Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365 - <AUTHOR> https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/ <comment><USER3> As somebody working in the healthcare industry, this is the killer feature for me:

>Q. What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support?

>A. Microsoft Teams is expected to be Office 365 Tier C compliant at launch. This broad set of global compliance and data protection requirements includes ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and FERPA. Microsoft Teams also enforces two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest.

The last time I'd looked into it, Slack was explicitly not HIPAA-compliant and therefore a non-starter for my team. We've basically had to stick to a combination of Hangouts for general chat and internal email for any HIPAA- covered data, so this would be a big win for us.

<comment><USER4> Could you tell us what desires you have and what issues the healthcare industry is hitting with computer based tech ? As an ex computer fanatics I wanted to make medicine all digital and smooth (naive), I see it's not there, yet I'm not in Health so I have no idea what are the reasons. I expect "world chaos" to be part of them.

<comment><USER3> If I'm understanding your question correctly, the single biggest obstacle in healthcare informatics today is interoperability. The industry grew up in a pretty ad hoc way and the result is that closed-off silos of data are pretty much the norm; every vendor has their own ideas about how data should be handled, and getting different systems talking to each other is a full-time job (my job, coincidentally).

HITECH and the ACA have forced the industry to start making meaningful steps toward real interop, but I'd say we're at least a decade out from it being less of a nightmare than it is now.

<comment><USER5> I agree. Integration is exceedingly complex. Data is stored and interpreted differently in every system, even if they share the same EMR, due to configuration differences in workflow, data setup, software versions, etc.

You can't exchange data without thoroughly understanding the clinic workflows that generated it or will be using it. It's all time-consuming and hard.

I work on a patient portal consuming data from the EMR, and even that is tremendously complicated to present medical data safely and correctly to a person.

\--

Sibling comment mentioned wanting to work in Health IT. The big market problem in healthcare is small companies doing good innovation (usable patient-side workflows, modern clinical tools, shiny things) running into the consolidated, massive EMR systems. The first question when they approach a healthcare system will be "Are you integrated with Epic/Cerner/whatever?" and if not, they will be sent away. Or be ready to embark on a very long, slow process and integrate deeply into workflows, data APIs, etc.

When a system consolidates their EMR (driven by real needs but also Meaningful Use incentives), it forces standardization and special one-offs become much harder. Getting a doctor interested in using a new device or software means working within the whole EMR - the staff doesn't have the time or leeway to go use tools that don't integrate, just because a doctor really wants it. That doctor needs to align large groups, get agreement, and it's going to take a lot of time and money.

It all comes down to interoperability/integration. Building cool stuff in healthcare is really easy since most of the tech in use is outdated and slow moving. But interoperability - required to sell into healthcare systems - <USER2> really, really tough.

<comment><USER3> > "Are you integrated with Epic/Cerner/whatever?"

The irony being that those tightly inegrated solutions tend to be some of the worst offenders in terms of being a nightmare for interop and walled-off silos. But they're popular because the pieces they do offer generally work.

And totally agree that the opportunity is there for highly targeted applications that cater to specific healthcare niches because the downside of the huge top-down systems is the fact that they're more generalized. But you have to be able to integrate them into that larger EMR environment for them to be realistically useful.

That said, the facility I'm at now (midsize, ~400 beds) took a best-of-breed approach and... well, there's a reason I say current interop is _bad_. It's appealing on the clinical side because groups like surgery or the ED or even endo get to run software designed to cater specifically to their needs, but the backend integration ends up being a huge exercise every time anything changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is exactly why Slack is not a defensible product.

1) The UI/interaction/UX can (and obviously will) be replicated, which has been slack's biggest value proposition.

2) There's no "stickiness" for companies. None of the data in chat is really a "system of record" and the switching costs are minimal. 3rd party bots/integrations are the only thing that really make it sticky for companies.

3) The IP isn't really all that interesting. Chat based systems have been around since day 1 of the TCP/IP protocol and it's design patterns are pretty well known. In other words, the tech can be replicated.

4) It's not solving a core technology problem for most business without introducing additional problematic externalities. [http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with- sl...](http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with-slack-but- now-im-dropping-it-completely-heres-why-2016-3)

<comment><USER7> What do you mean, not defensible? As in, it shouldn't exist, or there's no way it can be profitable long-term?

I think it's a great product experience, but as you say, without adding more value, it can be replicated by Zulip/Rocket.Chat/Mattermost/Cisco Spark/Microsoft Team/ you name it.

<comment><USER8> As in it doesn't have a moat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When Office 365 came out, I mostly compared the price to Google Apps and didn't really think Office 365 brought that much value.

Now, you can have a Google Apps, Slack, Trello, and Evernote alternative for your business under one subscription. Even if you choose the plan for installed Office applications on your computer, the price is still much more attractive than having to get a subscription for every one of the competitors.

Edit: They even have a Zapier and IFTTT competitor:

[https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/](https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/)

<comment><USER10> Whats funny is that Google Wave was basically a direct predecessor to these types of apps and they killed it before the technology really had a chance to catch up to the vision.

<comment><USER11> Yes! I'm so glad somebody else remembers Wave, it seems to have disappeared into the dustbin of history. I _loved_ Wave before it was killed, and while I know a lot of people still hold grudges over Reader, Wave is the axed Google product I miss most. The fact that you could have multiple threaded conversations in the same chat room was one of the best features for me, and Teams seems like the first descendant to have that. That alone is a plus over Slack.

<comment><USER12> Ah, wave.

I wish instead of just throwing it at the world, hoping for people to figure out what to do with it, Google had used it as infrastructure to build a variety of applications.

The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google shut it down. I still don't think there is a good equivalent to wave at the moment.

<comment><USER11> > The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to > figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google > shut it down.

Yeah, this tallies with my experience. I was in two separate Wave teams (Waves?), one for a six-person software team and one for a large-ish social group of non-technical people. The software team took to it immediately and loved it; the social group was mostly baffled and used it sparingly.

If Google had only iterated on it they'd be a in a great spot right now, but I guess eventually every big technology company has their "Microsoft moment" when they kill a product only to see that category take off years later.

<comment><USER13> Thinking about it, i feel that Wave shutting down was a turning point for Google.

It was built on XMPP, and allowed anyone to spin up their own Wave server that could talk to any other such server (iirc).

At the time Google (and also Facebook) used XMPP as the backend for their messaging service, and was even working on a extension for video and voice communications (libjingle?).

But then all that was scuttled, and they moved the messaging onto the proprietary Hangout. I guess they could not figure out how to monetize a distributed system like XMPP and instead switched to putting everything in a silo.

Then again, Hangout was tied closely to G+, and G+ was the brainchild of a ex- MS exec that was described as a "cookie licker" (meaning he would try to tie whatever other projects he learned about into his own) after his departure from Google.

<comment><USER10> The turning point was when Larry Page became CEO. For years Google tried to beat Facebook with open specs/protocols like XMPP, but there was also Activity Streams and others (PubSubHubbub). None of those really took off.

I think Larry Page made the company more product focused and a few successes, like Hangouts, "validated" that it was the better approach than focusing on open protocols.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Strange choice of hero photo to promote a chat-based virtual workspace: a team of people sitting around a table, thus having no need for the product.

<comment><USER15> As a Microsoft marketing person this really made me laugh :-)

<comment><USER16> As a fellow marketer can you comment on what the decision making process would be like for something like a product hero image?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The cheapest plan for Office 365 that includes this is the $5/user/month, which undercuts Slack's pricing.

It also includes a bunch of other stuff that I'm far less excited about; I wish they had gone with a more a la carte approach. I'm not confident that I'll be able to easily integrate this with the identities that I routinely use.

Also, it seems like an unwieldy name -- "I'll 'team' that to you", or "let's discuss this on 'team'"? I guess you'll just use "chat" and assume that context conveys the remainder.

<comment><USER18> [https://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy- future/](https://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy-future/)

>Consider your typical Chief Information Officer in the pre-Cloud era: for various reasons she has bought in to some aspect of the Microsoft stack (likely Exchange). So, in order to support Exchange, the CIO must obviously buy Windows Server. And Windows Server includes Active Directory, so obviously that will be the identity service. However, now that the CIO has parts of the Microsoft stack in place, she is likely to be much more inclined to go with other Microsoft products as well, whether that be SQL Server, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, etc. True, the Microsoft product may not always be the best in a vacuum, but no CIO operates in a vacuum: maintenance and service costs are a huge concern, and there is a lot to be gained by buying from fewer vendors rather than more. In fact, much of Microsoft's growth over the last 15 years can be traced to Ballmer's cleverness in exploiting this advantage through both new products and also new pricing and licensing agreements that heavily incentivized Microsoft customers to buy ever more from the company.

<comment><USER19> I once worked for a very big company that decided to use Microsoft SharePoint to unify all the forms of communication that had developed over the years. They hired a Microsoft consultant to help them out and I was basically her assistant during the entire process. This consultant was pretty expensive.

What I remember most is that she acted more like a salesperson than an actual help at getting SharePoint working in the company. She'd relentlessly suggest features or solutions that happened to require a newer version SharePoint, and obviously there were all sorts of other Microsoft solutions that would ease the company's pains.

It seems like a very clever approach, but I couldn't help but hate the role she had, and it made me want to avoid Microsoft at all cost... or at least until I'm not the one affected by the decisions she pushed the company towards, I guess.

