Do you use cash/have you increased your cash usage out of privacy concern - <AUTHOR> Have any other HN posters increased their use of cash recently? (Or already pay for things in cash when possible)
I originally did it for privacy reasons:
1.) No one can judge me for what I buy.
(Ex: OP goes to bars too often. No new liver for him!)
2.) I don't generate a giant list of establishments I frequent.
Ex: I want to harass OP - looks like his favorite cafe is at $ADDRESS.
But I had an interesting side effect - looking at cold hard cash makes me less frivolous with it. The money I make from my frugality exceeds what I'd get from credit card rewards.
I often see articles about societies going "cashless" on HN, and I thought it would be interesting to hear from HN users who are going in the opposite direction. <comment><USER2> I'm definitely in the cash camp, not only for privacy but also just wanting to limit how many vendors have my credit card info (so I use Apple Pay whenever possible, if not cash), especially after point-of-sale breaches like the ones at Target and Home Depot.

The problem with cash, for me, was that I'd run out of it too quickly.

That changed when I started focusing on saving 60% of take home pay, cooking almost all meals at home, stopped going to bars/cafes/coffee shops, comparison shopping of groceries (shifting to costco), etc.

Now I don't worry about small effects like CC cash-back or accidental frugality, because hitting over 60% savings is an overwhelming effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's been studied quite a few times since credit cards arrived, finding that spending cash means you spend least. It explains some of the push for cards, app stores, more recently cashless, and alternative game currencies. Perhaps explained as simply as paying over notes "hurts more" psychologically than invisibly debiting 50 to a card or account.

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-science- behind-b...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-science-behind- behavior/201607/does-it-matter-whether-you-pay-cash-or-credit-card) Lots of other research and links to find about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is also why casinos use chips, not cash, for betting

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When you're judged for a liver donation it's not by your bank records but by your liver condition. When you have your phone in your pocket you still generate a list of establishments you frequent (maybe cash machines too). Even if you were famous who'd have access to that information?

You have good points but bad examples. China is the only country where there's a known link between purchase history and government/quasi-government decisions. They have a lot of facial recognition technology so cash wouldn't help. If USA started this too do you think the NSA/etc are far behind?

</comment><comment><USER5> I've actually had the opposite experience as you. Having my debit card keeps an easy running tally which is difficult to do unless you only leave with small sums of cash in your pockets. However, when you only have a small amount of cash you run into the "just short" effect, where all you need is a few dollars more to get what you want and you can afford it but can't get it. To me, the potential opportunity cost is just not worth it.

<comment><USER6> I have found it difficult to track cash spending. I picked up using GNUCash this year, and that helped a bit. I at least can capture most cash spending to see if I'm within budget in different categories. But every few week's I still need to make a 'correction' transaction for ~$10, which is annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> I adjusted my budget so dining out is included in the broad category of "entertainment", along with bars, movies, and other stuff.

(I do track calories from these things though :))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always end up being more frivolous with my cash. The fact is that society has made it hard for users to use only cash or to use only any anonymous payment method. Living only on cash is almost as ridiculous sounding as living only on Bitcoin as a demonstration of what privacy-less dystopia we are barreling towards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Living on cash only is not doable.

But only using a CC for bills/groceries and moving your day to day stuff - bars, eating out, small errands to cash is doable.

<comment><USER8> > Living on cash only is not doable.

Why not? My last apartment, where I lived a year ago, included utilities. Although I wrote them a check for my rent, I could have used cash and gotten a money order. Groceries, eating out, etc. I always use cash. Once I got a car, I started using a card for gas, since it saved me a trip inside and I did not need to worry about if I was a bit over $20.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it it's an offline payment, it's always cash. It's not much about privacy as it is about optimized spending.

</comment><comment><USER10> I haven't. I get a discount/cash back for using credit cards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you make more in cash back than you'd make not buying something?

Keep in mind, to make 20.00 at 5% you need to spend $400. ($1000 at more common 2% rewards)

<comment><USER10> With the extra bonuses that come with new credit cards I actually come out way ahead.</comment></comment></comment>


Where in the world are all the hackers..? - <AUTHOR> http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/08/where-in-the-world-are-all-the-hackers/

<comment><USER2> It would have been nice to see some 'depth of visit' info next to the referral information, that would give an indication of the quality of the traffic from the various sources.

Time on site, number of pages viewed, that sort of thing.</comment>


Rock in Opposition was a movement of 70s bands united against the music industry - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_in_Opposition

<comment><USER2> This seems borderline for HN but this _was_ an interesting movement. However, the political attitudes of many of these bands seem quaintly 70's naive- Marxist now. I still enjoy Henry Cow's instrumental records but these days Dagmar Krause's Brechtian histrionics on the "In Praise of Learning" album just make me chuckle.

It's much more productive to try to humanize capitalism than reject it entirely, IMO.</comment>


Ask HN: Should HN have a toggle to show/hide paywall articles? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I think the logistics of this are too onerous for a site like HN. Even Reddit doesn't have anything like this. Between search engines/crawlers getting a different page than normal visitors, X free articles a month, and per-articles paywalls (such as sites that have removed the paywall for all COVID-19-related content) I think there is no easy way to tell if a site has paywall or not.

You could probably create a list of sites that have a paywall anywhere but I'm not sure if that would really provide a huge benefit.

For me, if a site has a paywall and I'm not willing to pay for it then I'll often read the comments to determine if I want to consider paying for it (normally only after I run into the same wall multiple times) or if I want to go looking on the internet for other reporting on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Taken to another level, why is HN showing articles from news sites at all, when it's own guidelines say if media would cover it, it's probably off topic?

<comment><USER4> > when it's own guidelines say if media would cover it

Actually, the guidelines say: "If they'd cover it on _TV news_ , it's probably off-topic". And also: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is OK.[1]

Long-form articles on news sites usually have much more intellectual content than TV news.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes HN should hide all the paywall articles. It wouldn't be that hard to do since most of them are NYtimes, WashPost, Medium, etc.

Hell, I'll help build the feature its that much of a nuisance...</comment>


Police Drop Bomb on Radicals' Home in Philadelphia (1985) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-radicals-home-in-philadelphia.html

<comment><USER2> I was a kid living in the Philly area when it happened. It got lots of local TV coverage of course and it honestly did feel quite crazy having a military like action against a house in Philly, but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over. IIRC it was Mayor Goode who called the action, and being african-american, maybe that helped keep racial tensions down. I can only surmise if it was today that there would be much longer lasting coverage and repercussions.

<comment><USER3> I think when you get down to it isn't quite as much about race as the news would have us believe. It is more about the plight of the poor vs. authority trying to keep them in their place but by highlighting incidences with racial components like this they can polarize the various groups that would otherwise have common interests.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) but they are often portrayed as polar opposites and played against each other in the news and politics.

<comment><USER4> I've made the point elsewhere that a lot of activists in the US are shooting themselves badly in the foot by playing up the race aspect over and over in these cases.

They are missing that while there certainly _is_ racism in the US, these problems correlate much stronger with poverty than race: The vast majority of differences in violence along racial lines disappear when you start adjusting for social equality.

By tying it to race, these activists are pushing away large groups of people - both poor people of other ethnic backgrounds, and other people who don't find the race issue comfortable for various reasons (including not so savoury reasons).

And by focusing on the police, rather than the underlying social inequalities, they are likewise pushing away groups that see the police as fundamentally protecting them against a lot of the people that are demonstrating.

At the same time, address the poverty issue, and 1) it has a much more significant impact, 2) it leaves the remaining race issues in much starker relief (it is far easier for racist cops to justify their behaviour when the victim is black _and_ live in a poor area where it is easy for people in the community to accept that a black kid in that area can be scary)

It is heart wrenching to see how off the mark these things end up going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to read something about how the police didn't kill someone. It seems like most of the people that help other people are "strangers" \- are there any kinds of statistics on how often the police actually help? I'd imagine that situations like domestic abuse are cases when they're really successful but other than that it often seems like the police cause real problems that tear people apart.

<comment><USER6> Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good.

I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail, say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of radiation if there were an accident.

You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations. But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up. There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think ahead.

Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or, as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of the car and shoot him in the head.'

<comment><USER7> Police are not supposed to be a net good. They are a classic solution to a game theoretic prisoner's dilemma. If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it. So as a classic solution to the prisoners dilemma, you introduce a force that strictly decreases everyone's utility function. How can this be a good thing? Well, because it changes everyone's optimal strategy from stealing to not stealing, reaching a global optimum. Now you'll notice that this strategy only improves things if it actually changes people's behavior. If people continue stealing anyway at the same rates, then things have only gotten worse (unless you subscribe to punitive, rather than deterrent punishment). So the primary purpose of police is deterrence through the threat of negative reinforcement, not "helping people". Further, whenever police actually have to enforce laws, its a sign that something has gone wildly wrong. The deterrent didn't work, and things are worse off than if there were no police at all. Of course, in reality criminal behavior has a lot of motivators and it's not possible to change everyone's optimal strategy just by raising punishments, so you're going to have police enforcing laws. But there is no police department that is more successful than one where the police just sit around and do nothing.

