JavaScript Fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/javascript-fatigue-48d4011b6fc4#.m0c2f9fe5 <comment><USER2> I certainly can appreciate most of this post. I've used so many different frontend (angular, polymer, ExtJS) and backend (express, hapi, restify) frameworks and the various common building tools (grunt, gulp) that it's almost impossible to become great at all of them and for a new comer who maybe only used one or two of those frameworks it can be painful getting started.

I've started using less and less frameworks as I work on harder and more complex projects. Sometimes I worry I'm toeing the line at becoming the "old kook who hates new frameworks" but I like things to be explicit and simple; for example if I can write a plain script to handle my build process without integrating grunt or gulp I'm certainly going to do that.

> Leverage folder & file-naming conventions for automatically discovering > application-specific routes, actions, tests, and more.

Not a fan of this. This is implicit behavior which is almost never intuitive until you're experienced in the tooling that has it. I'd much rather be a tiny bit explicit where there is a list somewhere and I edit that list with patterns or explicit file names. There is no reason there should be "discovery" of such things at _development time_.

<comment><USER3> Similar to this note: I've done my fair share of using dependency injection frameworks in the Java backend world (e.g. Spring), just to develop a healthy dislike for every DI out there. The magic is nice and good, until it becomes a burden, and a constant question of where certain objects are coming from. It was a pain to see the same design pattern to emerge in the (compiled-to-)JS world, with all of the same problems and complexities.

I wonder if any _good_ pattern had similar lifecycle, winning the minds and then spreading to different domains.

To be fair: I do think DI has value, but I started to prefer explicit over implicit, and most DI stuff is focusing on implicit and magic.

<comment><USER4> have you tried dagger 2 ? I think it makes a good job at dispelling the magic as much as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Today I started a rebuild of my website as a technical exercise.

1 working day in, and I haven't written a single line of actual html.

Do a search for "require" on npm. There are 90,000 npm packages. There's "require-dir", and "require-directory" then "require-all". Some are shims for require on the frontend, rather than for the backend.

Every other build tool has its own ecosystem of tools that shim around an existing tool. And then webpack's packages notoriously pollute the package global namespace ( _-loader, and slightly better_ -webpack-plugin).

Main problem is both the blessing and the curse of Javascript (and slightly mirrors the ongoing popularity of PHP) - there're so many resources available that it's so damn easy to get in. And it's so tempting to build YAJF/J, and even more so nowadays. And as the author mentions - there's very little community curation.

For someone who doesn't sit in the frontend stack everyday, it's quite frankly madness. It's like playing chess with a hydra. The author has problems with the React startup cost - I think it's a problem plaguing the entire js stack.

<comment><USER6> If you're not a front end developer, then why is it a technical exercise to learn all this stuff? Personally, I don't want to learn things that will be obsolete in a few years.

I also rebuilt my website as a technical exercise, but I'm doing it in raw HTML, CSS, and JS. Literally with vim and shell scripts to build it.

I know it can meet the requirements of a personal website, and many other kinds of sites. It probably takes a little longer, but I know it's going to work in 5 years, and I will know how to maintain it.

And I will have more foundational knowledge. Things have changed a lot with HTML and CSS. I learned how to use HTML5 onHashChange. And I did my own "CSS reset" without using any libraries. I wrote my own table sorter with raw DOM manipulation.

I think you need this knowledge to help you use the framework correctly anyway.

<comment><USER7> >>If you're not a front end developer, then why is it a technical exercise to learn all this stuff?

There are many reasons. For one thing, a lot of developers are "full-stack" and don't have the luxury of focusing on just the front-end or the back-end. For another, learning new tools, frameworks and methodologies will make you a better overall developer.

>>Personally, I don't want to learn things that will be obsolete in a few years.

Better not work in web development then. It's probably the fastest moving subfield in software and there's no guarantee that what you're learning today won't be obsolete in a few years. So your best bet is to learn as much as you can, rather than putting all your eggs in one basket that you think will last a long time.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, professional web dev is not for me, though it seems I'm not the only one lamenting the state of affairs. It seems that it's not just the frameworks that are thrown away in 3 years, but sometimes the products built with them too!

I think learning new "frameworks and methodologies" only makes you a better developer to the degree that they are well thought-out. It seems like a lot of JavaScript stuff is basically still in a state of flux, where people are experimenting and figuring things out.

I spent a lot of time learning Python, C++, C, R, bash, OCaml, and HTML/CSS/JavaScript. All those things have lasting value, and I expect to be using them in 5 years, and probably most of them in 20 years.

I would say jQuery has lasting value, since it has an elegant data-driven / document-driven model. I look a new things to understand if they have lasting value. React does seem principled to me, and I was interested in playing with it, although these threads have what dampened the enthusiasm.

I am using HTML/CSS/JS to display statistics and visualizations, and it works perfectly for that. In any case, I do think there is a problem where a lot of front end devs don't actually understand the abstractions the browser presents. It's basically the same problem as Python or Ruby programmers not understanding what syscalls are and writing horrifically slow code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's scary that if you don't jump on _some_ kind of framework bandwagon, you'll be half as productive as framework devotees within 4-5 years.

When I joined my current team in 2015, they were still using Python Paste and jQuery for everything, while I was well-versed in Angular + a modern Python server framework. Armed with my modern libraries, I could do more in 1 day than an average teammate could in a week. In other words, my team lost a _staggering_ amount of productivity over the past 2-3 years, just because they were hanging onto old ways that were still legit even in like 2011. And it's obvious that the half-life of frameworks is only decreasing over time.

What will happen when an average framework's half life is 1 year? Or 6 months? Humans aren't built to adapt so much, so quickly. I can gain proficiency with a new library in 3-4 months, but what happens when I get tired of doing that? Will I just fade into the background as some high school kid outproduces me 5:1 simply because he was lucky enough to learn FrameWorkABC a couple months ago while I was busy with a personal issue?

Hopefully by that time, the singularity will be so close at hand that we'll have bigger fish to fry, like basic income, or something.

<comment><USER6> Honest question: what kinds of things are you doing with React/Angular that you can't do with jQuery? (I'm not a front end developer -- though I do write significant amounts of raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Is it really higher productivity, or is it just keeping up with the latest fashion?

I feel like the vast majority of websites don't need more than a little JavaScript -- exceptions being Google Maps, Google Docs and spreadsheets, etc.

AirBNB is listed here -- honest question: do they really need a lot of JS? I mean mainly it's showing a lot of pictures and providing good navigation and search. Am I missing something? It's basically like eBay in 2000 except prettier, and that was done without a lot of JS.

[https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Sites-Using- React](https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Sites-Using-React)

Asana might be a good candidate for a real "app" that needs the complexity.

Why is Wired on there? I think news sites are the worst offenders in terms of using unneeded JavaScript.

<comment><USER7> >>Honest question: what kinds of things are you doing with React/Angular that you can't do with jQuery? [...] Is it really higher productivity, or is it just keeping up with the latest fashion?

Answer to the first question: nothing. Everything you develop using React/Angular/etc. can be written using vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.

The difference is that, as your pages become more and more interactive, it becomes harder and harder to deal with the complexity. I recently developed a web form that has a little over 1,000 lines of JQuery. After a while, it became really difficult to keep track of various event handlers, when they would fire and how to make sure they didn't interfere with each other. If I were using a framework like React, it would have been much easier. Here's a diagram that outlines this concept: [http://imgur.com/dSQTLDE](http://imgur.com/dSQTLDE)

>>I feel like the vast majority of websites don't need more than a little JavaScript

Web _sites_ don't. Web _apps_ do. The distinction becomes bigger and more important every day.

<comment><USER6> I just have a hard time understanding where all these web _apps_ are coming from, and what the real requirement is. It seems to me that the ratio of problems that require web apps to web sites is more like 1:1000 than 1:10. In other words, I wonder why it seems _everyone_ is using React or Angular, rather than just a few people.

I mentioned Google maps, docs, and spreadsheets as bona fide apps. They require a completely different approach. They are extraordinarily stateful on the client.

What other sites need that? As mentioned, I don't think AirBNB does. How much state does it need on a page? It's basically like a shopping cart, like eBay. You search for properties, and then you book one. (Maybe it is different for listers, I haven't listed).