<comment><USER18> Microsoft is rapidly moving away from this type of situation. You buy 365, always have the latest version, have nothing on prem to maintain, can beta test everything in the cloud before general release, AND most importantly, youre not getting an empty infrastructure/platform that isnt useful out of the box.

Sharepoint by definition required an architect or someone to flesh it out. Microsoft is taking on that role of turning a skeleton into a body.

Their pricing is more like (a made up example): Exchange $2, Sharepoint $2, Skype $2, OR Everything + BI, Teams, Groups, Planner, Flow, PowerApps and whatever else they make/dreamup this week for $3. It makes no sense to buy 2 things from Microsoft over the bundle. The pricing is even more apparent when you look at their mobile management offerings, and its cheaper to buy 4 products than it is to buy 2. So now that you are "getting Teams and Planner for free" you might as well try using them before shelling out for Slack and Trello. Plus compliance worries are handled.

Also, it's fairly easy to "leave exchange and sharepoint document libraries" if your setup and permissions arent complicated. Microsoft is pulling an Apple, and abstracting the filesystem away so you use Planner directly to store planning data, in a proprietary, non exportable format, instead of having a storage locker to store files. These "freebies" exist to make it more painful to leave the ecosystem once you have them up and working. That said i am guessing most companies dont have a ton of buyin to things like Planner or PowerBI yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really like the fact that Microsoft stresses the security of this product:

        Broad compliance standards support
        Data encryption at all times, at-rest and in-transit
        Multi-factor authentication for enhanced identity protection

The only other thing I think they didn't mention in the feature set that Slack is much better is 3rd party API integrations.

<comment><USER21> I've found Slack's API integrations to be mostly used as distractions from work, but that may just speak to the team more so than Slack

<comment><USER22> If you don't find its API integrations useful, then why use slack over just about any other communication software?

For us, the API integrations are huge. Slack is our one-stop hub for finding out what's happening throughout the company with integrations for PM tools, Monitoring, Alerting, Deployments, Build Systems, Support Emails, AnswerHub, GitHub, etc.

And of course, giphys.

<comment><USER23> It's general chatroom infrastructure where you don't have to be invited to join a chat room. @heres , good mobile clients and so on are part of the package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Two really unique things I think this product does

1) The use of GIFs/memes. While this seems silly, it is actually a big deal because it lowers the formalization of communication. Having used this product, you just have much better free flowing conversation and many times these "fun" items help you get the message across significantly better (ex. asking for updates or bumping things can now be done in a funny way).

2) Creation of a horizontal matrix. Having tabs is awesome because it makes information more compartmentalized and helps keep the priority the same on each screen. This essentially adds an extra layer of depth into the product without overcomplicating things (and imagine one day having ability to live edit documents on a tab, while chatting and seeing metrics). Keeping a multi- dimensional communication design model is very scalable to mixed reality too.

Essentially I see MSFT Teams as "Slack meets Google Hangouts meets Email", and see it doing very well from a product sense. However, their business strategy of bundling with O365 will not help them hit SMB, which is a conscious decision I think they made. I would have actually used Teams as a trojan horse to capture stickiness and then upsell users to O365, but overall still excited to see where this goes.

<comment><USER25> FWIW, Slack offers Giphy integration.

<comment><USER26> I've used the Giphy integration, and unless I was using it wrong it is horrendous. You can just write /giphy <word> and it will pick a random gif for you, and most of the time they are completely irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Microsoft is charging $6/month/user for online office/teams/1tb storage/50gb email storage/skypebiz/conference calling

Slack $7/month/user just for teams :///

anyhow i hate office so i am gonna stick to gsuite..

<comment><USER28> not trying to insult you or anything but microsoft probably doesn't really care. make most of their money from contracts with companies with thousands of people.

<comment><USER29> Yep, not to mention entire cities and state governments. Also, the entire Military and Military Industrial Complex...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Whether or not Slack has the better product or not, Microsoft will blow past them in terms of paying customers. Slack has 1.25 million paying customers as of now. Microsoft announced it signed a 400,000-employee comppany on launch day. They can easily sign Coca Cola, Macy's, McDonalds and Unilever in a matter of months, which could bring them at most 10 million paying customers. Microsoft has the power of existing customers to connect to. This is very much the Snapchat vs. Instagram Stories situation but for team communication.

<comment><USER31> The point might be moot but there is a difference between enterprise licenses and active users. In some big multinational business a subscription with a service like Office 365 signed and paid for at the parent corp level often means dick. Services like this are sometimes a negotiable value add so it may not even be on the radar in terms of implementation for the parent corp. Even when it is many child companies/divisions have a lot of latitude to choose how they collaborate because the bureaucratic corp IT groups are often unaligned with the child companies and focus on cost cutting. Ultimately they are inherently focused on providing a least common denominator solution which often ends up sucking equally for everyone.

To put it another way, look at something like SharePoint. Microsoft will happily tell you it has a ton of users. They might tell you that it's quite profitable. But SharePoint is a just a terrible piece of shit that everyone hates but IT departments drag everyone to it kicking and screaming.

So subscriptions will get purchased, contracts signed. Microsoft will make money. But will they take mindshare? Maybe Slack won't be able to differentiate enough. Time will tell but today employees actually want Slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> WHAT was Slack thinking writing this?!

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack- microsoft-t...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft- teams-new-york-times-ad)

Is this the worst ad in the history of advertising? HUGE publicity for Microsoft, with a schoolboy level of condescending, passive aggressive nonsense. Not sure what they were thinking with this one, especially with an opening line doing nothing but praising their competitor.

The confidence(arrogance) is astounding.

<comment><USER33> The "do it with love" part is especially funny as their support doesn't actually give a shit what their customers think or feel. They'll happily give you absolute bottom-of-the-barrel effort canned copy-paste responses to carefully written and considered bug reports, indicating the agent neither actually read nor remotely understood what you were writing about.

Slack doesn't have a box to stand on to tell others how to treat people.

<comment><USER32> That part was almost unreadable, it was so cringe worthy. "Made with Love" movement is a meme in itself at this point.

<comment><USER34> At the risk of sounding like a grump, something about the emojis in software movement really aggravates me. When I see "Made with love" or the hideous heart eye smiley, something makes me just not want to use the software that's showing it.

<comment><USER35> I agree. I guess it is to seem more like buddies, I think it is strange dynamic. I am paying for the product, I don't want an emoji response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Haven't tested Teams yet, but very shrewd move by Microsoft. They lead in the productivity suite with Office/Skype/Sharepoint etc in enterprises and a slack competitor which tightly integrates all their services is a wonderful addition. As someone mentioned on this thread, they could have picked a better name "Let me microsoft team it to you" sounds weird.

<comment><USER30> "Post it on Teams" I don't think people say "I'll slack it to you" either.

<comment><USER37> I sometimes hear: "I'll send it on Slack" which sounds alright to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> HIPAA compliance...nice, just killed all the "secure email/chat for healthcare" startups out there, since this is coming from the makers of Outlook/Office/every enterprise machines' OS.

Wonder how long until Slack upgrades their compliance.

</comment><comment><USER39> So I just tried the desktop app and it's terrible. Fuzzy fonts almost everywhere, feels sluggish. It keeps nagging about the mobile apps.

And then it popped up randomly over an hour after closing it, happily informing me that I got the latest updates. Thank you, but no.

The web app refuses to work with anything but the _very_ latest browsers. Why? Probably no reason at all. It also doesn't work in IE, which is kind of sad. It also consumes humongous amounts of memory, as does the desktop app.

The avatars, blurry too, of course, are embedded as Base64 Data URIs. Why?

All in all this is _yet another_ collaboration tool from Microsoft. It feels very rushed.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems like a shame that it is bundled with the overhead of Office 365. Makes Slack feel like a lighter-weight option.

<comment><USER41> What overhead? If you don't want the other stuff don't use it.

<comment><USER42> Would it be much cheaper and easier to activate if it wasn't bundled with Office 365? I think that's where aarpmcgee was getting at.

In any case, this looks like a much better value proposition than Slack. However, I can test Slack in a second by going to their website. If I want to test MS Teams, I need to think about Office 365, sign up, find where to enable it, etc. Right now signing up for Slack is friction-less.

<comment><USER43> I believe that they are offering the tier of Office 365 that includes this (along with all kinds of other stuff) for less than Slack costs per month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> We're a team of five people all remote and in different time zones. We use Slack, and its been great, but we also use Office 365. Teams with its wide integration with all the different MS products is really cool. What I see missing here is mobile apps, and 3rd party integration. Once those are available we'll have no reason to pay the extra $300 a year for Slack.

<comment><USER45> why office 365 vs google docs?

<comment><USER46> not op but office365 includes desktop versions of word, excel, outlook, etc and they are faster and have more features.

<comment><USER47> Not all license types include the desktop apps. Lower-tier licenses are web- only.

<comment><USER48> Pretty sure Web only became totally free a couple years ago. All paid version include desktop version too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I won't trust Microsoft to make the Mac version of this product as good as the Window's version. There is a long history of Office development that supports this conclusion. If you use Mac in your workplace, probably best to stay away from MS stack

<comment><USER50> From what I can tell, it's written in Electron. I assume they did this so that they could share the code base between desktop (win/mac), ios/android/winphone, and web -- keeping the features sets the same on all platforms. VS Code is the same way and that works beautifully on Mac. I expect that same for this.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft (Azure) but have no relation to Office or Microsoft Teams.

