Ask HN: Does GTD or Pomodoro really help you get things done? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, So here's my work loop: 1) Catch interest in something. 2) Keep hacking until it's done. 3) Collapse || Lose interest. 4) goto 1<p>You will be amazed to see how much I can actually get done using this weird method. But a friend of mine told me to try pomodoro or GTD to get my work in order. Do you think having order in your work increases the output so much that it's worth the effort? <comment><USER2> It depends a lot on how complicated your life is. I use parts of GTD, along with a to-do list and a synced calendar, but then I have a day job, two or three quasi-entrepreneurial side projects, a house, pets, and a significant other.

What having some kind of a written/electronic system does is that it frees you from having thoughts of "crap, that's another thing I need to remember to do" interrupting your creative work. When you have a thought like that, you should quickly get it out of your head and into a trusted system (your "outboard brain").

Then every so often (it has to be often enough that you learn to trust your system), you go back and look at your list and see what you can and/or must do. Slightly less often (GTD suggests weekly), you go through your projects and, in an organized way, ask "What am I missing?", and write the answers down.

In short, once your life gets moderately complicated you'd be silly to try and keep all the stuff you have to do in your head. That's what computers and paper are for.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please note that my comment may be biased. I'm one of the developers of Priority Matrix (<http://www.appfluence.com>), a product using the Covey method, which competes somewhat with GTD.

From my personal experience and those in working with our customers, I think individuals can be divided into at least 3 distinct groups. If you've ever taken the Meyer Briggs test, you may notice that the 4th letter is P for Perceiving or J for Judging. I want to break the J's into 2 subsets (B and C).

The three groups, in my opinion, are: A) Perceiving, people in this group are not interested in general organization unless necessary. GTD will not work well for these individuals. B) People in this group must plan out the specific details of their work. Knowing the purpose of what they have to do next gives them peace and comfort. GTD and/or Pomodoro work well for these individuals. C) People in this group are interested in planning, but only for important things. The general approach to prioritization and categorization is sufficient to keep the person sane, but there's no necessary investments into detailed planning. I think the Covey method works well for these individuals.

To go back to your original question, do you think you are in A, B, or C? I think that group A individuals who try GTD will see the planning work for a while, but will quickly become frustrated as they get a lot of things done, but they don't feel like they get IMPORTANT things done. GTD looks at tasks from an altitude-like levels: "10,000 ft view" vs "50,000 ft view" etc. For perceiving individuals, the 0-10,000 ft level can be frustrating. But for many Judging people, I certainly think that this detailed planning provides clarity.

<comment><USER4> "A) Perceiving, people in this group are not interested in general organization unless necessary. GTD will not work well for these individuals. "

This describes me. I did the same sort of thing where I used it for a while and gradually burned out on it. I still try to keep files for organizing papers, one of the few parts of GTD that I kept.

Generally I do not have enough tasks that I am going crazy trying to remember them all. I am more interested in a methodology that keeps me on track and keeps me from procrastinating, especially as I am ADHD

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's weird, I posted something similar today after postive experiences using the pomodoro technique -

[http://www.minklinks.com/weblog/2010/11/16/countering- procra...](http://www.minklinks.com/weblog/2010/11/16/countering- procrastination-keeping-focused-and-ripe-juicy-tomatoes/)

(original HN submission here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1910005>)

I haven't tried GTD. My experience so far with pomodoro has basically helped in two areas: focus and distraction.

I'm finding that I'm much more focused on the task at hand (and have usually planned it) with pomodoro. I'm also more aware of my distractions. That's not to say that I don't get interrupted, but that I handle it a lot more efficiently.

As for things such as maintaining interest, I'm not sure if that's a goal with pomodoro, but it's too early for me to tell.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use pomodoro, but honestly only because it's important to get up regularly and walk around or exercise a bit.

I work for a bit, and when the timer goes off I do some jumping jacks or push ups. For the longer break (~ every 2 hours) I take a longer exercise period, generally go for a walk around the block or something.

I find it helps _a lot_ because I feel healthier, and additional it takes me away from the task for a little bit and can give perspective. Sometimes you get bogged down in a problem, and you become focused on "solving" it...and just taking a breather can help the answer just come to you.

Using just the technique by itself without the exercise didn't help much...I often found myself getting distracted during the 5 minute break.

</comment><comment><USER7> If this is working for you, just keep at it.

The problem I have with systems like pomodoro or anything that "forces" you to put leisure time in-between times of focus is that, for me, it's difficult to get into the zone when you're switching gears so much. If I really get into my work I might leisurely browse the net every-now-and-then and get right back to it without really thinking about it. With pomodoro I had to make a conscious effort to stop due to the pomodoro timer, with a slow ramp-up time right after.

I've also tried GTD years ago but it never really fit for me. A Post-It note with all the stuff I need to get done for the day works for me.

</comment><comment><USER8> For me, it's the structure that allows me to get things done.

I've only ever dabbled in GTD or Pomo, but the basic building block -- have a list of tasks grouped and broken-down by time -- is what lets me get things done.

I'm sure the processes recommended on top of that building block also help. But I'm set in my ways, and don't like much overhead, so I keep it simple just by keeping a Pomo pool around, without the egg timer.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think you'll find most creative work is best done on your schedule, while most administrative work maps well to GTD. Administrative work (boring stuff like paying bills or doing laundry or status reports) should be separated from creative work (for more on this idea: <http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think (hope?) that the structured methods help when there are external factors driving priorities and potentially causing interruptions and interference.

In the absence of any outside influences, 'keep hacking until it's done' is probably close to an optimal strategy.

</comment><comment><USER11> well GTd methodology is great, but following it to a "t" is a bit much, I have a little Nugget from GTD that works for me- it's the process of "categorizing" your life and actions.

I basically structure my inbox with categories (like categorizing tasks but doing it with email) and send myself emails of individual action items that get categorized.

Then I can filter by category and focus on 1 project at a time.. been working great for me for several years and I feel insanely more productive!</comment>


Breakthrough Listen Project to Observe Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua - <AUTHOR> https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/news/14 <comment><USER2> Some more details (besides the announcment) here for the curious [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/yuri- mil...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/yuri-milner- oumuamua-interstellar-asteroid/547985/)

It'd be crazy if we detected radio signals, in part because we don't really have a good way to send any probes fast enough to visit it closer as it speeds away from us, at least with current technologies. There's more on that here: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/so-you-want-to- send-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/so-you-want-to-send-a-probe- to-catch-up-to-oumuamua/)

<comment><USER3> > "The more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder > whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an alien > civilization," Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department and one > of Milner's advisers on Breakthrough Listen, wrote in the email to Milner.

It may sound silly, but I find it fascinating that we're finally in a time when someone in such high position in science can say such a thing without fearing ridicule. I'm also grateful that there are people wealthy enough to sponsor these scientific efforts. What an amazing time!

<comment><USER4> I think he's bat-shit insane to make a mildly qualified statement like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only reason we suspect that it is cigar-shaped is because its brightness changes (by a factor of about 10) with a somewhat regular frequency. But this indicates that it is tumbling, which would probably not be great for a ship designed with a long shape to reduce interstellar friction. Another potential (but less plausible) explanation is that it is not elongated and tumbling, but just blinking at us somehow.

<comment><USER6> What if it's a _wreck_ though? :)

<comment><USER5> Yeah - what if it has a distress beacon? Then we'd have to go!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Oumuamua is now about 2 astronomical units (AU) away... At this distance, it would take under a minute for the Green Bank instrument to detect an omnidirectional transmitter with the power of a cellphone."

That's pretty impressive.

<comment><USER8> Shouldn't we have some much better pictures and a better idea of it's shape at that distance?

<comment><USER9> The thing is tiny, and that is very far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would be a possibly good way to learn we're not alone in the universe. It's clearly not staying around and thus not a threat. Just a simple "proof of existence".

Edit-yes I'm aware the odds are surely small that it's something like that. But just the same it wouldn't be a bad way to learn of "others".