I get that you need more advanced stuff like React and Angular to manage a lot of state on the client. jQuery gets messy in that case. But I am wondering why apps all of the sudden need this much state. If you break up your app into different pages, then you don't need so much state on each page. The state is in the URI.

In other words, I see a lot of it as self-inflicted pain... the customer didn't actually want all this stuff. They just want to order a meal online or something. I looked through that whole "Built with React" github page, and I am still trying to understand where the requirements for lots of state are.

I don't buy the motivation of keeping everything on one page to save network latency... if you actually profile a lot of web pages nowadays, the rendering time is greater than network time! I'm seeing _full seconds_ reported by Chrome dev tools just to render!!! It doesn't appear that anyone cares about latency, given how slow most web sites and apps are.

<comment><USER7> It's not about latency, but about overall performance. Rendering on the server is slower than rendering on the client, because the server may have to deal with a thousand requests per minute whereas the client doesn't. So you push the logic to the client and let the browser deal with it until talking to the server is actually necessary (e.g. when the time comes to submit the data). Therefore client-side frameworks become a kind of distributed processing of application logic.

Furthermore, you shouldn't take latency for granted. Many users are on choppy mobile connections. Waiting for the server after every action results in a really bad user experience in those scenarios.

<comment><USER6> I'm not really buying it... Rendering on the server seems like a solved problem to me. Web apps scale.

Sure, you can save servers by offloading work on the client. But I think your server cost is absolutely dwarfed by developer salaries. I guess it depends on whether you have more front end people or back end people. Good front end people seem to be just as expensive and rare as good backend/C++/Unix/distributed systems people these days.

On mobile, most web apps are a disaster. They are certainly a lot worse than light HTML. Never mind waiting for the server on every action -- try getting the app to load in the first place! The Android and Chrome team have numbers on the astronomical rate of user-aborted or otherwise failed page loads on mobile. On mobile, users see the white screen for 5-10 seconds (probably waiting for your 10-50 round trips for your JS, CSS, heavy image assets, and especially third party JS) and then give up.

<comment><USER9> You are so right!

I hand tuned web apps (vanilla JS5, no libs/frameworks) and opimized them for mobile, and they are very fast.

But most don't care and use bloated JS libraries/frameworks and the end user has to wait several seconds until the 1MB JS file loads over a cell connection or even crash the mobile browser because the site owner thought it is okay to integrate 30 advertisement and analytics third party JS files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have used many frontend frameworks (Backbone, Knockout, Angular, CanJS, React, Polymer). I find React to be overly complex/bloated. It sucks you into a whole new universe which probably shouldn't exist in the first place.

At first, you think that React will take the complexity out of building apps. Soon enough you realize that React on its own isn't enough; you have to follow particular programming patterns like Flux or Redux (which adds more constraints/complexity).

Then, with all the complex data rendering happening behind the scenes (diffing), you start to realize that REST is no longer a suitable medium for transferring data over the wire so now you have to use GraphQL/Relay.

Personally, I much prefer the approach which Google has taken with the Polymer 'framework' \- You can setup models (WebComponents) to hold simple, atomic values and you can wire them all up on the frontend (no diffing necessary) - You get all the live binding awesomeness without the insane complexity.

For example, with Polymer, you can setup a dynamic collection of item IDs and then use those IDs to load the individual properties of each item - You can hook everything up to update in realtime (both the collection and the bound properties for each item).

The Polymer approach is simple and efficient - Also, once the WebComponents standard has been implemented in all major browsers, you will be able to run that code without any special libraries or frameworks.

<comment><USER11> Well, I think in comparison to Polymer, Angular and Ember it has a really tiny API and easy to grasp concepts. Yes Polymer uses components too, but I found it a bit clunky in the past (used it ~2 years ago).

But yes, stuff like Flux isn't really easy. I use Redux and it took me much more time to grasp than Ember-Data or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> React has shifted the questions asked by newbies, from which framework to choose, to what tooling to choose to complete the framework. Essentially it's a framework in library disguise.

It's used more as a simplifying term for a family of related technologies, rather than React the library itself.

For experienced coders this doesn't matter too much. More toys to play with. Newbies seem to be having a hard time picking up all those buzz-word ridden notions of the available tooling.

Not everyone can have a deep computer programming background, so they have to be confused and then get it wrong, in order to learn.

It's not React's fault, it can't solve everything. It is what it is, the problem is irrational people, trying to make a front-end messiah out of it.

<comment><USER13> The difference is that with a framework, moving to something different (sometimes even upgrading the framework) for a big project is extremely painful.

With libraries, and pretty your own framework custom build for that project, you can upgrade components one after the other and move without breaking everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the last few years, 2015 in particular, have been about finding the right patterns to enable development of robust and performant JavaScript apps. It's feeling more and more like most of the gaps have been filled in, with just a few things remaining.

Remember, before frameworks like Django and Rails came along, state-of-the-art backend web development was pretty horrendous. We're still in the wild west stage for front-end, which is arguably a much more hostile development environment. It doesn't really matter if your backend toolkit is 100mb, on the front-end it absolutely does. The backend doesn't also have to deal with new browser releases having bugs that spontaneously break your website.

But I think we're honing in on the right patterns, it's felt to me that whilst there's been a lot of churn in which individual libraries we should be using, there's increasing stability in the approach they take. I'm hoping that in a little more time, the Django's and Rails' of the front-end will start to appear.

</comment><comment><USER15> I see the multiplicity of tools and libraries as a result to the fact that we have not yet arrived at a good stable solution for the unique problems that interactive front-end applications have today.

If we had good and stable solutions, new libraries and tools would have a very difficult time to get traction, just for the sake of being new and doing things different.

The javascript stack today is a reflection of the complexity of the problems it needs to deal with.

We can still use jquery and write code directly on script tags of html page, zero tooling problem and complication. Most front-end developers don't do that anymore because it does not solve the problems for developing complex web applications.

A clear winner may one day arise and dominate and simplify the stack, but it's also a possibility that the complexity and multiplicity of the problems the front-end deals with don't sustain one clear winner.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't get the point of this article.

It posits the usage of small independent tools as a problem, and then provides solutions to the problem that are not much more than prepackaged combinations of these tools and therefore were made possible entirely by these tools being small and independent. But these tools are apparently also bad because you need to think to use them, and write config files to tell them what you want from them.

This doesn't make any sense. The ecosystem is working as it's supposed to be working.

Am I missing something here?

PS: Not sure why you would pick on React for tooling complexity. You can use it with one <script> tag and no JSX, just like angular or jquery or whatnot. If you also want to use ES6, JSX syntax, have your code linted, hot module reloaded, uglified, your sprites auto-generated, and all your assets packaged for efficient distribution that's not react, that's a lot of independent feature requests that require astonishingly minimal boilerplate to get running considering the value you're getting. All of that is completely optional too. If you look at how typical real-world react and angular projects look, they would be very similar in terms of build tools used.

<comment><USER10> The article makes perfect sense; React is bloated - It has too much tooling, too much complexity, too many ways to do anything and no single way to do it all!

In other words, conceptionally, it's about as simple as that tangled mess of jQuery logic you wrote 10 years ago.

React without JSX is just horrible. I don't know why they even bother mentioning this approach in the beginner tutorials - The code would be completely unreadable.

<comment><USER17> While I agree React without JSX is terrible and React with JSX isn't too great anyways ("className" vs "class"? "defaultChecked" vs "checked"? everything has to be wrapped in a parent or it errors??) it really doesn't feel bloated to me. I do almost everything inside of class method functions I define or inside of the render itself - if you're heavily leaning on stuff like shouldComponentUpdate that really feels like an antipattern regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is actually highlighting (indirectly) the strengths of Ember.js and its ecosystem. As an Ember dev this article made me appreciate the way the development of ember tooling and the library itself are both intertwined, and that best practices are constantly being implemented into the tools used across all developers, core maintainers and simple users alike.

</comment><comment><USER19> Every language / framework has its tooling options but javascript has _a lot_ and no standard/preferred ways. Like with standards, it seems that tooling problems are solved by creating new / more tools.

I have a strong Python background and I'm overwhelmed by the tools available for just building / managing javascript and making it usable. With python (for example) you don't need additional tools for managing/defining/importing modules, building/compressing/minifying code or adding additional language features.

