Please rate my startup: ZigzagCloud - A Mobile File Management System. - <AUTHOR> http://zigzagcloud.com I'd like to get some early feedback about my new startup, Zigzag Cloud: A Mobile File Management System for Business. http://zigzagcloud.com/
The goal of Zigzag Cloud is to provide a dead simple, and secure way for managers to get company files out to their employees iOS devices (iPads initially). These files could be Sales Content, Training Material, Board Papers or anything else you want to view on your iPad or iPhone.
Our core features are around security, tagging and permissions.
Having large "health clients" as foundation clients, security is really important to us; we have end to end encryption and a users & groups permissions structure that ensures that client's files are safe.
The app has been designed so that users can sync files to their device for offline use, but must check in to the server once every 5 days to maintain access to their locally stored files.
Today we support all the MS Office Documents, iWork, Text Files, Images, Music, Video and of course PDFs.
We also can view HTML docs within the app which has lead to some interesting experimentation around HTML5 based apps within Zigzag Cloud.
For the techies:
We're running on Rails 3 with nginx and Postgresql. On the client side we've got a talented iOS team which has written the app from scratch.
If you feel like telling us about what your dream Mobile File Management System would be like, let us know too, we really want to hear about what our (future) users want!
Thanks in advance! Marcus <comment><USER2> I think one of the main problems you might have here (and I'm only speaking from my point of view on seeing this) is that you're solving a problem people don't know they have yet.

I looked at the site, the descriptions, etc. and I still don't have a clear idea of what impact the product will have on my life.

If the terminology "Mobile File Management", "Content Management" and "Content Distribution" have specific meaning amongst your target audience then what I'm saying doesn't count but to me they're sort of meaningless.

Try telling me a story. The questions I'm asking are: Where were these files created? Who created them? Why do I want to share them? Who do I want to share them with? What other ways of sharing them exist and why are those problematic?

A video wouldn't go astray[1] and you should also check out this video (which I've linked to about a billion times since I first watched it) where Simon Sinek tells us that "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it"[2].

Oh ... and Reprazent the Sydney startup scene bwooooy! Ping me (email in profile) we should catch up for a coffee sometime :) Us Aussies have to stick together.

[1][http://www.decalcms.com/page/What_I%27ve_learned_about_makin...](http://www.decalcms.com/page/What_I%27ve_learned_about_making_product_videos)

[2][http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...](http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Iain,

Thank you for your comments.

Re: The terminology.

You're right. We've been wondering about how you market such a product. We have a close relationship with a certain fruit company and they've been feeding us some good leads every time a crate worth of their product goes out.

The need becomes very apparent when you have 50 iPads and need to get content out to them.

I'm always up for a coffee, I'll flick you an email!

Cheers,

Marcus

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not the target audience but wanted to chime in with a few things about the design and copy:

* Why is the iPhone 3 times larger than an iPad? I got a little confused the first time the site loaded trying to figure out what the giant black device behind the iPad is.

* "Signup Now". English isn't my native language but I'm fairly certain "signup" is a noun, and you want the verb or "sign up" instead

* "Zigzag Cloud has powered built-in analytics". Powered by what? Or is it "powerful"?

* Love the logo and the colour scheme of the site!!

<comment><USER4> this is a classic hacker's critique. Let's look at your comments from a user's point of view:

> Why is the iPhone 3 times larger than an iPad?

Irrelevant. Users won't care.

> "Signup Now". English isn't my native language ...

Irrelevant. Users won't care.

> "Zigzag Cloud has powered built-in analytics". Powered by what? Or is it > "powerful"?

Irrelevant. Users won't care.

> Love the logo and the colour scheme of the site!!

Relevant. Users will care :)

<comment><USER5> This is "Hacker News", not "User News".

<comment><USER4> So user perspectives aren't welcome?

<comment><USER5> I'm just saying that criticizing someones feedback because it characterizes the audience of the site is illogical.

<comment><USER4> fair enough. mitjak did also warn he/she wasn't the target audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea and the design is very good.

I think the landing page could do with an overhaul. The main issue is it's not _immediately_ obvious what the product does. What exactly is "mobile file management", "content management" and "content distribution"? HN users could tell you, and if they didn't know they could probably make an educated guess but what about the office manager who currently uses email to share files?

To be fair, further down the page you have this:

"Zigzag Cloud is an easy to use Mobile File Management (MFM) System for business. Sync your documents, meeting notes, training material, or sales presentations to your team's iOS devices over the air without"

I think it could be simplified and moved to the top of the page. Something like:

"Zigzag cloud lets you share presentations, spreadsheets and other files with your team using ipad and iphone (coming soon)".

It would also be interesting to A/B test the wording, design and placement of the download button. I think you'd see more downloads if you ditched the 'learn more' button (make it a prominent link on another part of the page instead) and if you removed the popup for the download button - you've already told the user it's an iOS app and that only the iPad version is currently available. There's no need to repeat that info. I'd be tempted to try something simpler like "Download from iTunes".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Sixty,

This feedback has been invaluable! Thank you!

"Zigzag cloud lets you share presentations, spreadsheets and other files with your team using ipad and iphone (coming soon)". - Expect this change on the site shortly!

Re: Button text and pop-ups.

You're absolutely right, we'll make that change asap.

Cheers,

Marcus

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My suggestions on pricing:

\- severely limit free plan, to maybe 2 users, 200MB

\- make currently free plan quite cheap, maybe $20, so it would appeal more to small businesses.

Everything else, especially the design, is very professional, and inspires trust. Still trying out the app, but at a glance, it seems really nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Flixic,

We really appreciate your feedback! Yup, limiting the free plan sound like a good idea. We're still exploring how to best appeal to small business. I think when you're at the 2-person stage Dropbox is still a great solution.

Cheers,

Marcus (@Schappi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's a great concept and the site looks professional. I'm not sure about the viability of the pricing plan though, but I don't have enough knowledge about the costs involved and the typical usage profiles to make a better suggestion. However, I did get the impression that your competitors (such as Dropbox) may offer more for less.

One question though: on the front page you say that people can try ZigzagCloud one month for free. But on the pricing page there seems to be an entirely free usage tier without any time limit. You should probably clear that up somehow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Udo,

You've got some great points. I love Dropbox (for better or worse my life lives inside it).

We excel in an environment where an organisation needs to push content out to their employees in a managed environment. For example pushing sales content out to staff.

Our security model allows you to push content out to staff, but manage how that content is used. For example you might have some sales content that an employee can view and open with a potential client, and you may allow that content to be shared with the client via email. You might have other content that is for internal use only, such as training content, this content can be watermarked 'confidential' and sharing is disabled.

We also force the iOS app to check in every 5 days to ensure that polices are maintained on the device.

In short, Dropbox is a fantastic personal consumer product. We're aiming at the corporate market, it's almost like a CMS for iPad.

BTW, you're right on the money with the "one month free" versus "free plan", we'll fix that right up!

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciated it.

Cheers,

Marcus (@Schappi)

<comment><USER7> I see. I wish you all the best, keep us informed! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It sort of looks like dropbox with a few extra features - I guess it is always good to have competition. But what is up with the pricing? I don't think too many people will pay $100 per month for 5gb

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Nhoss2,

Yeah dropbox is consumer, we're aiming at business. I love dropbox, but it isn't great when I need to push sensitive content out to a sales force or a board and know that I can yank access / enforce current versions etc when I need to.

Re: Pricing...

You're right, it's not cheap, but we hope it's good value for a select type of clients.

As an individual I wouldn't use Zigzag Cloud, but if I had a business I wouldn't use Dropbox.

Cheers,

Marcus (@Schappi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You ought to say more about security. I would never touch a document solution that doesn't include technical details about its security measures and credentials.

<comment><USER5> Right, this does look very interesting (and any sort of Sharepoint integration is going to appeal to the "enterprise" market) but in light of recent events I'm not even considering any "cloud" service that doesn't employ encrypted storage and extensive logging.

If you did those two things you'd be safer than dropbox which is something else that lubricates sales to the business market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jason,

Thanks for your comment. We encrypt on the server, in transport and on the device.

As you know, Dropbox doesn't have a users & groups permissions model, nor do they have encryption because they de-duplicate files on the backend.

We also have a beta of the web service which can reside on a VM behind the corporate firewall.

Cheers,

Marcus (@schappi)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the info Marcus!

I've been looking hard for a service to replace Dropbox with and yours is the first I've found that provides encryption of the files on the server as well as an iOS interface.

Will you be providing an API for third-party applications? This is another area where Dropbox seems to dominate and is important especially for iOS users who can't use files stored this way unless they are accessible via an API of some sort.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jason,

Server side encryption is a tick box we've had to do for our health clients.

We've been actively building an iOS SDK that is very similar to Dropbox's own SDK (the idea being that we'll be able to provide a low barrier to entry for other devs that have already implemented Dropbox's SDK).

We have a RESTful private API that as each day goes by is getting more and more locked down. We're looking forward to making it public as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Marcus (@Schappi)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, I hate the name. I know you probably thought a bit about it and accepted that such a unique name would have people who dislike it. So I'm sure this isn't news to you, but yes, I hate the name.