<comment><USER11> Unless it released billions of MEMS which have started appropriating resources.

Small odds though :)

<comment><USER12> What an interesting idea.

<comment><USER13> Basis of The Expanse series.

<comment><USER12> oops. I think you just gave me a spoiler.

<comment><USER13> Not really, it's revealed pretty early.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I propose we call the object "Rama".

<comment><USER15> For those who don't know, this is basically the plot of a classic science fiction novel, _Rendezvous with Rama_. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama))

<comment><USER16> better than 2001.

I thought the commie Russians dated the novel when I read it in the 90s, but here we are, 2017, and everyone is worried about the Ruskies again. Funny ol world.

<comment><USER17> The sequels are pretty bad, by the way - Clarke eventually just started "co- writing" books where the other less-good writer did all the work. One of them has a foreword just so Gentry Lee can apologize he wrote a chapter about his historical hologram waifu.

<comment><USER18> I only made it a few chapters into the sequel, the writing is completely different and completely uninspiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was informed that its shape and rotation make it very unusual, in addition to being the first known interstellar object.

<comment><USER20> In our solar system, most small stuff has been rounded by billions of years of collisions. This may be a primeval shard from a high-energy collision in another solar system - unaffected because it was flung out of that system at high speed. Cosmic pointy shrapnel. :)

(Big stuff self-rounds per gravity, of course, but this ain't that big)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1919/](https://xkcd.com/1919/)

I read somewhere that this might be a spent first stage, and the real spacecraft is currently decelerating as it approaches our solar system. That would explain the shape, tumbling, and trajectory, but then again "weird space rock" explains those things more plausibly.

<comment><USER22> > this might be a spent first stage, and the real spacecraft is currently > decelerating as it approaches our solar system. That would explain the > shape, tumbling, and trajectory

I'm believing this until proved otherwise. I figure that would probably have the real ship arriving probably sometime in my old age, which would be perfect. Live to see the aliens, but close enough to death anyway in case things get ugly.

<comment><USER9> Far longer than old age, unless you plan on living a very long time. The thing was only moving a few 10's of kilometers per second.

<comment><USER21> It's possible that the first stage was also used to decelerate a bit before being jettisoned, explaining the relatively low speed

<comment><USER9> Not that low a speed. Let's say the generational ship was moving 0.01c, at the low end of what's believable (500-1000 years to a nearby star). That means the ship was decelerated 99.999% of the way from cruise speed before jettisoned. In terms of energy, that's 99.99999999% of the stopping thrust already expended. That's without even getting into the rocket equation which makes it even worse.

At that point why not carry it into the system with you? The mass would be negligible given the energy budget. Ejecting it seems to serve no purpose but wasting several cubic kilometers of presumably processed material. Why do that?

Now maybe it was a probe ejected from a ship at distance, but then why is it tumbling end over end?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember from reading about O'Neill cylinders that an object spinning on it's long axis will, under the influence of random perturbation, eventually start tumbling. So I'm wondering, if we take Oumuamua's angular momentum and figure out the rate of axial spin required to get the same angular momentum, do you get anything like earth-gravity equivalent centrifugal force near the surface of the object?

<comment><USER24> If it's 400 meters long and do one rotation in 7 hours the gravity is essentially zero. It'd have to rotate twice per minute to produce 1g.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A question to the experts: Is it possible with current technology to send a probe after it? Let's say we decide today to do it and then spend the next 1-2 years to build a probe: would we still be able to catch up to it?

<comment><USER26> Several designs for propulsion systems capable of these accelerations with sufficient efficiency exist. These fall mostly into the region of nuclear drives such as NERVA or Project Orion/Medusa.</comment></comment>


Want to know your users better? Run your own analytics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.theicebreak.com/blog/2011/9/29/want-to-know-your-users-better-run-your-own-analytics.html

<comment><USER2> Nice example, but a major pain point I see is dev time. There is going to be significant amount of time being spent making the analytics platform, and then scaling it. It might be better spent on the product itself until it takes off.

<comment><AUTHOR> We had a simple dashboard for tracking key metrics, but soon needed reports like retention breakdown by user.

It literally took is 1.5 days to get this whole thing up and running, and saved countless amount of time in the future trying to analyze the usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really? Mixpanel[1] is really nice for doing it, doing it realtime, doing it across platforms (not just web), and adding the cohort analysis[2] (which yields the most important non-vanity metrics).

[1] <http://mixpanel.com/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986186>

<comment><USER4> mixpanel's got a _long_ way to go. As the main dev leading mixpanel at my company, it is a pain inserting a line to track every event some person may need at the organization.

This really holds back an organization where product and dev teams are separate.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, whenever product and dev teams are separate these kind of skirmishes happen. Let it be tracking or any other kind of features.

Unfortunately bridging this gap is the only way to solve it.

 _Behind every technical problem there is actually a human problem that needs to be fixed_ [1]

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/scobleizer#p/search/1/1p3vcRhsYGo>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I fully agree. We track millions of events per day and I use hive and hadoop to do my analysis. Not as user friendly but putting the data into a pivot table helps alot.

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing about analytics is that it's BIG data. A single user event can cascade into multiple datapoints that you either have to keep normalized (like in the SQL example) or denormalize into something more manageable. The latter of which is really the only way to handle TBs of data, and it's not trivial. It's a fun job, but it's full time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see an article on this subject. I'm of the thought that basic analytics are an extension of an app's/site's dashboard. You do have a dashboard don't you?</comment>


New research considers 'growing' drones - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36694899 <comment><USER2> Tl:dr they have an unproven process and a pretty animation and are basically fishing for founding

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the clickbait headline.

<comment><USER4> The BBC usually flags it's dodgier stories by using single quotes somewhere in the title e.g considers 'growing' drones in this case or [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-36700571](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36700571) ... 'second' gator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a puff piece.

> _Prof Cronin admits that creating even small aircraft out of chemicals > "would be very challenging"._

Hey then goes on to say it might work "some time in the future". Well sure, along with cold fusion and eternal life. "Someday" is not much of a prediction, especially for a business!

<comment><USER6> Tell that to Elizabeth Holmes ...

<comment><USER5> If only someone had!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of the time of building is not spent shaping the parts, but in assembly, integration, and qualification. I see no improvement in those areas, so the article doesn't really being any real light.

</comment><comment><USER8> > _An animated video of what it might be like is almost a scene out of Star > Wars "Attack of the Clones"._

There's the irrelevant pop-culture namedrop that every science article has to have for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER9> Eyes are just squishy cameras

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be interesting to grow anything. Buzzing in with "drones" disqualifies it with the title...

</comment><comment><USER11> Prey by Michael Crichton.</comment>


Ask HN: Good books on history of mathematics? - <AUTHOR> I am just finishing the book "The Lady Tasting Tea" and it created a good perspective on how the field of Statistics evolved over a period of time. I found it to be extremely important context to have. In fact, it was a much more informative read than various other books that try to dumb down the concepts of statistics to make them easier to understand.<p>Are there more books of similar nature about other branches of mathematics (e.g. linear algebra, calculus etc)? <comment><USER2> I like anything by John Stillwell about the history of mathematics. It's accessible (not QUITE as accessible as The Lady Tasting Tea) and interesting.

[https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Mathematics-Euclid-John- Stil...](https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Mathematics-Euclid-John- Stillwell/dp/0691178542/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Princeton companion to mathematics</comment>


Has the Internet Been a Force for Good? - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/think_again_the_internet

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this kind of argument completely vacuous? If it didn't bring world peace, it must not be a force for good.

The last 30 or 40 years, or perhaps all the decades since World War 2, technology (including the internet) has empowered individuals at an unprecedented scale. Numerous individuals, or small groups of founders, have created companies, products, NGOs like never before. But, it has also empowered individuals more inclined towards terrorism, crime and other rude behaviors. It goes hand in hand. You cannot empower individuals and not expect some of them to do bad things.