The solution for me was to switch from Angular (where I had to make all choices myself, which I wasn't capable to do) to Ember(-cli) that is making the choices for me. And the lack of such a tight integrated supported set of tools is what is and will keep me from moving to other frameworks in the forseable future.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think Meteor might be the solution to some of these problems: it's easy to set up, you can start working in few minutes.

Also it's very easy to work with React from Meteor:

[https://www.meteor.com/tutorials/react/creating-an- app](https://www.meteor.com/tutorials/react/creating-an-app)

<comment><USER21> Another solution is ember-cli[1]

[1] [https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.2.0/getting-started/ember- cli/](https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.2.0/getting-started/ember-cli/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Application developers should not have to become experts in the underpinnings of the library just to use it.

I understand that that is the final goal. But as we introduce new technologies it takes a time and more powerful machines until they can be simplified.

There is a lot of people asking for easy ways to build systems for millions or billions of users. We will get there but we are still not there. It is amazing that it is already so much simpler and cheap than 10 years ago.

If a product with similar features is easier to use makes sense to choose it. But demand simple solutions to complex problems looks like out of place.

</comment><comment><USER23> As people,tools and runtimes move to ES6 modules things will get better and people will no longer have to use these dreadful frameworks. I for instance try to experiment directly with virtual dom and dom diffing, without using anything else.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fully agree.. Javascript "stacks" are just that. Stacks of unrelated libraries which have to be stitched together using competing tools that do the same and cannot describe their own USP.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's time to stop the madness:

[http://intercoolerjs.org/](http://intercoolerjs.org/)

<comment><USER26> ...because the solution to JavaScript fatigue is yet another new JavaScript framework.</comment></comment>


Semi-productive online tasks to avoid doing real work - <AUTHOR> http://voato.com/office/semi-productive-online-tasks-to-avoid-doing-real-work/

<comment><USER2> Cloud services look nice, but how many of the underlying companies will still exist 2-4 years from now? How many of the perhaps new owners would be interested in maintaining these free or semi-free services?</comment>


How Do I Get Rid of Search Results from India? - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/9262123?hl=en <comment><USER2> Some people on the website are complaining that people are putting their video titles in English but the content is in some other language. This is not a lame attempt to get more clicks, but driven by the fact that: (i) Hindi typing works only somewhat well on mobile phones and does not work at all on most desktops/laptops in India, and (ii) search in languages like Hindi sucks even more. Given that most tech savvy Indians are bilingual anyway, it just makes sense to have titles in English so that people can search for them conveniently.

You'll see this is something even Hindi newspapers do. I pulled these two articles from the front pages of the Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar, two of the bigger Hindi newspapers: [1] and [2]. Very little of the content, except for the title is in Hindi. This is so that people can search for content using English searches.

[1] [https://www.bhaskar.com/bihar/patna/news/prashant-kishor- pol...](https://www.bhaskar.com/bihar/patna/news/prashant-kishor-political- strategist-bihar-patna-visit-latest-news-and-updates-on-former-jdu-national- president-126775173.html?ref=ht) [2] [https://www.jagran.com/politics/state- up-budget-2020-yogi-ad...](https://www.jagran.com/politics/state-up- budget-2020-yogi-adityanath-government-will-focused-on-overall-development- budget-over-five-lac-crores-20040808.html?src=p1)

<comment><USER3> Weirs, when I visit those sites almost everything is in a script I can't read. Only a tiny bit is in English.

This is what the sites look like for me: [https://imgur.com/a/h6U1Un1](https://imgur.com/a/h6U1Un1)

<comment><USER2> Sorry I had a typo. I meant to say very little of the content is in English. But the page title is in English and that matters because I can google for "Jagran UP budget" to get to the second article.

<comment><USER4> Have you considered editing your previous comment?

<comment><USER2> HN doesn't allow edits after a few hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can personalize the recommendations by clicking on the 3-dot menu and selecting "Not interested" and/or "Don't recommend channel". It even asks "Tell us why". I'm Indian and I hardly see any Indian videos. Here are my recommendations right now:

[https://imgur.com/a/KlSamZA](https://imgur.com/a/KlSamZA)

(Basically Anjunadeep, Patrice O' Neal, and Batman :-) ).

I believe their recommendation ML is top-notch and they keep improving it. For example, it seems to have finally learned that I absolutely effing hate "reaction" videos (it used to struggle with that ~ 1 year ago).

<comment><USER6> I never noticed that. Thank you so much! Hope it helps recommendations for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading the comments there feels more like targeting a community rather than a real inconvenience.

Some of the example -

> thanks man, i thought my pc was infected with an indain virus. sounds like > its not only me ....

> İ sicked of fucking indi*n videos on youtube.

> This is so true, I totally hate those indian video

I feel that the real problem is understanding the Indian accent.

<comment><USER8> The main problem FOR ME is the title. It's in English. No indication that it's in Hindi.

I watch some Chinese / Japanese channels but I know what I'm going into before hand. Because both the channel name and the title would have hyrogliphs.

I wouldn't mind if I had unlimited data. But I can download 10 tutorial videos based on their title only for 3-5 to be Hindi.

Google search has been proven to forget old excellent articles. I think this amnesia is happening to YouTube as well.

<comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I'm an Indian.

We all have English keyboards and use it all day(I don't know whom you want to blame for this.)

So it's easy for us to read and write in English. We even type Hindi in English. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish))

<comment><USER8> Some people add (Hindi) to their video titles. So the keyboard isn't to blame.

<comment><USER9> For some people in India, it is difficult to read Hindi because it is not their first language. They can understand spoken Hindi. So some of these videos add English title so that everyone can read the title and listen to Hindi video.

<comment><USER8> [https://youtu.be/WgcjvcKHZKE](https://youtu.be/WgcjvcKHZKE)

See how the YouTuber put Hindi in the title of that video? That's what I'm talking about

<comment><USER9> I agree with your sentiment, and feel that YouTube should add a language tag rather than uploaders having to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sarcasm Alert - Hey, as an Indian I am tired of American English videos. The accent is so bad, I can't understand anything!!

Btw, it looks like a good problem to solve. It is not easy to ML millions of videos to identify spoken language, but I guess google already has means to do it as they provide closed caption.

Also, the YouTubers in the comments seems to be searching for IT topics, which is heavily dominated by Indians

<comment><USER11> I would honestly be happy if there was a way to filter out content from Indian users on sites like Quora. And I say this as an Indian.

<comment><USER12> The fact that you use quora, a network very popular in India, and expect indian content to not be there is like going to a Italian restaurant and asking why is the menu full of pastas.

<comment><USER11> I don't use Quora. Quora just pops up in my search results all the time.

There is nothing innately Indian about Quora. Indians are just overrepresented on it.

<comment><USER13> Just add '-site:quora.com' to your search query to avoid Quora altogether

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I noticed this too the other way round: as a german native speaker i notice more and more videos in youtubes recommendations that are just popular english videos with german titles. i somehow always assumed these are automatic translations from youtube itself.

<comment><USER15> Yes, these are automatically translated by YT. I'm seeing a lot of video titles that have suddenly been translated to Dutch when I log in. I find this very annoying and have been looking how to turn it off, but couldn't find it.

In my observation not all videos have translated titles, I'd say about 20~30%. So my theory is that it is either some A/B test from YT, or that the channel owner can opt in/out of the automatic translations.

<comment><USER16> The only way I've managed to turn it off is by changing the language of youtube to be English (I've had it in my native language before).

<comment><USER17> I'm French but have everything in English (system, browser & YouTube). I've seen a lot of French YouTube videos with their title auto-translated in English a couple of weeks after their diffusion.

(Bad for two reasons: (1) badly translated titles, sometimes hilariously so, and (2) the algorithm recommends me videos I have already watched. I guess (2) is because I don't usually watch the last 20 seconds, the static "my last video was", whatever it's called, so YouTube must think I haven't watched the video. Most times, the red gauge below the video thumbnail shows half-full even though I've watched the video minus these 20 seconds. There's still room for improvements...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm assuming the poster is searching for videos in a niche IT area. Whenever I'm digging into a computer science topic I get tons of Indian videos. They're in English with a thick Indian accent. If you are able to understand the accent they're actually decent videos.

</comment><comment><USER19> The comments in that discussion seem a bit xenophobic.

There _is_ value in being able to reliably filter by language. After all, if you can't understand a lecture video, then there's little point in watching it.

But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".

