER17> The xonsh Xontrib [1] open pull request sounds handy, allowing devs to extend the functionality of xonsh beyond what is provided by default.

As an example, gitsome [2] is powered by xonsh and might have benefitted from Xontrib.

I've found that xonsh + prompt-toolkit [3] is a nice combo that helps autocomplete the following:

* Shell commands

* Files and directories

* Environment variables

* Man pages

* Python (REPL too)

[1]: [https://github.com/scopatz/xonsh/pull/829](https://github.com/scopatz/xonsh/pull/829)

[2]: [https://github.com/donnemartin/gitsome](https://github.com/donnemartin/gitsome)

[3]: [https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt- toolkit](https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt-toolkit)

</comment><comment><USER18> Earlier discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207738)

</comment><comment><USER19> The feature set is very interesting, but I tried it out on my machine, and it's just too slow for me. I'm sticking with ZSH.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm baffled with the effort people put for writing _g_ and not writing _it_. Now I'm incredibly fond of path completion, but I guess it shouldn't be the shell to do that, but the terminal, because the function is generic, i.e. whathever shell one uses, it is beneficial. Emacs/Comint does that, and it's comfortable and predictable.

<comment><USER21> > I guess it shouldn't be the shell to do that, but the terminal

How would this work over SSH? What if you're using a temporary shell as another user? Also, the terminal really shouldn't have to know what is going on in the shell in order to work reliably. Tools like tmux, screen… should not have to perform directory completion.

<comment><USER20> There can be a single pathcompd service that does ipc too. Or maybe that can be left to readline, etc. I don't see why a command interpreter should do line editing/path completion in and of itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not really well-versed in what happens when you replace a shell and then run your programs with it, but can someone ELI5 how does this get away with making 'env variables typed'.

How is the program like 'ls' going to see a variable that is an array when originally it was a string delimited with ':'?

<comment><USER23> It will see a string delimited with ':'. The point is that while inside xonsh, your variable is typed, and then xonsh hands the env in the expected way to the subprocesses.

<comment><USER22> So basically it goes back to string from array by simply unconditionally joining it on a ':'? I guess that makes some sense... But isn't this convention (delimited by ':') only for PATH?

<comment><USER23> Most path arrays are :-concatenated on unixes (RPATH, LD_PRELOAD, etc...), so the convention holds for the majority case.

There might be a way to specify the serialization of your array somewhere, but I can't find it in the doc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks really good, it's Yet Another Fantastic Shell!

I'd love to use it, really. But as long as it's not shipped by default with a popular Linux releases, I will not. My customers, Telcos, don't approve any "non standard" software in their server rooms.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sounds very useful. I'll give this a try right now on my personal machine and maybe even use it for some build scripts at work later if I like it.

</comment><comment><USER26> That's lovely! Would really love some docs on how developers can extend this!

Am I missing something to enable smart autocomplete?

$ git c<tab> completes to a folder, starting with c.

$ git cl<tab> does nothing.

(OS X, installed with pip.)

<comment><USER27> I have this for starters: [https://gist.github.com/BYK/66dfd985491b483bd140](https://gist.github.com/BYK/66dfd985491b483bd140)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is nice to have new projects in the world.

Personally, I just don't get what it solves that can't be solved with shells and programming languages pre-installed on every machine already. From a personal workstation/development box shell (I used GNU Emacs for dev/mail/usenet for over a decade), I can understand but for servers this may not be appropriate.

It is "cool" but I'd argue that most geeks don't even fully understand installed tools on their current machines, so this is "interesting" at best. It was someone's project to learn programming?

I may be being negative, but "meh".

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks very useful, I think it's time to replace my zsh.

</comment><comment><USER30> How does this compare to cmder on Windows?

<comment><USER31> Not at all, they're completely different things.</comment></comment>


HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL - <AUTHOR> http://www.husl-colors.org/ <comment><USER2> Someone emailed me recently about a tool he was building using an HUSL-based color picker. Here was part of my response:

As for the color space, I can understand the idea, but personally I think both HuSL and HuSLp are quite far from human friendly in practice, either for manual color selections or programming heuruistic color choices. In the case of HuSL, the numerical values for "saturation" are useless for comparisons across lightnesses or hues, and in the case of HuSLp, the very limited gamut of RGB displays in certain hues ends up leaving the majority of display colors outside of the HuSLp gamut, while still leaving the saturation numbers somewhat useless for comparisons across lightnesses.

I think end users would be better served by just using a cylindrical representation of CIELUV directly (or actually CIELAB, IPT, or CIECAM02 would be better still for most UI purposes I think, even in the context of computer displays, or perhaps NCS for certain use cases). HuSL is better than HSL/HSV, but that's a very low bar.