If the definition of a Good Thing is achieving world peace, then nothing that empowers individuals will ever be a Good Thing.</comment>


Mandrill's Betrayal - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangrossman.info/2016/02/28/mandrills-betrayal/ <comment><USER2> Big win for Mailgun, huge loss for MailChimp. They just stabbed developers in the back.

Take note kids: this is a shining example of how not to market such a large product/service change.

What a fiasco. Directly going against their About Page, failing to update their pricing page to indicate the change.. it's all bad.

I'm in the camp of everyone else where the TOS change is forcing my startup leave.

The net negative effect is that I'll likely start moving off of MailChimp for marketing emails as well. They've already broken my trust.

Their pricing model is a sham anyways: paying for list maintenance is utter BS. It's a small multi-kilobyte file if you're not actually using it.

I've taken to exporting and clearing certain lists at intervals to keep costs down. In reality, I should simply never have done user data collection with MailChimp to begin with.

<comment><USER3> I imagine there was some kind of crisis happening behind-the-scenes... That's the only explanation I see for the overnight policy change and lagging updates on the site. Either that or total incompetence.

Interestingly, their (former) competitors are taking full advantage of the outrage by running ads on Twitter and LinkedIn aimed at Mandrill customers who've been screwed.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if they found certain types of Mandrill users were destroying their deliverability metrics and were starting to cause issues with major email providers and their spam factors. These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability, so they have to put protecting that ahead of a lot of other things that might get them more customers.

<comment><USER5> "These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability"

I think you meant _deliverability_. But maybe we should all switch to calling it desirability.

<comment><USER4> That may have been an autocorrect or may have been my mind not functioning correctly, but yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's way worse than just the TOS change. Mandrill has a lot of advanced features (webhooks, reporting, AB testing, templates, etc). Some companies may be able to switch to SES or mailgun in a day, but more advanced integrations could take weeks. We're stuck with either pulling people off critical project in order to meet their ridiculously short deadline, or pay insane bills (the new price is over 4x the price we signed up for).

I emailed their founders and never received a reply.

Lesson learned: do not take a dependancy on MailChimp for any reason.

<comment><USER7> Other mail services can do the same. It's funny we have not fixed the problem of free mail, i.e. any one should be able to run a mail server anywhere and expect delivery of their mail. We should just do a better job of filtering spam and bad users, but mail should still be able to leave any server and be delivered to any other address.

<comment><USER6> Just to be clear: I'm happy paying a premium for all the great features services like SendGrid/Mandrill offer. We knew about cheaper services like SES, or the ability to roll our own, but we didn't want to re-invent the wheel.

I'm not happy about them quadrupling their prices, with a ridiculously short deadline to avoid it.

<comment><USER8> The real kicker: will Mailchimp drop support completely later on... next month? I've no confidence in them anymore. We're moving asap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some head-to-head comparisons of Mailgun and SendGrid, for those trying to find an alternative provider.

\- _Free Tier_ : Up to 10k emails/mo with Mailgun, up to 12k with SendGrid.

\- _Low Volume_ : To send 100,000 emails/mo on a shared IP, you'll pay $45 with Mailgun or $20 with SendGrid.

\- _High Volume_ : To send 300,000 emails/mo on a dedicated IP, you'll pay $204 with Mailgun or $199 with SendGrid.

\- _Deliverability_ : In today's InboxTrail comparison, Mailgun shows 62.5% inboxing, SendGrid shows 97.5%. [1]

If you need any help with your integration, I'd be happy to put you in touch with the right people on our team. My email's in my profile.

Disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.

[1] [https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare](https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare)

<comment><USER10> The Mailgun spam rate of 37.5% [1] seems both awful and unusual as no other provider seems to suffer from this. Does anyone know if this data is flawed, or what's the story here?

[1] As reported by [https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare](https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare)

<comment><USER11> We are working on this based on what we have discovered so far, there appears to be a content issue that's impacting deliverability. We have ruled out any issues with the IP address these messages are being sent from. Our lead reputation engineer going through this and we've not been successful in reaching out to the inboxtrail team yet.

Disclosure: I lead product development for Mailgun.

<comment><USER12> Though you definitely still have space for improvements. I have a Mailgun account and:

1\. I didn't configure my MX so you don't track delayed (asynchronous) bounces. It should be your responsibility as an email provider to use an appropriate Return-Path so spam complaints/bounces reach back to the client in this situation.

2\. I opened ticket #212817 a while ago (September) about how a MITM could capture emails and replay them by injecting duplicate Subject/From/To headers (article here: [https://wordtothewise.com/2014/05/dkim-injected- headers/](https://wordtothewise.com/2014/05/dkim-injected-headers/)) but this still isn't fixed today :(

That said, we're very happy with the service :), one of the killer features is how easy it is to manage wildcard sub-domains (compared to the pain it is with Mandrill).

<comment><USER11> On issue #1, we're going to update the language around this in our control panel and put together better documentation. In reality, having MX records are important to allow for sender address verification [1], which many SMTP servers require.

On issue #2, Thanks and apologies for the slow response, This ticket slipped under our radar.

To give you a quick answer: we'll look into the approach you described in your blog post as well as RFC 6376. It seems legit but we'll need to do some more testing to ensure that deliverability does not suffer due to changing how we sign messages. If deliverability does suffer, we can always make this something that is an optional security setting that can be toggled, like how you can enable and disable TLS certificate validation now.

Our security engineer will take a look and reach out to you with more details in the ticket.

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

<comment><USER12> Thank you for replying. Glad you guys are considering this :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mailchimp has a made a terrible mistake.

Firstly:

Before, you could get "up to 12k emails per month" for free.

Now, you get 2k free sends once (for dev), and then have to pay $9.95/mo.

This all sounds actually great, so far (although, I think $4.95/mo would have been a better bottom-tier plan - the goal is to get rid of users that don't pay anything but send 12k emails per month). $9.95/mo is affordable to any startup, and it's sustainable (vs paying accounts having to cover the cost for the hundreds of thousands of users sending millions of emails for free).

The mistake they made was in doing _anything_ else besides this. If they had simply changed the pricing like this, but left everything else alone, they would double their profit in 5 minutes while only pissing off the customers that aren't ever going to pay anyway.

Instead, they did what they did, and now they're no better than TWTR.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't agree more. I was sending a couple of thousand emails a month with mandrill for free. Would have happily paid 9.95 a month. But when I got their email, and read their blogpost, it was completely unclear what I had to pay. The message I got from them was, "sorry, don't want your business."

With this, and Kimono, in one week, I am moving to amamzon ses, though it has very few reporting features. Sorry Sendgrid/Mailgun, but TWICE burnt, and all that...

<comment><USER15> Sendgrid has been in the game for a long time and has it as their core business (unlike mandrill). So I wouldn't be too afraid of them closing down overnight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the people debating the "If it's bulk email, why not just use Mailchimp?" question, consider the Trello use case: Someone updates a ticket and there are 4 people subscribed for notifications. In that case, it sends the same email to 4 people.

According to the AUP, it's against the rules to send "emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content"

Are we really going to say that someone like Trello should be using Mailchimp for that?

<comment><USER17> There is a fine line. As long as it's a notification email, I don't think anybody can have issues. I guess what they resent is BULK emails send through mandrill.

<comment><USER16> I agree in a practical sense. I doubt Mailchimp has a problem with the case I've described.

I just think the wording of their AUP is too vague. If taken at face value, it invalidates a lot of legitimate use cases. That just means all their customers have to bend that rule a bit, and nobody knows just how far they can bend it. It's a shitty place to be as a customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > They're merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with > immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service's > raison d'être: sending bulk mail programmatically.

I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails. In fact bulk emails are specifically what Mailchimp is designed for. Sounds like people were using Mandrill in an attempt to get around some of Mailchimp's pricing structure, and now that has come to an end.

That said, I will agree that the change has come rather abruptly.

<comment><USER19> > I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. > not bulk emails.

[https://www.mandrill.com/about/](https://www.mandrill.com/about/)

"Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, _as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters_."

So, their About page is currently explicitly condoning violating their own Terms of Service.