<comment><USER49> It is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate resources to ensure feature parity across both OS systems. When MS starts selling Teams to huge enterprise customers (e.g., Walmart, Ford, GM etc.) that are on 99% Windows platform and the feature request and pressure starts building, where do you think the resources would go ? It is not MS fault, it is the nature of their business. Windows based enterprises are their bread and butter and that's what they will prioritize. I work for an enterprise Cloud company, and we prioritize IE because of this reason.

<comment><USER11> > It is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate > resources to ensure feature parity across both OS systems

It _is_ about the technology platform, because the amount of resources necessary to ensure feature parity is a function of the platfrom. Word for Windows and Word for Mac are probably two separate giant monsters of early-90's C++ and keeping them in sync is agony. Assuming Teams is written in Electron, the amount of work is nowhere near the same; _not_ having feature parity across operating systems is probably harder than having it.

<comment><USER51> Word for Windows and Word for Mac are much closer together than you may realize. Pretty interesting talk about cross platform Office.

Part 1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw- nf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4) Part 2:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc)

<comment><USER11> Ah, interesting. I always just took it for granted that the old Office codebases were huge beasts, but maybe not. Thanks for the info!

Still, no matter how nice that codebase is, I assume they can't beat Electron for ease of X-platform compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> 1) Is this a cloud/online product, or does it require desktop installation? 2) I see it mentioning the a Preview is available, but I can seem to find it on my Office 365 apps panel (I'm a Business Premium account/user).

<comment><USER53> 1) It's both cloud based and has a desktop app. I believe the demo screenshots I saw were all in the browser though. 2) There was a mention that it wasn't available immediately but should start showing up somewhere in the dashboard around 1:30 EST. You might have to find it somewhere deep in the settings if I remember what someone else showed me. I.e. it's not in the main app grid by default and has to be enabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> If they offered it a la carte I would be a lot more interested. Our company is just getting over Microsoft hegemony. I'll never be part of getting back into that by buying Microsoft services that are intertwined.

<comment><USER55> Buying the cheapest SKU of O365 that has Microsoft Teams is actually cheaper than per-person cost for Slack.

<comment><USER54> For now it is. If service income is to replace on premise licenses the price will have to go up.

<comment><USER56> Disagree. People had fairly long upgrade cycles on desktop office before office365. A subscription provides more reliable income.

<comment><USER54> Most of Microsoft's income comes from businesses. They already use a subscription service called Software Assurance. That's the income they will need to replace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> [https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5055/5405231875_927598741d_z.j...](https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5055/5405231875_927598741d_z.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER58> The requirement to have an Office 365 account will not allow it to grow. I understand Microsoft wants people to pay for Office 365 and then for more and more services, but they need to have a free tier so that influencers can try out their solutions, and then the money will come on its own! So, the "new" Microsoft is not really "new" in its marketing strategy. I was unpleasantly surprised that as a developer I cannot use Hyper-V on Windows 10 Home either as the Hypervisor is free with macOS.

<comment><USER59> Gees, I guess they will be constrained to their 60M paying customers and their 1,2B employees.

Tough life.

<comment><USER58> Well, you oversimplify things, and that's a very typical fallacy. Just like they have a market today, without something to keep people loyal, it can dissolve pretty quickly. Look at Apple! With their arrogance and laziness, they are going down the drain fast. Android runs on 9 out of 10 phones, people are swapping Macs for Surface, and things didn't look like this not so long ago! Arrogance and laziness killed MySpace, too!

You always need to flirt with your customers and mostly - with the influencers! Microsoft used this strategy to flirt with developers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Maybe now my office will stop with those endless email chains.

</comment><comment><USER61> Since this was harder than you expect it to find on the main announcement page...the page you want to go to in order to actually access teams is here: [https://teams.microsoft.com/](https://teams.microsoft.com/)

And the app downloads page is here: [https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads](https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads)

I'm getting an error on my end though after following their activation steps so I need to figure out why it's doing that. (Shows me "errorCode=AdminUserLicenseNotPresent" so maybe there's an extra step I have to complete that wasn't mentioned)

<comment><USER55> Maybe you have to get your enterprise admin to enable it?

<comment><USER61> I am the Enterprise Admin...that's what I'm confused about, since I already went through their simple 3 steps to get started video which was essentially just flipping a switch in the Office 365 Admin area. I expected it to work right away, but then couldn't see where the actual main page for Teams was, so I kept on looking and eventually found it, but even so, it didn't seem to allow me to login yet...right now I'm chalking it up to them not being fully ready for everyone to use it.

<comment><USER62> Ever figure this out? I did the same thing today! I enabled it, and both the app/browser version say I need to enable it. Already did, but maybe it just takes a little while.

<comment><USER61> Hi Kratisto...yup I did. It appears that Teams isn't actually for our type of organization yet (since we're an EDU organization using Office 365...seems like it won't be available to us until early next year so we'll have to wait until then from the responses I received back from our Microsoft sales people over at Computer Land).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> +1 for adding another great option. The more options the better...

-1 for no shame when coping the design.

</comment><comment><USER64> I saw a few comparisons to Slack and Google Wave.

But, seriously, this is likely more like Microsoft Groove (originally from Groove Networks) brought to the web. This idea has been around for a very long time.

</comment><comment><USER65> How does this relate to Skype for Business (previously Lync)? Is it a update and rebrand of group chat, or something separate?

<comment><USER18> if you start a private chat with a user, and they have never logged into Teams, it sends them a Skype for Business message. So I can be using Teams and they can still be using S4B

the team chats are threaded with embedded documents, likes, emojis etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This actually looks really good, and considering the security/compliance features I'm seriously thinking of moving from Trello to "plans". It comes close to trello for UI and considering it's available through my organisation it means I can put non-public data in my weekly task lists too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Somehow reminds me of Google Wave.

</comment><comment><USER67> Slack Killer.

I have been saying for a while that Slack is not a defensible product and that their customer base is notoriously fickle.

As microsoft, google, and apple begin integrating chat more directly into the OS Slack will see its market share vanish.

</comment><comment><USER68> Can I setup MS Teams without IT Admin?

<comment><USER69> depends on how your tenant is setup

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Yammer with a new skin?

<comment><USER71> To the other replies suggesting similar products from different vendors, you're missing the point. Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 so could have very well used a lot of the same tech under the hood of Teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Looks quite good, maybe worth to try it...

</comment><comment><USER73> Creative name for a slack clone...

</comment><comment><USER74> Whatever happened to Microsoft's billion dollar Yammer acquisition? Has it already been added to the company's write-off fall of fame?

Hmm, kind of looks like it, doesn't it?

[http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing- yamme...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-yammer- enterprise-in-january-2017-will-start-integrating-office-365-groups-first/)

Is Skype next?

<comment><USER75> The headline is misleading, it is only that Yammer is not a standalone product anymore but is part of the Office365 suite.

<comment><USER76> Apparently the whole yammer team was working on this, since it's still not possible to edit and update post on yammer. Which is a pain to write longer posts with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Great, but would I trust Microsoft with my data? I don't think so.

<comment><USER78> but you would trust slack with your data ? Also Microsoft has on prem version so you don't have to trust anyone

<comment><USER77> I thought they don't have on prem version. Cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Will it come to on-premise SharePoint 2016 (or later) too? Or is this just a cloud-only service?

</comment><comment><USER80> I don't understand how chat service can be so intertwined with printer-first applications (Word, Excel).

<comment><USER81> A lot of large documents are team efforts, and you'd start with a discussion outside the document before it moves into comments inside.

<comment><USER80> So if company prefers printed documents and bureacracy, why not just talk by telephone or use Microsoft Lync? Why they're trying to combine these dusty office things with hipster web interface?

<comment><USER81> It's not necessarily a question of preference; sometimes your employer may be contractually required to write specific forms of documentation.

Excel can also be very effective as a small database - I did some volunteer IT work for a co-op grocery store that runs their entire business operation off spreadsheets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> It doesn't scroll new messages, but instead shows a button "New Messages" that you must click or mouse wheel scroll.

We tried using Teams last night for release coordination. This misfeature made it practically unusable. It's a seriously dumb feature. I'm still a bit baffled that someone actually designed and developed it, thinking it was a good idea.

<comment><USER83> Presumably this works exactly like Skype. All new messages are scrolled but if you manually scroll up to read old messages you'll get a button for "new message" that you must click on to resume. Which makes sense in that you don't want the screen to automatically advance if you are manually scrolling for old messages.

<comment><USER43> No, they broke this in one of the more recent updates. It never scrolls to the bottom once you get more than one window full of messages automatically anymore.</comment></comment></comment>


p5.js – A library to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators - <AUTHOR> https://p5js.org/ <comment><USER2> I give them credit for putting together a fun explanation of what they are trying to do.

I've used Processing Java and Processing.js, so I assume this is some continuation or extension of those projects.

It might be more effective if the explanation focused on the _benefits_ of using p5, rather than just saying "It makes a circle" or "It draws a slider" (which are _features_ ).

For instance, maybe some of these are true:

\- p5 speeds the creation of animations on your site

\- p5 allows beginners to create complex interactions compatible across devices

\- p5 allows low-cost prototyping of game designs

\- p5 shrinks site size by replacing videos with animations

Of course you would have to look to the community and beyond to figure of which resonate with potential users.