</comment><comment><USER3> The _tool_ jacobolus is referring to is a color scheme editor I made: [https://www.colorize.io/baskerville/RVXGW50G/](https://www.colorize.io/baskerville/RVXGW50G/).

It was, indeed, originally based on HuSL, but I later realized I could get a more meaningful picker by just constraining the chroma component not to go beyond the maximum in-gamut chroma for the given lightness and hue.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure if I actually understand what is it about. I'd like to see HUSL colorpicker beside the rival ones (including HSV) to understand if it's really more useful. Random generated colors are nice indeed, but I'm always having a struggle with defining what I want from random, so I want to neglect this use- case.

I mean, I never can trust any studies that say "70% of respondents told us that these colors have brightness of 60%, although, technically speaking, this color is brighter that that, so it's a property of human eye to perceive these shades brighter than these" for several reasons. I can trust a physical definition of brightness, or as simple definition of color as RGB. There's real meaning to that. But what one actually means, when he says "this color is 60% bright"? It is totally a matter of his learning experience, that made his definition of "bright" to be what it is. If one spends enough time working with RGB, he can guess hex-codes closely enough, for him it would be intuitive, as his mental model of color was developed with RGB as a guide. But I doubt any newcomer can say RGB is "intuitive". Intuitive understanding of any tool comes with real experience of using it. So it's not about how intuitive tool _looks_ , but how effective it is after you learn how to use it.

So, yeah, at a first glance HUSL looks "intuitive", but I cannot say if it's a good thing or a bad one, without actually trying to pick colors using that scheme.

<comment><USER5> This talk introduced me personally to various 'alternate' color palettes and why they might be useful (though the talk is more specific to data visualization domain): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJr8D4Bxjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJr8D4Bxjw), Subtleties of Color by Robert Simmon at OpenVis 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know why HUSL is based on CIELUV rather than CIELAB?

It seems that, although CIELUV and CIELAB were considered equally good when adopted in 1976, CIELAB has generally been preferred more recently (e.g. for the 1994 and 2000 "Delta E" formulae [1]).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#Delta_E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#Delta_E)

<comment><USER2> The CIE 1976 (u', v') UCS chromaticity diagram is a somewhat better chromaticity diagram than the standard 1931 (x, y) version for e.g. showing chromaticity of the primaries on a computer display: it reduces some of the dramatic perceptual distortions of xy. CIELUV is supposed to be a full 3D color space made out of a combination of a (very bad) chromatic adaptation method, the same lightness L* from CIELAB, and color coordinates L* u* v* which are simply derived from L*, u', and v'.

In theory, CIELUV is a bit more directly relevant to colored lights or images on a television / computer display, whereas CIELAB is defined for surface colors. In practice, CIELUV just isn't a very good uniform model of human color vision, and CIELAB is somewhat better (even for display colors) while still being quite easy to compute.

The reason color difference measures are defined with reference to CIELAB coordinates is that they are typically used for specifying tolerances on surface colors in industry. For instance, you might specify that a particular textile or paint color must be within a particular perceptual distance of a target color. CIELUV wouldn't make any sense for such a use case.

Personally, I'd recommend people move on to use IPT or CIECAM02 or something similar instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is just a first impression, so maybe after further reflection it won't be an issue, but: all of the examples of HUSL colors are drab and less interesting than their HSL counterparts. It seems like the benefits of using HUSL (which are still unclear to me) are not worth the cost of being unable to describe vibrant colors. Please tell me why I'm wrong.

<comment><USER8> I think the benefits of HUSL are kind of explained backwards, with technical details first and practical applications later. But once I saw their comparison of contrast (60% brightness random colors HUSL vs HSL) and the demo, it's pretty clear that HSL is way more difficult to depend on for random colors due to wildly varying contrasts.

Comparison: [http://www.husl-colors.org/#comparison](http://www.husl- colors.org/#comparison) Demo: [http://www.husl- colors.org/syntax/#506055](http://www.husl-colors.org/syntax/#506055)

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in seeing a version of the demo with HSL, for comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The way the polygon morphs as you adjust the sliders, to reflect the reduced gamut in that slice, is really cool!

</comment><comment><USER11> I've added HUSL support to the "Colour Picking by Simulation" program.

[http://xqt2.com/p/colours_sim_HUSL.html](http://xqt2.com/p/colours_sim_HUSL.html)

You can toggle between normal HSL and HUSL. I find that the greens are too suppressed for my liking.

</comment><comment><USER12> So far, when it comes to color models the only one I found rudimentary intuitive is NCS[1]. Unfortunately it's proprietary.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System)

</comment><comment><USER13> The interactive color picker is neat, but the irregularity of the space is hard to visualize in 2D. I'd love to see a 3D point cloud version of the color space.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ha, is the grey on black explanation too low on contrast or is it just me? :)

HUSL rocks, I wish all color pickers had it.