<comment><USER20> Not sure if that's really true. Non-bulk marketing and newsletter emails are a thing.

<comment><USER19> [https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/206251597-Wha...](https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/206251597-What-types-of-email-can-I-send-with-Mandrill-)

> What types of email can I send with Mandrill?

> But you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too.

<comment><USER20> Additionally, > View our Terms of Use for extra details.

It seems like this change is to avoid being on the hook for those non-{legal, non-spam} emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What pissed me off the most about this change is that Mandrill was specifically marketed as a separate product, something they believed in. We had no reason to suspect MailChimp didn't actually care for the market they were operating in.

Now MailChimp have come out and said something along the lines of "Sure, it made us lots of money. But we never really cared about you or your use case. So we're killing the product."

It is for this reason I have lost respect for MailChimp. Quite frankly, they can't be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER22> As a replacement consider mailgun ([http://www.mailgun.com](http://www.mailgun.com)). I have used their free tier before when I had to send mail for a side project.

<comment><USER13> \+ 1

We use Mailgun at work, and I can attest to its consistency and performance in inbound mail processing. Our webhook is consistently hit within about 1 second when I send a test email to our app's email.

I will say that Mailgun's UI could use a little bit of help. There are a number of things that make it feel half baked, but in terms of functionality, as aforementioned, it's not lacking.

We were, hitherto, considering the possibility of using Mandrill for outbound mail, only because they seemed to offer more spam folder avoidance knowledge and analytical data, while Mailgun was (and is) surely preferable for inbound... that switch will never happen now.

<comment><USER11> Great feedback. Our UI is definitely something that could use some attention and is a big priority for us this year. We've made some big hires that are 100% focused on making it a great experience.

If you'd like to talk about more specifics, please reach out at anytime josh [at] mailgun [dot] com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting, 5 months ago we made the switch to Mailgun because we were afraid of this day.

Basically, MailChimp didn't like Mandrill sending mass emails from the beginning. As far as I remember (5 months ago) Mandrill only allowed you to send emails one by one but Mailgun lets you send 1K emails at once.

That, plus the fact that they changed their policy for verifying domains with no notice which affected many users (not us).

[http://blog.mandrill.com/we-are-making-domain- verification-m...](http://blog.mandrill.com/we-are-making-domain-verification- mandatory.html)

"This is a breaking change for us, we didn't have any notice at all?! Very poor customer service!" \-- Adam Curtis (Mandrill user, 7 months ago)

Lucky for us we made the switch many months ago!

FYI, I'm sad to see that MailChimp (as a company) cannot see how two divisions in the same company can compete. Like Amazon hosting Netflix and also competing with Netflix. IMO, Amazon management is smart enough to keep these two divisions separate enough so either one that'll do a better job will succeed.

</comment><comment><USER24> We were using Mandrill's email to HTTP feature for delivering inbound emails into our web services. The cutover period for needing to be a paying Mailchimp is April 27th, so we had two months to convert. Luckily it took less than a day to build and test the same functionality using Amazon SES, so we've already converted away. To be fair, it was functionality we were using completely for free, so I expected it to happen sooner rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was going to use Mandrill/Mailchimp until this fiasco. I discovered SendGrid, which has quite a lot of great features. Their free tier is pretty generous with 12k emails a month. I recommend them to people looking for an alternative to Mandrill.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mailgun & SendGrid are good solutions. This is a script that may help you migrate over quickly and uses both API's so you are not locked into just one [https://github.com/gosmartsolutions/mandrill- alternative](https://github.com/gosmartsolutions/mandrill-alternative)

</comment><comment><USER27> In a previous job we tried to mimic Mediums "email only - no password" login infrastructure using mandrill. Whereby a user clicks 'login', a session token is generated and a link sent in an email, the user clicks it and is then logged in - no password needed. sounds great...

It turned out that in production, even after all the hoops that were there to be jumped the bounce rate was around 5% and some of the messages that did get through took around ~15 mins to turn up in the users inbox.

I don't think much of this is Mandrills fault but up to that point i had little inkling of how bad email is for communicating en mass.

<comment><USER28> Email is not supposed to be necessarily near real time, I think (not an expert though). Not sure of the details at the protocol level, but my guess is that it may work differently from HTTP, due to being older, and invented in the time of UUCP, IBM email, etc., some of which involved store-and-forward techniques, mail queue files, etc. (I've used UUCP email back in the day, at one company I worked at. We used to have to dial up the other city's modem and then go through a slightly arcane dance of Unix commands to send the email on its way, or receive email from other branch offices. Fun times ... When it first became available, I remember using it a good amount to download tech articles from various sites via Internet-over-email methods, such as ftp to rtfm.mit.edu via email :) There was even a chapter about that in a Dummies book. And there's an Internet FAQ about it at faqs.org, or there was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ah, might be worth pointing out my earlier proposal[0] in the HN discussion when the Mandrill announcement happened. I was surprised by the response I got, with >300 people leaving their email address. A number of providers emailed me as well, so I'm still planning to send out whatever I get to everyone on Thursday.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173325)

</comment><comment><USER30> Everybody talk about Mailgun, but there are other valuable alternatives: Sendgrid, AWS SES, Postmark.

At Redokun we use Postmark. It proved to have a good deliverability and the UI is very good.

<comment><USER31> Postmark is super unreliable for large volume - their servers are down periodically and their email is periodically delayed for hours.

It still does not support multiple admin roles per account.

<comment><USER30> I've never used them for large volume actually. Are you using them via SMTP or API? I'm asking because I've never seen a single API call fail with them, but maybe it's about the volume like you said.

For large volume sending, I'd probably use AWS SES. In the past, I've used it for sending 150-200K/transactional emails per day and the service was very robust.

On the other hand, I've seen Mandrill increase the number of failed API calls with a lower sending volume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This has impacted our platform as well. While the Mandrill API is still operational at the moment, the immediate change in TOS means that we were technically in violation of the terms before we were even notified that there was a change.

> You can no longer use it to send mail on behalf of your users, as in a > contact form processor or white labeled service.

</comment><comment><USER33> I switched my MVP to AWS SES yesterday after having used Mandrill for transactional emails for about a year. I _almost_ decided to just pay the $20/mo for a MailChimp plan because of SES's documentation and setup complexity and the annoyance of the sandbox (you can only send mail to and from pre-verified email addresses while in the sandbox).

However, I filed the support ticket to get out of the sandbox, requesting 2.5K daily emails. They approved it several hours later with 50K daily emails (!), so they are quite generous there - I was worried I'd have to keep an eye on the number of emails I'm sending, but the amount they gave me gives a nice buffer.

edit: Just to add, I'm one of those people that would religiously open spam emails and look for the relay, and if they're reputable like Mandrill or SendGrid, I'd go to their abuse page and report the email by pasting the email headers. Extrapolating from how many spam mailing lists I got added onto by recruiters, I can see how MailChimp employees' time could get sucked up investigating a lot of these spammers who probably slummed off the free or low cost tiers, and could damage their bounce rates.

So I can't totally blame them for this move w.r.t. Mandrill, and I still plan on using MailChimp when I have a need to send marketing emails to my users.

<comment><USER34> Doesn't any email originating form an AWS server get big marks against it from most spam filters?

<comment><USER19> EC2's IP range is scorched earth, yes.

SES is in a separate set of IP ranges, and their feedback loops with major ISPs lets Amazon manage their reputation much more closely.

<comment><USER35> True, but we switched from SES to Mandrill because of delivery problems from SES.

Mandrill was way better, but now it looks like we need to move again. (And our complaint % on Mandrill was somewhere around 0.01%)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This indignation seems a bit oversold. Part of that is quoting the bulk prohibition on Mandrill without quoting the explanation that immediately follows:

 _Mandrill is designed for transactional email. Please use MailChimp for your bulk sending needs._

Anyone who was using Mandrill for bulk mailing will now need to use MailChimp, which should have been the case anyway. Maybe someone misunderstood the different purposes of the two services, but misunderstanding happens, and it's a two-way street.