<comment><USER20> There is too much of that going around these days. Almost as if it's in fashion. It doesn't really bother me, except for the ones saying, "I'm Indian too, and I hate my kind".

Also, some might not know this, but English is pretty widely spoken in India. It's common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.

And also, my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can't understand. It's never really bothered me though.

In general, it's accurate to say that I've never come across great videos because YouTube recommended them to me.

<comment><USER21> _> my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can't understand. It's never really bothered me though._

I'm a little confused at how people are getting these bad recommendations from YouTube, because my recommendations - at least on my Samsung TV's YouTube app - are mostly spot on. It knows I'm interested in music production, long form studio tours and interviews, 8-bit retro gear & repair, and that's pretty much all it recommends. It can infer that from my subscriptions, but seems to go more by what I actually watch & like.

I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it recommends something wrong? Or maybe Google's algorithms are just really really terrible outside of US / UK / Canada / Aus?

On the other hand, my recommendations on the mobile app aren't as good. It's almost as if YouTube treats each client as a separate account/context, even though I'm signed in on all of them.

<comment><USER20> > I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat > YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it > recommends something wrong?

I do those things often, but not all the time. They usually recommend every single video from a random channel, if you happen to watch just one of their videos. So it's not all the popular Chinese cooking videos, rather all the videos from this one channel alone. That sort of stuff. Almost like they want some people to get large followings and become influencers, because it's more profitable to have influencers on your platform rather than having many great videos from different creators.

In a way I'm happy that YouTube recommendations are not so great. That way at least, I'll not get hooked on the platform and be even more of a time wasting failure than I already am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> _-___________-_ I seem to have thoroughly confused Google with regard to my region/language/currency preferences. Youtube regularly shows me videos in German, Google Maps keeps reverting to UAE dirhams for the currency it shows prices in, and Google Search always opens in Chinese.

I use Google products in a Firefox container which is always logged in to my Google account, which should contain enough information for them to understand that I read English best and would prefer prices to be shown in Euros (or any of a list of maybe 10 other currencies before I would consider dirhams), but there you go.

<comment><USER22> Most Google engineers are comfy sitting in the USA where "use IP location detection, map the country to a default language, and use that" sounds fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I noticed this on Youtube: i keep getting more and more Indian Videos, for reasons unknown to me. I am not really "pissed off" by this, but a lot of these videos are just hard to understand for me, so it feels like a bad UX for me.

What really annoys me is that Google in general is pushing German content into my face, despite the fact that my OS, my browser-settings, my Google profiles and my search queries are 100% English. Just the fact that i am physically located in Germany seems to be enough for them.

I started switching to Google-alternative products almost 1.5 years ago because i am tired of them.

<comment><USER24> This whole language choosing thing seems to be an unsolved problem. It would be great if users could specify their preferred languages somehow in their browser/OS and websites and apps could respect that. But I guess users won't set it properly so websites will try to second-guess them.

You used to be able to do something like google.com/ncr to get US English Google but that doesn't seem to work anymore :( Too many people thinking they know what they want, I guess.

<comment><USER25> >It would be great if users could specify their preferred languages somehow in their browser/OS and websites and apps could respect that

There is[1], but no one uses it. At this point its primary purpose is probably just browser fingerprinting.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Language)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not having search results / videos from languages you do not know is a valid concern, but some of the comments on that thread are essentially just racist.

I don't understand the complaints about the English accent being bad either, because there isn't an "ideal" English accent. It's just different. They also come off as extremely entitled. Guess what, everyone accustomed to a non-UK/US accent has to get used to them to actually understand pretty much any content on the web.

</comment><comment><USER27> I only search YouTube with Google video search as YouTube's built-in search always seems to be delivering much less relevant results for me.

Google Search seems to ignore the user's preferred language choice from the HTTP Accept-Language header and (for a not logged-in user) default to whatever can be inferred from the IP address/location but at least this behavior can be overriden.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've never had this happen to me. How common is it?

</comment><comment><USER29> From one of the comments, it is interesting how "-HINDI" in the search string does seem to eliminate most Indian videos (even ones in other Indian languages like Tamil) where "HINDI" does not seem to be present in the video description.

Looks like a real market need here, although maybe limited to videos in a particular segment (I searched for "Angular tutorial" for this example), because somehow I don't get these Indian hits at all -- despite being Indian and living in India.

</comment><comment><USER30> The poster did not say what exactly is his problem with indian videos. Because he did not say if the videos he encounters are not in English.</comment>


Microsoft CEO defends military contract that some employees say crosses a line - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/25/tech/augmented-reality-microsoft-us-military/index.html <comment><USER2> I think there needs to be a delicate discussion about who gets to have an opinion on these things. How much can an employee expect their companies to listen to their opinion? Who should be listened to? Should everyone get a vote? What if some of the objecting employees are from a country that is an adversary of the US, does that bar them from having an opinion on military contracts?

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure what's better.

The google response was a bit spineless. 'whoops' we got caught, guess we will have to cave. Most of their gender-scandal responses have been similarly reactive (see James DeMore).

I'm not sure I agree with Nadella's reasoning, but it's nice to have a predictable vision.

</comment><comment><USER4> I posted this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19248873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19248873) .

<comment><USER5> And yours was a dupe, too.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19247613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19247613)

<comment><USER4> I'm going to start checking both title and URI using [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) (I was just checking the URI). It still probably won't catch everything though. Thanks for bringing this to my attention `masonic.

<comment><USER5> It's easy to just plug a couple of key words from the title into the search box.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the Videogame Industry Is Powering Down on Employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-a-75-billion-business-is-getting-out-of-the-hiring-game-1491838235 <comment><USER2> No-charge version at MSN [https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a- dollar75-billi...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a- dollar75-billion-industry-is-powering-down-on-employees/ar-BBzF4sg)</comment>


Grunge Inc: Live-In Startups Combine Frat-House Culture With Venture Capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/30/MNGEUK86BI1.DTL&type=tech <comment><USER2> Why stop there at geek-frat-house life? Add a camera, and wham, instant reality show: the trials and tribulations of six young programmers hard at work for their millions. There will be drama, and tears, and laughter, and everyone will come out better for it.

<comment><USER3> We could call it vlad.tv or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've got a projector (from Woot), so our nightly dvd/video game breaks are pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I dug up this old article based on the number of suggestions going around about getting a large hacker house for this summer :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I am becoming very intrigued by the combination of real estate + venture capital

</comment><comment><USER6> This is as distinctive a feature of "Web 2.0" as Ajax.

<comment><USER7> I dunno. I think it's really reminiscent of the startup in the garage of yesteryear (even before the web), but with the beds closer to the computers.</comment></comment>


Atlassian, AU company raises US60M, unheard of for Australian company - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/from-uni-dropouts-to-software-magnates-20100715-10bdh.html <comment><USER2> I'm pretty ignorant about financing. I have a question for finance folks:

This company is about 8 years old, profitable since day one, and made 58 million last year in revenue.

I never hear about companies getting such a cash injection at this stage in their lifespan. Perhaps I'm just primed for "things are different now" stories after reading Fred Wilson's recent post on the topic ( [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed- fu...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fund- phenomenon.html) tl;dr : "While many businesses require a lot less capital to start, they don't require less capital to grow.").

But even by a new We Need to Grow yardstick, it seems Atlassian is mature.

What do you folks think?

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of Jive Software. They were in a very similar position when they took money, in the same market, at a very similar level of maturity, and one of the prime competitors to Atlassian.

I can't speak to the financial implications for their company, but as a customer, the move was terrible. Their prices got jacked way up, they dropped all their offerings in favor of what they saw as the product likely to provide the highest return, invested a ton of that money in sales and marketing, and their service and quality plummeted.

They switched to a subscription software licensing model, stopped listing prices on their website, added a "Solutions" tab next to "Products", etc.

I never understood why they took the money, but I understood why those changes came with the money. As a customer, I hope Atlassian doesn't go down the same road, but given the amount of money and the actual scope of the products they work on, I can't help think that it's an inescapable path.

<comment><USER4> As the founder of the company, I'd like to say that we don't plan on any changes to the business model or pricing.

We've grown Atlassian 3x over the last 3 years, all by following our current model of reasonable, transparent pricing, and selling in volume to thousands of customers around the globe.

There are things we want to improve of course (around our products - we're never done with improving them), but we don't plan to change our model.