<comment><USER8> _If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone 's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it._

This makes no sense if you've ever interacted with other humans. There are several logical societal deterrents to stealing beside police. (Ostracism, retribution, foresight, modeling…)

<comment><USER7> You're missing the forest for the trees. The fact that some people's utility function supports not stealing by default is irrelevant to the structure of the game. It's still a prisoners dilemma and the existence of the police is justified in its efforts to modify the game's structure.

<comment><USER9> It's _not_ a prisoner's dilemma.

A prisoner's dilemma is a _wholly fictional_ and _game-theoretic_ construct involving _single, isolated interactions_ among _perfectly rational agents._

None of that has anything to do with humans. Humans never play the prisoner's dilemma because they're never any of the above concepts. Humans are certainly not perfectly rational, and almost always interact with the same set of people. You can't apply such an abstraction to public policy.

<comment><USER7> Yea, right... You can't apply math to public policy - only stories and soft science. Math is absolutely useless because it's abstract and ... "fictional".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those interested I highly recommend the documentary "Let the Fire Burn".

[http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Let the Fire Burn" documentary - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA)

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege) \- another fascinating read (beside everything else, the fire decomposing tear gas into chemical weapon grade gases)

</comment><comment><USER13> One of the houses on Osage Avenue that was burned down was my dad's childhood home.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it. What's the rush with situations like this? They're not going anywhere. Surround the area, stay well protected, and think, negotiate, anything seems better than this.

<comment><USER15> There was no rush.

>A 90-minute shootout this morning came _after a week of growing tension between the city and the group_ , known as Move. _Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years._

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I swear I saw this before, or a similar thing. Also I swear I saw something similar in Independence, MO; but I cannot find a thing about it. Perhaps I was conflating it with this event.

</comment><comment><USER17> If it happened today: "OMG WE HAVE GOTTEN SO VIOLENT." Nope. We just have the Internet.

Interesting story.

<comment><USER18> Here's another story you seldom hear about; it's from 1927 and had a worse outcome than recent school shootings.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster)</comment></comment>


Search less, understand more: Evri goes live - <AUTHOR> http://www.evri.com/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I really like this.</comment>


How Facebook Will Put Google Out Of Business - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/facebook-google-out-of-business/

<comment><USER2> This big talk based on assumptions is so boring.

How to make a title people click on:

"How Git will kill the publishing industry"

Everyone can commit, the crowd knows much more than the individual writer. All texts will shared by Git open source for free, so nobody will buy anything any more.

You say this is bullshit? It is, but you can't prove me wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. The fact that Facebook knows what bands and tv all my friends are into is why i choose to do my tens of searches a day on Facebook. Pity it never tells me anything useful.

So the author thought of a cool metaphor about dust and archeologists. Shame it's complete rubbish. This isn't a game where Facebook has more data than Google. It has _different_ data. Useful and cool data for sure. And I'm sure google would love to get their grubby little paws on it too. But if the author thinks that Facebook are casually going to replace Google or even that we are all going to loose interest in what Google offers then _really_ should they even be writing opinion pieces?</comment>


Maids for Sale: Silicon Valley's Online Slave Market [video] - happy-go-lucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxz-vmbFXd4 <comment><AUTHOR> I feel apprehensive about some of these things… well, not the specific instance here, more generally:

There's an implication (in this story and others like it) that Apple, Google et cetera should turn away distasteful customers, or if they don't, then A/G/… can be blamed for whatever those customers do. But it's not clear to me that a very big company should even be permitted to choose its customers. That a smallish company with 0.1% worldwide market share is choosy, okay, in that case would-be customers have other suppliers and service providers.

But if a monopolist or oligopolist turns away customers, IMO that encroaches on the legislature, which ought to have the sole right to forbid things. Expecting Apple or Google to ban things that the relevant legislature will not ban is, in a way, to step away from the rule of law. Expecting that is to want a world where we're ruled by corporations rather than by legislatures.

Or…?

</comment><comment><USER2> Fake news. This is taking place in the Gulf, using local apps (similar to eBay or Craigslist)... that happen to be available on Apple or Android stores.

Instead of reporting on an ancestral culture of slavery in this region, the BBC used a heuristic that keeps shifting the blame until it falls on a western/white country. Disgusting propaganda.</comment>


Zotonic - The Erlang CMS - <AUTHOR> http://zotonic.com/

<comment><USER2> I used zotonic a few years ago, it feels very "unerlangy" and I think thats a good thing, they have put together a fairly solid product and the site + documentation is top notch, it did feel someone stuck between being a cms for end users and a web framework for developers but that may have come from my preconceptions.

Its nice to see some mature + user friendly web components come out for erlang

<comment><USER2> oh and in case the zotonic guys are reading this.

I have a feature request :) what are the chances of packaging zotonic for agner (<http://erlagner.org/>), it would make it very attractive for erlang devs to try it out

<comment><USER3> I am reading this :) At the moment we don't have a package on our plans. We are reorganizing the complete installation and splitting up the module system. Maybe you can file a feature request? Then we can look into it for some future release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it odd that it seems to be its own Webserver, that makes it hard to save a lot of time using standard Apache modules for common use cases which might not be addressed in their build.

<comment><USER5> You can always run it behind Apache. Or if you want to run several heterogeneous web apps, you can run Zotonic on different port and reroute to it from port 80.

<comment><USER5> Of course Apache will just slow it down :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zoton is a brand name for Lansoprazole. Is this name meant to mean something?

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

<comment><USER7> With a lot of projects these days, I get the feeling that the meaning behind the name is "this domain was available".

<comment><USER3> We have some other *tonic projects, which is the primary reason behind the name.</comment></comment></comment>


Preprint Analysis of Preprint Articles Defining Global Discoure Around Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/maiamajumder/status/1227412132850995202 <comment><USER2> twitter doesn't work on my browser, is there a link to the article or is the analysis done on twitter itself?</comment>


100 Days of Code – free, open-source VS Code extension - <AUTHOR> https://www.software.com/100-days-of-code <comment><AUTHOR> 100 Days of Code is Software.com's newest open-source plugin that helps you reach your goals and complete the #100DaysOfCode Challenge. Log your progress, earn milestones, and share to twitter, right in your editor. Check us out on Product Hunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/100-days-of-code-vs- code-e...](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/100-days-of-code-vs-code- extension)</comment>


Ask HN: What programming languages aren't plain-text-based? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for examples of programming languages, particularly for web stuff, that are not fundamentally plain-text-based -- i.e., the source code cannot be expressed as plain text.<p>I'm thinking about languages that use things like background colors or graphical elements to actually signify instructions (rather than just pretty things up). <comment><USER2> Check out LoseThos[1] which has images and things as part of the source code, a variant of the C spec which powers the whole OS to run JIT code. 64 bit interesting operating system, all by one guy[2] over several years. LoseThos himself was hellbanned by pg awhile ago and comments a lot still, but you only see his comments if you put showdead to on. He posts lots of strange comments about God's words to him and sometimes relevant comments.

[1] <http://www.losethos.com/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=losethos>

</comment><comment><USER3> A controls engineer I know designs systems using ladder logic diagrams, which represent the control logic graphically, largely by drawing the relays and other devices that an earlier generation of engineers would have wired up physically. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic>

In the systems dynamics world, programs like Simulink, ModelicaML, and Stella allow users to graphically assemble the systems they want to simulate, by linking icons (e.g., "accumulators" and "flows"). <http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/> [http://www.iseesystems.com/softwares/Education/StellaSoftwar...](http://www.iseesystems.com/softwares/Education/StellaSoftware.aspx) <http://www.openmodelica.org/index.php/developer/tools/134>

None of these cases really meets your criteria that the source code _cannot_ be expressed as text. Rather, they all use graphics to enable non-traditional programmers (e.g., controls engineers with legacy skills) to interact with a modular programming system.

</comment><comment><USER4> Colorforth is a Forth written by Chuck Moore, the guy who created Forth in the 70s. In this quote from Colorforth site (<http://colorforth.com/cf.htm>) , read _word_ as _function_.

>In Forth, a new word is defined by a preceeding colon, words inside a definition are compiled, outside are executed. In colorForth a new word is red, green words are compiled, yellow executed. This use of color further reduces the syntax, or punctuation, needed. It also makes explicit how the computer will interpret each word.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's Fortress. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_language%29))

Not exactly what you were looking for, but its 'source code can be rendered as ASCII text, in Unicode, or as a prettied image.'

