How Not to Do Time Tracking for Software Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.7pace.com/blog/developer-time-tracking-fails <comment><USER3> Tracking time is part and parcel of being a consultant, at least if you have multiple clients and overlapping work. After doing it for 15+ years, I've tried it all - everything from the spreadsheet, to the apps, to forgetting and having to go back and reconstruct.

I read this article and I think it's missing the point about what's so hard about time tracking.

What's hard is: Implementing the trigger on the context switch.

You're working on one thing, something happens and you make a context switch to something else - and in order to track your time, you need a trigger to fire to prompt you to record the switch. It doesn't matter if it's in a spreadsheet or an app or on a piece of paper - I find that my brain doesn't fire that trigger very reliably. Especially if I'm busy.

If someone can solve _that_ problem with a fancy app, I'd be impressed!

I've said it in another thread [1]: I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790918)

<comment><USER4> I have this in a cron:

      * 08-23 * * * ~/.local/bin/with-i3 '~/.local/bin/record-active-window'

this is record-active-window:

      # set LOGFILE to whatever place you want to record things.

      echo "DATE = $(date +%s 2>&1)" >> $LOGFILE
      echo "IDLE = $(xprintidle)" >> $LOGFILE
      xprop -id $(xprop -root  _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | sed 's/.*# //') WM_CLASS WM_NAME 2>&1 >> $LOGFILE

this is with-i3

      #!/bin/bash

      source <(cat /proc/`ps -e | grep ' i3$' | awk '{print $1}'`/environ  | sed -r -e 's/([^\x00]*)\x00/export \1\n/g')
      bash -c "$*"

I was too lazy to figure out what env vars were missing from the cron (probably dbus socket) so i copied them all from the i3 process above

That plus the habit to lock the screen while I'm away from it works fairly reliable.

edit: you also have the idle time in case you want to ignore result where you've been idle for way too long (forgot to lock screen)

edit2: a sample log entry (idle is in miliseconds, date is unix timestamp in seconds)

      DATE = 1550608681
      IDLE = 2456
      WM_CLASS(STRING) = "google-chrome", "Google-chrome"
      WM_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "Edit | Hacker News - Google Chrome"

If only Slack changed the window title when I change chats, I could also track how much time I spend talking where :) The web version does it though, so I might stop using the electron app...

<comment><USER5> Have you come across arbtt? It's a script that pretty much does exactly the same thing, but comes with a few extras for categorization and analysis.

<comment><USER4> I don't like arbtt because it has an undocumented binary log format making it unnecessarily difficult to build tools on top of it. Its documentation in general is also poorly written.

This is not perfect either, but its just a little extra work to convert it to JSON and put it in elasticsearch to use kibana on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, couldn't get past the arrogant know-it-all writing style. "With almost anything in life, there's a right way to do things and a wrong way." Is that so, Socrates? I'd say the opposite, with almost anything in life there are complex and subtle tradeoffs and many good alternatives. Absolute, black-and- white thinking (and writing) is comforting but narrowminded.

</comment><comment><USER7> The crux of the story is this sentence:

"They've taken a tool that could give people more ownership over their own work and distorted it into a mechanism for managers to exert control over their team."

This is true for every company, no matter the tool. This could equally apply to a Methodology, meetings, deliverables, timelines, or any other top-down approach designed around coercion.

I'm reminded on Tom DeMarco's thoughts about Control and what kind of projects need such controls [1]:

To understand control's real role, you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects:

\- Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.

\- Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.

What's immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

Can I really be saying that it's OK to run projects without control or with relatively little control? Almost. I'm suggesting that first we need to select projects where precise control won't matter so much. Then we need to reduce our expectations for exactly how much we're going to be able to control them, no matter how assiduously we apply ourselves to control.

[1]: [https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep...](https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf)

<comment><USER8> In Film production control is crucial, because although the returns might be huge, only control allows you to get the best out of a limited budget. Good control means also to know precisely where to leave creative freedoms, otherwise you will end up exactly with a bad version of what was planned.

<comment><USER9> Interesting comparison. With a film, you normally don't start production without a script. You also appoint a director that (hopefully) is fully responsible for the vision of the project.