We spoke at great length with Accel Partner about this. They like us for what we are, not what we could be if we changed.

<comment><USER3> Hi Scott --

Thanks for replying. Congratulations on the investment, and I hope this works out for you and your company.

However, in my experience, nobody gives you $60 million (or $6 million) dollars and doesn't expect to have their finger in the pie. Everyone -- CEOs, the board, the investors themselves -- _always_ says that they don't want to change a thing about a company, but how can you really avoid a shift in incentives when you hand over a board seat and start spending other people's money?

Whether or not that priority shift will be a good or bad thing is relative to who is asking. Often, there's surprisingly little alignment between what is good for the founders, the customers, the employees and the investors.

Regardless, I wish you all the best, hope you can keep doing things the way you want them to get done, and hope we can continue as Atlassian customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad to hear they're continuing to do so well. Atlassian is one of the great Australian IT success stories - I really hope the government and people see them as a shining example of IT in Australia and why the industry should be further encouraged.

They're also quite generous to a number of causes. They sponsor the Sydney University IT Society and NCSS (which is a summer program in computing for talented high school students) and commonly come and give talks to the local universities on a wide range of topics (technical and entrepreneurial). They also provide free software for open source projects and host the local Java User Groups.

Overall I really do have a fond spot for them, even if they work in Java ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is what Joel Spolsky was worried about a while back. [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth- equal-...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow- death.html)

<comment><USER7> _I had to wonder. We do have a large competitor in our market that appears to be growing a lot faster than we are. The company is closing big deals with big, enterprise customers. And the wheels are falling off the donkey cart over there as the company stretches to fulfill its obligations. Meanwhile, our product is miles better, and we're a well-run company, but it doesn't seem to matter. Why?_

For those of you who might have missed the reference, Spolsky is referring to Atlassian here, even though he doesn't mention them directly by name (not sure why he didn't - perhaps he was still in the denial phase)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good to see the Australian tech sector has some life. The thing I found most interesting was that they bootstrapped off their credit card.

</comment><comment><USER9> Title is incorrect. My large company has been using Atlassian software for years (Confluence, Jira). They are not a startup anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, they're not a startup anymore really, I've updated the title a bit.

The story does talk about the founding of the company though

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tell you that most people hated working with them.

<comment><USER11> A few months ago, I wanted to insert a double backslash into a Confluence wiki page. This isn't as odd as it sounds; Windows network file paths begin with \\\Foo\\. Since backslashes are of course an escape char, you usually have to use \\\\\\\ to get \\\ to output. But, in Confluence, this outputs two newlines. Yes, double-backslash is the symbol for a newline.

Counter-intuitive, yes, but no worse than that so long as there's another symbol you can use for when you do need a double-backslash. But, the thing is, there isn't. When Confluence was first designed, they used up their _only_ escape char with their nonstandard newline symbol. This is, their support staff informed me, a deep-rooted and unchangeable aspect of how Confluence works. It's not a bug, because it will never be changed.

This should give you the gist of what Atlassian is like.

<comment><USER12> They must have fixed something, because in our Confluence wiki:

      \\ -> new line
      \\\\ -> \\\\
      \\Foo -> Foo
      \\Foo\Bar -> \\Foo\Bar

Somewhat errant result for \\\Foo, but the other ones seem to work.

<comment><USER11> The \\\Foo\ example I gave was poorly chosen, because they put in a kluge fix so that anything that resembles a Windows file path will pass through unparsed. You cannot use \\\ in any other circumstance, which is why \\\Foo failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They have a significant SF office, as well, by my understanding.

<comment><USER14> Yup. 60-odd folks there, though the majority of the engineering crew are still in Sydney.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As an employee its very exciting. Welcome to the team Accel!

<comment><USER16> I'll be starting as a Graduate Developer (in Sydney) next year. It should be fun be part of Atlassian and watch it expand.

<comment><USER15> Welcome aboard - looking forward to having you here. Any idea what team Talent have placed you in?

<comment><USER16> Don't know yet - there's still about 7 months to go so it's not a big rush. You'd know more than me - but judging from the direction of the Summit announcements I'm guessing it'll be a Dev Tools team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems odd to me. I've looked at their products in the past, and they certainly aren't giving them away for free. I can't imagine they're not profitable, so what would they need this kind of money for?

<comment><USER16> Mainly expansion.

It looks like Atlassian is planning to use the money on getting more into Europe and Asia; getting some more acquisitions and giving some liquidity to employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> well, they have a real product and real paying customers. that goes a long way I hear.</comment>


Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images - <AUTHOR> http://phrase.it/

<comment><USER2> It's sad that people call their little/fun projects useless. I just used your project and thought it was awesome. And even the worst project ever is useful for _you_. It's how you learn, build and explore. Plus, some truly great things have started out as "useless."

<comment><USER3> Sadly, it's often a good idea to preface "Show HN" submissions with this nowadays so that someone else doesn't tell you how useless your project is in the comments thread.

<comment><USER4> It's the analogous of Reddit comments starting with "I know this will be downvoted but..."

<comment><USER3> Sort of, except that this is usually considered as down vote baiting on HN and is frowned upon. From HN's guidelines: "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."[0]. In this case though, I don't feel it was OP's intention to invite down votes.

[0] <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some useless weekend projects are worth big money!

There was a company called bubbleshare built around this feature a few years back. It was acquired by a company called Kaboose for ~$2 mil, and then Kaboose was acquired a few years later by Disney. (<http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/bubbleshare>)

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool promising project! i dont see why you can't make it as big as pinterest ( or at least a fraction of it)

Remove the TOS and the checkbox during post, make the process easier. At home screen immediately bring a top list of funny pictures with speech balloons. Add facebook/twitter and pinterest integration (if possible), to share your photo with friends. Create a bookmarklet a la pinterest to allow easy sharing of images from any web site. Create a snapchat like mobile app for photo taking and phrasing with a speech bubble and sharing with friends. give me and 20 funny friends of yours accounts to get traction quicker. Make a grand plan, and speak around about it; "cartoonize the web". Add `Laughed' or lol buttons. You have 2 ways going forward 1) a mobile app like instagram or snapchat 2) a web site like pinterest.

edit: beauty is social with pinterest, curiosity with hn/reddit++ but humor is not yet web-full-scale social. phrase.it can be that.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I think it has potential.

It could also be nice to be able to directly embed the image in forums, so have a direct link to the image (might also be useful for reddit ?).

I know that then, it makes it a bit harder to exatract money, but adding a "created with phrase.it" at the bottom should help with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> Add cartoon style speech bubbles to photos within minutes

I think you are underselling here... I don't think you'd be lying if you said "in seconds". I can't imagine any quicker way of doing this.

Also, I like how you can drag an image directly onto the page and it uploads. You may want to add some visual queues for that (like imgur).

Good job!

<comment><USER9> I concur. It took me maybe 10-20 seconds, because it's very intuitive to use and I don't have to upload to give it a try. Plus, the site has no loading issues, which is rarer than it should be.

Do the suggested improvements, especially the social integration, and it might go viral. Good job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It can fetch images that may not be safe for work. I had to immediately close the window. Will check out in the evening after work.

<comment><USER11> same here as well. It did find a random image that was not safe for work. Please do add a warning somewhere above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This loaded a fairly NSFW random image when I tried it. Sort of uncool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just removed the NSFW image as i can not edit the title any more. Sorry for that! Did not think that far when posting.

<comment><USER13> There are safe places to get random images for testing, like placekitten, perhaps others have more recommendations. Personally, I didn't get an unsafe image and found your site easy to use and effective.

<comment><USER14> Both flickr and google image search can be made to return only CC-licensed SFW images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Simple and nice. I would suggest adding a third option to take a photo from webcam.

<comment><USER16> Either webcam or from Instagram/Facebook/Flickr, like Picplum does.

<comment><USER17> Yes, pull an image from my Facebook, let me add a bubble, post it back as a new image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why don't you create a facebook app for this? It could be quite viral if you give it a shot...

<comment><USER19> You could even pull your user's pics (or their friends'?). I'd use that...

<comment><AUTHOR> i actually thought about this but wanted to keep it simple in the beginning. i reconsider it right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree, this isn't useless. I know my mom used to buy stick-on thought bubbles to put on pictures of her kids in baby books and such. If she wanted to do that now she's have to insert a photo into PowerPoint and add a thought bubble. I would use Photoshop which arguably would take even more time.