</comment><comment><USER6> I think Thyrd (<http://thyrd.org/>) fits the bill. You might want to look at the screencast for a good intro: <http://thyrd.org/thyrd/screencast.php?v=01>.

</comment><comment><USER7> All source code can be express in plain text, so I guess what you're actually asking is what languages are significantly easier to understand with graphic representation as opposed to textual.

Circuit boards are a good example of this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Look for some of them here: <http://strlen.com/programming-languages> (although they're not directly web-related)

</comment><comment><USER9> LabVIEW comes to mind. Not really for web stuff though...</comment>


Powered by poo: Students use dog waste to light park - <AUTHOR> https://asunews.asu.edu/20120501_dogpark <comment><USER2> Probably easier to get the dogs running on a treadmill and power the lights that way.</comment>


We've Got the Vaccine, Says Pentagon-Funded Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/03/breaking-weve-got-vaccine-says-pentagon-funded-company/163739/ <comment><USER2> | If regulatory hurdles can be cleared, he said in a Thursday interview, the vaccine could start to become available in November.

So, possibly faster than some estimates, but it's not exactly tomorrow. The headline heavily implies it's ready to go.

Also, super hilarious that instead of the headline saying "Canadian Company" it says "Pentagon-Funded Company" \- USA! USA! USA!

<comment><USER3> i remember reading about this technology being developed in scientific american, mid 80s. there was an uproar as the suggestion was that fruit or vegetables could be engineered to carry a vaccine, it was about 2002 when i first heard serious consideration of such a product from a small laboratory in southern ontario. It was a wild ride.</comment></comment>


Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/15/upshot/the-best-places-for-better-cheaper-health-care-arent-what-experts-thought.html <comment><USER2> The extent to which this article is recrafted according to where it geolocates you is surprising:

"Consider Denver, our best guess for where you might be reading this article. Spending on Medicare patients is about average in this area. When it comes to private health insurance, spending is also about average. Denver is one of the few places where spending for both programs is very similar – in most, there is some degree of mismatch."

</comment><comment><USER3> > Consider . Spending on Medicare patients is in this area. hen it comes to > private health insurance, spending is .

I may be using an old browser, but I still didn't expect it to mis-render so strangely. Turns out it's actually trying to geolocate you and cite something nearby.</comment>


Chrome Overtakes Firefox Globally for First Time - <AUTHOR> http://gs.statcounter.com/press/chrome-overtakes-firefox-globally-for-first-time <comment><USER2> I use firefox because I believe in the work of Mozilla foundation. Chrome, IE, Safari are all company products and those companies objective are tuned to increasing their stock value. Yes, they make very good products but Mozilla makes a good philosophy and I trust them to value privacy, quality and open source. Firefox might be slower than chrome and not that beautiful but it is made with a mindset that is similar to mine.

This may sound too political for a software choice decision but hey, I LIKE MOZILLA FOUNDATION and their products.

<comment><USER3> I assume you never buy anything from a company. It pointless to try to prop up products despite it being worse. Open source project will not success in the long run unless it is better. Firefox being better at protecting privacy is a reason to use it, but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason.

<comment><USER4> _I assume you never buy anything from a company_

You can certainly do business with companies, while showing preference for an organization that shares your values whenever such an organization exists.

 _but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason._

I think it is more that some people (including me) think Mozilla values privacy because they flat out say they do and then they have a consistent track record of supporting privacy. The fact they are non-profit does make it slightly easier to take their statements at face value, but it is their track record that really demonstrates it.

<comment><USER3> Firefox's track record in regard to privacy is a great reason to use. What I don't like is the support of products based on vague values that can't be tested. What does it really mean that Mozilla only cares about the web and not profits? This is a silly as using Android because it is "open". The way google uss open is kind of meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Putting aside the layman for the moment, has anyone else found Chrome particularly annoying to use as a power user? There are so many issues, such as the uncustomizable download bar (can't even have it autohide!), the inability to fine-tune history/cache/etc. deletion, inabilility to set filetype-specific download settings, and so on.

And Firefox isn't _that_ slow in its latest incarnations.

<comment><USER6> Of course. Chrome isn't really good for power users due to the less-powerful extension setups (can't even do true ad blocking). And it's of much less interest to companies due to the per-user installation setup and not being self-contained (it relies on the host OS for encryption, proxy handling, etc).

<comment><USER7> Chrome has had a system installer for years: [http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=11...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=118663)

I'm also not sure what you mean by "not being self-contained." Chrome relies on OS subsystems where appropriate because it simplifies management and provides a consistent user experience--that's why we use the OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings. We've also seen quite a bit of enterprise uptake because Chrome is the only browser that provides full centralized management on all supported platforms (via Windows group policy, Puppet, etc.).

<comment><USER8> > OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings

these things are awesome! firefox just doesn't work with most sites on my company's intranet (particularly with authentication), but when i use chrome, everything just works.

<comment><USER9> that sounds odd. details?

<comment><USER7> Just guessing here, but it's pretty common for enterprises to set up a lot of configuration via some sort of centralized policy mechanism. So, you'll have custom certs and a proxy PAC pushed at the system level via GPO or Puppet. If a browser (or any application) re-implements these features entirely, it won't pick up any of that context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Despite loving Firefox I see this as a good thing. Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user.

Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons, but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.

<comment><USER11> _Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user._

I'm not sure. I think it's the opposite. Most end-users won't really know or care what browser they are using, but they do care what their hobbyist/technical friends/colleagues/kids use, because those are "the experts" so they know what's best.

Chrome had very significant uptake among those, and one of the reasons for the very steep growth in its market-share is that this "trickles down" to lesser experienced users. It's also the biggest problem for Firefox, because it gained its market-share in exactly the same manner.

And for the users that were impervious to this, bundling deals like with Skype and Flash are also obvious big wins over IE and Firefox.

I'd be curious what features of Chrome make you believe its a more slick experience for the end user as compared to Firefox.

<comment><USER10> Mostly the lack of options, and the way the updates don't get in your way.

Firefox gives you a lot more power, but everything you can do in it beyond the basics gives you the possibility of things going wrong.

So you can install Tabmix Plus, but that gives you a wall of tab options that can leave you wondering how to find things. You can install NoScript, and be left wondering why half of your web pages don't work any more.

When it comes to "plain Firefox with nothing installed" and "plain Chrome, with nothing installed" I suspect they're about as easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I too am a Chrome convert and loved FireFox in its day (mainly because of its development tools), but its rampant memory leaks drove me away. While Chrome's dev tools aren't quite as robust as FireFox's, they're getting there very very quickly.

On a side note, I'm tired of having to design and develop around IE. All versions have the promise of adhering to modern web standards, but with each release, they tend to fall short of those promises.

<comment><USER13> May I suggest you to delete your Firefox profile folder (<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox>) and give it another try? They have corrected tons of problems, really.

IE10 is pretty solid, but you're right, we'll have to develop and design for older versions for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work at a federal agency and our browsers just got updated a couple of weeks ago from IE6 to IE8. While I'd kill for either Chrome or FF, I have to say: I never thought I'd be so happy about IE8.

<comment><USER15> Install Chrome Frame ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, it doesn't. Net application's stats, which are much more realistic, are here: [http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qpri...](http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0)

IE 53% Firefox 22% Chrome 18% Safari 5% Opera 2%

<comment><USER16> I looked into Net Apps vs Statcounter a couple of years back and found the opposite to be true. From my notes (so may be a little out of date on figures):

\</comment></comment><comment>--- Stats Counter: Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.

Net Applications: Accumulates data from 160 million monthly visitors to its network of hosted websites that collect statistics. The average traffic for a HitsLink customer is just over 1000 page views per day \</comment><comment>

On sample size Net Apps are not nearly as good nor do they have many foreign market users to give a true global picture. It was not until 2010 that Net apps weighted by country population figures which skewed their results heavily to the US market share. And it has been alleged their stats are for sale.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone else find Firefox hideous from an aesthetic perspective? I believe in the work Mozilla does, but I can't use Firefox without being distracted by it. Chrome is gorgeous and gets out of my way, allowing me to focus on what I'm doing. I did see some Firefox beta sketches a while back on HN, and they looked similar to Chrome, so hopefully they go that way.

<comment><USER18> Are you using XP or Mac OS? Cause Firefox looks pretty nice with Aero on Vista and 7 - a lot like Chrome, actually...

<comment><USER17> Mac OS X. Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And I remember back then when firefox was not even 1.0, and was replacing the horrible browsing experience on Linux on Konqueror, with a delightful one (with tabs!).

I am glad to see how far we've come.

<comment><USER20> I actually liked Konqueror, but it might have been a later version than what you had.

<comment> guard-of-terra Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser.