It doesn't roll off my tongue. Without checking for .com availability, I would personally find ZagCloud (preferably) or ZigCloud a far better option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Encoderer,

I hate to admit it, but I think you're right!

Cheers,

Marcus

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting service. One thing I didn't like was having to enter a credit card in order to sign up for the free plan ... I'd get rid of that - don't ask for credit card information until they purchase a plan and you are going to charge them.

</comment><comment><USER12> How do the users work? Is it like Dropbox where I can sign up for a free account and then have subscribers to the bigger accounts share with me or do I have a new account for every hosted plan I'm shared with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for the question.

We have the concept of account owners/admins. The account owner can access Zigzag Cloud via a web interface and create further users and groups.

All users can access content via the iOS client, but only admins can access the web interface.

Within the web interface admins can:

* Upload new content * Tag Content * Create Users and Groups * Set access permissions to folders within the system * Do account admin-y stuff

Cheers,

Marcus (@schappi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks fine, but as a potential customer, my main question is not answered:

Why should I stop using SugarSync in favor of you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Synnik,

Thanks for your comment. In a sentence: We provide encryption end to end, a granular permissions structure.

Cheers,

Marcus

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There should be an option to buy additional storage space, if needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> HI Swatthatfly,

Great point! We should really add that as an option. FYI we have found that for most clients the number of users has been the limiting factor, not the amount of storage.

I appreciate the feedback!

Cheers,

Marcus (@Schappi)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who has the best API Documentation? - <AUTHOR>

We are in the midst of redoing our API docs.  I have been visiting other API providers to see what they are doing and been getting some great ideas (dwolla's docs are amazing IMO).  I am sure you all have read docs that have made your lives easier.  Where are they? Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> jQuery</comment>


Trouble at the Koolaid Point - <AUTHOR> http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point <comment><USER2> This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage for something like this.

In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.

I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]

At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?

[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.

[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .

<comment><USER3> >willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff

Serious question: why does this even bother you?

<comment><USER4> I am not who you asked, but if I may step in?

It bothers me for the same reason it bothers me that those things exist. They are terrible, and should not be given a platform. I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.

<comment><USER5> May I ask where you are from? Free speech - bigoted, hateful, maybe untrue, or otherwise, is perhaps the one enduring (sacred) tenet of American society.

<comment><USER6> Harassment isn't. One of the big points of the article is that when law enforcement doesn't act that is justification that the action is legal and thus "free speech". Except that law enforcement almost never acts against online harassment. There are plenty of laws restricting free speech when it harms others, and I'd hope you agree that some of the examples in the article crosses the boundary into things that should be criminal.

<comment><USER7> The boundaries of harassment are very blurry and tend to favour the powerful. For example, some of the campaigns against online harassers look even more like harassment than the actions they're going after people for: [http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/online- trolls-w...](http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/online-trolls-whos- hounding-who/15966) Except that because it's the press harassing people to the point of suicide, we don't see anything wrong with it.

<comment><USER8> > we don't see anything wrong with it.

Not entirely true - the reaction in the UK to this whole incident has been quite negative from what I've seen. Then again, we're not overly happy with our press at the best of times...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> She really understands social networks trolling and how it works in details, very good article. It is something like inescapable in the internet, and this is very sad. I ran an italian social network site for many years and this was our main problem. If you read Twitter, this is huge. Moreover a few companies are making the problem worse by polarizing and using this in order to attack competitors. The DMCA thing is spot-on: creating facts from nothing, since there are enough people saying it, it must be true. Nobody bothers to actually check. However, doesn't this just reflect a general lack of "information analysis" skills of most people on the internet? The "button" trolls are able to touch to enable certain behaviors in other people, sounds very related to their inability to take apart true information from false information. Logical analysis from faked one. So after all the root cause is that most communities are not the quality they should be.

</comment><comment><USER10> After reading this, I'm battling the urge to suggest technical solutions to social problems. Except that in this case the social problems are caused by the fact the internet is a house built on sand and the underlying protocols don't support authentication or accountability to anything like the degree traditional public conversations did. That said, the choices that were made in the 1980's and early '90s to support pseudonymity and to allow the flexibility that meant that tools like NAT and anonymous forwarding could be developed and deployed may have been the right ones for that time.

I suspect that one outcome of the wave of vicious trolling that has been building the last few years will be stronger laws against online stalking and harassment, possibly even a national quick response network to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security can protect American citizens from these "lawless online thugs".

I don't have an answer for you; but I know that I am saddened that some of the smartest and most technically adept people I know are viciously harassed for their public participation in the technical community. If you think being a woman in public justifies rape threats or death threats; I have no respect for you. If you think that sort of thing is just a game, you need to grow up. And if you think the current situation can go on indefinitely without winding up in one of a number of drastic failure modes; you're fooling yourself.

<comment><USER11> I think there are technical solutions to this problem (though nothing that has to do with protocols and authentication) that are very similar to the ones encountered when people were moving from small villages to cities. People seem to be able to behave in a civil and constructive manner in a group at or below Dunbar's number [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) For cities to form, the technology that needed to be invented were laws and a justice system to enforce them.

The logical requirements for reciprocal altruism are: 1. Others are recognizable 2. You can remember their past behavior 3. There is a reasonable chance of interacting with them again. It is this simple game-theory situation that we have to reckon with and the Internet gives us much more elegant and humane tools than Hammurabi had. Remember when comments were ordered by submission date? The difference between that pointless cesspool of idiocy (FRIST!) and the acceptable level of comments ordered by upvotes is striking. If such a simple change in UI can cause a significant increase in the quality of community discussion, there must be many other techniques to make online communication more civilized yet to be discovered. Unfortunately, they are not easily tested because it requires a large, active community and time.

I am doubtful that more moderation is the answer. If the problem is people behaving poorly, giving some people more power does not sound like a solution - just a different problem.

Millions (or billions?) of racist, sexist, cruel and sadistic people exist. This is not a problem with the Internet. It is a problem with the world. If there are not laws enforced by traditional justice systems against stalking, harassment and threats, there probably should be. It shouldn't matter if it is done verbally, over the phone, through the mail, or online.

tl;dr The Internet did not create jerks, but it may have tools to handle them better.

<comment><USER12> "2\. You can remember their past behavior" I think this is a big missing piece. Sure in many communities I can kinda look up their past behavior, but it is not easy.

I would be good to know if this person: 1\. Adds to the discussion 2\. Has skin in the game

Systems like karma/points/votes kind of address these, but they aren't perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm grateful that I can read the author's account of her experiences, and her analysis of what is going on sociologically. Her story is utterly shocking to read and I feel terrible for her.

The general phenomenon of misogynist trolling, and in particular the wave of misogyny masquerading as #gamergate has been astonishing to read about. There's something deeply, deeply disturbing and raw going on here and it is hard to see the contours of it.

It's a pity that a 12-hour old HN submission [1] of Anita Sarkeesian's moving talk at XOXO [2] didn't get much traction (indeed a sock-puppet immediately emerged to denounce the submission as 'trash').

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423719)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah8mhDW6Shs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah8mhDW6Shs)

<comment><USER14> The point of the article linked is exactly that: separate out the misogyny from the trolling. Expose how the trolls (or that particular troll) use any kind of story that they can construct, be it misogyny, misandry, censorship, whatever people at large hate or fear, to construct polarizing narratives aimed at damaging individual people.

I response to your implied question why this is perceived as much more interesting than an older submission of a talk by Anita Sarkeesian (which I didn't watch, I'm just extrapolating here), it's because it separates out the ideology part from the description of the trolling phenomenon. You don't need to drink SeriousPony's koolaid to hear her argument about trolling in general and this troll in particular.

You can't expose trolls by preaching to the choir, you have to talk everybody's language to subvert trolls' efforts to create a polarized discussion.

Note how OP's post was met with weird complaints that she "thought prostitution and being a victim of domestic violence were somehow 'shameful.'" \- this is again trying to use ideology to polarize a discussion that should be troll-targeted and not ideology-targeted.

Note: I'm not claiming that we shouldn't try to discuss ideologies, just that it's something that trolls will try to exploit. And that the difficulty of moderating such discussions is why Hackernews doesn't even try to be welcoming to discussions that are or look ideological. Let's put it this way: the moderators here have a good track record for creating a pleasant, constructive discussion around technical stuff (including Windows and Linux and upstart and systemd and a host of contentious issues) and around business/startup stuff. As we find out how to have a constructive, non-polarizing, non-troll-prone discussion about other issues (global economy, misogyny/misandry, whatever), these things will be received more positively on Hackernews. (Or maybe: as much as they are somewhat related to YCombinator's business with startups).

<comment><USER15> I don't think you can separate ideology and morality entirely from this. Even the statement "it's wrong to harass people for entertainment" is ideological.