My suggestion for improvement: have it auto-upload to imgur or another image sharing site (maybe add a checkbox for that when people are reviewing the TOS).

</comment><comment><USER21> Very nice, and quite a bit of fun.

My only objection is with the TOS: while I can sort of understand defamatory and libelous (even these rule out most of the fun), I have issues with "inaccurate". Does not leave much wiggle room, does it?

</comment><comment><USER22> <http://i.imgur.com/Sq8Kd.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER23> This is simple enough to catch on with the tweeny Facebook crowd. Make is more SOCIAL NETWORK and with luck it may go viral.

<comment><USER16> You should add the ability to modify an existing phrase'd picture. That would make it easier for trends to emerge.

<comment><USER24> Or clone to start your own based on a current one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When people say "weekend project" on HN, is it implied that it's multiple weekends worth of effort, or just one?

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest it was more like a long Christmas weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks amazing! Nice work.

I'd recommend changing "Take a random photo" to "Use a random photo". The take action for photo is generally understood to be different to the one you are using it for.

</comment><comment><USER27> Love how it works, possibly a new way to create memes...

</comment><comment><USER28> Your app didn't really like my vertically oriented screen, but otherwise it's really neat, the random picture button is really genius (lets us use the software quickly). I hate to be "that guy" but... maybe using rounded buttons for the "preview and save" would be better? It seems to fit the aesthetic

</comment><comment><USER29> I've tried it 10 times, and have only been given two different images to work with. I suggest-

A: more images B: a faster, more intuitive way to skip an image, rather than forcing the user to "cancel" and then start a new caption.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point about the cancel button! Once i find more pictures i can put to the stock i'll definitively add a "next image" button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Really nice domain name too! So many sites have .it, .io, etc domain names where the TLD doesn't mean anything at all and it's glaringly obvious it's just cause they couldn't get the .com. In this case it works very nicely.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thank you. I think this is useful project for me. The other day, I also thought about making a algorithm to create a speech bubble around a piece of text. You have a pretty good implementation.

</comment><comment><USER32> looks really cool, well done! Only thing I would recommend is to immediately popup the share icon as soon as it's done rendering. The heart icon also isn't clear how I share the image.

</comment><comment><USER33> Very cool, I like it and definitely don't find it useless because it's a nice product. I made one: <http://phrase.it/show/wMQYy>

</comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty awesome. A friend of mine wanted me to look into doing something exactly like this. And this is definitely not useless. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER35> If anyone's looking for something like this but more flexible, the $30 desktop app Comic Life (<http://comiclife.com/>) also lets you add speech bubbles to images, as well as arrange the images in panels and write sound effects. Comic Life was bundled free with new Macs a few years ago, so you might already own it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Really nice! I think it might be good though, if the UI controls for speech bubble style could be on the other side, away from the "business end" of the (default) speech bubble. Usually those controls will be covering the face or mouth or... sound utterance mechanism of whatever you're making talk.

Really nice and fun though!

</comment><comment><USER37> I think reddit would go crazy for this sort of stuff. In fact, have it load images from imgur. Also, nice work.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good work. What did you use to build it?

<comment><AUTHOR> On the client mostly jQueryUI, qq-upload and some little jQuery plugins. On the server my usual PHP setup (Smarty, phpThumb) and the awesome instagraph library for the filters (<https://github.com/webarto/instagraph>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Turn this into a Facebook app that lets you make comics and it could be big.

Also, add some more fonts ;)

</comment><comment><USER39> Nice. Reminds me of my Bubble Project concept from a couple of years ago. <http://valentinlaube.de/projects/bubble%20project/>

Edit: check out the interactive prototype on the bottom of the page

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm reminded of the... I don't know if it's a quote or a general idea, but the sentiment that the next big thing starts out looking like a toy.

Possible UI bug though - I can't seem to control the line spacing to fit the text in the bubble?

</comment><comment><USER41> One suggestion: A quick check, if Cancel is really what the user wanted or, if the site gets reloaded or the user leaves it by accidentally hitting a bookmark display a notification, that he/she might want to save first.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is awesome great work, please do a follow up post on how you built it :).

</comment><comment><USER43> I think this could actually have utility in a business setting: many folks doing presentations, newsletters, etc... don't have image software (or the know-how) to create this kind of effect.

</comment><comment><USER44> You could add an option to select a photo from one of my existing albums on Facebook, make changes on top of it and then upload it back to Facebook as a new image.

Nice application btw.

</comment><comment><USER45> Before clicking, I thought as though it would be like <http://mustachify.me/> with a prompt/variable to render the bubble text.

</comment><comment><USER46> This reminds me of this website: <https://makr.io/>

I think I found it on HN a few months ago.

Fun little project anyway :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I hope "weekend project" is just a thing people say these days and this really took longer than a weekend, or I wish I could create something this awesome in a few days :/

</comment><comment><USER48> This is extremely well done and has a lot of potential. A lot of people talked about incorporating it with Facebook and other mediums (maybe an app).

Do it up!

</comment><comment><USER49> Very cool and lots of business potential. My nephew loves to 'make' comics. I can see parents uploading their kids drawing and adding speech bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER50> Ha! This is fun though I was hoping for some simple machine-vision based pre- processing on the image to auto place the speech bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER51> Very nice! I'll echo thoughts of some one else here who said you'd be representing it right if you added "in seconds" to your tagline.

</comment><comment><USER52> Useless? No way! Just a clever title! ;) Nice work, bookmarked! You should create more useless projects IMO! Or better this one!

</comment><comment><USER53> Cool! I found it difficult to place the call-out in the right position because a smaller version is showed while dragging.

</comment><comment><USER54> Unfortunately, I can't add Japanese character for this. It seems that this application don't have CJKV fonts.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is awesome! So far from useless, I'd like to see the most recent or most popular on the home page though

</comment><comment><USER56> actually its quite usefull project. Do you know. we can use this for campaign like we love Iran. <http://www.weloveiran.org/>

can you share the techonology stack or how its built. is it open sourced ?

</comment><comment><USER57> Looks awesome ! I was using befunky, and ps previously, but this one s gonna be my new fav

</comment><comment><USER58> Make this into an iPhone app and you'll probably get some very nice monthly dosh from it.

</comment><comment><USER59> <http://phrase.it/show/gYTbo>

</comment><comment><USER60> @chezmo I'd love to see a write up on the technology stack used for this project!

</comment><comment><USER61> The site only has one default Photo of the dude pondering in his cube?

</comment><comment><USER62> I couldn't find a way to change bubble type after dragging it in.

</comment><comment><USER63> Just wondering how you render the final image?

<comment><AUTHOR> i transfer all parameters via json to php and redo the rendering on the server with the GD library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pretty cool. How did you implement filters?

<comment><AUTHOR> instagraph library (<https://github.com/webarto/instagraph>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This shit is pretty awesome. Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is fun and works nicely.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is great. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER67> simple idea, beautifully made, love it!

</comment><comment><USER68> Looks great!

</comment><comment><USER69> i like it :)

Note: Not useless

</comment><comment><USER70> Very neat!

</comment><comment><USER71> "take a random photo" might be NSFW

</comment><comment><USER72> facebook would love this

</comment><comment><USER73> where is the gallery?

</comment><comment><USER74> for god's sake .. add a nsfw tag for the auto generated pics ... not cool man</comment>


The song that the MPAA do not want you to hear - <AUTHOR> http://www.monotoko.co.uk/2012/04/16/the-song-that-the-copyright-cartel-do-not-want-you-to-hear/

<comment><AUTHOR> They're quick... fixed the link XD</comment>


Any app that can take video without any concern? - <AUTHOR>

My friend came to me and ask if there is any app that can video without any concern? She loves to take video with her SmartPhone whenever she can. She has limited storage of 16 GB and wanted all her video in HD!
Then I answer, you can use the Ustream app! But she said she does not want to publish her video, but only want her video on her private storage! Then, I have no idea what app can do this...
I am quite surprised she has such demand. Do you know of there is a group of people also similar to her? I can recommend it to her.
That's why I am asking here... Any input would be much appreciated!
Cheers and happy Easter guys and girls! <comment><USER2> Something like this wifi capable portable drive?