In comparison, with software, we often don't know what we want to build except in vague terms. It's a bit like one of those failed movie projects where they know they want to make a Superman film, but they don't actually have a script and are constantly rewriting as they go. Also, unless you have a very enlightened group, usually there is nobody that is responsible for the vision of the project _except in very vague terms_. If you have a question, "Should we collect the user's login data before we allow them to see the welcome splash screen?" usually nobody knows. When someone makes a decision, it's not necessarily due to having an overall vision of how the product works, but more a random choice. Often the people making the decisions about how the product will work are marketing, sales or management figures, instead of people on the creation side of the equation.

I think the latter issue can be fixed and I think it would go a _long_ way towards making better products. The former issue, though, I think is not fixable. We tried the "analysis upfront" approach for decades and it never worked well for software. Usually you can't tell what you need until after you built it at least once.

<comment><USER10> What? A script is exactly like a vague description at the start of a software project. It doesn't detail what sets are built, costumes, who will star, how much it will all cost, who will be hired, where the lights go, the music, and a 1000 other things.

Your comparison is silly.

<comment><USER9> A script contains a description of exactly what will happen from the start of the movie to the end. It contains all of the dialog. It contains descriptions of the important interactions with external entities like the location and any props you will need.

I was suggesting that the script is a bit like what we used to do when we wrote requirements documents. I doubt many people do it any more, but a long time ago we used to describe all of the workflows for an application before we did any design even. It was a description of exactly what would happen in every scenario. Sometimes it would have UX descriptions, but often not -- those would come later. This almost always fails because usually people's initial ideas are poor and it takes iteration to come up with a product that actually works well.

I don't think it's too far of a stretch to compare a script to a requirements document. Of course apples aren't oranges even though they are both fruit. You can find commonalities in anything and also differences. My main thought was that the OP suggested that filming a movie required complete control over the process, even though it was a lucrative endeavour. I thought, what's the difference between a movie and a software project, then? Are we missing opportunities because we don't apply enough control?

I don't think so. I think a movie project has a lot more information about what they are building before they start than a software project. _That 's_ the reason that control works better for them. However, I _do_ think that software projects often lack vision because often nobody is responsible for that vision. Interestingly, as I said, movies appoint someone to be in charge of the vision of the project. Would the same thing work on a software project? I think it would.

If you think that my comparison is silly, then how do you rationalise the OP's claim that control is necessary for making a movie, while it appears that control is something we want to avoid for software projects? Or do you believe that software projects _do_ require control in the same way that film making does?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend activity-watch[0] if anyone wants a good, open-source, at-a-glance system of tracking for their own computer usage. It's definitely helped me rebuild a memory of my activities on days that got away from me.

[0] [https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch](https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch)

</comment><comment><USER12> There is no technical fix that will make managerial time-tracking less of an exercise in control and relentless optimization at the expense of the developer. If you want to preserve some autonomy and dignity, you need to fundamentally restructure the relationship between yourself and management (like with, for instance, a ~union~).

<comment><USER13> I think this bears some elaboration because I feel the same way, but if we don't talk about _why_ we feel this way, it looks like we're spending our time playing video games and pretending we're working. ("After lunch I just... space out... for a couple of hours. But it looks like I'm working!") I spend a fair amount of time reading documentation; no matter how many programming languages or tools or environments I know, there's always something new to learn. This is true whether I want to learn something new or not - even if I were comfortable just using the stuff I knew when I graduated college, I'll eventually inherit or have to work with something that somebody who knows something newer wrote. As a result, learning new things, reading documentation, experimenting with unknown systems is part of the job - <USER2> is completely unappreciated. When I was younger, the managers would ask me what my plan for accomplishing task "X" was and I would start with, "Ok, the first thing I need to do is to learn the environment" and invariably they'd go apeshit when I suggested that I "waste" their time and money on something as pointless as "learning". If I was competent, I'd already know this stuff, and admitting that I needed to waste time reading documentation was sort of an admission of weakness. Of course, being young and naive, I'd try to reason with them but after years and years of having the same circular arguments I finally learned to give bland, inane responses like "research" and avoid giving specifics.