<comment><USER14> The statement "it's wrong to harass people for entertainment" is much less ideological to the extent that (i) you do not immediately jump to conclusions such as "you must be a pro-peace rather than a pro-lulz person then" or (ii) people do not make statements such as "any person who cares for [important thing X] must support the case of [entertainment rather than boredom || giving people peace of mind]"

Ideology starts when you automatically view an instance of a decision on a particular topic as a person's disposition towards that topic, and automatically view a person's disposition towards one topic as a reason to put a label on them and ascribe to them dispositions towards totally unrelated topics.

A non-ideological stance can consist in noting that, while many occasions have shown a co-occurrence of sexism-related idiocy and trolling, they are not the same thing (see Lennart Poettering being harassed for non-sexist reasons), and hence we have multiple angles of attack: combating the trolls through effective lawful action (which is a bit tedious, but still what OP thinks should be done when the guy in person has a well-known track record of harassing people in ways that frequently go beyond what's funny or harmless), combating people's willingness to act on behalf of trolls (e.g. reddit and 4chan's ban on personal-army type posts), as well as acting on the polarizing issues that make people more prone to get drawn into these astroturfing- initiated conflicts (which is a hard thing to do).

Do we have a moral common ground to do any of this? Absolutely. Even if we suspend contentious arguments and ideological blame-shifting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yikes! What an incredibly brave blog to write. I can't even begin to fathom what life has been like for her over the last 10 years.

I don't know any of the backstory to this, so I'm taking the blog at face value. Even if only 1% of what she say is accurate (and I'm inclined to lean the opposite way), it's absolutely horrendous.

How is it possible that people behave this way? I don't understand what the line of justification can be. It's just cold-hearted, mean and vicious behaviour. I can't understand what benefit is drawn from treating someone like this.

Is there by chance a theory of sociopathy that covers this kind of behaviour?

I hope I never, ever make the terrible mistake of even unknowingly treating someone in this manner.

<comment><USER15> People maintain their self-image by doing down others. That's all it is.

It happens that this is an extreme example of this common phenomenon. Some men find successful women _extremely_ threatening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, this is even worse than I ever imagined. It is unbelievable how far trolling can go and what the costs are in life for the victim. I don't know you personally Kathy but I really feel sorry for you. You deserve respect for having the courage writing up these thoughts despite of everything that has happened to you and your family in the past 10 years. What's even worse how easy it has become for us to judge from the sideline with smug remarks on Twitter. Sad, really sad.

</comment><comment><USER18> I only have one story of harassment, but it might be interesting.

When I first started blogging, about 10 years ago, I would also post on slashdot.

I started getting a lot of traffic. Along with that, I started getting harassed.

It was some of the vilest stuff I've ever read in an online forum -- attacking me, my family, my personality, and so on. I found it quite disturbing, as if one of my friends was secretly insane.

I finally had to institute blocks. After about 100 blocks, I was able to bring the blog back under control.

At that point, I stopped promoting my blog so much. I was happier just to write for myself.

They say there's always 2% of folks that you're not going to get along with. There's also probably 0.2% of folks who actively wish you harm. On the internet with 2B folks? Those percentages add up big time.

My point is that gender is important here, but I'm not sure it's anywhere near being the entire story.

<comment><USER19> [http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788](http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788) [http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer- assessing.pdf](http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf) [http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/12/146144481245...](http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/12/1461444812458271.full) (if you have login)

<comment><USER18> No doubt there's all kinds of interesting statistics in here. I'd be interested in finding data about the age of the people harassing others. I doubt you'd see many 40-year-olds.

It's really crazy that we give adolescents all this latitude growing up -- they can't be tried as adults, their medical care is the responsibility of others, they are provided free food and medical care if needed, etc. -- and then we expect these same folks to go online and somehow behave like miniature adults. At any one time there's probably a thousand 12-year-olds living in crack houses that are online. And we expect them to behave the same way as a 30-year-old.

By no means am I condoning this kind of trash. But we can explain things without condoning them.

The internet is nice because nobody can tell anything about you, but when talking about things like this, that's not a good thing. There's a vast difference between being harassed by, say, people who are mentally barely able to care for themselves and being harassed by the guy who lives next door.

<comment><USER20> Anecdotal counter example: Google 'sweepyface' and you'll find the sad story of what I would describe as a conspiracy theorist who tweeted thousands of times regarding the Madeleine McCann (missing child) case. The technical question of whether she was trolling and harassing people or merely tweeting her views repetitively is up for debate but she was 63.

Obsession and outrage comes from all types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This was really eye opening for me, I had no idea weev was involved in such things, I always thought of him as the guy who hacked iPads.

<comment><USER22> Which is really frustrating, because Weev has been openly bragging about ruining Sierra's life for years. But every time it comes up, everyone seems to go "Weev is a hero! LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU SAYING BAD THINGS ABOUT THE HERO." And then everyone goes on talking about whatever he's in the news for now and _never ever talks about the trolling._ So nobody knows about it.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I thought he was just a daft hacker caught by bad laws until I saw the article about his new swastika tattoo a couple of days ago. Between that and finally catching up on the finer details of 'gamergate', I'm thoroughly depressed about the state of the world.

<comment><USER23> What you're not aware of is that the dailystormer itself is very likely a trolling site in itself, aimed at creating ridiculous and believable content to draw in support by real white supremacists and enrage the unsuspecting public. It would make perfect sense for weev to go on there with a photo of him with fake tattoos to help them in their quest.

That is how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Also, since you mention gamergate, have one adult link on the matter: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate-a-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate- a-closer-look-at-the-controversy-sweeping-video-games/)

<comment><USER24> Oh look, an example of the _exact thing_ the original article is talking about, down to the unsourced accusations of DMCA takedowns for censorship.

<comment><USER23> It's the exact opposite in fact.

The original article is about trolls making up lies and victims having little recourse.

The lie in this case is "Zoe traded sex for press coverage". Kain explains how there is no basis for this claim whatsoever ("the initial concerns were quickly proven to be all smoke and no fire") and then goes on to explain how, despite being based on nothing, this managed to blow up anyhow by everyone making allegations that are nearly impossible to make fact, yet are taken as fact by many others.

This kind of thing is exactly what the original article is talking about, only that in the GamerGate case it's happening in both directions.

As for the DMCA thing: The video was down. While i haven't even watched it, as it's probably full of bullshit, you can go to the video ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5CXOafuTXM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5CXOafuTXM) ), click "... More > Statistics > Daily" and see the view count drop to zero in august for a few days. This outage may have had several reasons, but due to the original uploader linking to what seems to be a DMCA takedown notice on his tumblr ( [http://archive.today/UqAwg](http://archive.today/UqAwg) ) it appears that she did send that. And that is all Kain said.

Given these two facts, and how they do belong into the greater discussion, i am curious how you'd expect him to express that differently.

<comment><USER24> Well, Kain's article is a description of the exact kind of harassment campaign described in the original article. So the first sense I meant is that the contents of the article are the exact thing talked about.

For the DMCA: "unverifiable" is probably a better description than "unsourced", but the part I wanted to highlight was how this whole thing followed the exact playbook described in Kathy Sierra's essay.

Second, while Kain is trying to take a balanced approach, he unfortunately only looks at the surface of the issues, reporting the accusations in great detail. This is a dynamic that's _also_ pointed out in the original article: uncritically accepting a new martyr while glossing over the original harassment. Lots about "gamers are over" and TFYC, virtually nothing about the mob harassment for anyone other than Phil Fish. And absolutely nothing about the organized astroturfing in the IRC channels, which has been documented extensively.

The accusations are repeated without much introspection, in a way that it can be used as an apologetic hammer against either side. It may not be actively harmful in itself, but it doesn't do much to actually inform the reader of all of the issues.

For an even-handed look at the topic, I'd rather suggest, say, a scholarly look at the issues that acknowledges some of the problems: [http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/we-will-force-gaming-to- be...](http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/we-will-force-gaming-to-be-free/) or at least an article by someone who is less personally involved than Kain is: [http://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained- ever...](http://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody- fighting)

<comment><USER25> So just let me just get this right...

You believe that an article that describes both sides' claims without judging either is "harassment" and that instead of something that "can be used [...] against either side" we should be looking at articles and authors that are directly and openly associated with Kotaku/Gawker or Polygon/Vox for a more "even-handed" look?

Is that correct?

<comment><USER24> No, I didn't say that article itself is harassment. Just that it isn't as even-handed as it tries to appear.

I just grabbed to Vox link because it was one of the more even-handed summaries from the more general news sites, regardless of association. Read both and come to your own conclusion if that makes you feel better.

I suppose I can dig up something by someone with absolutely no association with any of this, but those people generally aren't writing about this at all. That's part of the problem with that particular mess: everyone who _can_ talk about it already knows each other and have probably already been attacked by one side or the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> weev's current webpresence:

[http://www.dailystormer.com/what-i-learned-from-my-time- in-p...](http://www.dailystormer.com/what-i-learned-from-my-time-in-prison/)

clearly a posterboy for neckbeards around the globe.

if you download an mp3 you go to jail, you harass another human being nothing happens.