<comment><USER19> Part of the indignation is that Mandrill's About page still says:

> Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and > welcome messages, _as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters._

[http://mandrill.com/about/](http://mandrill.com/about/)

and:

> you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too

[https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/206251597-Wha...](https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/206251597-What-types-of-email-can-I-send-with-Mandrill-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow good to know I am not the only one upset at this. This will be big for the bootstrapped business I run. Have a lot of clients on mandrill and need to move them away slowly. This is going to be a long process with multiple clients. Thank you Mandrill!! /s

</comment><comment><USER38> I feel like SparkPost should get a mention here: [https://www.sparkpost.com](https://www.sparkpost.com)

edit (more details): The free tier allows up to 100,000 emails

<comment><USER39> Thanks for the mention jdstafford - I'm on the application development team at SparkPost - we'd love to have you give our service a try. We've got a Slack community up at [http://slack.sparkpost.com](http://slack.sparkpost.com) \- feel free to jump in and say hi!

<comment><USER38> No doubt. You all support CharmCityJS which is awesome. I was actually using mandrill for a side project and will be switching to sparkpost. Thanks for the reply.

<comment><USER40> I'd stay away - far away - from sparkpost. We've been a volume user with sendgrid for years and recently started a test with sparkpost (well before the Mandrill thing), thinking it would be a good backup solution over our inhouse alternative. Suddenly this weekend, we're getting 403 rejections thru the sparkpost API. We were thinking it was an issue on our side and spent some time verifying it wasn't us. When we asked Sparkpost customer support to look into it, they eventually came back saying our Sparkpost account was suspended by their compliance team -- this with no indication or warning (and with us sending very low volume to known-good users in this test). fyi, our sendgrid reputation score is >98 and blacklist-free. We know how to maintain a good sender rep. Sparkpost CSE says their Compliance team is overwhelmed and maybe we'll hear back in a couple of days. Are you kidding me? We had high hopes for Sparkpost until this. Now, I can't see how we can possibly trust them, which is ironic to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> They must be popping bottles in the Mailgun offices today. :)

</comment><comment><USER42> I hated this change, and switched to Mailgun immediately. I never liked mailchimp at all, and this sealed the deal.

</comment><comment><USER43> Quick comical irony break: the heads-up email Mandrill sent us about this went to our spam folder.

</comment><comment><USER44> I just noticed this when I logged in to check on a Mandrill template this morning. Couldn't believe it is an immediate TOS change without any sort of grandfathering or timeline for existing customers - that's a terrible way to handle things, never mind the rapid shutdown.

Doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me as a Mailchimp user. I'll be looking at alternatives for both transactional email and newsletters ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER45> I co-run [https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com) (an email marketing service which uses Amazon SES), and over the past few days we've seen a huge increase in signups. The fallout from this email seems large - these people aren't just moving away from Mandrill, but are also dropping MailChimp at the same time.

<comment><USER46> I really hope their customers completely abandon them. We have - switched to Sendy and SES for newsletters, and investigating what to do with our transactional emails.

This sort of behaviour should be absolutely frowned upon, in any industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've had a Mandrill account for about 3 years, and a Mailchimp account for about 4. I just cancelled my Mailchimp account and listed the reason as how poorly they handled this situation and how they screwed a customer over. I can't in good conscience support a company that could do this. I'll take my business elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER48> Was very disappointed with Mandrill as I've been using them reliably for the last couple of years.

I did a bit of research as soon as the news was announced. And found Sendgrid the most on par with what Mandrill was offering.

It seems a tad slow, but it's ok. Someone mentioned SparkPost, but quite a few emails from them were going to SPAM folders.

<comment><USER39> I work on SparkPost's app dev team - I know you've decided on another route but would love to understand what you were seeing. If you'd be willing to share details with email@example.com or on [http://slack.sparkpost.com](http://slack.sparkpost.com) we'd really appreciate it.

Additionally, we have an awesome deliverability team over here and we work very closely with our users to diagnose and resolve problems like this efficiently. They'd be happy to chat with you about inbox placement should you decide to re-investigate :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I second for Mailgun. Works perfectly well.

<comment><USER50> Very underrated service. The level of control that their inbound email system allows is impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I feel bad for the people forced to switch due to various reasons. The Mailgun guys were always extremely helpful when we used them and often went way above and beyond in helping us debug mail issues. Also, their webhook API is great when you need to accept large attachments.

</comment><comment><USER52> Another alternative when looking for the absolute lowest price is sendy.co. It's a self hosted solution that connects with Amazon email services.

Does anyone have any experience with Sendy.co? And how it would compare with mailgun for deliverability?

<comment><USER53> It has been great for me. Set it up on a DO droplet, somehow worked my through the Amazon setup and voila, my own sendy instance! It's tracking is excellent. And the guy behind it responds quite promptly to any issues. I'd say go for it.

<comment><USER52> Thanks for the feedback! How many emails are you sending out a month? And do you do any newsletters?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> What a mess and no way to treat the 'power' users who value you most (i.e. developers).

I've always found MailChimp's editor to be a complete and utter nightmare to use, for formatting — it's so buggy — not to mention random shut-downs of other sub-services (such as the advanced editor).

They really need to sort out their developer evangelism.

</comment><comment><USER55> Can someone explain to me why they would do this ? I cannot think of a reason why they would stop providing this service.

<comment><USER34> They've making an 80/20 decision. Make the service better for the 20% of users that produce 80% of your revenue and price everyone else out. They don't want to be the startup economies dumb email tube. They want to be a high margin service for companies with more marketers or designers than programers.

<comment><USER46> Indeed. But instead of gracefully transitioning like a sensible company would - i.e. slowly phasing the two together, teeing up alternatives for customers, giving plenty of advanced notice and warning etc, they've gone full nuclear.

Part of me hopes they go bankrupt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> @bwest from SendGrid is working on an API to API migration script and I believe is looking for some more users to test it out. See Tweet here: [https://twitter.com/bwest/status/704704023589289984](https://twitter.com/bwest/status/704704023589289984)

</comment><comment><USER57> Does any other provider (Mailgun? SendGrid?) support EU standard clauses and send them on request? Mandrill does this. EU startups are out of options otherwise.

<comment><USER11> We (Mailgun) have a process to support EU model clauses that has allowed us to continue supporting most of our EU customers. There are a lot of nuances to all of this, so it's best to talk to someone on our team who has expertise and access to our legal team to come up with a plan for you.

Additionally, the landscape will change on this once Privacy Shield, the successor to Safe Harbor, is enacted. It will offer stronger protections and guarantees to EU customers without the need to have model clauses signed between entities.

Our sales team sales [at] mailgun [dot] com can talk to you about your specific situation.

<comment><USER58> Your answer is ambigious. Refering to privacy shield is of no help.

Your sales team did not answer to several inquiries last autumn so some of my clients switched from Mailgun to Mandrill last autumn.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure why there was a disconnect with our sales team, but I'm happy to help. Could you e-mail me with more details? josh [at] mailgun [dot] com

The model clause process is not trivial and often requires work between the legal teams from Mailgun and the respective EU company. We've gone through the process and can definitely help any of our existing or prospective customers get through it, though. Every business is a little different, so we'd need to talk through the specifics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Interesting that my mandrill dashboard shows I can send 62000 emails "absolutely free". I'm on the free tier.

</comment><comment><USER60> I want to use AWS SES, but the lack of a dashboard (like Mandrill had) is a dealbreaker.

Quick strawpoll: are others in that boat too?

<comment><USER61> Amazon is the safest bet for me given their resources and reputation. For my uses I can live with their rudimentary dashboard for now knowing they'll likely improve it over time. My service sends about 1500 emails a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Bummer. We were huge users of Mandrill. Never loved the UI, but it got the job done.

Now, Sendgrid vs Mailgun?

</comment><comment><USER63> What a strange decision. They are murdering an amazingly successful business.

</comment><comment><USER64> Goodbye Mailchimp. $500 per month soon to be spent elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER65> Did they promise never to do this or something?