<comment><USER3> P5 is indeed the official port of Processing for Java (Processing.js being an independent attempt from John Resig). But like Processing, P5 is more about artistic realisations than applied use, which all of your alternate descriptions tend to lead to.

<comment><USER4> _> P5 is indeed the official port of Processing for Java (Processing.js being an independent attempt from John Resig). But like Processing, P5 is more about artistic realisations than applied use, which all of your alternate descriptions tend to lead to._

This sounds unnecessarily negative. Even in the light of pure artistic realisation, I found 3 of the 4 points still very good.

The first point __is__ very much about artistic realisation:

\- p5 speeds the creation of animations on your site

The second and last point are about the accessibility of the artistic stuff. Some don't care, but others want to show their stuff and all their intermediate stuff to the widest audience possible:

\- p5 allows beginners to create complex interactions compatible across devices

\- p5 shrinks site size by replacing videos with animations

But as gp said, this list is just an inspiration and the real list of benefits needs to be determined empirically with the community of (potential) users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've built all kinds of things with d3, I've been using it for over 4 years. It's a seriously great library.

However, there's a cognitive overhead of thinking in selections and update patterns... It's hard to remove state and make composable components that can work well in React, Angular, et al.

While p5 sounds like the answer. We've been stripping away imperative programming on the web for the best part of it's history. Modern web development is more and more declarative every day... I just can't help shake the feeling it's a step backwards.

<comment><USER6> > While p5 sounds like the answer. We've been stripping away imperative > programming on the web for the best part of it's history. Modern web > development is more and more declarative every day... I just can't help > shake the feeling it's a step backwards.

Maybe, but I really like it -- a use case I'm looking at is making interactive versions of the types of figures you'd normally find in textbooks, and there's no one good library for this kind of thing. Each case is unique and has a large illustrative element. p5.js (and, before that, Processing) just allows you to get stuff done. I think that's why Processing took off so much in the artistic community too.

<comment><USER7> I think you're agreeing with the parent. He's saying the idea that everything's supposed to be declarative is a step backwards, because indeed sometimes you just want to write some imperative code and make something happen.

<comment><USER5> Excuse my clumsy wording. I mean p5 feels like it's out of step with modern web development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made a few fun tools with p5.js a little over a year ago.

Image quilting: [http://clayheaton.github.io/p5jsTiler/index.html](http://clayheaton.github.io/p5jsTiler/index.html)

Genetic algorithm cartoon generator (that I never really finished): [http://clayheaton.github.io/generative_cartoons/index.html](http://clayheaton.github.io/generative_cartoons/index.html)

I love both Processing and p5.js. They're great tools for fun creative coding and also both are useful other types of prototyping and app development.

Some day I'll get around to extending the image quilting sketch to generate Wang tiles.

</comment><comment><USER9> For anyone who has previously read or seen Shiffman's book 'The Nature of Code', he's also ported the examples in the book(Processing) to p5.js

[https://github.com/shiffman/The-Nature-of-Code- Examples-p5.j...](https://github.com/shiffman/The-Nature-of-Code- Examples-p5.js) [http://natureofcode.com/](http://natureofcode.com/)

<comment><USER10> This is a great book and unique. I am impressed he ported his demos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> p5js is an awesome library! If you're looking for ideas to play with, checkout Dan Shiffman's Youtube Channel - Coding Train[0], a series in which he build ML libraries, games and lots of fun mini-projects.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman](https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman)

<comment><USER12> His coding challenges are a source of endless entertainment for me. I swear I could watch an hour a day of his unique combination of cheery, clumsy, and informative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't get why that guy in the video is so excited about this. Isn't this just some interactive JS animations overlaid on top of video?

I say this because at first I was also excited just by watching that guy get excited, and then suddenly I was like "wait..isn't this already possible with pretty much 100s of libraries out there?"

Maybe someone can explain what makes this unique (so much so that the guy is so excited about it)?

<comment><USER14> Processing (from which p5 takes its inspiration) has an explicit goal of being beginner friendly. I was first introduced to it in an art class.

From the processing website: > For the past fourteen years, Processing has promoted software literacy, particularly within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach programming fundamentals within a visual context, Processing has also evolved into a development tool for professionals.

[https://processing.org/overview/](https://processing.org/overview/)

They (Shiffman, in the video) have a pretty cool youtube channel where they use processing, p5, etc to teach programming, visualization, graphics, that kind of thing. I think it used to be called "coding rainbow" but he ran into copyright trouble I'm assuming.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman](https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman)

<comment><USER15> > Processing (from which p5 takes its inspiration) has an explicit goal of > being beginner friendly. I was first introduced to it in an art class.

openframeworks.cc is a vastly superior library IMHO (C++ though) for serious visual work.

Processing already has a JS port which can be used both with Javascript and a Java like language ( [http://processingjs.org/](http://processingjs.org/) )

The book [http://natureofcode.com](http://natureofcode.com) which is a good starting point for creative coding uses ProcessingJS

<comment><USER16> processingjs.org hasn't been updated in years, and the java-to-javascript interpreter is full of quirks.

With p5 you can get as close to the metal as you can in JS (for example, it has a WebGL based renderer if you want, and you can use typed arrays for your data). So it's a lot better.

Regarding OF: yes, for computationally intense stuff it's a lot faster, a native OpenGL application written in C++ _should_ be faster than using JS in the browser.

However, it's also a lot more painful to develop in IMO. I tend to work out my sketches in p5js these days, then when I need performance port it over to OF. Given that most of the time the performance bottleneck is either "how many particles" or "how high-res is the input video", testing in p5 is a simple matter of scaling down.

<comment><USER17> their webgl is completely broken and unusable. do not use it for webgl at all, use other libraries like threejs.

<comment><USER16> Can you explain how it's broken for you? The examples work just fine in all of my available browsers, but I know that's only a limited sample:

[https://p5js.org/examples/3d-sine-cosine- in-3d.html](https://p5js.org/examples/3d-sine-cosine-in-3d.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Past discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8144212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8144212)

</comment><comment> ryan-allen Developer friendly intro: [https://p5js.org/](https://p5js.org/), examples [https://p5js.org/examples/](https://p5js.org/examples/) (this library is ace!)

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately, rendering all that text on a canvas even in your link makes it inaccessible to many people living with disability too - the same as the intro video without captions.

This is a really good example of how not to use canvas.

<comment><USER20> This seems like a petty thing to complain about to me considering how excellent the tech is and how it makes interactive graphics attainable for so many people.

<comment><USER21> ...but it continues to apply to less than the entire human base that generally browse the Internet. Seems like it makes interactive graphics attainable to people who were already able to, just making their effort to achieve it less.

<comment><USER22> I agree. When we made this video four years ago, we didn't know much about accessibility at all. We have been working since then to improve things. While we're going to leave this video alone as it's quite outdated (and probably remove the link from the website soon), we are building a web-based p5.js code editor that aims to be accessible to blind and low-vision users. In addition to being screen reader compatible, it will make the canvas, normally impenetrable to screen readers, accessible as well by providing and option of three different types of audio feedback based on what type of sketch you're trying to create. Claire Kearney-Volpe and Mathura Govindarajan are heading up the efforts, and Cassie Tarakajian is leading the development of the editor (more here: [https://medium.com/@ProcessingOrg/a-p5-js-web-editor-for- all...](https://medium.com/@ProcessingOrg/a-p5-js-web-editor-for- all-64aaa3f9d767)). We're aiming for a release very soon. We are always looking for more accessibility feature testers, so if you are interested in previewing an alpha version please email firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER19> > it will make the canvas, normally impenetrable to screen readers, accessible > as well by providing and option of three different types of audio feedback > based on what type of sketch you're trying to create

So impressive and great to hear! This will open up the canvas to so many applications currently we can't use it for. You could build so many web components running at a smooth 60fps that are currently janky!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> both processing and p5.js are amazing but I'm curious are they amazing by design or by effort and luck.

Bret Victor went over many of the reasons why Processing is poorly designed in his opinion

[http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

it kind of made I feel like more of right place at right time for success rather than by design

not that I have any hope of supplanting it with something better anymore than 8086 assembly being replaced something more elegant.

note: much of that linked article is not related so search in page for Processing

</comment><comment><USER24> At first I thought it was a video until he said that the clusters are avoiding his head. It is nice to have video interactivity like this.

Also, my opinion might not be popular but kudos to them for making the introduction so dumb-proof with the video and the visuals. More projects have to do this.

<comment><USER25> What video? I'm on mobile and there isn't one in the index page. "Request desktop site" is not honored either, as usual.

<comment><USER24> I think they changed the landing page. Now if you click on that "Hello!", or go to hello.p5js.org it comes up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is by far the most novel way to introduce a library that I've seen in a long time and also very impressive. It isn't accessible, and I don't think p5 can be accessible as well, so I guess that is OK. I really bow to such original presentation.

<comment><USER27> Check out this comment about p5 and accessibility :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14750486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14750486)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There were a video ??? Waited 40s and nothing happened (iPhone + Safari)

<comment><USER29> [http://hello.p5js.org/](http://hello.p5js.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Link took over 10 seconds to load on iPad before I gave up.

</comment><comment><USER31> One upvote for the interactive playground on top of a video of a friendly fellow named Dan that tells you what you can do.

</comment><comment><USER32> About the web design: please value readability a lot more; now it is quite difficult to read the text with that background. Besides that, Processing was really fun to play with back when I did, I wish you the best as well!