[http://www.macworld.com/article/2033633/review-boost-your- ip...](http://www.macworld.com/article/2033633/review-boost-your-ipads- storage-with-seagate-wireless-plus.html) or [http://www.sandisk.com/products/wireless/flash- drive/](http://www.sandisk.com/products/wireless/flash-drive/) or [http://9to5mac.com/2014/01/15/review-lacie-fuel-the- wireless...](http://9to5mac.com/2014/01/15/review-lacie-fuel-the-wireless- portable-drive-for-all-your-idevices/)

I wonder about how well implemented the security might be on devices of this class though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! Not specifically portable drive, any app or device can meet her demand should be fine :)

Probably it will be good enough for her ;)

With portable drive, I think user still need to constantly clear up the drive to enable more video storage.</comment></comment>


Who vomited on Mashable's layout? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/

<comment><USER2> Looking at the design my eyes wander, rather than being directed -- element are too stylistically similar. It doesn't help that the images are roughly the same size which prevents them from denoting relative importance. The constant use of blue is overwhelming as well.

I never thought i'd say this, but the new mashable makes TC's design look inspired. At least on TC its very easy to ignore the right column.

</comment><comment><USER3> The single post page looks much better/more thought out than the front page. The front page lacks flow; there's no differentiation between the sidebar and the content and I'm not quite sure where to look first, next, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kind of puts the "mash" into Mashable, don't you think?

</comment><comment><USER5> Mashable has _always_ had a pretty horribly layout. That's the main reason I never visit that site.

</comment><comment><USER6> It was much better before

</comment><comment><USER7> Front Page is horrible!

</comment><comment><USER8> that's what happens when you design for advertising

</comment><comment><USER9> The front page design makes me think that they're going for _some_ whitespace, but that you really can't click on the page without clicking on something. A blurring between ads and content that makes it more likely to accidentally click an ad, and that every click on a page should result in a pageload of some sort, even if the user was intending to click a blank area.

It's like 'horror vacui'[1] applied to web development.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui></comment>


Ask HN: How do I get my open source library known? - <AUTHOR> I have been open sourcing some of the libraries I use when I develop iOS apps everyday. But nobody seems to see them. Is there any successful way to get them known? <comment><USER2> 1\. Make them useful.

2\. [https://www.cocoacontrols.com](https://www.cocoacontrols.com)

(n.b. I created Cocoa Controls)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! I will take it a look.</comment></comment>


What's wrong with CRUD - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenativeweb.io/blog/2017-10-25-09-46-ddd-and-co-part-1-whats-wrong-with-crud/ <comment><USER2> Really good write-up. I haven't finished all the parts of the article but I like it. I will definitely will try to build something with wolkenkit

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your very nice feedback :-)</comment></comment>


Mantle graphics API programming guide [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.amd.com/Documents/Mantle-Programming-Guide-and-API-Reference.pdf

<comment><USER2> So, we are talking about 1000 LOCs driver code here?</comment>


New Business Model: Free iPhone Apps. The Source Costs Money. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tausendstern.com/ <comment><USER2> This is a new idea but the market is extremely small. None of the those applications are that difficult to replicate. I might be willing to pay for some OpenGL app with a lot of documentation but I don't see this really turning into a good business model.

Even an OpenGL app is pushing it, there is already code from Apple freely available and you can download the code from TouchFighter 2 in some places. I just don't see this filling a need.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this a consequence of the broken "What's Hot" ranking at the iPhone App Store combined with the NDA? Perhaps there's more profit potential in the horde of greedy wannabe iPhone app authors than in the AppStore customers?

<comment><USER4> nda is over and done. And it may be that for this guy free apps + and a reasonably priced source distribution is the most profitable business model.

None of these apps strike me as uniquely useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What this seems to be saying is that the iPhone apps that are not popular are no longer making money. Someone who has some not popular iPhone app should tell what's really going on there.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm tempted by the bonjour apps. Are there any open example of bonjour on iPhone currently?

</comment><comment><USER7> Resale rights for E50 on 9 apps? That's a surprisingly good deal.</comment>


After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/technology/cryptocurrency-investor-losses.html <comment><USER2> > Now, eight months later, the $23,000 he invested in several digital tokens > is worth about $4,000, and he is clearheaded about what happened.

> "I got too caught up in the fear of missing out and trying to make a quick > buck," he said last week. "The losses have pretty much left me financially > ruined."

I think it's distasteful to criticize the decisions that lead to someone's downfall, but maybe someone will read this and take heed for the future. If losing $19,000 will genuinely leave you financially ruined, cryptocurrency is way too high risk of an asset to get involved in.

I feel bad for him and hope nobody ends up in the same spot.

<comment><USER3> I don't think any investor saw this as anything else than a bubble, they just wanted to enjoy the ride up. I would go all-in in a bubble if I had the confidence someone would tap on my shoulder to let me know when it's going to crash. Investing requires discipline.

<comment><USER4> That isn't what they were saying at the time. Even level-headed forums like Hacker News had a lot of comments (gathering positive votes, although I suspect not all were organic) trying to describe with a wide-array of pseudo- science why Bitcoin was the king of a new world of inherently superior currencies.

Of course it was nonsense, as anyone who'd read about previous bubbles could tell you. But it was a mad time last December.

<comment><USER5> I know people who still think there is value there and it will go back up.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I am one of them. This is what, the fourth Bitcoin bubble that has burst? The December bubble bursting is no surprise for most level-headed folks that have been following this for a while -- just for the newbies making extremely risk bets at the top of the latest bubble.

Also, most of us are not deluded enough to think it going up to $100k+/BTC is a certainty; there are a number of reasons the larger BTC experiment/bubble could deflate for good one day. But there's also rational arguments for betting otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where do they find these people? Is this what a lot of "ordinary" people do? Take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to invest in cryptocurrency? Are the people profiled in the article a representative sample? Or are we hearing about the worst cases only because they are so notable and out of the ordinary? Will this post ever stop asking questions??

Stories like these are full of anecdote and short on facts, it's hard for me to know what to make of them.

<comment><USER8> I work in a software firm. Last autumn half of my team was "investing" in cryptos. People who never traded before, who didn't knew what a bid or an ask was, and who complained to me that exchange interfaces were terribly complicated. Some of them were mulling breaking their 401k (or whatever the term is) so that they could invest the money here.

In January they were saying to me "it's not a loss if you don't sell, right?" Literally 0 financial education.

<comment><USER9> > People who never traded before, who didn't knew what a bid or an ask was

and the more amazing thing to me was that they also didn't even want to know

the markets were moving too fast to learn anything, too fast to learn about the history, too fast to put any asset under scrutiny because there is another shiny new thing to trade with a cool name and interesting founding team

or as the ZCash employees and fans are programmed to say "the math is interesting and the cryptographers are highly regarded so--" THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CRYPTOCURRENCY TRADERS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every Bitcoin market decline brings out stories like this. Here's one from 2013 that's worse than anything in the NYT article:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r88vl/need_advice...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r88vl/need_advice_on_inheritance_arbitrage_family_etc/)

<comment><USER11> He got himeslf in over his head with arbitrage. Hindsight is always 20/20, but if he had waited a bit, he could have turned that into what... a 10 million profit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Investors? More like speculators, gamblers...

Most people buy crypto because they believe the price will rise and they will be able to sell at profit. Investing is when you buy something that generates profits or utility, for example a share of a company or a house.

<comment><USER13> Isn't that what my 401k is? Sure I get matching contributions from my employer, but I am hoping it keeps rising and that I can sell later for a profit when I retire. Maybe I'm oversimplifying that, but how is that any different?

<comment><USER14> Because companies exist to create revenue and grow. Revenue means dividend and R&D investment, hence, people spend more to buy those shares because company values are higher. For Cryptocurrencies, you just expect someone else will pay more than you do, but there is no obvious reason why it should be that way forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nothing new. When you see ads in the subway to buy cryptocurrencies, and you have people buying cheaper coins because they don't realize they can buy a fraction of a bitcoin, this happens.

There is no fast way to get rich if you are dumb.

<comment><USER15> We still have reality television right?

<comment><USER8> You are not wrong:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/love- isla...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/love-island-fame- is-more-lucrative-than-an-oxbridge-education)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To be honest with bitcoin currently still over $6,000 there is a lot more pain to come.