E.g. it had okayish system integration while other browsers have it awful. It displayed site favicons in task panel, instead of boasting its own. It was a birthplace of webkit.

<comment><USER21> > Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser.

More importantly they did something right which _is_ in most other browsers, their renderer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sadly, Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead. IE10 seems to be quite solid, but it will be available only for Windows 7 and 8 (and not before mid-2012).

<comment><USER22> IE8 will be around for years because XP can't get an IE9/10 upgrade. It looks like combined IE6 & IE7 are around 6.5% in North America. IE6 is around 1%. Being able to stop supporting IE6/IE7 is still huge. Yesterday I noticed that this map app no longer supports IE7.

<http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa>

"Sorry, you are running an old version of Internet Explorer which is not supported. For more information please visit here "

Link: <http://map.itoworld.com/ie-error.html>

<comment><USER23> Google has also dropped support for IE7 as of August this year (for apps at least): [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to- support-m...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support- modern-browsers.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mozilla needs to do more marketing - I seem more ads/posts for Chrome these days, compared to a few years ago when almost every site (that I visited) had a banner saying "Switch to Firefox for a better Web" or smth like that.

Both browsers are good, however I use Firefox since I have all the add-ons I need, and the awesome Awesome Bar, which lets me access my favorite sites or sites I visited recently with a few keystrokes or keywords (I remember a word or two in the URL/title and I can always go back).

I had no luck finding something like that for Chrome, and that's my biggest annoyance - every time I have to bookmark a site (which I always forget), or I have to search for it again through Google. I type a damn keyword and it searches instead of showing me the URL... I have a suspicion that is on purpose, since it leads me to Google.com :-)...

<comment><USER24> Unsurprisingly, google has a _slightly_ higher marketing budget than mozilla... :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For my use, I measured my memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome (with whatever little number of tabs I keep open daily), and I found that the memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome is exactly the same. So I don't bother with Google and rely on Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER26> there is one big factor why i use chrome over firefox. and that is the auto- complete as i type in things in the address bar. once i got used to that on chrome, i can never get back to firefox, no matter how much they have improved elsewhere. hope this serves as some good feedback to mozilla devs.

<comment><USER25> auto-complete is there in Firefox, it is just not there by default.

<comment><USER26> good, then question is, will they ever make it by default?

<comment><USER25> I'd rather they make it as a simple enough choice (a check box or something). There are privacy implications of auto-complete and I personally believe Firefox is accurate in not enabling it by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%."

"In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%"

I am very surprised to see that IE is so much stronger in the US. I always thought IE was strong in Asia and that that lead to its high market share. Does anyone have a theory as to why IE is stronger in the US than in the rest of the world?

</comment><comment><USER28> Why?

Every time I read news like this I go back and actually measure rendering times for the pages I frequent together with overall memory consumption.

Every time Firefox comes out on top, but yet somebody everybody thinks it is faster and consumes less memory.

(And I am still using Firefox 3.6.*, and Chromium 14)

Maybe I'm different in my browsing habits, but I find that hard to believe.

<comment><USER29> Firefox has improved a lot since Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.6 was released on 2010-01-21. Firefox 8.0 was released on 2011-11-08. (Chrome 14 was released on 2011-09-16.)

I suggest comparing the latest Firefox (8) with the latest Chrome (15).

(Disclosure: I get paid for working on the engine of Firefox.)

<comment><USER28> Oops, rereading my post... it was highly ambiguous.

What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox 3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When Chrome introduced plug-ins like Adblock, I started to consider switching. Now I'm on Chromium. And it's good.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's interesting, if you look at the Worldwide numbers, Chrome seems to be on a steady progression. But if you look at North America or USA, you see that both Firefox and Chrome had a fairly significant dip in the last set of numbers, while IE had a fairly significant uptick.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, market share numbers are completely different by country. Compare Germany and South Korea, say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Chrome has already overtake even IE in South America: <http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-sa-monthly-201011-201111>

</comment><comment><USER34> I like Firefox for extreme customizability. Nothing matches that and Chrome is nowhere close to it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Netscape was pioneer but lost steam later with version wars. Firefox came much later to Mozilla which gave hopes, but performance and memory leaks caused it to never be dominant browser, and it too got into version number war and is loosing.

Webkit has won on smartphone browser war(arm), same is being repeated on Desktop

</comment><comment><USER36> The Awesomebar keeps me using Firefox. Is there an equivalent for Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER37> I love Chrome since I don't have to install external flash player plugin which is kinda annoying. Chrome has a built-in flash player. You don't have to update flash and restart all your browser.

</comment><comment><USER38> firefox/mozilla was essentially 'funded' by google search(the search bar built-in)? wish it the best, as firebug is my favorite.

<comment><USER11> Firebug is gradually being phased out in favor of built-in developer tools (which is nice, because Firebug is one of the things making Firefox slow). There's been lots of blogging about those lately, just check out a Nightly/Aurora Firefox build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> All of the talk about giving Firefox a try again... please, someone set up a sane package (PPA?) for Firefox that includes the proper Ubuntu font packages, that will allow me to test the dev releases on my machine. I love Chrome because I get dev builds every other day from their PPA and it _just works_. I've never had a similar experience when trying to use anything except the distro provided copies of Firefox.

<comment><USER29> The Firefox PPA that corresponds to the Chrome dev channel is [https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla- daily/+archive/firefox...](https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla- daily/+archive/firefox-aurora)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> free paid pr spam, i don't believe or trust this site.

<comment><USER41> Why not? Statcounter would have the right information to make this finding.</comment></comment>


Should I start showing people my beta service now or wait for a bit more polish? - <AUTHOR>

This is a silly question to ask a board full of agile-bodies but I am curious to get a consensus of how readers on this board feel about this question:
I have a very early beta up of a free service I'd like to offer (and maybe even open source).  I feel the timing of it is right, and the service useful, but I have little time to work on it and so it could still use several weeks of hard polish and testing.
That said, I feel that given what is currently happening in the world of social services (app.net, twitter's api changes, etc), it is timely.
Do you feel it's better to take another week or two and add a bit of spit shine, or should I start getting feedback immediately?
I expect the answer most people will give is to just get it out there so I can find out if it's what people want, and if not, why.  But there are definitely cases where that might be a mistake, and I would like to know what things someone might be cautious of when making this decision.
Thanks to all you great folks at HN! <comment><USER2> "Usage is like oxygen for ideas."

<http://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/></comment>


Kill Sticky Headers (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ <comment><USER2> Sticky headers make me feel claustrophobic, I don't know why. Regardless of my screen height (it could be a 30" monitor), it feels like something is "stuck" to my browser that wasn't before and makes me feel anxious.

Even without that feeling, sticky headers kill the feeling that I'm moving through a viewport of a webpage. It makes your website look like it's not of the "webpage" medium that I've been familiar with for 20 years. Humans have a very good eye for relative movement. The visual processing part of your brain considers movement _much_ more contrasting than color. So a fixed header when you're scrolling at 1cm/second is visually equivalent to a big bar moving upward at 1cm/second while you're trying to read an article. It's hard _not_ to pay attention to it. But navbars don't contain content, so they shouldn't steal attention from the page content.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. When I'm using an application called a browser to view a document on the web, I don't want the document to try to become part of the chrome: that breaks the "web page" metaphor. There is a _very small_ subset of websites, such as Figma, that feel more like independent applications than web pages, and for those I get more annoyed by the presence of the browser chrome, for basically the same reason.

What's worse, almost no sticky header has any useful items in it. Take StackOverflow as an example. It has a link to the homepage and a searchbar, in spite of the fact that many frequent StackOverflow users have never visited the homepage and never used the built-in search. The top of the screen is the most valuable part, because my head is usually above the screen, so it's more comfortable for my eyes to rest around the top of the viewport. So if you put something there, it had better be important.

<comment><USER4> You should hit f11 if you're working in an app and are upset with the browser bar. Go full screen or go home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever since I started using unlock origin's cosmetic filters to remove headers, footers and sidebars from most websites I visit, the web has become a much more enjoyable place. These 'engagement hacks' do little other than make your website look cluttered and distracting, which probably gets misinterpreted as 'engagement'.

<comment><USER6> You can add [https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances#one- click-...](https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances#one-click- installation) to UBlock Origin as a custom list instead of removing them yourself.

Disclaimer: I've never tried it.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! Installed. Commenting so I can find it later and put on other computers.

<comment><USER8> Please don't comment for that reason. Favorites are intended for things like this. To add a comment to your favorites list, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'favorite' at the top. You can revisit your favorites from your profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It took me awhile to realize how bad sticky divs are for my users. Justification of using sticky elements was that they were always visible. But why? Because they are frequently accessed elements? Scrolling to top doesn't take much of effort. They might be frequently accessed, but they were also not that hard to access.