<comment><USER15> I'd love to know this too: almost every article on HN has someone commenting about the contrast on some text. To me the difference between the black and grey is fine, and I wouldn't have even thought about it if you hadn't said anything.

I initially figured it was because of the MacBook Pro retina monitor is good, but I hear the same complaints from other people on the same (or similar) set ups.

Is it a world of difference between monitor calibrations, or human eyes, or both?!

<comment><USER16> The macbook pros tend to use more correctly calibrated colour than typical desktops with monitors, and typical non-apple laptops; This means that decisions made on non-reference monitors that have never been calibrated.. well, they can look completely wrong on a monitor with the correct calibration.

Get a Lenovo huey or a Colorhug, correct your monitor, and you'll see what I mean.

On the web, you don't really know what you'll run into. You should aim for a level of contrast so sharp that it borders on uncomfortable, so that when the contrast between your colour selections is less than you thought, it'll still at least be legible.

<comment><USER14> Got any reference for that statement? I often work with color in surveys so that would be super interesting.

<comment><USER16> Sadly only personal experience and rumour.

I work in an office full of Mac users, and I'm among maybe three people who don't use Macs for work at the company.

All of the non-Apple monitors in the company are not correctly calibrated and lack colour profiles (and are by default not configured correctly either).

I recently bought a colorimeter, and calibrated all of my displays(including my external displays); after doing this I realized that the colour on my monitors most closely resembled the default colour response on the MacBook Pros in the office.

My colleagues(who admittedly didn't understand colour calibration at all, even the designers) are under the impression that Apple profiles and calibrates the panels at the factory(and presumably ships custom profiles for the factory state of the panel).

I think it's probably cruder than that. It's likely that they ship one profile for an entire family of panels, which gets it closer but doesn't account for time and manufacturing variances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HSL is bad for this use case that's why we use HSV.

The swatches at the bottom of this Wikipedia article show the difference.

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

CIE* gets you more comparative, perceptive uniformity however when picking a color that's almost exactly what you don't care about.

Author would benefit from an art class and/or two hours reading the mind- numbing tech documentation around color theory.

<comment><USER18> HUSL brings the perceptual uniformity of CIELab with the intuitiveness of HSL. Author has done something awesome with a solid theoretical foundation. I have used HUSL to generate pleasant color palettes in [http://bezier.method.ac](http://bezier.method.ac)

<comment><USER17> I'm an artist and musician and generally horrified by the amateurish algorithmic noodling in both spaces.

When you pick a color you're picking it relative to one already on screen -- or something in your mind's eye. This color picker does not help solve either problem.

If you look at the paint chips in the store -- or the Pantone books -- you'll see they're organized a certain way. Often you pick the color and then you tweak the saturation and brightness. I do it all day every day. Even the dorkky CSS pre-processors have features for tweaking saturation and lightness. It's what artists do.

This tool makes a mess of saturation in particular.

Meanwhile nobody's demanding to do Delta-E crossfades on #ffffcc vs #ffccff in SASS. Hmm. I wonder why.

Color picking is often handled by swatches and fanning out real-world books of similar tones. Fiddling with a computer is great, and if you think it's important that your screensaver randomly pick cool colors -- hey, if this helps you, go for it.

You're likely far better off limiting the color cube a different way. Perhaps by popularity, or culture, or by simply typing in a couple dozen colors that don't look like shit and calling it done.</comment></comment></comment>


Colors: Army Green (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/59/keefe.php <comment><USER2> Interesting, for they _did_ come up with a stunningly good shade of green for non-field uniforms, I wore them in JROTC in the late '70s. On the other hand, olive drab wasn't a non-field uniform color, was it? I've heard that part of the equivalent WWII era color scheme including "pink", or so it was called.

Not that there's anything wrong with olive drab, prior to us going to camouflage patterns it helped in the field because you don't _want_ to stand out from the background, and it wasn't bad in most environments for that.

(Compare to the Army's MARPAT envy rushed into the field "Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), also referred to as ACUPAT (Army Combat Uniform Pattern) or Digital Camouflage" (Wikipedia), which I'm told and believe only works in a gravel pit.)</comment>


What's Your Personal Productivity Style? - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/01/assessment-whats-your-personal-productivity-style <comment><USER2> Where was this question?

I fill random questionnaires about productivity found on HN while working on an important project

\- Never

\- Rarely

\- Sometimes

\- Often

(*) Always

</comment><comment><USER3> > I'm selective about the tools—pens, paper, folders, and so on—that I use.

Lol. I haven't had a piece of paper on my desk in 5 years.

Also they labelled me a planner who always has a to-do list even when I specifically answered that I never do that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is five minutes of email followed by 25 minutes of Twitter a style?</comment>