</comment><comment><USER66> Pepipost - Free SMTP alternative to Mandrill

[http://www.pepipost.com/](http://www.pepipost.com/)

\- Free plan and send up to 25,000 emails each month. Free forever. \- No credit card required. \- DKIM is not required (Domain Verification: (a.) Meta Tag Validation, (b.) File Creation - System can verify the domain based on the presence of a file in the root directory of the domain.). \- Pay only for emails that are not opened by your customers.

* 3 Months Free Unlimited Transactional Emails + 25k emails per month free forever. * Use the below code while signup with Pepipost.

Code: MANDRILL-TO-PEPI

Great! This is probably the best FREE alternative for Mandrill.

<comment><USER19> I'd want to see deliverability numbers, and "free forever" is probably what got Mandrill into this situation. They had to roll back that promise. No credit card required means spammers just register a new account for every 25k emails they want to send.

I'd rather pay for something sustainable.

<comment><USER66> Hello, Pepipost build on a very clear philosophy to encourage good senders and fight against SPAM, hence Pepis follow a strict on-boarding and delivery processes for both Paid and Free customers. This helped in achieving 100% deliverability with highest Inbox placement rate for all good senders.

<comment><USER19> [citation needed]

No one gets 100% deliverability, and highest inbox rate for all senders requires serious proof.

<comment><USER66> We have 100% deliverability with clients who sends emails on double optin database. You are right for other senders there will be ups and downs in rate, based on the database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> We were relying on Mandrill to send a lot of emails. The problem with Mailgun, Sendgrid and others is that they're too expensive, which means they're unaffordable by our bootstrapped startup. Is there any service that has pricing similar to Mandrill?

<comment><USER44> Mailgun and Sendgrid are too expensive? How so? Mailgun offers 10k emails/month totally free, and it's $0.0005/email or less after that. Sendgrid will give you 40k emails for $10/month, or 100k emails for $20/month.

If you can't afford those prices, your business has bigger problems.</comment></comment>


Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html <comment><USER2> well it's either that or the audience gets to hear my snoring :)</comment>


Delicious founder on site's potential: 'The time has passed' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/04/29/delicious.schachter/index.html <comment><USER2> The time for sites like Delicious has passed thanks to the fact that sites like Facebook and Twitter have integrated link sharing, while browsers like Firefox and Chrome have integrated bookmark synchronization.

If you think about it, that's what Delicious did - bookmark synchronization and sharing. It did them damn well in its time, but that time has passed now - that functionality is integrated into other tools, and there's no demand for a standalone service that just does bookmark sharing/sync.

<comment><USER3> For me Delicious was all about finding my bookmarks back. Both FB/Twitter as well as the browsers make this very very hard. Ever tried finding a link back that you tweeted a year ago?

<comment><USER2> Your use case falls into the bookmark synchronization category. Firefox Sync and Google Bookmarks Sync can synchronize bookmarks across machines.

<comment><USER3> No it doesn't. We're talking a few thousand bookmarks here -- I need search, not synch. (I use synch too, but for a much smaller subset (<20) bookmarks across many devices.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mentioned it before and I'll mention it again. Delicious' time has passed by but you've got ask why one would acquire old technology. The answer is simple, to do something with it. I'm excited to see what they come up with.

<comment><USER5> I think they were mostly acquiring the name and the user base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The time for Delicious may be over, but there seems to still be tons of demand. The mismanagement of Delicious created a perfect opportunity for <http://pinboard.in/> to step in. I pay for the full archival membership and I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did someone bury the lede here or is this _not_ the first time joshu's talked about exactly what Tasty Labs is doing?

</comment><comment><USER8> What I really want to know is when is someone going to buy memepool and post something new?

</comment><comment><USER9> seems to me there's still plenty of life in the social bookmarking/link- sharing market. Reddit for example seems to be doing quite nicely.

<comment><USER10> Reddit isn't social bookmarking. But I do agree. In the case of Delicious, however, the original user acquisition mechanism has faded in efficacy. And five years of lost innovation...

<comment><USER11> I prefer to think of it as stored-up innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> delicious just never evolved into something really useful. They have so much data but they don't do anything too interesting with it. Where are my personal recommendation for example?

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think so. Delicious was never really executed completely, it was always a good concept but I never felt like they fleshed out a lot of features.

I would love to see Delicious go through a Renaissance.

<comment><USER14> I agree. I have found amazingly useful stuff from the people I follow on Delicious. Very high signal/noise when you follow the right people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> They have a perfect platform for social recommendations. They could rival stumbleupon, reddit, and many others utility-wise simply because they have such detailed profiles of all of us based on our bookmarking habits.</comment>


The Other Linux Logo - <AUTHOR> http://ecogex.com/the-other-linux-logo/#HN <comment><USER2> Looks like a salt shaker wearing a mask and cape .</comment>


Social Media Guidelines for the Times Newsroom - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-guidelines.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> From their new guidelines:

> In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, > promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do > anything else that undercuts The Times's journalistic reputation.

Is this for real or was it an erroneously early April Fools gag?

<comment><USER3> Consider what's happened to the NFL with the anthem protests.

By not putting a strong policy in place (or rather, not consistently enforcing the policy they had) to avoid politics in the workplace, the brand has been damaged and the product they are selling has been hijacked.

Employers need to carefully weigh the pros/cons of letting employees participate in politics while they are representing the company. In the NFL that would include time on the field.

For the Times they judge that to include _all_ social media use -- a clearly much higher bar brought on by journalistic responsibilities which hits at the core value of NYTs entire service.

<comment><USER4> Or you can view it as a high-profile step in an ongoing employer power creep.

When you work for a company, how much of your life does that company own? Do you have any rights as a private citizen at all if you have an employer? Can they tell you what to say in your off time? Can they tell you who to vote for? Whether or not to stand when a certain song is being played? Whether or not you can own a gun? Which political organizations to join? How about where to eat? Who to be friends with? What conferences and meetups to attend? Whether or not to smoke and drink alcohol? How much to exercise? When and where to pee and to surrender your bodily fluids (step over here for this mandatory drug test, please)? Can they own the ideas that you think of when you are not working, like they do in tech?

The most fascist governments in all of human history would salivate at the chance to exert this much control over their people. While here if you disobey, you are not sent to jail or killed, instead you lose your livelihood and health care, which for the poor approaches a similar end result.

<comment><USER3> As long as you are an employee at will, you can be fired for any reason that is not protected by law, or no reason at all. You choose where you want to work, and a rational part of that choice is how much you are comfortable with your employer looking over your shoulder, and how much they might try to dictate how you behave in and out of the office.

If a company can make a reasonable argument for why they have a certain policy as a condition of my employment, I am willing to consider it. If I find the policy anathema to my personal beliefs or lifestyle then I'm not a compatible employee for that company and I won't work there. Rational people might decide to avoid even companies like Google and Facebook for these reasons!

Can companies intrude too deeply in their employees personal lives? Certainly. But what we're talking about here is not personal life but public persona as a representative of the company, so I think you've gone a bit hyperbolic and it undermines your argument.

We see companies firing employees for bad behavior inside and outside the office all the time. Weinstein would be an obviously attrocious example / the PyCon developers or the Google engineer perhaps more borderline examples. Sometime we laud these public firings other times we question them deeply. Curt Shilling was fired for a Facebook share.

I can't judge if these are all right or wrong, but I do believe they are legal and should be legal for a company to choose its employees based, in part, on how they conduct themselves. And we are free to judge _companies_ on how their employees conduct themselves, and how they react to their employees conduct. How meta!

This feedback cycle is an extremely powerful force now due to social media but I don't think we can or should put the genie back in the bottle. There are various forces pushing in different directions and there certainly can be negative feedback when people perceive a firing to be unjust.

One thing is for sure, a company's reputation and brand is a lot more complex to manage when every employee is an "ambassador" and everyone is watching what they are doing/saying, and it's all recorded in searchable archives.