</comment><comment><USER27> This was a very well-written article. Though I haven't followed any of this person's journey that she's recounting and can't simply trust her retelling of what happened (based on the fact that I really don't know anything about weev or Kathy or their online presences), she hits on something important. It's shocking how numb a lot of internet culture is toward "trolling" or otherwise hateful statements.

Nobody goes around in public threatening to rape or murder strangers. This might seem naive, but honestly, why is this tolerable by so many people if the words are said on the internet rather than on the streets?

It's not pretend. These are REAL people that are being subjected to threats that at least aren't innocent and at worst are also real. People's intuition of "free speech" seems to be warped here. Should it be okay to type these things to someone? Would it be okay if you called them and said it over the phone? What if you said it to their face? Mailed it to them in a letter? Does the medium change the message?

I'm just tired of the "nut up or shut up" attitude that a lot of the internet seems to overflow with.

<comment><USER28> > Though I haven't followed any of this person's journey that she's recounting > and can't simply trust her retelling of what happened (based on the fact > that I really don't know anything about weev or Kathy or their online > presences),

saying this is so unnecessary. The harassment Kathy has received is widely documented, for years. Do a little googling up front instead of unnecessarily dishing out assorted seeds of doubt.

<comment><USER27> The intent of the sentence was to point out that her article is important because it speaks out about something that's outrageous, regardless of if the reader knows who is writing it.

I did google both of them, and read some of her other blog posts. I'm not going to proclaim though that I really understand what's happening after 25 minutes on google. It's irrelevant to her deeper point.

<comment><USER29> Like you, even I was unaware of her and the incidents in the past. I read this post last night and thought its just another post by a woman in tech seeking attention. However, saw the comments here and decided to read more about her, and now I feel sad.

I think it makes more sense to know who whom this is coming from, what she has suffered rather than someone who was never a victim writing about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it's horrible she had to endure all this. Online harassment and is real and until we have laws for this we are mostly on our own.

I'm not sure laws will be able to stop all this single handedly. What we really need is something like shaming. We need to show no tolerance to those who take part in harassment, and even supporters, maybe. We kind of have this for racism and it works more or less. It's amazing we're still going through it when it comes to sexism.

</comment><comment> w0rd-driven The immediate "solution" I thought of came from "who watches the watchers?" Why not form a anti-troll trolling group that's sole purpose is to dox the doxers as it were? I then realized all you're doing is changing the victim but at least a tiny bit of karmic justice is served in the process.

There seems to be no real constructive, intellectual or positive way to deal with this problem. Sociopaths aren't technically sane so how do you deal with an insane person? Expose them as having a mental illness and getting them locked away for treatment does seem like one avenue. Like reverse-swatting, you inform mental institutions of would-be patients but everyone is a tad bit insane so there's a lot of room for abuse.

This is not an easy problem to solve, verging on unsolvable from an individual perspective. How does one change culture to make this unacceptable? Because in the 10 years since this started, I don't see any positive momentum. Not really. Sure, I do see well more exposure because it's become extremely prolific but it really feels like nothing is being _done_ about it, just talked about ad nauseum. That just really reinforces that it is a tough problem to solve.

</comment><comment><USER31> Couple of comments:

1\. I know of weev from hacker circles. He really is this douchetastic. But what's really insane to me is that there's a bunch of women in the hacker scene who _adore him_. I couldn't quite understand it, until I saw them also adore Adrian Lamo, and so my theory is very close to Kathy's here: hero worship distorts reality. In order to stop people from enabling abusive trolls like this, someone has to debunk the hero status. Which is a lot more difficult than it sounds.

2\. Being a troll is about one thing, and one thing only: power. The power to abuse someone and laugh and get away with it. The essential requirement of trolling is that you make someone upset. So there's a very real requirement that you do not respond in the way the troll wants in order for them to put their attention on something else. But trolls are varied, and sometimes they'll just keep plugging away at you. In cases like these you have to change tactics, though there's no guarantee anything will definitely put them off.

3\. In general, trolls have goals. Usually it's to harass you until you literally disappear into the ether. Once they can't find any trace of you anymore, they have nothing left to do, and so they find another target. In this sense it's sometimes necessary to literally leave the [online or physical] community you face harassment in, or find a way to force the troll out of it. In either case it's basically a war, and you have to decide to either abandon the area or fight it out to the death.

4\. I believe I understand why she was targeted. She has opinions that some people _hate_. Why, I have no frigging idea; ask a shrink. The point is, when people hate something, they lash out. And the internet is basically a hate delivery mechanism. And here's my opinion that will probably get me downvoted into hell: there is no way to stop this, other than leaving the internet.

Editorial rant (sorry about the length):

Being abused was not Kathy's fault. Unfortunately, you don't have to do _anything at all_ to be abused on the internet. Just your picture, or a handle, or _anything_ can be fodder for trolls. You can do absolutely nothing but exist and people will still try to abuse you.

In my opinion, from what I know of the internet, there is virtually no way to stop someone that hates you from abusing you here. There are no closed systems on the internet. E-mail is public, Twitter is intended to be public, but even if you make it private there's still a picture and a handle to start with (AND you can still direct tweets at private accounts), with Facebook you can avoid non-friends but not on comment sections, and on top of it all these accounts can be hacked. Private information like address, SS#, phone, etc can all be gotten incredibly, stupidly easily, without you _ever going online_. The internet is the easiest attack platform there is.

If you are visible in any way, you are a potential target for trolls, period. And I don't see any simple solution to any of this. We could re-design our internet services to protect people's privacy and anonymity better from abuse, but this wouldn't protect people who want to _publish works_ like Kathy has. We could try to develop better tools to combat trolling, but that might become an arms race, who knows. Maybe we need to require a ss# and a picture ID for people to make accounts on social media. But regular accounts might just get hacked to be used as sock puppets.

So perhaps there is no technical solution. Perhaps we just need to change the way our entire society treats itself, both online and off. _Peacefully_ boycott sources of abuse, negativity, ridicule and scorn online (i'm looking at you, every-forum-on-the-internet). Combat the causes of insecurity and fear and hate. Provide more social services to support the emotional welfare of all people. Something other than band-aids and coalitions. Maybe it'll never happen in our lifetimes, but at some point we've got to sit down and figure out a way to encourage people to be compassionate, or we're all doomed in the much larger picture of world-wide human affairs.

<comment><USER32> >> mechanism. And here's my opinion that will probably get me downvoted into hell: there is no way to stop this, other than leaving the internet.

What about ending anonymity? Much as I like the idea of remaining annoymous online (not that I am here), there are legal means to deal with the extreme end of the trolling spectrum so long as you can identify them.

The next issue that pops up of course is privacy. We need to end anonymity while making privacy the default. But that allows criminals to communicate privately - they can now, but it takes effort and many don't know how.

<comment><USER33> Honestly, removing anonymity has made things worse over time.

Facebook and Youtube now have _open_ racists who push their malignant opinion upon everyone now, and are proud enough to sign their name next to it.

<comment><USER34> I think this is, to put it mildly, undemonstrated.

The KKK wore hoods for a reason. Sure, there were plenty of racists willing to be open about their views. But letting people be anonymous assholes greatly increases the awfulness.

Even gamers know it: [http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)

<comment><USER33> Your viewpoint is similarly "undemonstrated".

Weev's public identity is known. That didn't stop him from trolling or harassing the subject of the article.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>-

EDIT: also, the Penny Arcade comic you linked was from 2004, literally 2 or 3 years before the invention of youtube and long before Twitter and Facebook existed.

The opinion contained in the said comic does not, and cannot apply to the modern internet, where Anonymity is beginning to be stripped away and yet the trolling / harassing problems are _clearly_ remaining.

Indeed, it has only gotten _easier_ to get doxxed online and humiliated by the trolls, now that we communicate through Facebook and our names are attached to us in Google / Youtube / everything.

<comment><USER34> I'm glad we both agree that you have demonstrated no evidence for your views.

As I already said, some people will be assholes under their own names, because they're just that awful. But that proves nothing about how many people would be assholes when they can evade accountability.

<comment><USER33> True, no hard evidence either way. But real hard evidence is rather hard to come by.

I'm more worried about the people who shy away from online conversations when anonymity is stripped away. Anonymity is my _only_ protection from harassing trolls like Weev.

If I didn't feel secure in my thoughts, I wouldn't be able to talk frankly to you, and I'd leave.

[http://www.groklaw.net/](http://www.groklaw.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow, I had no idea anything like this was even happening. How horrible.

> _You're probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law > enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed > online, no matter how viscously and explicitly.......There IS no "the > authorities" that will help us._

I find this part of the article most disturbing. I can't imagine how law enforcement doesn't take online threats as seriously as "real" threats. Kids are thrown in jail for posting about bombing a school on Facebook, but if I directly say I'm going to rape or kill someone on Twitter or Facebook nothing happens?

How do we get the authorities to start making examples of these people and handing down serious jail time for online threats?