</comment><comment><USER17> love p5js, I put together this site for practicing drawing with p5js: you get challenges to draw: [http://www.pushpopchallenge.com/](http://www.pushpopchallenge.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I've seen Mike Brondbjerg speak a couple of times about iterative artistic development using Processing and p5.js. It's really cool stuff, and I'd suggest seeking it out if the area interests you.

</comment><comment><USER34> Did… did they render the text on the landing page as an image?

edit oh no, I see the <p> elements… but the page makes the text non- selectable, and the right-click context menu acts like I clicked on the background image.

</comment><comment><USER35> Firefox on MacOS and it sounds like it's about to take off.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a bit surprised that there aren't more comments about following the submission link and then being dropped on, what is apparently a technical product/project, with nothing but a full screen, long-form, non-transcribed video. If I hadn't read the comments here, I would've never assumed it was something technical. And I'm still not going to watch that video.

Hopefully they can put together some text that I can digest accessibly...

</comment><comment><USER37> I get that this is designed to facilitate "learning to code within the context of the visual arts" and I think that's great but holy shit tone down the javascript nonsense on your website. Granted, I'm not the target audience but the site was gorgeous before the animations started. Simple, complimentary colors made me want to read the carefully chosen font face.

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks cool, but the page uses one full CPU core on Chrome on my Linux machine.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can't click on links in Edge (except the top menu)

</comment><comment><USER40> But the arrows don't point to their heads.

</comment><comment><USER41> They are really excited people.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can we please get this link changed to the text intro, dang, or anybody? It's at: [https://p5js.org/](https://p5js.org/) It's a cool project, so I don't want to downvote it, but the sound is loud and not opt-in.

Or at least add a [video] tag or something. It woke up half my family.

<comment><USER43> While loud and awkward, it's one of the better ways I have been introduced to a library. I'm kind of tired of the "<x library> is a <word I don't know> for <task I'm not aware of>ing <word soup>, it's that easy!"

<comment><USER44> Perhaps I'm just old and grumpy, but the video seemed to be more about the people in it than the library itself. I guess it was pretty fun to make, but bleh, a little overkill for a JS lib?

<comment><USER43> Honestly I think it's great showing what it can do as there were parts of the video that were interactive. The point is to show that P5 allows you do do interactive visual applications and an introductory video that shows that you can do that is rather interesting. I just started checking out this [http://hello.processing.org/editor/](http://hello.processing.org/editor/) and it is in the same spirit. I personally think this should be how all instruction should be. There really is no point in learning if doing is saved for a possible future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I just spent 30 seconds looking at a loading spinner - no thx bye p5.js</comment>


Ask HN: Are specializations at udacity, coursera etc worth it? - <AUTHOR> Udacity calls them nano degrees, coursera calls them specializations etc - have you done those? Which ones did you like (learning/knowledge wise)? And from a job perspective, do they make a difference? <comment><USER2> Before i tell you my opinion, I want you to know that I spend most of my day learning (still student) and when I'm not in university, I am learning from MOOCS, and to take this a bit further, I have done more than 100 MOOCs on all the three platforms Coursera Edx Udacity, each of these has its own PROs and CONs, learning in itself is awesome, it has made me in more knowledgeable more than most my peers, but one thing to note, is that while the content might be amazing, the certificates or whatever you get from it are mostly not recognized and doesn't really have value in the industry, what I can suggest you to do, is to use your knowledge from these courses to build cool projects that can show future employers how skilled you are and your mastery to that specific domain, That's my experience, I wish you good luck learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any favorites from the courses you did? 100 courses is some serious effort, kudos :)

<comment><USER2> Sure, there is of course the CS50 introduction to computer science (Best MOOC EVER), also Sedgewick lectures on algorithms and data structures, control of mobile robots on coursera and the software engineering interview on coursera, beside that most courses on Udacity are awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Udacity nano degrees are industry recognized. A lot of people has been hired by AT&T and others. Besides, Udacity is changing the hiring process by eliminating interviews. So now we can rely on porfolios built in those nano degrees and rest assured that psychological factors from recruiters and interviewers will be eliminated. It is great, and congratulations on those 100 MOOCs! Maybe you can apply your skills and build something for the advance of human species.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was asked a similar question during a recent interview. "What certifications [more traditional PMP/CFA style] from XXX do you have?"

My reply was something along the lines of "I don't pursue certifications, but learning that I can benefit from, you can, and can benefit the organization. 90%+ of people with such certifications can't demonstrate 10% of what was in the syllabus, and you know this is true."

This question was general, but I directed it towards a Learning Managment System which I implemented in a past company. There are props for implementing an LMS in one's org too. This was quite special (video, interactive, nice UI), but anything at a basic level will get you noticed as a 'strategic thinker'. Do it if you're (the figurative reader) doesn't have one already.

"Does the system offer certification?"

"Of course it does, but it also implements a development plan for anyone on any course, for their management to rate their implementation of skills learned." Closing the loop in performance assessment; a bit harder.

\---

Demonstrate learning, don't just brag about it. MOOCs are fantastic, and to take part as a contributor (to a larger, fee paid, internal, or open MOOC) is to release years of learning and understanding you may have, that others don't, and as a participator, to harvest that cerebral mass of others and yourself.

Use it, implement it, criticize it, grow it. People are sharing, share back by whatever means, and demonstrate you do so; that principal is priceless and makes certification at whatever cost worthless. Though by doing so, monetary return is not denied.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm taking several classes via Coursera to brush up on algorithms/data structures for fun and personal interest, but find it really hard to stay focused on the video lectures. I much prefer to read textbooks when learning any new information. But that's beside the point. I've conducted an interview and the candidate had taken multiple MOOC's on Coursera and Udacity and that really impressed me. Showed that the candidate actually cared about learning and deepening their knowledge in some areas.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently finishing up the Data Science course and whether or not it's worth it totally depends on your goals.

These courses are not going toake you into professional in the field, you'll need more than just one certificate for that. But they're a good way to explore what you'll be doing in a given field and they're a great adjunct to any formal education you may have.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are looking to learn about something new, Cousera, edX... are great. I tried them before but I'm not sure if their certificates are worth anything.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find market/industry data? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
I'm looking to find some market/industry statistics to build the story around my venture. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence (personally and through conversations with individuals) to support my story, but I know hard data is king.
I'm looking for info related to the social network and online dating markets. Where are some good places to look for this kind of stuff? I'm not looking to pay for it.
Any alternative methods or techniques for estimating or finding this sort of data (especially if used by you in the past) would be helpful.
thanks! <comment><USER2> OKCupid used to do some blog posts and provide data, but I'm not sure about how this has been handled since their acquisition by match.com

A collection of dataset sources was put together by jacquesm, and you might find something useful in it: <http://jacquesmattheij.com/Free,+Public+Data+Sets>

</comment><comment><USER3> "I'm looking to find some market/industry statistics."

Not necessary to prove its a big market because everybody knows there is a demand in this space - no point selling that point.

You can just go by how much revenue you can steal from big companies: "30% of Match users leave before meeting someone", "LavaLife has $x million is revenue that has been growing for at this rate", "Personals in papers and Craigslist have x number of users, trying to do y but can't".</comment>


Fare: A killer app for the XO? MYCIN - <AUTHOR> http://fare.livejournal.com/151064.html <comment><USER2> There's also DXPLAIN. I wonder if the datasets are open anywhere?

I've always wanted to build something around medical bulk data. Lots of places you could do interesting stuff: diagnosis, symptoms, drugs, drug side-effects, outcomes, etc.

I'd kill for a set of symptom -> diagnosis priors...</comment>


Is Homo naledi just a primitive version of Homo erectus? - <AUTHOR> http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/naledi/homo-naledi-homo-erectus-2015.html <comment><USER2> One of the most significant parts of this rebuttal is this team's commitment to open scientific data. They've made 3d shape files available on [http://morphosource.org/](http://morphosource.org/) and encourage critics and reviewers to _print out the bones_ and compare them.

Imagine the kind of access this gives laypeople! Everyone from poor institutions in developing nations to high schools in farm towns can now duplicate these bones for research or to simply inspire wonder about human history because of new technology and one team's belief in free information.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks very well argued, though I'm not exactly in a position to judge the accuracy of either claim.

Still, if Tim White has proposed new species based on very flimsy descriptions and then argues against much better documented species, that's... certainly interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> The end of the pbs documentary on the excavation suggested that because there is proof of interbreeding among different Homo species, that the hierarchical genus-species-subspecies framework may not work as well as a mesh-like graph.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, really, _Homo sapiens_ and _Homo erectus_ will probably turn out to just be very widespread species throughout Afro-Eurasia that had a lot of regional subspecies? Doesn't seem too surprising to me. Perhaps even _Homo antecessor_ and _Homo heidelbergensis_ will turn out to be two subspecies of the same species as well.

<comment><USER6> The article answers the question with a no... I presume you didn't read it.

<comment><USER5> I didn't refer to _Homo naledi_ in my comment, but nonetheless the article does touch on the fact that _Homo erectus_ was a widespread species across Africa-Eurasia, but after _nadeli_ was around.</comment></comment></comment>


Some Notes on the "Who Wrote Linux" Kerfuffle (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/ <comment><USER2> (2004)

It's an interesting historical report, but all the controversy (or not controversy) is about a book published in 2004.</comment>


AFNetworking 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/afnetworking/afnetworking#readme <comment><USER2> Kudos to Mattt Thompson and the whole community of collaborators that put work into this release. AFNetworking makes a large part of my job making iOS apps a joy, and I can't wait to start working with latest round of changes and features in this new release (including support for NSURLSession in iOS 7).