It hit me hard, when I saw my user's screen which was relatively small and my sidebar and header were both sticky, leaving only a small area to display the main content.

I've now gone back to mostly non-sticky elements. It's refreshing. Not seeing those "frequently accessed" elements isn't much of an issue. I don't think I ever complained about popular websites not having its header sticky.

Letting users focus on the main content has been by far the most beneficial thing from my perspective.

<comment><USER10> Thank you.

As a user of a laptop with a small screen, I can say that, at least where I'm concerned, making those "frequently accessed" elements sticky is a great way to ensure I won't access them that much. I don't much go for non-enjoyable reading experiences. So I'm either going to hit the reader button to make the header disappear from my life, or, if that's not an option, I'm going to read what I came for and then go somewhere more fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just finished studying Multimedia design at KEA (Copenhagen School of Design and Technology), and I was surprised how popular sticky headers were among the teachers. Some even arguing they improved the browsing experience. Clearly they could not be more wrong.

I think part of the issue is, educationally, people gets told that sticky headers and huge font-size or white space is good design. In reality, they are just chasing away people from their websites.

Webdesign trends are so hostile towards users...

<comment><USER12> Web design isn't the solution.

Web design is the problem.

(In fairness: 99% of Web designers give the other 1% a bad reputation.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are few things that frustrate me more than scrolling down a web page, while trying to read and article, and having the header become sticky and obscure what I'm reading.

As far as I can remember, the _only_ app I've ever seen get this exactly right (in terms of not ever obscuring text) is the New York Times' Android app.

<comment><USER14> It's even worse when it only appears when you're scrolling up. You want to scroll up one line to re-read the sentence that scrolled off screen. Nope, now you have to scroll 50px because the navbar spawned. Oh, it's gone again. Nope, it's back, I didn't even mean to scroll up 1px that time.

It's no wonder my girlfriend makes more than I do as a UX professional. Someone on the team that actually has the users' interest at heart is critical. Else you get these ridiculous break-room ideas that nobody spent more than 5 seconds thinking about.

<comment><USER15> What's funny, there is a good way to do that: just look how ios safari urlbar works. When you scroll up, it collapses and bottom menu slides off-screen too. Then when you scroll up by dragging it (no 'kick' up), it remains collapsed. But if you 'kick' up, it shows both urlbar and bottom buttons at full size. It's like that since ios 7, afair.

Websites just show it on scroll-up no matter how you do it, so annoying.

<comment> frosted-flakes What do you mean by "kick up"?

<comment><USER15> Put your finger on screen, move it quickly enough down, lift it while moving, so content still scrolls inertially. As opposed to put, drag, stop, lift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sticky page headers are easy to implement and bad for UX. On the contrary, sticky table headers would be really helpful for long tables and it is impossible to implement them without compromises (fixed column width only, opaque background only or JS-only etc.)

<comment><USER17> This is a real failure of browsers, by the way. The table HTML has all the semantic information necessary, browsers could use it to improve table usability (such as sticky headers) but none ever bothered to try.

<comment><USER18> Developers can opt into this with CSS now.

th { position: sticky; top: 0; }

I don't think it would have been reasonable to include/force such functionality at the spec level.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately this only works on `th` and not `table > thead` or even `thead > tr` which is annoying because things like `tr` backgrounds won't be displayed which look ugly if you have cell spacing without a cell border.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For people who would like a more concise source (in ES6 & a bit of functional style):

        [...document.querySelectorAll("*")].filter(el => getComputedStyle(el).position === "fixed").forEach(el => el.parentNode.removeChild(el));

The code above also works, you can add the URL below to bookmarks.

        javascript:[...document.querySelectorAll("*")].filter(el%20=>%20getComputedStyle(el).position%20===%20"fixed").forEach(el%20=>%20el.parentNode.removeChild(el));

Also, for people who uses Safari:

You can add javascript: links to your bookmark by adding any bookmark & changing the URL.

<comment><USER20> Thanks! That's a lot easier on the eyes!

So I did this:

      javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed' || elements%5Bi%5D.className %3D%3D%3D 'awsui-flashbar') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

To add the flashbar from AWS to the mix, how would I do that with the streams like this? I'm sure if I hunt a bit I'll figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sticky navigation on desktop that is appox the height of the Hacker News nav and does NOT include ads is fine with me. I loathe sites that have a sticky header with a 970x250 ad, however, such as the Washington Post.

Sticky navigation on phones is not OK, but I actually like when the nav pops down when I scroll back up. A "peek-a-boo" nav, if you will.

<comment><USER22> Really? I feel like a navigation stuck to the top on a phone is a must. Scrolling on a phone us much more complicated and tedious than with a mouse; as long as it's small and not intrusive.

<comment><USER23> Just tap the top of the screen and your browser scrolls up. Most of the time I come across a sticky nav bar and footer I just turn on reader view and turn off all the site's terrible styling.

<comment><USER24> (On iOS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's a good post. The sticky elements is one of the most annoying things on the web. So after getting annoyed enough I made a simple extension that hides them. It automatically hides the sticky elements on nearly all websites, has a whitelist, and handles special cases like sticky splash screens. It runs on desktop browsers and mobile Firefox.

[https://github.com/lykahb/sticky-ducky](https://github.com/lykahb/sticky- ducky)

</comment><comment><USER26> It's worth noting that this solution will not work for anything using the relatively new `position: sticky`

<comment><USER27> > relatively new

sticky has been around since at least 2014

<comment><USER18> sticky was originally added to Chrome in 2014 behind a flag, but that implementation was removed and the feature wasn't reimplemented and released to stable until 2017.

Also "relatively new" is still accurate in web terms, which has specifications dating to the 90s.

<comment><USER27> Most other browsers had it for a long time before 2017.

>Also "relatively new" is still accurate in web terms, which has specifications dating to the 90s.

The majority of web features are relatively new under this definition.

<comment><USER18> "a long time" = a maximum of three years?

I think the two of us just disagree on how spans of time should be labelled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> seph-reed Be a dear, and add this to your page.

      @media (max-height: 700px) {
        .My-Sticky-Header-Selector {
          position: absolute;
        }
      }

<comment> frosted-flakes Yes! Sticky headers sometimes have their place (usually not), but they should never be used on short viewports, such as on phones in landscape mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The viewport/scrollbar issue can be fixed by properly setting the css scroll- padding property: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scroll- padd...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scroll-padding)

<comment><USER29> Many try, but nobody quite gets it right.

</comment></comment><comment> V-2 Sticky headers aren't necessarily full-width, or overlapping the content, which invalidates most if not all of the criticism.

Eg. see the sticky headers in the mobile Google Calendar app (on Android at least).

Even in this very article, which self-referentially demonstrates how a sticky header gets in the way, there are sizeable margins on both sides of the text (something I'm personally not very fond of, but I digress).

Now, the sticky header, should it contain any useful information, could very well be moved to one of these empty areas, without obscuring the text, without disrupting the scrolling experience etc.

<comment><USER30> > there are sizeable margins on both sides of the text (something I'm > personally not very fond of, but I digress).

Really? I find having text flow to the full width of the browser to be harder to read. I think there should be some limit.

But I do like your idea of using that empty space when the browser is wide enough to make it available.

<comment> V-2 I don't mean literally 100% of width.

But this website - on my 24" monitor - uses merely 35%; 900 out of 2560px. You (should) know you've gone over the top when the margins end up taking twice as much space as the actual content. What a waste of screen estate, what's the point of a wide monitor then?

That's why the user has to scroll constantly, and we can't read a text comprised of just several paragraphs without taking our finger off the mouse wheel anymore. It's like printing newspapers on till rolls

<comment><USER30> But what I'm trying to say is that I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective. It's not the margins that are too wide, it's the text that's too narrow.

This may sound like the same thing but it's not. It doesn't matter what percent of the page is taken up by margins, so long as the physical line length vs. font size is comfortable to read. Too long and it's harder to follow, too short and, as you say, you have to scroll constantly. If you had the same physical text width but a smaller font, it'd be better (so long as the font was still big enough to read comfortably).

Classical research suggests the ideal line length is somewhere between 45 to 75 characters. For the web it's suggested you can go up to 85 characters, depending on the font. This website sets the maximum width at 36.5em which is on the narrow side of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I used to have this in my bookmarks bar as 'defuck page' but decided that name was too awkward for work when projecting my screen.

there's a more advanced version of this that is an extension. it offers a fixed delay, adjustable per site. so you can nuke slide-overs and html5 popups as well. it isn't perfect but it's still a useful tool. sorry i don't have the link handy as i'm not using that extension currently.

</comment><comment><USER32> My "kill sticky" bookmarklet gets used dozens of times a each day (that might be an exaggeration, but not by much). I treat my browser profiles as mostly ephemeral, discardable, and instead of browser bookmarks I have [https://dotat.at/:/](https://dotat.at/:/) ... except for kill sticky, which gets added to a new profile right after uBlock Origin and 1Password.