</comment><comment><USER36> Is it known how doxers are able to get information like social security numbers? I can understand a determined party being able to find, say, your phone number and home address, but certain information just shouldn't be available to the public.

<comment><USER37> They may just be buying them:

[http://peopleinfofind.com/find-social-security- number/](http://peopleinfofind.com/find-social-security-number/)

(and I'm sure others, that's just the first I quickly found)

I have no idea how reasonable their verification of purchasers is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> He went to jail for something he shouldn't have because he didn't go to jail for something he should have.

That's karma for ya.

<comment><USER38> I'd like to believe that. It would certainly be nice if it were true.

Unfortunately it's not. Weev went to jail for reasons that had nothing to do with the bad things he did. And I think this is worth pointing out, because unjust laws are not selective like karma; if we tolerate them when they target assholes, it's not long before they start targeting innocent people.

<comment><USER39> Putting people in prison for unrelated things is a normal and celebrated aspect of the American legal system. I don't mean celebrated in some metaphorical sense, either. I mean it is _actually celebrated_ in American culture. Think "Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion".

Maybe that's not a good thing, but it sure worked in this case.

<comment><USER40> I through that Al Capone really engaged in tax evasion. Even as he did much worst things, if he was really guilty of tax evasion, then it is perfectly ok to put him in prison for tax evasion. Putting people to jail for things they are not guilty of just because they did something else bad is injustice.

Putting people to jail for things they ARE guilty of is fine even if that is not the worst thing they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why is it the _only_ time I hear about Kathy Sierra is when she's talking about being harassed?

The world is full of all types of people who get their kicks in all types of ways. Unless you propose monitoring everybody so that any offensive speech can be punished, there is always going to be a contingent that will capitalize on any chink in psychological armor just to get someone's ire up. When someone's image primarily consists of being a victim, it's not terribly surprising that they're going to serve as a lightning rod for all sorts of harassment - it's known to work after all!

Frankly, what's sickening is seeing otherwise reasonable people proposing that the solution might be taking away anonymity, perhaps even at the _protocol_ level! If you'd like to be so mollycoddled, then stick to your "web 2.0" VC- gardens. Please leave the Internet alone with your misguided surveillance wet dream "solutions."

And finally, if this article itself is about harassment and speaking truth to power, then why do I feel compelled to use a throwaway account to post this comment?

~8 year HN member.

<comment><USER34> > And finally, if this article itself is about harassment and speaking truth > to power, then why do I feel compelled to use a throwaway account to post > this comment?

Because you show all of the sympathy and concern of an albino crocodile? Because you indulge in blatant victim-blaming? Because after (maybe) reading about the horrific campaign of calculated abuse, all you can care about is yourself?

And, of course, because you recognize that other people will (correctly) think less of you. So rather than owning up to your opinions, you are only brave enough to mewl from the shadows.

<comment><USER41> That's an awful lot of ad hominem. I made some other points too, you know.

You're right that other people would think less of me, for the same reason I could never hope to refute your attacks - the narrative for this topic has left the domain of logic, and is based solely on _hysterical feelings_.

Now that nerds have achieved societal glamor through VC money and social acceptance from selling their mothers and friends to Apple and Google, they've eagerly formed the same oppressive mob as everyone else.

At least the jocks ran on a shallow strategy that was easy to understand and avoid. This new set of bullies exerts endless brainpower fooling everyone (most importantly themselves) that they're "making a better world." Alas, we all know how that turns out - same shit, different day.

<comment><USER34> Yes, your comment was a paragon of unemotional wisdom. You have no interest here other than cool exercise of rational thought. You aren't upset at all. It's those other people who have let their feelings run away with them. Just keep telling yourself that. Because as we know, feelings like empathy and concern have no place in a discussion about how humans should treat other humans.

Funnily, I agree with you that nerds are behaving badly now that they have power. [1] But I disagree with your conclusion. What happened to Sierra is a great example of nerds misusing their sudden social power. Now we need to start taking responsibility for the broader effects of our works and our previously insular culture.

[1] For others, this is a good analysis: [http://petewarden.com/2014/10/05/why-nerd-culture-must- die/](http://petewarden.com/2014/10/05/why-nerd-culture-must-die/)

<comment><USER41> The only thing I'm upset about is what I perceive to be a large case of groupthink. I have no other dog in this fight.

Weev posted a response that contained specific assertions. If he is lying then rebutting them should be quite easy, yet the only responses are ad hominem dismissals.

> _feelings like empathy and concern have no place in a discussion about how > humans should treat other humans_

The topic starts with that, but takes on a much larger scope. Empathy and concern don't scale, as illustrated by main stream media's pathologies.

I don't think it's right to harass people, but I think it's inevitable that some people will be harassed on a global communications network. Even if you change the culture (all cultures), outliers will always remain. Castigating "the culture" for the doings of the outliers effectively creates a new Original Sin.

I could expound on the necessity of anonymity and lack of centralized control, but it would fall on deaf ears here. The same argument would be well-received in a Snowden thread.

<comment><USER34> > The only thing I'm upset about is what I perceive to be a large case of > groupthink. I have no other dog in this fight.

Suuuuuure. Please link to your many other posts (on a wide variety of topics) complaining about groupthink, especially ones where you don't open by complaining about how much you have to hear about these darned women and their abuse. And then follow up with a defense of how you totally deserve to be free to be an anonymous dick without consequences, no matter what cost there is to others.

> Weev posted a response that contained specific assertions. If he is lying > then rebutting them should be quite easy, yet the only responses are ad > hominem dismissals.

Weev is a famous troll, willing to say literally anything for entertainment and/or his own convenience. There is no point in refuting him. If you do, he will ignore you or come up with another set of lies. It's like trying to engage with a tobacco company PR rep. Reasoned dialog is a privilege earned through demonstration of responsible use of dialog.

> I could expound on the necessity of anonymity and lack of centralized > control, but it would fall on deaf ears here. The same argument would be > well-received in a Snowden thread.

Which is odd given that Snowden didn't actually make use of anonymity. He used the traditional method, which was journalist-mediated anonymity.

Look, your precious anonymity is safe. Nobody will end that. It's not even possible. For at least our lifetimes, literally anybody will be able to rent a server and open a website. What people want is to prevent anonymity from being used as a platform for abuse, harassment, and threats.

If you want to preserve the socially valuable sorts of anonymity, the best thing you can do is to condemn the abuse and work toward limiting it, while providing those who need anonymity with hard-to-abuse flavors of it. That will work a lot better than coming here and being anonymously shitty while demonstrating zero empathy for victims of abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Brand problem and anonymity mismatch.

Plenty of people hate brands. Microsoft, Ford, Chevy, Walmart, Green Bay Packers. You try to turn yourself into a brand, you're going to pick up hate because you're a brand not because you're a person and hating brands is culturally seen as a great idea that should be emulated as much as possible. So trying to fix hatred toward humans is pretty much a waste of time when the root problem is hatred directed at brands. Even if they are "personal" brands. Or rephrased whatever is done to fix this (if anything) the blowback will eliminate brand hatred (umm, good luck with that BTW). No more hating some random female programmer or journalist means no more hating walmart or ISIS or the Jews or Obama (oh wait Obama is a dude not a brand, well, he is both, whatever).

The other aspect is anonymity mismatch where semi-anonymous people are attacking very non-anonymous victims. The solution proposed over and over is less anonymity for attackers. Removal of identity from the victims would work just as well. This merges in with "personal brands" paragraph above. If supposedly you truly want to promote a message and not a brand, that brand being yourself of course, you'd do it for the cause and not the fame. Unless you really are promoting yourself as a brand using a message as a tool to gain fame, and unfortunately gains attacks.

Combine the two concepts and a "famous" non-anonymous brand, which happens to be an individual, will get a heaping dose of trolling for deep seated cultural reasons related to what it means to be a brand and what it means to be famous (and not famous). Good luck fixing that by getting distracted by "brands are people too" and "be nice to people", its the wrong tactic to fix it. You're trying to install deck screws with a hammer.

<comment><USER43> That's an interesting take on the matter.

An internet where all online identities are decoupled from offline identities seems possible, at least in theory. The idea that using your real name online makes you act more responsibly doesn't seem to work anyway.

But wait. That would only solve part of the problem - trolls targeting women, minorities etc. Even if you have a fictional online identity, once you have visibility and say something a troll doesn't agree with, they'll still come after you.

<comment><USER42> I think your last paragraph misses the entire point of my post... No matter how many people hate General Motors, the spokesmodel of the latest TV commercial is not likely getting death threats.

Its always the people who insist on making themselves the brands, that self- promote themselves as a brand, that attract the death threats and nut cases, just like any other "brand".

If you can separate the brand and the person in a way even the trolls can understand, let them hate the anonymous brand all they want, what does it matter?

Maybe a sports analogy helps? Everyone in the state of Wisconsin viciously hates the brand of the Chicago Bears and the journalists encourage it as much as possible. But no one sends death threats to Mr. XYZ who is a ticket collector at gate 3. One is a brand and hating brands is seen as a universal good (other than on social media, whoops). The other is just some dude making his way thru life, no problem.