That said if you haven't used AFNetworking before, I highly recommend doing so. Start with the AFHTTPRequestOperation class(es). And if you're writing an API wrapper of any kind, definitely check out subclassing either AFHTTPRequestOperationManager (for iOS 6) or AFHTTPSessionManager (for iOS 7).

Edit: Derp, I was wrong — AFHTTPClient's been split-up. Thanks for calling me out, @dcaunt; I've updated my remarks.

[https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/wiki/AFNetworki...](https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/wiki/AFNetworking-2.0-Migration- Guide#afhttpclient--afhttprequestoperationmanager--afhttpsessionmanager)

<comment><USER3> With AFNetworking 2.0, you'll use AFHTTPRequestOperationManager in iOS 6 and AFHTTPSessionManager in iOS 7 rather than AFHTTPClient.

<comment><USER2> I glossed over that originally, apologies; I've updated my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Response serializers can also be chained, using AFCompoundSerializer"

 _Does a dance._

"AFNetworking 2.0 introduces AFURLSessionManager, which manages an NSURLSession object based on a specified NSURLSessionConfiguration object, and conforms to <NSURLSessionTaskDelegate>, <NSURLSessionDataDelegate>, <NSURLSessionDownloadDelegate>, and <NSURLSessionDelegate>. Convenience methods to inspect and cancel tasks are provided, as well as block-based callback properties for each delegate method"

 _Does another dance_

It just gets better and better.

</comment><comment><USER5> This library is arguably the most used library on CococaPods, and has been serious refresher for me in terms of what a network API should look like. It was during a discussion about what AFNetworking did that kickstarted CocoaDocs so that everyone has easy access to documentation for any Obj-C library.

To bring it back to CocoaPods, Mattt's push towards making sure that CocoaPods works well with AFNetworking and vice-versa has had a huge benefit on the community in terms of both showing what the new standard for OSS on Obj-C should look like and what the best practices for writing apps should be. And I applaud him for this.

I think AFNetworking is the library that has most raised the sea level that we all now work at. Thank you Mattt. If I didn't already owe you a beer, I do so doubly now.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've used AFNetworking pre-iOS7 and it's been a godsend. However with the advent on NSURLSession, I don't see the need to have a 3rd party wrapper to do network calls anymore. Although I admire Mattts' efforts, I'm still not convinced using AFNetworking 2.0 is more effective than using NSURLSession directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion, no better case for AFNetworking 2.0 wrt/NSURLSession can be made than AFURLSessionManager, and all of the great stuff it does for you. [http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFNetworking/2.0.0/Classes/AFUR...](http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFNetworking/2.0.0/Classes/AFURLSessionManager.html)

Another essential feature is SSL pinning, which helps prevent against man-in- the-middle attacks and other vulnerabilities. If your app interacts with any sensitive customer information, you would be well-advised to take a look at AFSecurityPolicy: [http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFNetworking/2.0.0/Classes/AFSe...](http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFNetworking/2.0.0/Classes/AFSecurityPolicy.html)

If you're using UIKit, there's a good chance that at least one of the many UIKit extensions would be worth your while: [https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/tree/master/UIK...](https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/tree/master/UIKit%2BAFNetworking)

I also think serializers will have a dramatic impact on the reusability and composability of business logic across your application in a really elegant way.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts as you do networking on iOS 7 with and without AFNetworking. Feel free to reach out over Twitter or email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. Also, check out and sign up for Matt's link (at the bottom of the page) for his upcoming OReilly book - AFNetworking the definitive guide.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been playing around with it for the part couple of weeks or so since his original announcement and it is really awesome - if you aren't already using it, or you're using AFNetworking 1.x in your apps I highly recommend using 2.0 - the serialization and session stuff has made the API not only more streamlined, but helps create really nice code.

</comment><comment><USER9> This may be the unpopular opinion, but I would never use this. It adds to much complexity in my opinion. To many things that can break. Sure it gives you a lot of stuff that makes things quicker to implement. Plus you have to abide by their design and now how you think it should work. And frankly that doesn't sit well with me.

<comment><USER10> Not unpopular at all. I've been considering this precise thought myself. So far haven't bailed yet, but still looking into it.

Concerns are that once I make my own, I will make the same mistakes, and in the end it would have been fruitless. AFNetworking is one of those libraries that is if I were to remake it, I'd make similar mistakes and end up hating what I made.

<comment><USER3> What mistakes do you think AFNetworking has made?

<comment><USER10> Incredibly bloated, massive interface files, too many coupled classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There look to be some solid improvements.

Originally I saw that the 2.0 release would only work on iOS 7. Does it work with iOS 6 and under now as well? That would make me more bullish on upgrading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, AFNetworking 2.0 (with the exception of `NSURLSession` functionality) is compatible with iOS 6 and Mac OS X 10.8.

(This was changed from the original plan to only target iOS 7, after it was determined that A) only the two classes needed iOS 7, and B) although iOS 7 adoption is crazy good, the same isn't as true of OS X)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone compare it to MKNetworkKit ([https://github.com/MugunthKumar/MKNetworkKit/](https://github.com/MugunthKumar/MKNetworkKit/)) ?

I have been using it for a few projects and it's been really helpful. Has the correct level of abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone used the real-time rocket stuff?

<comment><USER9> As in RocketSockets' Websocket implementation? I use that all the time at work.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it recommended to use a secondary laptop for malware analysis? - <AUTHOR> I picked up a copy of "Practical Malware Analysis" to get started with malware analysis and reverse engineering. One concern I have, especially after reading the VM setup chapter, is doing malware analysis in a VM on a primary computer. Apparently malware can detect if its running in a virtualized environment, and try to exploit any vulnerabilities to escape it's sandbox to infect the host system.
Now, I have a fancy $2300 MacBook Pro, and I'd be devastated if I messed it up by being careless. I was considering picking up a used Thinkpad for like $150, maybe installing a small SSD and upgrading RAM. Total cost would be more or less $300 and a peace of mind not caring if the laptop gets killed or screwed up.
I want to hear some insight from experienced folks about their thoughts on the topic, if its worth getting a secondary laptop or if I'm being paranoid and can safely run all malware in a VM on my MBP. Thanks! <comment><USER2> For malware analysis, I'd definitely look at computers as cattle rather than pets...I guess I'm leaning that way in general.

One way of approaching it though is to swap out SSD's. Turn the box off, pull one put in another and [assuming there is only one persistent storage device] it's a whole new computer. For a lot of tasks, _swapping state_ could probably just be thumb drives. For many tasks, 16G or even 8G is going to be plenty for Linux, tools, and the object of interest. Those run about $8 in bulk these days.

Build a standard tool image; store it on the Mac and burn it onto thumb drives asynchronously. When a new project comes along, pop one into the second machine; load in the malware; and have at it. Don't even need a VM.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can minimize the attack methods/surface but you can't eliminate it completely. There is no fool-proof way that will work in all situations.

\- Malware in VM has potential of migrating to host.

\- Malware on a network connected separate hardware system has potential of migrating through network.

\- Malware on a stand-alone separate hardware system has potential to migrate through external media (USB key/disk) exchange between the two systems.

As you are starting to learn, you most probably will be learning with known malware. As long as you are not analyzing malware that is known to escape from VM to host, you most probably be better of starting with VM for analysis.

When learning a new topic, it is better to get started quickly rather than focusing on finding the perfect setup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could you run your experiments on something like AWS EC2 or Digital Ocean? Likely cheaper and they're easy to start from a clean slate.

<comment><USER2> Mightn't VM aware malware become aware of the VM and behave differently?

<comment><USER4> Most likely. What would be the plan for how to quickly reset the state of the malware laptop though?

<comment><USER2> See the approach outlined in my direct response to the OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doing analysis on an external drive from where it wasn't run is probably a good idea.. there's always risk though. That said, I'd invest in an external usb3/thunderbold sata3 drive reader, so you can run on the thinkpad, then read the drive on the analysis machine.

ymmv, ianal, etc...

</comment><comment><USER6> yeah, having more laptops for various purposes (malware analysis) is always a good idea</comment>


Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are - <AUTHOR> http://datagenetics.com/blog/august32015/index.html

<comment><USER2> This blog post doesn't really add anything beyond what the original paper says, though at least it links to it, though the OCR font replacement in the version he links isn't my cup of tea. The original paper is thorough and well worth reading for anyone interested in designing keyboard-type input devices.

Here's a link to a scan where the OCR doesn't clobber the image [http://mrserge.lv/assets/human-factors-engeneering- studies-o...](http://mrserge.lv/assets/human-factors-engeneering-studies-of- the-design-and-use-of-pushbutton-telephone-sets.pdf)

The lowest errors and fastest keying rate were actually with the standard circular telephone arrangement (most familiar), followed by the two-row five- column layout, and those were also the test subjects' preferred layouts. In the final test between the 3x3+1 grid vs. the 5x2 grid, the vote tally was 12-3 in favor of the 5x2 gris.

I assume the company's final choice was based on some engineer or manager's aesthetic preferences or non-human-factors technical criteria (e.g. it fit better on a particular phone body design), though I've never seen any concrete explanations of how the final grid layout was chosen. Or in other words, we still don't have a solid answer to the question "Why are the numbers on a telephone keypad arranged the way they are?"