<comment><USER16> Bitcoin has been through at least 3-4 major "run ups" already. Those who do not look at the log chart think that "this time it's different" and Bitcoin will surely die for good. Later it'll crash from $250K to $50K and then it will certainly be the end.

2011: $1->$30->$3.

2012: $5->$15->$10.

2013: $10->$270->$80.

2013-14: $100->$1100->$250.

2016-2018: $500->$20000->$6000 (so far).

<comment><USER17> That looks like skillful manipulation to me. There _is_ an important difference with the most recent bubble -- now bitcoin is a household name. Where is the next pool of gamblers coming from?

<comment><USER18> Institutional investors via Bitcoin futures ETFs[0].

It will likely result in a lot of money flowing into the market via funds and investment houses where investors seek to diversify their investments.

That will probably bring the cryptocurrency market back up to $20K and above. It probably won't happen until 2019 or 2020, though. The SEC is still on the fence about it, but I see it as an eventual inevitability.

[0]: [https://www.coindesk.com/sec-bitcoin-futures- etf/](https://www.coindesk.com/sec-bitcoin-futures-etf/)

<comment><USER17> Good grief, I hope that does not happen. I think any professional financial services people who blatantly speculate with clients' funds should be on the hook for criminal penalties. It's one thing for Joe Blow to play the speculation game with his own money, it's entirely different for a professional to do it with everyone else's.

<comment><USER19> Don't worry, the SEC has now declined to approve two separate attempts at a Bitcoin-based ETF, both times citing the extensive manipulation of Bitcoin markets as one of the reasons. I don't see them changing their attitude given that rampant market manipulation is the main thing keeping Bitcoin alive at all right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this kind of thing the whole reason we have accredited investor laws? This might be an unpopular opinion, but if we want to protect people from themselves, maybe we should stop banning people from investing in private equity and start worrying more about exotic stuff like crypto. It seems utterly absurd to me that I'm not allowed to buy a single share of Uber or SpaceX, while sinking my life savings into whatever obscure cryptocurrency I choose is perfectly legal.

<comment><USER21> I'm unclear on why we wouldn't just ban both things.

The reason you can't buy a share of Uber or SpaceX is, effectively, that those companies _don 't want your money_. Both could easily do a public offering and admit you as a shareholder, but choose not to.

Further clarity: I'm "accredited", and I don't think I can buy a share of either company either.

<comment><USER22> That's not the only reason you can't buy a share of Uber or SpaceX. There are probably hundreds of employees who would jump at the chance to sell some of their vested shares. There are some secondary markets where you have to be an accredited investor, but most startups will block the transaction.

P.S. I think it would be a very good idea to buy some Uber shares before their IPO. Maybe try EquityZen [1].

[1] [https://equityzen.com/trending/uber/](https://equityzen.com/trending/uber/)

<comment><USER23> Yes, the whole startup-to-corporate-acquisition-or-ipo funnel is an elaborate fraud and even the government is in on it. It's why many people invested in crypto in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 22 years ago

[https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/business/investing-it- the...](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/business/investing-it-the-talk-of- cyberspace-is-iomega-losing-its-zip.html)

<comment><USER25> Minidisc, anyone?

I still do not really understand why this wasnt more successful (at least by the time CDs existed/were used)

<comment><USER26> Why MiniDisc wasn't more successful, or why Iomega wasn't more successful?

For Iomega, it was because of terrible quality control, leading to fiascos like the Zip drive "click of death" (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_driv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_drives)). A storage vendor whose products develop a reputation for frequent, catastrophic data loss isn't going to stick around long.

For MiniDisc, it was because MD didn't offer a clear leap up from what you could get from compact discs, and because Sony couldn't help but be Sony and go off and develop their own system while everyone else in the industry was using a different one (DCC: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette)).

<comment><USER27> For the majority of people this is obviously true, but my MD was so much better than my Discman. I could record MDs and it was rock stable, while the Discman (even the later models with buffer) would jump all the time. Would have loved to own DAT, but was too expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Liquidated enough bitcoin in February of this year to payoff my mortgage. Owe a significant amount in taxes next year. Token investment from 2013 paid off, was time to exit based on articles like this.

Never shilled or advised others to "invest" because the best time to sell is when everyone else is buying and I understand how pyramid schemes work.

Got took for a ride in every major ponzi, scam, etc prior to 2014 seeking interest... greed. Hello, hi! HN - I know you don't like the bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER29> When everyone starts talking about cryptocurrencies, one should stop investing. A variant from a stock market quote.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, last year when my 76 year old mother asked me about bitcoin, I knew the bubble was about to pop. I've never been a bitcoin gambler myself, and I told my mom to stay the hell away as well. That continues to be my advice.

I still think it looks like a big well-constructed scam designed to pull vast amounts of money from starry-eyed naive people and transfer it to a very small number of sharks.

<comment><USER30> that is not a reliable indicator though. I remember a lot of non-tech people talking about bitcoin in 2013. Even at $100-250/coin it was getting a lot of media coverage.

<comment><USER29> It raised up to $1000 at that time and followed by a great drop to 100-ish and stay that level... but I don't know why it went up so much this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't like that gambling (on an obviously ponzi like scheme) is called investing.

<comment><USER17> That started a long time ago. Buying stocks that pay no income is also referred to as investing, even though it is more accurately gambling as well. At least with stocks there is something with a more convincing value proposition.

<comment><USER32> C'mon, some stocks don't pay anything because there are better ways invest their profit. You still own equity in something tangible and generating value most of the time.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but you are gambling that their reinvestment will raise their stock value in the long run so that eventually you will make money. It's still a gamble, though.

<comment><USER32> It's an investment. You buy equity in something that produces value. Paying dividends or not is a non issue. Sure there is risk but it's different than buying lottery tickets or imaginary internet money. Conflating the two in the eyes of the public was great success of crypto currency pump and dumpers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's zero sum. All those losers are needed to power the boom.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm so glad to see naive investors learning that cryptos are a scam. Now they can get back to real investments like social media apps and cloud computing.

</comment><comment><USER35> Made the opposite mistake. Called this a bubble way to early (Like $1 per coin) territory and refused to put money into it.

Pretty spectacular fail right there.

Currently trying to apply the above life lesson to investing in weed companies. It's a bit more difficult though since they have more plausible substance so it's more murky in a way.

</comment><comment><USER36> > After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Crypto"currency" gamblers.

FTFY.

</comment><comment><USER37> Any activity that simply involves spending money and not enough sweat equity is not an investment but rather speculation. Doesn't matter if you are buying stocks or real estate, and most definitely so with all cryptocurrencies especially when you are not mining.

</comment><comment><USER38> I appreciate being the opposite of this story. Bought into an ICO five years ago, forgot about it, remembered early last year, diversified into more tokens but had a feeling to pull out when BTC was $18k. Sold 95% of my entire portfolio.

<comment><USER39> Just out of curiosity, how does it make you feel knowing your gains were at the expense of not very fortunate or rich people losing out around the world - unprotected because of the newness of the "investment" type - by investment laws. I made a modest return on a bitcoin investment, felt shit about it, and donated all the return to charity.

<comment><USER40> Nobody had a gun to the buyers/sellers head. Everyone knows what they are getting into, and markets are a zero-sum game. I have no ethical issues with making profit from trading. I'm sorry that you were not able to take the win. Maybe you should not play games?

<comment><USER39> You're right, no-one got their guns out. But that isn't how confidence tricks tend to work. I think the reality for a lot of the losers -globally - is that they were kind of desperate, desperate enough to believe that there was some immediate answer to their cash needs. I started off believing in the crypto dream, but last year started to realise it was not what I thought it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It would be really nice if we could get financial literacy and basic investing taught in high school.

</comment><comment><USER42> Corrected title: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for n00b crypto Investors

<comment><USER43> That doesn't even make sense. Anyone that is attempting to invest in crypto is a noob, even the ones that claim to be 'experts'. Nobody had any type of signaling to predict a price deflation for any of the crypto assets. The hard lesson is about timing, not about expertise.

<comment><USER44> Not 100% true. It's a small market full of inexperienced investors. It's easy enough to play it as such and come out a winner. For example, all the price movements are exaggerated because novice investors lack emotional control -- they get too greedy when the price is going up (magnifying the upward trend) then sell in a panic when the trend starts to reverse.

I often make better returns in a sideways crypto market than buy-and-hold gives me in the stock market.</comment></comment></comment>