<comment><USER14> Part of being a mature "senior" developer is to stop budging on estimates. Give an estimate to the best of your knowledge. Don't budge. If there is not enough time, cut back on scope, not necessary tasks like research. Cite Steve McConnell if you need back up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fuck everything about these breathless, one-sentence-per-paragraph articles. It's infuriating to read.

<comment><USER16> In this case it's a real bummer because it's as if a perfectly fine article was then cut into little pieces, with some of them swapping position. It takes very little to improve it lots, e.g.

> We're outspoken advocates for tracking time. After all, we are a team of > software developers who willingly and knowingly created an application > specifically for the purpose of time tracking, right? Our philosophy is > simple: time tracking is like fitness tracking, it's a way for you, as an > individual, to assess yourself. We think that it's totally normal and > healthy for developers to want to own their time in a quantifiable way, > measure their own abilities, and master their craft.

> But it's no secret that most developers have a visceral reaction to the very > idea of tracking time, and the truth is that most companies do time tracking > entirely wrong. The reason why developers hate tracking time so much and > fight tooth-and-nail against the idea of having to log hours is because > companies have royally screwed it up, they've taken a tool that could give > people more ownership over their own work and distorted it into a mechanism > for managers to exert control over their team. It's like the company's way > of saying, "Sure, we trust you to do your job… but – just in case – we're > watching you." What kind of employee-employer relationship do you think that > creates?

> With almost anything in life, there's a right way to do things and a wrong > way, and time tracking is absolutely no different. It can be an effective > tool for helping developers own and improve their own abilities, but only if > management resists the temptations to use it in other ways. In most cases, > if the developers on your team hate time tracking, it's because of how it's > being implemented (or because they have PTSD from a previous job where it > was implemented poorly.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Time Tracking to 15 minutes or unicorn points in sprint estimation, beancounters will glom onto it and the stats will be juked, padded, and hoarded.

<comment><USER18> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Time tracking just makes developers better liars. It gives clients the room to be angry, fight contractual obligations, and essentially not pay for the development time.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just make mine super vague. I put in the number of hours I was in the office, and I summarize most days with some variation on "Made improvements and bug fixes". That's the only way I can spend time doing anything other than actively writing code without stressing out about it.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like WakaTime can help you. It's an automatic time tracker for programmers, but the part you would like:

It shows when you started and stopped working for the day.

An example chart: [https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding- ac...](https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding-activity)

<comment><USER20> I just look at the clock when I arrive, round to the nearest quarter hour, and unless there's something pressing I leave 8 hour later

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The "How Knowledge Work Happens" graphic is really what resonates with me. I run a dev shop and I hate time tracking for the complexity implied in this image. Questions come to mind.

What counts for time tracking and what doesn't? If I spend an hour emailing back and forth with a stakeholder, none of this is reflected in my GitHub activity. So there is a delta between what is billable time and the actual deliverable.

What if I spend an hour researching a solution for a feature? Or debugging my environment? Again, that implies delta between billable time and the deliverable.

What about my level of expertise? I might be a junior or senior level developer; I might have certain specialized knowledge in an area of programming (or lack it). Again, more delta that tracks closely to the specific logistics of a small feature and less with overall "time".

Suppose I had a machine that strictly tracked the amount of time I spent "doing something project-related" (whatever the specific rubric). At the end of the day, I now have a number. What does this number actually tell me? I am not sure it is that useful and it definitely depends on however the rubric was defined (which would be inherently arbitrary anyway).

To me, it makes sense to just allot hours to devs and trust that they are doing their jobs. When people stop doing their job, peers notice anyway, hour tracking or not.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you are an emacs/org-mode user, it's quite easy to clock in and out of tasks as you work, and generate summary reports of your time.

I've done this with good success when I was _required_ to track my time. If I'm not required to do it, I find that I just dont bother.

<comment><USER24> I used to have that problem but now that I'm freelancing, I actually take care to always have an active clock running on a task I'm working on. It's even improving my focus in a way - I have a constant reminder in my mode line (both in Emacs and in WM) what I'm focusing on.