Maybe it would be great if more often we could separate unsactioned employee actions from the employer themselves. But at the same time people use it as a lever to exact control over what they perceive as misbehavior. When rational people disagree over what constitutes offensive behavior, and both sides expect the company to _do something about it_ then shit hits the fan!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _On that same note, we strongly discourage our journalists from making > customer service complaints on social media. While you may believe that you > have a legitimate gripe, you'll most likely be given special consideration > because of your status as a Times reporter or editor._

One of the more sensible precautions IMO. It's very easy to get a company or institution to acknowledge to your complaints when you pull the "Do you know who I work for?" card. Difficult to be unbiased when things go your way.

<comment><USER6> It's also the sort of old-school professional integrity that feels almost out- of-place these days.

I mean–Imagine a life of constant vigilance against, for example, the corrosive corruption that sneaks in via the power of your employer's name to get your billing snafu at Comcast escalated.

And then every actual contact with the general population is just a litany of insults, attempts to tie your work to some grand conspiracy "the media" is engaged in, or accusations of taking money from the "global warming scientists-environmentalist complex".

C.f: the idea that the New York Times (first published 1851) is a CIA front operation, founded by a 1950's propaganda effort. Peddled downthreat (hopefully) with the "you're naive if you don't believe" shtick.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is so misguided.

This sums up my feelings exactly [https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/918864859537829889](https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/918864859537829889)

Be circumspect. Cover your tracks. Don't show you're biased. Be biased in private!

<comment><USER7> good message, but when delivered by someone who writes for the post it loses some credibility

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This honestly seems like it's taking their reader's intelligence for granted. When people see content from the NYT's they know the point of view it's coming from. I get that the actions of Time's reporters reflects on the paper as a whole but pretending that reader's don't understand that journalists have opinions takes them for granted.

<comment><USER9> I believe you're misusing take for granted here. To take for granted is to assume that something is true. So your first sentence would read "This honestly seems like... assuming their readers are intelligent" which seems to be the opposite of your point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Judging by these guidelines I see no evidence that NYT actually wants their staff to be unbiased. Only to appear unbiased. This, I presume, is because it allows them to present biased opinions as objective truths. An art which the NYT has perfected over the years.

<comment><USER11> It's more likely that they just _are_ biased in the sense that organizations and people have bias. There's little basis to assert that they are consciously, intentionally biased and trying to hide it. All their efforts to appear unbiased probably go along with a desire to be unbiased. Actually achieving some mythical unbiased view is much harder than some guidelines to avoid amplifying impressions of bias.

In short: even when they present biased opinions as objective truth, they don't have whole meta-conspiracy around planning to do that. Nobody is writing these social-media guidelines thinking "this will better allow us to get away with presenting our political angle as objective truth" or anything like that.

<comment><USER12> > There's little basis to assert that they are consciously, intentionally > biased and trying to hide it.

You might consider reading "Manufactured Consent", by Noam Chomsky.

<comment><USER11> I'm aware of Chomsky's thesis and basically agree with it. My comment is totally aligned with the thesis as I understand it.

Chomsky's thesis doesn't suggest that entities like the NYT are intentionally biased and crafty in hiding it. His thesis suggests that the basic nature of news media as we know it, the economic models, social structures, etc. inherently work in a fashion that reinforces mainstream thought and rejects challenges to it.

I think Chomsky is right. My point is that the NYT is behaving exactly as Chomsky would expect _including_ my suggestion that they aren't consciously _aiming_ to be biased and hide it. They exist in a broader context where they can't even see their own bias (which is common in many cases, even outside of this topic of journalism).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's naive to think that Operation Mockingbird ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird)) isn't continuing to this day.

These major organs of the media function simply as a fourth branch of government.

</comment><comment><USER14> >As you can see, we have tried to strike a balance.

...I can't see that.

</comment><comment><USER15> > If our journalists are perceived as biased

The point of journalism is to be biased, no-one is neutral. Pretending to be neutral is a huge issue, because it means as a person you can't see your own biases.

<comment><USER16> This may depend on what you mean by journalism. When I visit news sites, I am there exclusively for factual information on events that are occurring. I do not want to know what the writer happens to feel about these issues.

This probably sounds somewhat radical in today's times, but that's largely because of how the media has changed. In my opinion that change has been for much the worse. An example of what I would consider phenomenal reporting is this [1], the New York Times coverage of Watergate, just before the election of 1972. It is pure professionalism. I have no clue what the author thinks of the situation. There are no moral or character judgements, labels, or aspersions directed in any way. There is no implication or connotation of anything beyond what is there. It is a simple clean and elegantly written reporting of information with all basic relevant facts quantified so much as possible. It is then left entirely up to the reader to survey the evidence and come to their own conclusions. It's unpleasant to compare that to the media of today.

[1] - [http://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/01/archives/the-watergate- mys...](http://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/01/archives/the-watergate-mystery-the- watergate-mystery-after-19-weeks-of.html)

<comment><USER17> Amen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in > editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the > entire newsroom.

Continue to be biased. No problem there. Just don't make the mistake of showing that bias too much.

> We can effectively pull back the curtain and invite readers to witness, and > potentially contribute to, our reporting. We can also reach new audiences.

Don't lift the curtain too much. Or people will start paying attention to what's behind it. That's really straight from the Wizard of Oz. A Freudian slip perhaps.

But it is true in a way. To manufacture consent effectively, there has to be a minimal veneer of impartiality. Someone glancing at them in passing should be able to say "Look, the free and unbiased press at work".

</comment><comment><USER19> For those who do not have the context, senior figures at The Times were caught on camera talking about ties to people associated with the Democrat Party and talking about working closely with an individual at YouTube to favorably curate their front page. This individual also discussed a close personal relationship with former FBI Director James Comey.

If you want to watch the videos for yourself, look up "Project Veritas", and you can see the footage that likely prompted this post.

<comment><USER5> I doubt that that undercover string precipitated this policy, which no doubt took longer than a week to formulate. For starters, the thing you mentioned was chat taped during an _undercover sting_ , of which social media guidelines would not govern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > We consider all social media activity by our journalists to come under this > policy. While you may think that your Facebook page, Twitter feed, > Instagram, Snapchat or other social media accounts are private zones, > separate from your role at The Times, in fact everything we post or "like" > online is to some degree public.

      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---
      in fact everything we post or "like" online is to some degree public.
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

This is good advice for everyone.

In fact, I'm not sure if _' post or "like"'_ isn't even a too narrow definition. For example _" stories clicked"_ is probably a much more interesting metric than _" likes"_, and we can never be sure that this data doesn't become public.

<comment><USER21> Even things in your newsfeed that you pause over for half a second without clicking on can be tracked and made public also.

<comment><USER10> Things you never saw at all could be made public too. How would you prove them wrong? And would it even matter if you did? It seems like a fools errand to worry about this, even if you do everything right you can still get just as screwed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The phrase:

> our journalists

is used 14 times. Do the serfs go with the land, or can they have _any_ private/personal online presence?

I get that the Times is using "our journalists" as a shorthand for "journalists employed by the Times" or "people who work at the Times' newsrooms" but this seems like an exclusion of many significant personal opinions from online spaces.

It also seems to be a shift from journalists having both a private persona and a separate public body of work to a single public persona who is always and constantly expected to be on the public stage - like an on-call physician, a well-known trial lawyer, a politician, a celebrity, or an actor.

We might expect that shift for a small percentage of the people in journalism - the ones whose names might be recognized by any reader or viewer - but do we want it for all journalists?</comment>


CFWheels 2.0 – ColdFusion Markup Language framework inspired by Rails - <AUTHOR> https://cfwheels.org/blog/cfwheels-2-0-released/ <comment><USER2> Is there a captivating set of advantages or other reason to use ColdFusion compared to any of the more common languages today?1 I'd love to play with this and learn something new if it brings something interesting and different to the table.

1: Of course, other than leveraging existing CF knowledge.

<comment><USER3> We used it at my last job a few years ago, and it was pretty easy to get people who aren't normally even coders to build a ColdFusion page. We used it for the university's intranet and it was very good for making simple internal CRUD web apps that various members of our team could understand / troubleshoot / maintain easily.