(edited to give you another example. Look how /b/ on 4chan behaves toward women on /b/. Not women in abstract or women in journalism, I'm talking about humans with two x chromosomes talking on /b/ itself which is about 99% male trolls (and lots of lurkers). Frankly, /b/ behaves pretty nicely and civil almost gentlemanly toward women actually on /b/ AS LONG AS she doesn't go all self promotional "gimmie attention look here I am a girlie on /b/ everyone look at me because you're mostly guys and I are a girl so you must worship me its all about me me me me" and then they turn on her like starving wolves beginning with "show us (you can guess) or GTFO" and it generally kinda devolves from there, in fact it gets quite a bit worse, and very quickly. They now hate her because she is now a brand and not a person. Find me a trollier place on the internet than /b/ (good luck) and I bet they behave the same way, people treat people like people, and some people treat some brands like dirt, worse than dirt, worse than you can imagine dirt being treated, and if the brand happens to be an intensely self promotional person instead of an abstract entity or corporation or idea or whatever then things are really going to suck for that brand-which-happens-to-be-a-real-woman. Or TLDR if you want to be treated like a person on 4chan on /b/, its really easy no matter who or what you are, just behave like a person, not a brand or a PR rep or marketdroid. The internet is very nice to people, and occasionally utterly shockingly brutal to brands. Go choose your destiny...)

<comment><USER43> Ok, so your argument seems to be that if you hide behind an impersonal brand, you'll be safe. Sorry, but I'm not conviced:

> No matter how many people hate General Motors, the spokesmodel of the latest > TV commercial is not likely getting death threats.

The spokesmodel probably doesn't get death threats, but what about the president or the CEO of GM?

> Everyone in the state of Wisconsin viciously hates the brand of the Chicago > Bears and the journalists encourage it as much as possible. But no one sends > death threats to Mr. XYZ who is a ticket collector at gate 3.

Of course not, but are you sure nobody sends death threats to the manager of the team or the coach?

> One is a brand and hating brands is seen as a universal good

That's a bit hiperbolic. I don't consider Google bashing or Apple bashing, for example, to be a net good. IMO, it's just a tribal instinct that we haven't managed to get rid of yet.

<comment><USER42> As short as possible, people don't get undeserved hate, but self promotional brands get the burning hate of 10000 suns.

Some of those self promotional brands are multinational megacorps and when you divide the internet hate machine between prez, CEO as you list, plus board members, major shareholder investors, 10 thousand dealership owners, 10 thousand service dept managers, probably 100 thousand salespeople, the average "GM dude" gets a middle finger from the internet hate machine about once every decade and just kinda brushes it off. When the self promotional brand is one woman as the face of social justice warriors (generally speaking, not the specific lady from the article, although we know who I'm talking about), she's going to take the full impact square on full force no protection. Its going to hurt. GM can take a GM sized punch and laugh it off. One nice normal lady cannot take a GM sized punch. She, as a basically nice person, doesn't deserve it at all, but brands will be brands and culturally we think its OK to hit a brand that hard. And she wants to be a brand, so the painful result is not exactly surprising when it happens...

You wanna be as big as GM you better be able to take a GM sized punch. Nobody in the general public understands the difference between her financial statements and GMs statements, they just know her and GM are both on twitter, and we all know what twitter is for, so the guy who was screaming at GM for taking .gov bailout tax money last night is going to be on her case tonight, with 10 million of his "friends" and she's not going to like it.

"I don't consider ... bashing ... a net good"

Any mistake in my summarization of your position is my own. Given that disclaimer, the sound you just heard was every clickbait journalist and sports writer and PR dude in the world just disagreeing with you.

Members of the general public making an emotional connection with a brand is idealized because optimistic people assume it'll be like a laughter filled life long infatuation of a love affair right out of a sappy hollywood romantic comedy movie, forgetting that too many intense human emotional relationships end in hatred, murder, insanity, beatings. Not that many, thankfully, but enough to be a problem when you scale it to a 7 billion person marriage. If you use techniques that give people an emotional response to a brand, you might not like that response... And if you're GM sized you don't care, but if you're one human female sized that punch is going to sting a bit.

(Edited to add, think of social media as a multiplier. You can have the force of a billion dollar brand, if you're lucky and play it well. The bad news is if you don't play it well, you WILL have to be able to take a punch like a billion dollar brand. And that'll hurt if it all lands on just you. And the Billion Dollar Brands like it that way, who needs competition from the little people?)

<comment><USER43> > people don't get undeserved hate

That is obviously not true. Racism, homophobia, bigotry are every-day examples of undeserved hate.

Regarding the rest of your hypothesis - that when the brand is represented by a single person, the hate gets concentrated on that single person - it seems plausible.

I was going to make the argument that some types of "personal brands" seem to get more harassment than others, but then I found this piece about Mike Arrington (a white guy): [http://www.blogherald.com/2009/01/28/michael- arrington-takes...](http://www.blogherald.com/2009/01/28/michael-arrington- takes-a-break-after-death-threat-and-spit-attack/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> My two cents:

Years ago, I found Kathy's posts both very informative and entertaining. She seemed to be very generous with her time and writing. She even took the time to respond to me, personally, once on some question or other.

Something I read at the time about the Weev "data breach" circumstance, that I did not see widely reported. I'm sorry I don't have a reference at hand, so take this as unsupported and from memory: Weev did not immediately reveal the problem. He first took some time (in relative terms; I don't know or recall an absolute quantity) to decide what he was going to do about it and with the data. The reporting implied that perhaps he chose disclosure after realizing there was no other avenue that was personally more advantageous; or perhaps he came to the decision to "do the right thing".

I do NOT support the prosecution of Weev especially under the twisted rationale proffered. The Internet is a public space, and if you are stupid enough, lazy enough, and/or especially simply uncaring and arrogant enough to expose your (and perhaps worse, your _customers '/clients'_) private data there on an unsecured URI/URL, then that is YOUR problem and you DESERVE to be called on it -- all the more so when you do it deliberately as a part of your design.

Nonetheless, I was left with the impression that Weev is not Mr. Goodie-Two- Shoes. (And this was before I knew he was the one who apparently led the bandwagon against Kathy.)

The prosecution shifted attention from the fuck up that is AT&T, onto Weev. Another stupid and probably self-serving prosecution...

And that's the last time I want to use his name. Because, as has become apparent, the loss we are focusing on now has been contributions like those Kathy made to our online world.

So, my two cents. The post implied it is up to _us_ ; therefore...

</comment><comment><USER45> The best way to do something about this kind of trolling is to make the punishment fit the crime. This is exactly what laws were originally created for. Before we had laws and enforcement for actions like rape, murder, theft, assault, etc, I'm sure those actions had a very similar place in society--the majority didn't engage in them, but the minority did destroyed the lives of their victims. This is no different. Internet assault is a recent invention, made possible by the invention of the internet. Therefore, it follows that we need to invent appropriate laws and penalties. And the difference in severity of penalties between internet assault and unauthorized access to a computer needs to be similar to the difference in penalties between physical assault and breaking and entering.

If this was the case, then we can clearly see the problems with Tor Ekeland's statement, "You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers." Ekeland thinks that the big problem is that weev's AT&T activities were a crime. Regardless of what you think about that, the bigger problem is that weev's asshole activities are not a crime.

Ekeland consolidates a broad spectrum of harassment into one term "being an asshole", and labels it as not a crime. But that is short-sighted. As Kathy points out, there is a point where the spectrum of digital harassment jumps over into the realm of real-life damage. And that should be a crime that carries stiff penalties and is prosecuted aggressively.

Oh, and one other point. Kathy laments how weev has been glorified in the tech community. My guess is that this is caused by nothing other than ignorance. If all you know about weev is that he seems to fall into the group of people that were at least somewhat unjustly targeted by the government for, scare quotes, "hacking" and received a punishment that seemed too harsh, then you'll probably express support for him (read, that cause). Even if you've heard that he says things on the internet that are trollish asshole material, you, like Ekeland, probably won't change your opinion much. What tips the scale here is the knowledge that his troll speech has had the very real consequence of destroying someone's life. That fact is everything. If you don't know someone is bad, you can't correctly adjust your opinion of them. So props to Kathy for speaking out.

</comment><comment><USER46> The typical mixing up of things that infuriates people. Yes, some people apparently are mean to women. But the conclusion can not be that women can never be criticized.

If she could separate one thing from the other, perhaps she would have an easier time online.

</comment><comment><USER47> My take away from this article is simply raise your standards of people. Esteem should not be so fickle, it should mean something.

Our culture has a very short attention spans and we exalt the wrong people. It creates a weird tension. Being a bad actor is an equal opportunity field and the doubt this creates grows until reasonable people are swallowed.

We have no willingness to forgive and this puritanism has in the end soiled us.

<comment><USER15> What do you mean by "exalt the wrong people"? People like weev?

<comment><USER47> A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions. \-- Marcus Aurelius

<comment> mkr-hn That sounds bleak.