</comment><comment><USER33> Theres always my extension to toggle the darn things which works sometimes [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbko...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbkoefoepgmeifoglafkomgjbge/related)

<comment><USER34> Relevant GitHub repo: [https://github.com/eemeli/chrome-kill- sticky](https://github.com/eemeli/chrome-kill-sticky)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use "Click to Remove Element" Chrome extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/click-to-remove- el...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/click-to-remove- element/jcgpghgjhhahcefnfpbncdmhhddedhnk?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the majority of users don't use spacebar for scrolling in 2019. Besides that (and the screen real estate), I'm not sure it's bad enough to need a bookmarklet to kill it.

<comment><USER37> The issue that was raised isn't just about the Spacebar. It's about scrolling by full-pages, so PgDown/PgUp would also have the same problem when a page has Sticky Headers.

I guess you can make the same argument that it's possible that people don't use PgDown/PgUp either, but that's besides the point, I think.

Generally, interfaces have a lot of features by default and when a particular interface breaks or removes them for no good reason (and I don't think I've ever seen a sticky header that could justify it), well that at least leaves a very bad impression. It's wasteful.

Same goes for links and buttons which are made to work only when clicking with the mouse, when by default they work with the keyboard too. Same goes for text which is set with a fixed width and necessitates a large minimum window width to read properly when by default text adjusts to a window's width. etc.

Nobody is average, so the world would suck if it only worked for the average.

For the record, I do scroll with the spacebar. I like to skim pages as quickly as possible, and PgDown is in different positions in different keyboards, so I just find spacebar to be super-accessible.

<comment><USER38> Also links that can only be activated and not "Open Link in New Tab". Those onclick script links. Every link should have an actually URL in its href.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Instead of a bookmarklet I recommend using a browser extension like greasemonkey or tampermonkey to autorun the script and have the sticky headers unstuck on page load. No manual work of clicking the bookmarklet.

<comment><USER40> They explain in the article why they don't like that.

<comment><USER39> The snippet in article removes the element, while I was suggesting to just change the position type to unstick instead of removing completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Another benefit of this is that it improves scrolling performance on old hardware. I sometimes browse on a 2010 Mac mini (using Safari) and killing headers can make a big difference.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was wondering if the sticky advertisement on this page was meant to be ironic; navigating to the other pages proves it was. Neat touch. :)

</comment><comment><USER20> One of the most annoying parts of AWS Console is that you can 'x' them but there is no 'hide always'.

<comment><USER20> OK I updated their script to work with AWS Flashbar. :-)

      javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed' || elements%5Bi%5D.className %3D%3D%3D 'awsui-flashbar') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Great hack to manipulate the DOM with a bookmark!

<comment><USER32> Lots of fun things are possible, eg I use a feed reader that does not strip inline styles, but occasionally that is annoying so I have

        javascript:(function(){
          document
            .querySelectorAll(
              '[style*="font"]'
            ).forEach(elem =>
              elem.removeAttribute(
                'style'))
        })()

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think they're okay for desktops (still prefer without them), but on tablets or smaller viewports, it just takes up too much screen real estate.

<comment><USER44> They're not OK for desktops as they break page scrolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Yet this site has a sticky header...

<comment><USER46> That's the point - the header is there so you can remove it with the provided bookmarklet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Right click

Block element

</comment><comment><USER48> That's beautiful. Well done!</comment>


The next step for games? Simulate the entire world - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-01/12/simulating-the-real-world-online <comment><USER2> It's been done already.</comment>


Help Make Open Source Secure - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/09/help-make-open-source-secure/ <comment><USER2> You mean it's not currently secure? ;)</comment>


The war Microsoft should have won - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@christianhern/the-war-microsoft-should-have-won-65d836aa2358 <comment><USER2> One thing not mentioned is that Microsoft software had already acquired the same stench as GM cars of the 80s: buggy and unreliable. It may actually be true that WinCE was "[a] solid and stable embedded OS code base", but for people like me, who had had their fill of installation hell, boot hell, systems that would never shut down cleanly, and BSODs, the prospect of carrying around all that trouble in our pockets was just laughable. (Remember all the jokes about the name, "wince"?)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The first comment on Medium is from Steven Sinofsky, who closes a few thoughtful paragraphs with a link to his own take: [https://medium.com/@stevesi/it-is-worth-recognizing-that- mic...](https://medium.com/@stevesi/it-is-worth-recognizing-that-microsoft- tried-to-recreate-the-pc-ecosystem-with-mobile-e114a1958c18)

(Found via [http://mspoweruser.com/windows-mobile-autopsy-holds- warning-...](http://mspoweruser.com/windows-mobile-autopsy-holds-warning- windows-10-mobile/) , which discussed extracts.)</comment>


Euclid's Algorithm: An Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adamdklein.com/?p=334

<comment><USER6> Euclid's algorithm doesn't make as much sense until you see it done at least once. It's a shame there's no example. Finding the GCD of 85 and 221:

      221 = 2 * 85 + 51

      85 = 51 + 34

      51 = 34 + 17

      34 = 2 * 17 + 0

So our GCD is 17. Why? Well, if we rearrange the parts, we get...

      51 = 34 + 17, so 51 = (2 * 17) + 17 = 3 * 17

      85 = 51 + 34 = (3 * 17) + (2 * 17)

      85 = 5 * 17

      221 = 2 * (5 * 17) + (3 * 17)

      221 = 13 * 17

So 221 and 85 are both divisible by 17.

Bonus: This also gives us a way to write 17 as an integral combination of 221 and 85. We also get this by rearranging the parts:

      17 = 51 - <USER2>

      34 = 85 - <USER3>

      51 = 221 - 2 * 85

so

      17 = 51 - (85 - 51)

      17 = 2 * 51 - <USER5>

      17 = 2 * (221 - 2 * 85) - <USER5>

      17 = 2 * 221 - 3 * 85

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, you're right, examples are good. Thanks for pointing out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting historical note.

The original importance of Euclid's algorithm was that it made calculations with ratios easier. And the reason why _that_ was important was currency conversions.

It is used today in cryptography, which is used for online financial transactions.

One way or another, it all comes down to money. :-)

<comment><USER8> Math, counting and numbers in general were developed for trade - so yes it all comes back to "money" (What you really mean to say is trade). When farmers stopped farming for themselves and started trading with others they suddenly had a need to be able to count how much rice and livestock they had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice analysis if you're into juggling formulas and theorems. I prefer a more pictorial argument like:

      a=24: a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a
      b=18: b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b

      d= 2: d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d|d d

      d= 3: d d d|d d d|d d d|d d d|d d d|d d d|d d d|d d d|

      d= 4: d d d d|d d d d|d d d d|d d d d|d d d d|... no good;

multiples of d must hit the ends of b and a

      d:   |                                   |           |

      b=18: b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b
      a-b : a a a a a a

      d:   |           |                       |

      b-(a-b): b b b b b b b b b b b b
      a-b    : a a a a a a

      d:      |           |           |

      b-(a-b)-(a-b): b b b b b b
      a-b          : a a a a a a

      d:            |           |

      d=6

</comment><comment><USER10> Clicking on that link I expected something more than just the kind of information given by every math textbook covering Euclid's algorithm (with a sketch of proof).

<comment><USER11> Agreed

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is "grand-daddy" of all algorithms! --Don Knuth</comment>


Revisiting Our Sister Planet [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.venuslabs.org/Rethinking%20Our%20Sister%20Planet%20(ebook).pdf <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: a giant balloon filled with an atmosphere of similar composition to the Earth's can float in the Venusian atmosphere. Humans could live in such a balloon. This allows for all sorts of interesting possibilities in terms of colonization (floating colonies!).

At the same time, it is faster to get to Venus than to Mars, and Venus could become an interesting stopping point on the way to Mars.

This document does not argue that _only_ Venus should be colonized, but that Venus could be a stepping stone towards a Mars colony.</comment>


THE WEB FOR ALL – Learn to easily create websites - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arikrak/the-web-for-all-learn-to-create-websites

<comment><USER2> This doesn't look like anything that doesn't already exist online, _for free_. I don't know why anyone should support this project.</comment>


Theranos charged with fraud [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2018/comp-pr2018-41-theranos-holmes.pdf <comment><USER2> Dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16585892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16585892)

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a better more accurate title would be "Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos charged with fraud".</comment>


Did the Sale of Pyrex Hurt the Crack-Cocaine Industry? - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/28/did-the-sale-of-pyrex-hurt-the-crack-cocaine-industry/ <comment><USER2> They were "forced to switch from measuring cups purchased at Walmart to test tubes and beakers stolen from labs"? Really? This doesn't pass the sniff test.