One of the defining features of ColdFusion is the tag-based syntax. You can have a single "web page" file in, say, "my-widgets.cfm". It can then have a mix of HTML and CFML tags that lay out the page, which would include an SQL query of a database and the HTML being output for each row. Other languages have templating, but this is more like a core feature of the language.

By default, it's also got that PHP style of "just upload a file and open it in your web browser" that makes it simple. So if someone else wanted to make a page like my "my-widgets.cfm", they could simply duplicate it with a different name and make changes until it's ready to go. This lets you turn around internal web apps very quickly that, you know, does in realtime what an administrative assistant does in a week with an Excel spreadsheet.

I use Python now and I certainly recommend it, but it wouldn't be as simple to jump right into as a barely-techie. Same with modern PHP (on something like Laravel). Earlier PHP would be similar, but ColdFusion's <cfquery> functionality is so easy to use and so critical that it's really a big deal. You don't need to know much ColdFusion to run a query and output the results (safely even) in HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been a long road to 2.0 with lots detours but we've finally made it! Thanks to an awesome dedicated team and community :)

Lol, and yes, asking if Coldfusion is still a thing is like asking if Java is still a thing. It's a dynamic scripting language on the JVM that gets stuff done. It's not going anywhere. If you had a bad perception of CF many years ago, do yourself a favor and check out Lucee before making any comments, lest you misrepresent the language and speak out of ignorance ;) -- Remember bad code happens in every language

<comment><USER5> > Remember bad code happens in every language

I remember writing a Windows service to reload the CF's DLL every time the number of concurrent connections to ISS exceeded a certain threshold.

That happened, literally, in the past century, but Cold Fusion earned its bad reputation at that time. I was glad when I saw most of the original plumbing being ejected years later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, CF pre-2001 had an entirely different architecture (when it switched from a static binary format to running atop the JVM ... lol it was a JVM language before that was cool)

<comment><USER6> "from a static binary to a monolithic JVM app"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did few projects in CF when it was the thing (before being acquired by Adobe etc). Here's one project I did back in 2001-2. It was my country's first jobsite for tech professionals. I was the web dev.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20020605022808/http://www.jobnox...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020605022808/http://www.jobnox.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> It was a thing a good while back. In fact it was the first Application Server. Still around early 2000s it was one of the best ways to create web applications. And then it wasn't. What is interesting is that the Lucee ([http://lucee.org/](http://lucee.org/)) project doesn't even mention ColdFusion or CFML in the first few pages.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if this is compatible with Fortran?

<comment><USER10> Nope, it requires COBOL.

<comment><USER6> It's the new COBOL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> is coldfusion still a thing in 2017?

<comment><USER12> I doubt there are many new companies starting to use CF, but it was a good option in 2001 when CF5 came out when compared to PHP4, ASP3, or CGI from those days. Companies that have a decade of CF code is not going to just replace it all because it is not the cool flavor of the week. It works and generally does an OK job.

It has always been an approachable language to people that don't program full time. It looks and feels like HTML, so novice programmers were productive fairly quickly in CF. Career programmers tend to not like it since it is verbose and restrictive, but I have know numerous people use CF as a jumping point for programming and IT careers solving company problems with a bit of code.

<comment><USER5> Legacy code is a thing. I fear the merging of template and logic that CF encouraged (and I don't think it's currently discouraged enough) results in hard to test and hard to reutilize code.

Since hard to test and, hence, untestable codebases are the hardest to migrate, I'd assume web applications that depend too much on Cold Fusion (or PHP, ASP or Model 1 JSP) will remain in those technologies until the whole thing is rewritten from scratch.

<comment><USER13> CFWheels uses RoR MVC concepts, so separation from data/logic/display as you'd expect. This (major) second version has it's own built in test suite for TDD, RESTful routing etc, and the whole core has been written in CFScript which is "tag free". My point being that any modern CFML web app can easily engage with best practice development - that's of course not to say there aren't a lot of legacy apps out there as you rightly mention.

<comment><USER12> I'm not knocking CF, it put food on my dinner plate for many years. I used to use fusebox (MVC with all the terms renamed) and had manageable code. I could knock out a CF based web app much faster than I can today with C# ASP.NET. The only reason we switched was the availability of developers willing to work on CF. You can find C# people everywhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Switch to vegetable fats linked to death risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.futurity.org/top-stories/switch-to-vegetable-fats-linked-to-death-risk/

<comment> marco-fiset Next up on HN : "A recent study proved that breathing will eventually kill you!".</comment>


A little mathematical point - <AUTHOR> This trick works with binary for the number made of 2 co-primes. 100101011 the mirror point number works like this 1+1=1 0+1=1 0+0=0 1+1=1 and there is a remaining 0 in the center. giving 11010 = 26 the original number was 13*23 26/2 =13<p>So using the mirror point number is there a simple relationship to either to the co-primes for every 2 co-prime number in the the integer universe if so might this seriously infer that RSA encryption is not safe no matter what bit size the public key is. <comment><USER2> I really don't understand what you are trying to say here.

By "made of 2 co-primes" do you mean "a product of 2 co-primes" ?

If you're trying to define a new concept here called a "mirror point number" I think you need to be much clearer and more explicit in your definition. You seem to be redefining addition in some unconventional way but I don't even see what you're then applying it to to get 11010.

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't work, try at 95 = 19 * 5. 95 is 0b1011111, and when you run mirpoint on that you get 0b1111 which is 15.

Same with 94 = 47 * 2, 94 is 0b1011110 and mirpoint says it is also 0b1111 which is 15.

Your description of how mirpoint works isn't clear but it looks just like a simple OR operator which doesn't work in this case.

</comment><comment><USER4> cool post!

This is how I understand it: if we apply the mirror point number algorithm on the binary description of some composite, we will recover at least one of the basis components. That's basically what you said with your reference to a fundamental weakness in encryption.

Would you explain more clearly what is the mirror point trick?</comment>


Metrics Metrics Everywhere - Coda Hale at CodeConf  - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0Bztc3_adHzlDNTA5N2VmY2MtYTdmYy00MGRmLWFkODItNDlkNTY5M2U0Yjdk&hl=en

<comment><USER2> Props for mentioning the OODA loop.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Good God, my scrolling finger is cramping. It seems like a nice presentation, but maybe something more compact would be a more suitable online format?

<comment><USER4> Coda's talk was really, really good - especially the parts where he talks about taking measurements in a meaningful way.

I think that the talks are being recorded; it would be worth watching the video even if you've gone through the slides.

<comment><USER4> Update - evidently the talks were not recorded :(

Fortunately, his metrics project has a pretty good overview on github: <https://github.com/codahale/metrics>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm using bcrypt cause Coda told me so.

<comment><USER6> For those who aren't savvy: <http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a- password/>

Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091104>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apparently the talk was not recorded - [https://convore.com/codeconf/metrics- metrics-everywhere-coda...](https://convore.com/codeconf/metrics-metrics- everywhere-coda-hale/604918/)

That's a shame. Sounds like it was a great presentation.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was really an inspirational and superbly executed talk. The slides ware basically just background without much value. I just wish hi's Metrics project would exist for my stack (PHP), I'll probably have to roll something of my own, or find something suitable as an alternative. Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to see the video of the presentation. Any idea of where to look?

<comment><USER10> Sadly, it wasn't recorded.

<comment><USER5> Projectors should just have a camera/mic and record everything while they're on, just in case.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my location tracking site - <AUTHOR> http://whereareyou.me/

<comment><USER2> I like the clean simplistic design. I also like that you have a short "privacy policy" right on the page.

I'd so some testing on the "Where Are You?" button because it might confuse users into thinking that they have to put where THEY are when they click that button. Maybe "Send Question" or even just "Go".

I don't have an iPhone so I can't test what comes up when you receive the email but the home page is really well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. If you would like to test the full cycle you can send me a location request at email@example.com</comment></comment>