<comment><USER47> Not really. Ambition is like a bottle for your consciousness. It is the container. As your ambitions expands so does your mind.

If your ambition is to troll someone, that is your maximum value. I think if you look deeply many will realize that this is not the value they want. I believe that they can dream of something greater then to harass someone online.

If anything it is reminder to avoid being trivial. Ambition leads action. This cycle is who you are. It is beautiful self awareness.

<comment> mkr-hn I think we're talking about different kinds of ambition.

<comment><USER47> This is what I mean by ambition.

[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ambition](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ambition)

<comment> mkr-hn This comes off as very condescending.

<comment><USER47> It is not. There is an association with ambitious and grandiose in general language at times.

I think it is related to whole 'the meek shall inherent earth' way of thinking. Which is a whole other debate if we get into the gospels of Matthew, Luke and Q issue.

Which if you follow the logic of the statement to Matthew 5:3 it related more to an understanding of poverty and conduct. Ironically very much in line with something Marcus Aurelius would say.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:5)

So I get the confusion, because I used to make the same error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Am I the only one with the feeling like i'm reading the "diary" of Amy Dunne, in Gone Girl? Like i'm in the middle of the movie, and the plot could tip either way.

<comment><USER49> Possibly, yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I don't want to downplay the significance of this writing - thank you for calling it out!

I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces that you have (I think accurately) spelled out:

1) "Doxxing with calls to action (that — and trust me on this — people DO act on)."

For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

Those that aren't, and who want to stay anonymous, have a big job doing so - not just from trolls, but from the NSA and corporate advertising culture.

2) "Swatting (look it up). That nobody has yet been killed in one of these "pranks" is surprising. It's just a matter of time."

This is purely a political problem. Clearly there's a flaw in the system when police can enter a home by the say-so of someone they haven't verified to be in that home. A sensible solution here is to work to abolish (or nearly abolish) so-called "SWAT" teams. For those that remain, obviously their standard of probable cause needs to change so that the scope no longer includes phenomena that are so easy to defraud.

3) Physical Assualt

In a general sense, this is already illegal under law that is widely supported. It's worth adding sexual assault as well.

The example that you give, which is disgusting of course, seems solvable by some kind of client-side solution that prevents machines from activating photosensitive epilepsy.

At the end of the day, there's not _that_ much that somebody can do from a world away. To the extent that there is, I assert that the solutions are largely political, social, and cultural.

<comment><USER51> Good points, but they don't help much if you're active victim of trolling. E.g. try to sleep at night if they doxxed your children :-(

Technology affects culture (and vice-a-versa). Trolling is/was rampant in blogosphere and Twitter, but I have impression that Facebook and Google+, who both enforce much hated real-names policies, have less of a trolling component.

<comment><USER52> I guess it's because Facebook and Google+ are built mostly around reinforcing meatspace relationships. It's harder to be an asshole if your family, friends and cow-orkers read your comments.

<comment><USER53> You'd be surprised how happily people will make abusive and hateful comments on sites with facebook comments.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Outside Plato's Cave #2 - <AUTHOR> https://outsideplatoscave.substack.com/p/outside-platos-cave-2 <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem to have anything to do with Plato's Cave.

<comment><USER3> "Outside Plato's Cave" is the name of the submitter's newsletter that they have been excessively posting on HN. (10+ posts in the past day)</comment></comment>


Edward Snowden on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/officialsnowden <comment><USER2> FYI I wouldn't post it but @jack followed this so it has some street cred. On another note, HN seems to be case-sensitive in regards to submitted URLs, letting through duplicates: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6670001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6670001)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would call this fake on a blink, but it is followed by Neil Matatall, Will Strafach, daveaitel and _Jack Dorsey_.

</comment><comment><USER4> should say " _Fake_ Edward Snowden on Twitter."

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh yes, an unverified Twitter account using a very public profile picture. Totally real!

How about a profile pic of Snowden holding up today's newspaper?</comment>


Show HN: Crypto news aggregator and live chat - <AUTHOR> https://crypto.metachat.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, we built this crypto news aggregator for our friends. Now opening to everyone!

Let me know what you like/don' like, suggestions, sources you miss, filters you would like etc.

This is a side project, pseudonymous, free, no ads.

Thanks!</comment>


San Diego Hacker News Meetup #10 - <AUTHOR> http://anyvite.com/vstf729t0o

<comment><AUTHOR> This meetup is special; during this meetup, we'll be taking a short field trip to a very cool co-working slash startup incubator, clean tech, etc. building that is a 5 minute walk away. Note: may be our new "home" (esp. if we keep growing). Come check it out and send me your thoughts: <http://bit.ly/bK8vU3></comment>


Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13361472

<comment><USER2> Tabletop fusion per se is trivial:

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

Or whack a piece of palladium deuteride with a hammer.

Breakeven is another matter.

<comment><USER3> Right. One of my clients has working sonofusion, but are currently spending several magnitudes more energy to produce the effect than they are getting for output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very short time relative to fission.

</comment><comment><USER5> Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate.

<comment><USER6> Apparantly you don't either. There are plenty of scientific theories that are indisputably resolved and closed to debate.

<comment><USER5> I think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability>, is used by many to define an assertion as scientific. From the article,

"Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby theories become less bad".

A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy.

There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1.

I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your email dreams? - <AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News,
We've spent the past 2 years trying to build our vision for a great cross-platform email app. We are planning to launch in the next few months and are looking for ideas for how we can make email easier.
We would really appreciate hearing about any bad experiences you've had with email, ideas you have, or what you're looking for in an email app.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Support multiple accounts with different providers, but through a simple unified interface. Do what apple does in their mail app and default the settings where you can .. e.g. put in the default mailserver details for known providers.

Support for delay 5 mins then send to stop accidental sends.

 _Easy_ attach pictures or files - 1 or two taps.

If you need to do something CPU intensive (e.g. resize the 10MB image to 500k - do it in a thread in the background - dont make me wait, free up the UI!)

Let me view attachments inside your app (images, pdf, xls, doc minimum)

Support alerts for important emails (e.g. simple regex or string matching rules, if you get email that matches rule, then alert like crazy - ring the phone if you can - until I've acknowledged it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Really appreciate your response. Definitely going to go through all of these and try and make them happen!

<comment><USER2> No probs, let me know when your app is ready, I will buy it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear that! 100% Free :-). And no 3rd party servers involved. Our goal is really just to improve email as much as we can. In the future we will most likely offer premiums for things like tracking emails, getting more involved contact info etc for sustainability but our primary goal doesn't involve profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am mostly happy with Postbox (commercial Thunderbird fork) and I'm unlikely to switch, but I will consider a premium cross-platform email client. Things that come to mind:

* Reliability is crucial. I love Postbox, but version 4 is hanging a lot on El Capitan. Email is the _last_ program I want to have to Force Quit. It has to be rock solid and easy for me to import/export my mail.

* Search is also crucial - I have my entire 20 year email archive (minus spam) on my laptop! Fast search is good, but search also needs to reliable. It's more important that it ultimately finds the email I want. Postbox also has a problem where as soon as I index an email folder, it tells me the folder needs to be reindexed.

* Email for me is all about filters & prioritization. I have hundreds of rules that scan my email before I ever read it and assign a priority to the email. Sometimes I have to manually tweak the priority if the rules were slightly wrong, and the client should memorize that. My inbox should be sorted in priority, as if an assistant has already gone through, got rid of the junk and determined which are most important and the order I should do them in.

* Keyboard shortcuts are a huge win. Having 'a' for archive and 'v' for file (and a pop-up window where I can type & search for the folder to file an email into)... it sounds like a tiny thing, but it was a _huge_ win for my productivity when Postbox copied that from Gmail.

* I don't need calendar integration, I'll use a separate calendar app for that.

* While I don't need support, it would be nice to at least have somewhere to report bugs. Postbox lowered their price & discontinued support, and now I can't find where to report the problems or have a sense of if they'll be fixed. I want the opposite of what Postbox did: increase the price & give a premium experience & powerful, luxury product.

* I still use POP3. I know I'm crazy, but it feels good to not have all my email stored on a server.

Email is mission critical for me. I basically run my entire business through it. I'm happy to pay for it - in fact, I'm waiting for someone to get serious and charge $100 for their premium email client with annual upgrades. MS Office is $100/year, Photoshop is $120/year, and yet email is more important to me than both of those programs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback! I agree with all of your points. Your third point regarding filters and prioritization has proven extremely helpful to us with understanding what people want from email rules :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait, I'm confused by your post. You've spent 2 years solving this problem. You still are a few months away. Why are you now suddenly asking what problems we have that you can solve? Isn't that what you did 2 years ago?

My question for you is, what are you solving? What problems have you identified? How can you make my life better?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the response!

Totally get your confusion! To rephrase we spent 2 years building the technology behind our platform but are still building the app itself. Our statement of a few months was a bit optimistic and most likely should have been omitted. We are asking for problems as we want to ensure we haven't overlooked any important issues. Our overall goal is just to build a great email app for everyone, not just us, and this is the best way we know to do this.