Whenever I go into a Goodwill/Savers/Salvation Army store, I see shelves full of old Pyrex and other borosilicate glass cookware selling for $1 a piece. Moreover, it's not hard to buy lab equipment out of a catalog (or online). Considering the profit margins on crack, I have a hard time believing that buying beakers ($5-10 each, in bulk; less for student-grade) "had a substantial impact on crack production".

<comment><USER3> actually mid 1990s at Purdue U campus police would regularly investigate 'missing students and missing labware" for this very reason..

Buying out of places and catalogs means someone can track it back to you..people who do illegal stuff do not want it tracked back to them

<comment><USER4> There's nothing suspicious in itself about ordering laboratory glassware, regardless of the type. If your lab is raided, the presence of glassware will be used to build a case against you for manufacturing, whether you bought or stole it.

Getting caught while stealing glassware from a lab is a much larger risk than having someone at a for-profit lab supply company play junior detective with your glassware order. This might not be entirely obvious while high on crack, though.

<comment><USER5> There is something suspicious in itself about ordering laboratory glassware. When clandestine chemists buy, they use shell buyers, dodgy distributors, false letterhead, and/or squirrel purchases across many distributors.

<comment><USER4> Clandestine chemists would prefer not to send their glassware to 15 Methlab Lane, certainly. But most of the clever paranoid tactics are for the acquisition of chemicals, which the DEA has a very tight grip on. In some cases, precursors of precursors. A chemical supplier can pretty easily divine illegal applications from the order combination. Glassware suppliers cannot. And I'm a laboratory glassware seller, so I can say that with some certainty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> According to Pyrex, they made the switch to soda-lime glass in America over 60 years ago.

<http://www.pyrexware.com/index.asp?pageId=30#TruthID6>

and according to STATS.org:

"[...]the industry as a whole switched from borosilicate [...] in the 1980s for a variety of reasons, including the fact that soda lime was easier to melt and work with (fewer deformities in the glass). But one of the major reasons for moving to soda lime was environmental compliance: borosilicate glass produces far more emissions from a glass furnace, accounting, in part, for the presence of boric acid in the water and soil. And it was not economical for companies to install multi-million dollar filter systems."

<http://stats.org/stories/2009/exploding_pyrex_oct14_09.html>

<comment><USER6> Note that lab grade glassware has been and is currently still borosilicate glass. (and is sold as such to prevent confusion over what you are buying).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not directly. The new purchaser of Pyrex reduced the quality of the product; That hurt anyone who desires temperature-resilient cookware, which includes my Mom.

No, she doesn't make crack cocaine.

<comment><USER8> See pessimizer's comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500938>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It definitely hurt the telescope optics market, there is no longer an affordable supplier of borosilicate optical blanks.

</comment><comment><USER10> Consumer Reports:

[http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine- archive/2011/jan...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine- archive/2011/january/home-garden/glass-cookware/glass-bakeware/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know why the borosilicate cookware is no longer made? It was great stuff, while it was available.

<comment><USER10> It's made - just not by Pyrex. I bought some a month ago.

<comment><USER11> And what brand did you buy?

<comment><USER10> Arcuisine Elegance 2.8 quart rectangular pan. According to a review comment, a cheaper borosilicate alternative is Marinex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is more information and a video in the original article: [http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-03/gray-matter- ca...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-03/gray-matter-cant-take- heat)

</comment><comment><USER13> i thought the low-end makers switched to using coffee pots and french presses. larger producers probably wanted that lab equipment anyway.

</comment><comment><USER14> The sale of the Pyrex brand? No. The reformulation of the glass? Yes.

<comment><USER14> Hy guys, just so you know, I'm a chemistry lab glass expert and have spent years actually working with borosilicate lab glass as well as soda lime (no, not in a crack lab).

I've been well aware of the situation with Corning, Global Kitchen and Pyrex bakeware for years. Therefore, it's humorous I'm getting downvoted on this story in particular. Carry on.

<comment><USER15> You're not geting downvoted based on you, you're getting downvoted based on your comment, which comes off a little snippy.

<comment><USER14> Sure, I was just saying it's a source of irony or amusement or something for me. The downvoting hasn't wrinkled my snout.

It's a fairly short and snippy article though, isn't it? That's my succinct answer to the title. Poor crackheads.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can you print 1st class USPS stamps remotely without paying a monthly fee? - <AUTHOR>

I already have a scale, I know that's offered as a freebie at stamps.com...   but it seems most places have a minimum purchase of $19.99 a month and I don't ship that much first class.<p>I mostly ship Priority because it interfaces with Paypal so easily, but every now and then I get orders that have to be shipped 1st class and I hate going to the post office to do it. <comment><USER2> I've looked into this myself, and I wasn't able to find any company that offered 1st class stamps without some sort of recurring service premium.

If you do a lot of shipping, I really recommend getting a Pitney Bowes machine to ship stuff first class (and all the other classes as well). But, of course, there's a monthly rental fee (roughly the same as stamps.com), and you said you wanted to avoid that.</comment>


Share your startup – February 2019 - <AUTHOR> I like these "Share your startups" on Reddit /r/startups and IndieHackers.com, so I like to do the same here.
Please do a succinct post, to make this clear. Please include these details.
Love to know your plan(s) this month for your awesome project :)
* Name
* URL
* Small description (< 10/15 words)
* Current stage
* Your plan for this month
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Great idea!

Name: HTTP Toolkit

URL: [https://httptoolkit.tech](https://httptoolkit.tech)

Description: Modern tools to intercept, debug & explore HTTP

Current stage: Free version released, paid tier coming soon.

Plans this month: Finishing up my checkout setup this week, building out the first paid tier features this month, releasing the paid version before March.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's mine:

Name: PDFShift

URL: [https://pdfshift.io](https://pdfshift.io)

Description: Convert any HTML documents to high fidelity PDF in a single POST request.

Plans: I'm almost done with the redesign, hope it will convert to more customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Name: IPPSec

URL: ippsec.io

Description: A physical and cyber security ecosystem that scales from a normal school to a smart city

Current stage: Prototype in development, projected completion: June 2019

Plans for the month: prototype dev, get into Bunker Labs, continue winning.</comment>


Show HN: SpeechBoard – Edit Podcasts from the Transcript - <AUTHOR> http://speechboard.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

Craig from YC here. Ramon Recuero and I built SpeechBoard.

Here's how it works: you record a podcast and upload it to SpeechBoard. We run it through a few speech to text APIs to generate a transcription for you. From there you can delete words from the transcript and we cut them from the audio.

Then you can download three files: your edited audio, your original file with cuts marked in metadata for importing to Audition/Audacity, and labels for importing into Audacity.

Nailing the in/out points of words was the hardest part, which led us to create the Audition/Audacity import feature and now I think that's the best part :)

Let us know what you think!

<comment><USER2> This is great! You've nailed one of the major pain-points in creating and producing high quality podcasts/audiobooks.

The other major pain-point that I've identified after spending 10 years in the podcast and audiobook industries is audio mastering. As a mastering engineer, I know how troublesome it can be to master audio so that it is at a competitive dynamic range.

Would you be interested in implementing an "auto-master" feature that I've developed? If so, please reach out! My email is in my HN profile.

<comment><USER3> I think you can pass the output audio file through [https://auphonic.com/](https://auphonic.com/) and that will get the job done for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of a recent Radiolab episode [0] in which they discuss a new technology that would allow you not only to remove words from audio, but also to add new ones in the speaker's voice -- and likeness, in the case of video. They made an example video [1], which was not super-convincing, but a very good demonstration of what it may be able to do in the future.

Of course, the focal point of the episode isn't the technology itself, but the implication it could have on society once it gets good enough that its output is virtually indistinguishable from real video (i.e. fake news in the form of convincing-looking videos).

Highly recommended if you have the time.

[0] [https://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking- news/](https://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking-news/) [1] [https://www.futureoffakenews.com/](https://www.futureoffakenews.com/)

<comment><USER5> Take a look at Lyrebird as well [https://lyrebird.ai/](https://lyrebird.ai/) ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting application. I am not sure if you guys have looked into this, but there is a Python library that can detect timestamps on word level if given the audio and transcript. It's pretty accurate for English: [https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas](https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, we have used it and can confirm it's pretty good :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been working on a similar problem, and excited to share as well.

Sample:

[https://reader.listensynced.com/ycombinator-jessica- livingst...](https://reader.listensynced.com/ycombinator-jessica-livingston- on-how-to-build-the-future.html)

As a podcast junkie - I've often run into issues with searching and sharing. Linking transcript and audio is first step to solving this...

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat! I know that guy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a podcast I listen to every time it comes out (Uhh Yeah Dude), but the creators don't create transcripts. One idea I had was directly targeting podcast creators and creating a service whereby you create searcheable transcripts for listeners looking for an old podcast.