<comment><USER3> I don't know which came first, but it might have been to make manufacturing easier give the signaling scheme keypad phones used: when you press a key, two sine waves are generated -- one represents the row and the other the column. There's two groups of 4 frequencies for 16 possible buttons; some radios have an extra column with A-D keys for the extra tones.

<comment><USER4> Some military phones used the extra keys as part of autovon.

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

> The Automatic Voice Network (AUTOVON) was a world-wide American military > telephone system. The system was built starting in 1963,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My school had us enter our IDs into a keypad to buy lunch, so I did this everyday. Then, I had to enter it in a computer and got annoyed as the system wouldn't take it. Turns out the differences was that the lunch keypad was set up like a phone with 1 on the top while computers were set up like calculators with 1 on the bottom. It had become muscle memory and I was swapping two digits because of the change in entry device. Ever since then I've thought the incompatibility baffling, as well as surprising that it doesn't cause more problems. I hadn't noticed it at all until then.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why the difference between numeric keypads and phone keypads?

Numeric keypad layouts mimic calculator layouts, which in turn, mimicked the original 'adding machines'. The inventors of these early devices did not perform extensive user based testing (as it often the case in technology; early adopters end up creating standards that others follow, good or bad).

The whole point of the article is the Bell labs undertook an extensive user based study to investigate which layouts might be better (Pretty much the first time this testing had been done on this issue). They tested both canonical forms of the (3x3)+1 layout and selected what we now know today as the telephone layout. (If I had to speculate as to why this layout performs slightly better than the calculator layout, I might suggest that, in the West, we read left->right and top->bottom and so this is the more natural numbering scheme).

Had extensive testing been performed by the original adding machine developers, maybe both devices would use the same layout.

Interestingly, the most creative benefit I've heard for keeping the calculator layout as it is, is because calculators are often used to sum up real world measurements, and these fall under to purview of Benford's Law* Because of this, the keys which are more likely to be used as the leading digits are closer to the at-rest position of the hand and require less energy to move and press … yeah … I'm not convinced either, but it sounds good 

* [http://datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html)

<comment><USER2> The keys near the rest position of the hand are 4, 5, and 6. The zero key is not in a particularly convenient spot for the thumb (it should be moved down and to the left), and the 1, 2, and 3 keys require relocating the index/middle/ring fingers from their home positions. The delete, space, comma, period, tab, equals, parentheses, and various operator symbol keys are mostly also inconveniently located, though the enter and plus keys are fine.

I don't think the standard calculator numpad layout is defensible on digit or symbol frequency grounds.

Even if we want to keep the numbers in the standard place for the sake of familiarity, I would recommend adding some keys and relocating others, something like [http://i.imgur.com/BnYqKLW.png](http://i.imgur.com/BnYqKLW.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a fun tidbit. DTMF supports 0123456789*# as you probably know. But it _also_ supports A, B, C and D - not present on modern phones. These tones were added for use with remote computers and such, think today's phone menus.

The lack of them means there's a whole DTMF "column" gone. DTMF works on a grid. When you press a key, the tone for the row and the tone for the column are played simultaneously:

      (Hz) 1209  1336  1477  1633
          </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
      697 |  1  |  2  |  3  |  A  |
          </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
      770 |  4  |  5  |  6  |  B  |
          </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
      852 |  7  |  8  |  9  |  C  |
          </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
      941 |  *  |  0  |  #  |  D  |
          </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Given the DTMF grid matches the typical layout on dialing pads, I wonder if early DTMF phones would wire the pad in the same grid to generate the corresponding tones?

</comment><comment><USER7> There's two things I found surprising. That they tested so many circular arrangements, and that there was a measurable difference between the two 3x3+1 orientations.

If the author of the post is reading this, the image of the two vertical columns is wrong. On the site it's essentially two columns, in the paper it's five rows. That is rows 15 26 37 etc compared to 12 34 56 etc. It makes for a surprisingly large difference, at least to me. The former looks completely unusable, the latter seems quite ok :-) So maybe I should not be surprised that the two 3x3+1 setups didn't perform the same...

<comment><USER8> I'd guess that the circular patterns are all because of the norm at the time being rotary dials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How curious, I had no idea american dials went from 1 to 0 with 0 the longest to dial! Where I'm from, they went from 0 to 9, with 0 being the shortest number to dial, like this:

[http://www.skrotnissen.se/prylshop/common/pic/whitegoods/dsc...](http://www.skrotnissen.se/prylshop/common/pic/whitegoods/dsc06666.jpg)

(This is why the emergency number is 911 in the US, whereas it used to be 90000 where I'm from)

Anecdote number two is that when I was working in Denmark in 2004 or so, I noticed that all the number pads on credit card readers were calculator-style, not phone-style, which was a legacy from when Dankort was rolled out in the early 80's, _just before_ keypad phones surpassed rotary dial phones.

(In 2010 or around there, most retailers switched their card readers to phone- style layout, so all stores had to have small signs apologizing for it, but mentioning that the rest of the world had phone-style layout, so let's just all get in line with the program...)

<comment><USER9> Better images:

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

Swedish original on top, US market models on the bottom.

<comment><USER10> _" The ergonomics of the handle was a focal point in the design. Additionally, the acoustic, production, and aesthetics aspects needed to be resolved. The handle was fitted in size according to the dimensions of an average face, which had been taken as the starting point of the design process."_

Superior ergonomics & one of the reasons I dislike modern smart _cough_ spy- phones. The audio is shite and software keys are no replacement for actual tactile feedback. Luckily they (rotary dial 800 series) are still available ~ [http://www.vintagephones.com.au/ccp0-catshow/refurbished- tel...](http://www.vintagephones.com.au/ccp0-catshow/refurbished-telecom-pmg- rotary-dial-phones.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kind of ignores how DTMF phones worked. The tones are actually two tones played simultaneously. Each row and column are separate tones. Laying them out in a circle could work but its not very practical.

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure DTMF came way later than pulse dialing - first keypads were just a change of interface but still pulse dialing.

<comment><USER13> If there was an early time when pushbutton phones used pulse dialing, it must have been brief. All of the pushbutton phones that I ever saw as a kid were DTMF. I'm not sure how a pushbutton pulse phone would have worked without digital electronics. This was at a time when, in the US, the phone company had a monopoly on phones, all phones were rented, and you actually paid more for "touch-tone" service.

Later on, the phone regulations were changed, and you could own a phone. That's when cheap pushbutton phones came out, that had a switch allowing you to choose between pulse and tone dialing, because you still had to pay more for touch-tone service and some regions didn't offer it.

The weird thing was, sometimes you had to use both, for instance at my college, the phone system used pulse dialing, but I had to enter a "calling card" code using tone dialing in order to call my parents and put the call on their bill.

<comment><USER14> I definitely remember (as a child in the UK) that our touch-tone phone had a pulse option that could be switched on the underside. If you flicked the switch then instead of a tone you would hear click-click-click-click when you pressed a number. This would have been in the early to mid-90s, though we were quite poor so the phone might have been older.

<comment><USER15> It took quite a long time for the UK phone system to be converted to support tone dialing everywhere so there were still places in the UK where pulse dialing was required. The last Strowger exchange, where the pulses directly stepped the switches, was only taken out of service in 1995.

There were phones out there that had a keypad but only supported pulse dialing too; if I remember correctly, my parents had one when I was a kid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I worked as a telephone repairman in the dial era. Impatient diallers would often "push" the dial back rather than let it unwind naturally. Switch gear in the central office was sensitive to mis-timed pulses so wrong numbers often resulted. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the early keypads sent pulses rather than DTMF, which made for an annoying clicking sound in one's ear.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious about the difference between the calculator and phone layouts.

I expect that the bias to the winning phone design came because of the bias in phone numbers - that is, because rotary dial phones would dial lower numbers more quickly, lower numbers were more sought after, and were allocated to higher population areas. This was both for personal convenience, and because it tied up the phone lines for less time with the dialing pulses.

I expect that this asymmetry also introduced a bias toward the 1-on-top dialing pattern that won, though I don't see analysis to that effect. (The original paper simply stated "that the arrangement frequently found in ten-key adding machines...was not the best [in its group]...the same geometric configuration with a different numbering scheme [one on top] was superior in keying performance... However the performance differences between the two were small".

Of course, the two arrangements primarily differ in which keys are obscured by your hand, and the proximity of the 0 key, which shouldn't be commonly used, so maybe this is just post-hoc reasoning...

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't there a simpler reason - a square design is easier to implement with a 3x3 matrix switch and the number layout ensures that the letters associated with the digits are in alphabetic order.

</comment><comment><USER19> Related to this I recall reading (somewhere) about going from a keypad back to a rotary dial and how infuriating it is even though there's only a tiny difference in speed.

We humans get used to the speed as little as it is and having to go back to the old way and it's only 1/2 or even 1/10 second slower drives us crazy.

<comment><USER20> The major difference is that with a keypad you can type at your own pace, while with a dial you have to 1) wait 2) a variable amount of time for the rotary to go back in initial position for each figure. Furthermore keypads allow "muscle memory". I'm not old enough to have used extensively rotary dials but I think it's very hard to form muscle memory with rotary dials. As an aside, I don't think the difference in speed the two is "tiny".

<comment><USER19> Oh no rotary dials you got into a rhythm mostly the sound.