Why build it and why 2 years?!? Before this project we had many previous issues with email. For example, sometimes important messages would fail to send, accounts wouldn't sync, and the experience just sucked overall. Since then I really wanted to build a email client for myself. Something reliable that just worked. A few months later Mailbox for iOS was released and demonstrated that people still had an interest in email despite the introduction of instant messaging etc. We absolutely loved the simplicity and beauty Mailbox brought to mobile email and thought it would be really nice to have something of this capacity for desktop especially given at the time there were barely any decent desktop email apps. So, we set out to build it. Given I was the only developer and had no prior experience with the email infrastructure it took a long time (2 years) to gain the proper knowledge and build the architecture behind it.

What have we solved? From our personal experiences we learned that adding more and more features, while nice, doesn't really help with the core issue we have identified. People gets lots of email. With this comes the realization that there really isn't much that can be done about this. Sure we could add some nice filters etc but the problem still remains. So while we do have a few extra features here and there our main focus has been on simplicity and reliability to cut-out all the time wasted from messages not sending etc so you can just focus on managing your email.

Summary So in summary we are building the email app we always wanted and are reaching out for ideas and experiences to make it one that not only we like but many others can like as well.

I really hope this made sense and answered your questions! If I failed to do so please let me know and I will do my best to answer.

\- Marcus

<comment><USER4> So in essence you have solved the problem of a mail client not properly notifying the user when mail does not send? I use Gmail, Mail, and Outlook. All of these notify me nearly instantaneously when a message does not send. On the odd occasion that my mail doesn't sync, I know almost immediately. Really, from my experience, email works quite well. As you say, you are reducing the time wasted by emails not sending and accounts not syncing so that time can be spent managing your email. That's fine, but we already have that. You say there is nothing you can do about the amount of mail people get. Unfortunately, that is the problem in the space I think. Mail clients and servers are very good at sending and receiving mail. But making the mail relevant, now that's a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you mean. For the time being I guess we are just trying to make a nice mail app. Hopefully in the long run we can differentiate ourselves more from the masses by determining as you said ways to show mail relevancy. We have a basic form of this at the moment in forms of the ability to filter by (Newsletters, Social, Personal, Service) but I hope we can expand it to be more useful in the future. Thanks for taking your time to get back to us, it really helps and means a lot :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have no problems with email. My problem lies with the types of email I get (recruiters, etc) only. Gmail is perfect

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response! I see what you mean, the best we could do for your situation is filter out recruiters I suppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to work for a company that provided support for Google Apps for Business (including Outlook through the Google Apps Sync tool), and a lot of the most common requests we received were as follows:

\- Ability to forward multiple emails at once (as far as I know, native support for this doesn't exist in Gmail, though an extension is available).

\- IMAP and POP3 are (surprisingly) still being utilised a lot more than you may think; I once asked a customer why they were still using POP and they explained that it helped them feel more in 'control' of their data as IMAP and other forms of syncing are merely representations of the emails themselves (including the WebUI), whereas POP3 gave them the ability to download a physical copy to store away - they didn't fully trust the whole 'cloud' concept and believed that segments (if not all) of their email could potentially disappear sporadically, which wasn't entirely implausible.

\- Backups. These were often a concern for customers, and it was quite a while until Google Vault was opened to end-users (at an extra charge). I feel it's having that peace of mind that matters, and without that users often contacted us requesting batches of messages to be restored, which can cause complications based on the TOC regarding data protection.

\- Consistent visibility of all email accounts (particularly amongst Apple Mail users); i.e. a list of each email account they own (regardless of provider) on the left-hand panel showing the primary mailboxes (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc.) This extended to iOS through the default Mail app (not sure if this is still a limitation preventing this functionality with recent versions of iOS).

\- Saving drafts or unread emails addressed to self as a way of keeping notes and reminders. I do know that Gmail (unless they still do) allow you to synchronise 'Notes' in iOS via native Mail app which then creates a 'Notes' folder in Gmail, where each 'note' is stored as an email with minimal message- body information. I found a lot of customers preferred this kind of ideal rather than relying on another external solution for their notes.

\- Push notifications; something that IMAP doesn't support out the box, where HTTPS protocols such as Exchange ActiveSync would be required for this.

\- Synchronising flags and categories for email (and contacts); something that was never supported in Google Apps Sync.

\- Automatic setup of email based on incoming MX record values (like how Thunderbird does it!)

\- Synchronisation of calendars, contacts, tasks, notes, etc. in addition to email. This is often a common request, and where it was supported by the Google Apps Sync tool, Apple Mail users would have to use separate tools (iCal, Address Book, Tasks?) to synchronise these. Outlook 2011 was available, but only synced email (unless cross-synchronised with iCal, quite messy).

Beyond feature requests, we frequently received reports from customers with PST corruptions and where this may be partly due to incompatibilities with the sync tool, PST does not seem like a stable format in which to store important email data. I've also seen situations where mail clients (commonly Apple Mail via IMAP) have deleted every message from the cloud mailbox store, resulting in requests to restore these messages or the arduous process of dragging and dropping those locally cached messages back into their Gmail mailbox -- those were long, drawn out phone calls; good times :)

I reckon your biggest challenge will be not just be in providing native cross- platform support, but rather cross-mail provider support. One of (if not the most) of the common issues we received from users were IMAP bandwidth limits being hit consistently, where Gmail imposes a limit on how much mail can be synchronised an hour/day/month. This was frequently reported for Apple Mail, to which I found related to the amount of active IMAP connections it keeps open to the server, and the frequency of any resulting requests. I imagine this was implemented for the sake of speed, but didn't play well with Gmail's limits.

We had a small number of users that used Thunderbird and I found it to be quite user-friendly compared to other mail clients I've tested; automatic account setup and optional modules (for migrating mail, syncing other data, etc.) being highlights here. I find the modular concept great here, and you can see it being used in Gmail in the form of 'Labs'. Some users like to have a minimal setup, so being able to choose your own features is a plus on many levels.

That's most of what I can think of for the meantime and I hope it helps. Do let me know if you'd like to discuss any of the above in more detail and I'll provide any further feedback where I can.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Your response is extremely helpful :-)</comment></comment>


What do you think of a game application as a challenge? - <AUTHOR> you play with people you know or not, and if you win, he must pay you and if you lose, you have to pay people pay on the system, both amounts are blocked until that one of those wins. The person who won the sum will be refunded and the one that has lost its sum will be paid automatically to the other player. <comment><USER2> [https://www.worldwinner.com/](https://www.worldwinner.com/)</comment>


PM4Py – An Open Source Python Library for Process Mining - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pm4py/pm4py-source <comment> yjftsjthsd-h What is process mining? The GH repo assumes that you already have the context (I appreciate them including a worked example, but it still doesn't tell me what they're trying to do), [https://pm4py.fit.fraunhofer.de/](https://pm4py.fit.fraunhofer.de/) has docs but all of them start with "this lets you do process mining", and examples don't quite make enough sense to try and infer it. About page has the same issue.

<comment><USER2> Process mining is a field related to data science. Basically you take an event log, put it into PM algorithms (e.g. heuristic miner or inductive miner) and you get a model of the underlaying process eventually (think of it as a flow chart). On top of that you can run analysis that look for bottlenecks, for example.

I'm not quite happy with the ecosystem though. Most tools are either cloud based like Celonis or organically grown Java bloatware (PROM, Disco). PM4Py also looks like a Java project that was tweaked until it was syntactically correct Python. However, it's probably the most usable free tool for PM out there. And to be fair, it's a quite young project also, docs looked much worse half a year ago.

Edit: added PM tools

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi guys,

A message from one of the founders of PM4Py. Cool that we are mentioned here, quite an honor actually.

Since we are an academic project, we have limited resources to generate more elaborate 'getting started'-type of documentation, etc. However, it is on our todo list. If you have any requests or ideas, let us know, it helps us to prioritize what is most useful.

W.r.t. the java project. The first lines of code are written by someone with a few years of primarily Java experience, I guess that explains.</comment>


My thoughts from IETF 96 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apnic.net/2016/07/28/thoughts-ietf-96/ <comment><USER2> For an entry that's titled "My thoughts on" it seems to mostly be a report on what happened with very little comment or reflection, except for the 6MAN section (and one or two other lines).

I'm not entirely sure what to takeaway from this either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting how this is since half a day on the front page with zero comments

<comment><USER4> The IETF is less and less relevant. For instance: how much of this is Huston talking about random DNS things, like DNSSEC and extensions, that will never be meaningfully deployed?</comment></comment>


The Lost Google Tapes - <AUTHOR> http://www.podventurezone.com/PodventureZone/index/index.html

<comment><USER2> I can see in Itunes how I can listen to the 4 most recent episodes on my iPod. But I can't after a few minutes figure out if, or how, I can listen to the archived tapes including the "lost google tapes."

This is either an "oh on, I am an imposter on HN" post. OR it is a comment pointing out a difficulty with the UI.

In either case, I'd sure rather listen to this on my iPod than my laptop!</comment>