I think the transcript creation service in itself must be worth something for these guys.

<comment><USER9> I would be quite interested in that, especially if it could integrate with my podcast app.

Since August of 2016 I've listened to 30 days worth of podcasts and saved another 22 days worth of time by skipping introductions, listening faster than 1x, etc. The most annoying thing I'm facing is that I've heard _hundreds_ of stories and the audio cannot be indexed easily. If I want to send a friend to a specific episode for a certain story, I have no good way to remember if it was the Freakonomics podcast, This American Life, Story Collider, Planet Money, or one of the 20+ other podcasts I listen to.

I'd love a system which would make available a searchable transcript of every podcast. I couldn't pay for transcribing all of them, but I'd pay 50 cents/podcast. Google tells me 1.75/minute will get a transcription from the top listed service, so if we had 210 people like me, we could transcribe an hour of audio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Roger that. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like how the core functionality/UI is immediately accessible above the fold. No log in, or other barriers to simply trying it out.

Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is excellent. Looking forward to the full release with the hope that pricing is affordable for hobbyists. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Can you email us?

firstname.lastname@example.com

We're looking to chat with hobbyists to see what you'd like out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really cool. There's something magical about just editing text, and then having real spoken audio change to reflect it.

I hit an error when I trimmed the text down to:

> Hey this is a different original.

> The text cuts into

Maybe I was too aggressive?

Some undo support would also be really helpful. Have you considered just having a free-form text field, then using something like wdiff to produce the edits? That might make the UX easier, since you wouldn't have to manually reinvent the text editing tools people expect (although you'd have to handle invalid edits, like people adding new words).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Yeah, without looking at your logs I suspect you cut too much. :)

We were using a free-form text field before and it led to a couple issues: cutting words in half + inputs. Both of those basically break it now so we went for a slightly less convenient but mostly functional demo.

I totally agree though, this needs a lot of polish on the UX side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hi Craig,

This looks very interesting. You might be the right person to ask about something related that I am currently working on: do you know of any app that would extract keyword / name based parts of audio? For example, extract only the parts where Elon Musk speaks given audio input (podcast, YouTube etc.)? Alternatively, extract only the parts (-30 and +30 seconds) when a specific word is mentioned.

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey!

Audiogrep may be able to do that for ya - [https://github.com/antiboredom/audiogrep](https://github.com/antiboredom/audiogrep)

<comment><USER14> > This looks very interesting. You might be the right person to ask about > something related

Hi Craig, do you know an app/code that can split the audio/transcript based on persons? Detect different persons in a podcast and group the transcript by person. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey!

That's something we're also interested in.

You can read up on the subject and see a few projects here - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_diarisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_diarisation)

[https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/3119/library-to- diff...](https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/3119/library-to- differentiate-people-by-their-voice-timbre)

But to answer your question, I have yet to try an app that can do it well.

<comment><USER15> Speechmatics diarisation is pretty good. [https://www.speechmatics.com/](https://www.speechmatics.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My question is the availability of transcripts for deaf and others to utilize? Is this possible as another feature of your service?

<comment><AUTHOR> What other features would you need to make it work well for you?

<comment><USER16> Hi. Not for me. Just thinking out loud if the transcripts are automated by your service and it'll be a way for the podcasters to provide along with their audio recording.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. Gotcha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would like an (automated) "IMDB for Podcasts." Specifically, I would like to be able to find, and be notified of, every podcast where a given person speaks.

Similarly, I'd like automated data on what ads are run/read.

Essentially, I'd like rich automated metadata, in addition to timestamped transcripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I feel that way too. So far I've found Breaker has the best guest search. Definitely lots to work on in the podcast space :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Won't let me upload a file in Safari, so I tried Chrome. Upload works, but then I just get "An error has occured. We are looking into it."

Like the demo. Wish I could try it out on some other audio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try incognito in Chrome. We're trying to sort out that bug. Thanks for your patience!

<comment><USER18> No dice, but I signed up for your mailing list. Will look forward to the final product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somewhat relevant (but more enterprise-y) project based in Austin, TX for anyone local: [http://clarify.io/](http://clarify.io/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Hey! This is awesome.

Side question: I just need (good) transcription of audio. I've never been able to find a good service for the price.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

<comment><USER21> I've used rev.com for a while. They're quick and accurate.

<comment><USER20> $1 a minute is just way too expensive for what I need. That sounds like a human is doing it...

Any services doing this automated?

<comment><USER22> I just discovered [https://trint.com](https://trint.com) .

No idea if they're any good, but they're certainly cheaper than Rev.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really magical to see audio editable like this. Love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> what languages are you supporting out of the box?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've only tested with English so far but it should be able to handle a bunch: Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin.

If you test another language out definitely let us know how it performs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> cool idea

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this a YC project or a personal project? Are you applying to YC with this to get funding by any chance? Nice one by the way!</comment>


Devbox setup with Vagrant - <AUTHOR> http://blog.quarterspiral.com/post/32335486158/devbox-setup-with-vagrant

<comment><USER2> You should have focused more on the "metaserver" you built. It looks pretty cool!</comment>


Musth - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth <comment><USER2> One hobby of mine is trying to imagine what it would be like if elephants developed human-level communication and thus civilization. They are close enough that it seems like a coincidence of evolution that apes got there and elephants didn't: maybe ape brains were selected somewhat differently, or maybe we went through moments of high evolutionary pressure (and survived), where elephants didn't (or like the woolly mammoths, didn't survive).

Imagining how a civilization might develop with musth is interesting: it seems biologically antisocial, like periodic insanity. Would there be pressure to self-regulate? Ostracism during that time? Evolutionary selection against musth?

It feels like there's an analogous suspicion and fear of human men as well, similarly peaking for adolescent humans, like adolescent elephants, who are least able to self-regulate. But the fears would be much stronger in elephants, and so acute since musth is temporary and outwardly visible.

If not ostracism, what social pressure could be applied via punishment? Elephants' scale would require different approaches: for instance, I don't believe any number of elephants could work together to lift another elephant. Elephants would have a degree of physical autonomy that, while not unbounded, would be greater than humans: they can hurt each other, but not subdue except through threat. And if you are crazy on hormones a threat might not be enough!

<comment><USER3> It kind of reminds me of Pon Farr from Star Trek, a regularly occurring period of increased aggression experienced by male Vulcans every 7 years.

<comment><USER4> Female Vulcans also experience the pon farr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an interesting topic but the (currently linked) English Wikipedia article is quite sensational. It unnecessarily focuses on the aggressive behavior and 30% of it is _" References in popular culture"_. It also left a bunch of open questions so I read the German Wikipedia article and it is _quite_ different - and not only in a superficial way.

English Wikipedia, first content paragraph after lead section:

> _" Although it has often been speculated by zoo visitors[2] that musth is > linked to rut, it is unlikely there is a biological connection because the > female elephant's estrus cycle is not seasonally-linked, whereas musth most > often takes place in winter. Furthermore, bulls in musth have often been > known to attack female elephants, regardless of whether or not the females > are in heat."_

German Wikipedia, first content paragraph after lead section (my own translation):

> _" Bull elephants reach puberty at about the same age as humans, which can > last until the end of the second decade of life. The periodic interval of > Musth, its intensity and duration can vary greatly from bull elephant to > bull elephant. The duration ranges from a few weeks to several, in extreme > cases up to nine months. In most cases, the first Musth lasts significantly > shorter in individuals, in older animals the average is two to three months. > Some bulls come in Musth once a year, others more frequently. There is no > preferred season, so Musth bulls can appear all year round. This is a clear > difference to the rutting season of various hoofed animals, which is partly > seasonally bound and thus synchronized within a population."_

It goes on to describe the phases of Musth. From what I understand from the rest of the German article it is basically the rut of elephants except that it does not occur seasonally. Not everything is known about it but it is well researched. In India it is culturally relevant.

</comment><comment><USER6> "...reintroducing older males into the elephant population of the area seems to prevent younger males from entering musth, and therefore, stop this aggressive behavior."

Fascinating.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of orangutans, too [1]:

> Males mature at around 15 years of age, by which time they have fully > descended testicles and can reproduce. However, they exhibit arrested > development by not developing the distinctive cheek pads, pronounced throat > pouches, long fur, or long-calls until they are between 15 and 20 years old. > The development of these characteristics depends largely on the absence of a > resident male.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I first read about this here: [https://medium.com/@flowidealism/evolutionary- mismatch-as-a-...](https://medium.com/@flowidealism/evolutionary-mismatch-as- a-causal-factor-in-adolescent-dysfunction-and-mental-illness-d235cc85584)

which makes the case that human adolescents, like elephants, benefit from having older males around. Maybe of interest.</comment>