For medium numbers kaching ticka ticka kaching, for the first numbers 1, 2, 3 it was really quick like tick tick tick.

The zero or even 7, 8, 9 seemed to take so long compared to the other numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I wonder about is why they didn't choose the calculator layout, or, conversely, why don't calculators use phone dial layout. In both cases speed and accuracy are very important. So, why the difference.

</comment><comment><USER22> The circular dial pads had me look up a Nokia oddity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3600/3650](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3600/3650)

Note btw that it ran Series 60, meaning Symbian. Meaning that for all intents it was a smartphone.

And while not circular, Siemens also had a oddity:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_SX1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_SX1)

And yep, that one is also running Symbian with the Series 60 UI (licensed from Nokia).

</comment><comment><USER23> I worked in a call center where people where simultaneously using a phone and keyboard number pad accurately and not even noticing. Subtle differences between the two but still interesting.

</comment><comment><USER24> Did the "calculator" layout yield much worse results than the winning inverted layout? If so, I'm really curious about the reasons for the difference in performance.

Should actual calculators adopt the phone layout, too? I've always been curious why not all devices use the same order (PIN entry pads, phones, calculators, etc.)

<comment><USER25> While not a complete answer to your question, American Scientist's much more detailed review of phone keypad design history says the final phone layout produced "significantly shorter keying times" than other layouts (with the exception of a layout with two five button horizontal rows that had to be rejected for other reasons) [1]. It also reports the differences between the top five contenders were statistically indistinguishable (but it doesn't record which designs were in those 5) and that the designers were aware of the calculator layouts (which were actually a lot less consistent at that time that most people assume today), so if the calculator layout had been in the top 5 it's likely they would have gone with it.

None of the calculator companies had the budgets or human factors research experience to do the kind of analysis that Bell Labs did (including some of the earliest true NUI UX research), so they just picked whatever design made the most sense to their engineers [2].

[1] [http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/2005761...](http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/20057611634_306.pdf) [2] [http://www.vcalc.net/Keyboard.htm](http://www.vcalc.net/Keyboard.htm)

Edit: correcting the quote to "significantly shorter" from "much shorter"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is a numberphile video about at&t's article. [https://youtu.be/kCSzjExvbTQ](https://youtu.be/kCSzjExvbTQ)

</comment><comment><USER27> 'We still "Hang up" when we want to terminate a call, and this refers to the action of placing the receiver back onto the hook of a phone ...'

oh my god. I'm old.

<comment><USER28> Interestingly, in German – where we mostly used phones like [1] originally, we use the word "Auflegen" (put upon) to mean the end of a call.

Different technology shapes language.

[1]: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Telefon0...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Telefon04_2.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Telephone dial is anticlockwise, dialed clockwise.

</comment><comment><USER29> The final winner three-by-three plus one is the only one suitable for mobile phone. Perhaps because in mobile phone screen is used as reference; in the phone keyboard the receiver used as reference. In the calculator and adding machine are not moved around and the table is used as reference.

<comment><USER30> The blog post describes a study published in 1960.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Popco.bot – a smart microwave popcorn timer - <AUTHOR> https://popco.bot/ <comment><AUTHOR> It was built in a single day of running across the street between coding in a coffee shop, and testing the product on the microwave in seven-eleven.

It is actually just a mobile-first (mobile-only?) single page web app.

Built using no JS framework, has no build stage, or server side code. Uses Bootstrap for templating, and a lot of hacky vanilla JS code to quickly create this MVP.

We use the Web Audio JS API to listen for pops using device's microphone. The pop detection logic is as follows: if the current microphone sample volume is 10 times higher than the average of the last 6 samples of volume, it is a pop.

The logic on when to stop the microwave is as follows: first wait for 5 pops with less than 1 second in between them. We call this the "peak popping stage". Then we wait for either 3 pops with longer than 1.5 seconds in between. or 3 seconds without a single pop. We fine tuned the parameters with a lot of testing.

Hope this helps people avoid burnt or unpopped popcorn, and enjoy perfect microwaved popcorn every time.</comment>


The real deal with Groupon - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7395218n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox

<comment><USER2> This is 60 minutes... where we're only 1 year behind the news! This is like their exposé on high-speed trading that came six months after the Flash Crash. Brilliant. Not that I hate the show. But their tendency to cherry pick well- trodden stories always annoys me.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. And in addition to that, they don't even dig deeper with the extra time. This expose has all the depth of a pleasant Sunday picnic with Mason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I immediately stopped reading when I saw they were interviewing Mason.. Groupon is a public company, and the CEO/founder of course wants to shine a positive light on things. You can't learn much here.

<comment><USER5> I didn't downvote but will say the comment is dumb. In fact, we can learn a lot from successful public company CEOs like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Marc Beniof and Andrew Mason.

<comment><USER4> I didn't say you can't learn much about runnign a company, but the title was 'the real deal with Groupon'. You can't learn the 'real deal' here.

<comment><USER5> You were clearly generalizing about founder/CEOs.

Lame downvotes, guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The scary part about Groupon's explosive growth is the difficulty of employing 150 people/day without lowering required employee competence.

In the long run I think that the smaller, competing companies with more competent employees are going to win the market on a city by city basis.

<comment><USER7> ala Living Social ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is not journalism, this is a company profile.

</comment><comment><USER9> For those complaining about this being a puff piece about groupon... understand that a media company has little to no incentive to take companies like groupon to task. Sure they may ask one or two mildly tough questions that may address some issues that people have with the company, but if they truly hit hard they would go out of business. No one wants to do an interview where they will be sweating the entire time, and journalists who gain a tough reputation will soon be circling the classifieds. This explains why someone like Larry King can be extremely successful, yet there aren't any hard hitting interviewers out there.

<comment><USER10> Tim Sebastian hosting HARDtalk was the only true hard hitting interviewer I've ever seen, although I suppose the BBC doesn't count as a traditional media company. I was disappointed with the quality of his successors; they turned HARDtalk into a talk show. Does anybody know of any current shows with a similar interview style?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I mean, he's a likeable guy, but something is rotten in Denmark.

</comment><comment><USER12> This probably one of Andrew's best interviews. In my recollection- every piece of press or articles written about him/groupon have been focused on the negative fact driven parts that defines groupon.

I did see glimmer of hope that he is a passionate ceo focused on making his dream of his business become a profitable reality. Right now it is leaning that his dream isn't sustainable but you never know.

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess my headline wasn't good. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468848>

</comment><comment><USER14> As a small business owner the interview left several questions unanswered for me. The most important I had was which investment would I lose least on: buying GRPN or running a Groupon?

<comment><USER15> Seriously, SOMEONE needs to perform this analysis.

Invest 10K into their stock and 10K into their program, compare results after N months (12?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Won't play on iOS…

</comment><comment><USER17> Did not see the video-report, the commercial required to watch this takes too long (more than 15 seconds). I've closed the tab after first 7 seconds.

<comment><USER18> It is a twelve minute video; a minute comercial is less than 10% of the overall time. It really isn't that unreasonable, in my opinion.

Watching a minute commercial on the internet is a good way to support video on the web.

<comment><USER19> _a minute comercial is less than 10% of the overall time. It really isn't that unreasonable, in my opinion._

I don't care enough about Groupon to hit the link, but I absolutely, completely, and categorically disagree here.

Aside from the fact that expecting "payment" upfront in the form of watching an ad before getting any info isn't necessarily the smoothest way of doing it, I think 10% is _a lot_ of time.

It seems there are really are only two kinds of people, those that understand that time is money, and those that don't. If I had to "give away" 10% of the time that I spent absorbing information online, I would probably stop using the internet altogether. The signal:noise ratio online is already in some places ridiculously low, especially in video content (which is why I read and not watch the news, weather, or whatever) and taking an additional 10% premium on that is ridiculous.

I surf "free" sites for work to gain knowledge and find ideas up to twenty hours a day. 10% of that time is _two hours_!!!! That's _a lot_ of time. That's enough time for me to drive to the next state and come back. It's enough time for me write a simple open source utility and stick it up on github. It's enough time for me to bill a client five or six hundred dollars easy (depending on the client and assuming a job is available, etc.).

My problem is this: time does not scale. If you demand something as universal as "10% of your time" from person A and person B, that's possibly asking dramatically different stuff. 2 hours of my time can never be directly compared to two hours of someone else's. Two hours of Bill Gates' time or Obama's time is worth more than I make in a year, if used correctly. At the same time, 10% of my time is more than a month of a junior high students life is worth.

/rant</comment></comment></comment>


How the Apple iPad Was Dreamed Up - in 1988 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/196367/how_the_apple_ipad_was_dreamed_up_in_1988.html

<comment><USER2> Didn't Alan Kay dream it up a couple of decades before that?</comment>


Top Mobile Browsers - Aug 2011 Trends - <AUTHOR> http://browserfame.com/208/top-mobile-browsers-stats-2011 <comment><USER2> These charts seems highly misleading. Why not list Safari instead of iPhone and iPod Touch, no reference to iPad either.

As they list Opera as one, which includes hundreds of devices, while Safari is split up? Even though the iPod Touch and iPhone is so much more similar than most devices running Opera are.

<comment><USER3> If you interpret the graph as a pissing match, then it is unfair that they've split up Safari. However I do find the information on how many iOS users have iPods vs. iPhones interesting, so I'm glad they did it.

Opera ought to be split up into Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, since they're different renderers on different types of devices.</comment></comment>