The key to making this work, when I couldn't make it work in Jira, is lack of friction. In Emacs, if I want to switch tasks I'm working on, it takes the following sequence of keypresses:

      C-a a -- switch to Org Agenda
      C-s taskn... <ret> -- find new task "taskname" via incremental search
      i -- clock in, automatically clocking out the previously active task
      s -- save all open org-mode files
      q -- close Org Agenda window

It's in my muscle memory, and I can do that faster in there than it takes for a single Jira page to refresh (reason #123 I prefer desktop native over web apps, and don't consider the latter as proper tools).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious if anyone here has had success with more "coarsely grained" time tracking?

I've found that I'd have no issues tracking my time by day or at most half-day increments, especially since for the most part that's how I end up working on things in a lot of cases (as a developer, not a manager).

I _feel_ like it would give most of the same benefits with a magnitude less work, but I haven't ever tried it out in a real situation before and I'm curious if it holds up.

<comment><USER26> I've had mixed results with more coarsely grained time tracking. On the one hand I'm more likely to actually do so when I don't have to clock in and out all the time. On the other hand, I kept forgetting to clock in or out because it wasn't 'regular' enough to do it automatically.

These days I use Emacs org-mode for todo items and time tracking (+ pretty much everything else), which makes it much easier to be extremely granular in my tracking without having to expend much effort. Since I have my todo list in front of me for any task anyways, starting the clock is just one keystroke away.

That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).

<comment><USER24> > _That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to > save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get > comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;)._

Between increased efficiency, less proverbial papercuts from alternative ways of doing things to cause your death, and things you just didn't do before you reduced your friction, switching to Emacs/Org-Mode has probably paid for itself many times over :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got into the habit of keeping a daily work log, and continue to do so even though I no longer work for a company that requires it. Very simple: Date, number of hours (0.5 granularity), planned work, actual work done, links to work output or meeting notes (if any). That's it. It helps me to get back up to speed after a weekend. It allows me to tell you what happened on that day X months ago when we were in the middle of project Y without searching my email for clues. It is very helpful for yearly performance reviews, allowing me to provide a detailed accounting of everything, big and small, that I did since last year. The self-assessment pretty much writes itself.

</comment><comment><USER28> I keep a hledger timedot file[1] open in a hot-key drop-down iTerm window. Each 15-minute chunk is logged with a dot. I group dots into hours for quick visual scanning.

        2019-01-08
        fos.hledger.sup  .
        adm.email  ..
        adm.finance  .... .... ..
        fos.plaintextaccounting  .
        fos.hledger.issues.941  .... .
        has-res  ...
        biz-res  ..

I've trained myself to update this often while at the computer, and before walking away. Delayed retroactive logging is also pretty easy. Working in quarter/half/whole hour chunks, and in rhythm with the clock, and having a pane showing recent sleep/wake/timelog-saved events, all help. Not every day is the same; this system has been quick and flexible enough to suit a range of conditions. I can set daily/weekly/monthly time budgets if I want. Some more details at [2].

[1] [http://hledger.org/timedot.html](http://hledger.org/timedot.html)

[2] [http://hledger.org/Time-planning.html#simons-hledger-time- da...](http://hledger.org/Time-planning.html#simons-hledger-time- dashboard-201805)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm a programmer. I also sometimes manage others.

Time tracking and continuous code code review is an important way to spot workers who can't stay on task or are way over their head. If you can catch issues early, you can help them and the team succeed. If you lack time tracking and continuous code review many developers will "fall through the cracks" and it will take much longer to discover they are a net negative to the team. Even if it becomes apparent, it becomes much easier to point to sometime somewhat objective then gut feelings.

Time tracking is good for accountability. Time tracking should be simple. Time tracking should only loosely be associated with tasks.

* Email 0:45 * Meet with customer 1:00 * Program Complete solution and deploy it (TASK045) 0:05

I would be very wary of developers who refuse to accurately track their time.

<comment><USER30> Tracking at the microlevel is horrible. The time wasted keeping up and the padding in explainable areas to offset the undocumented task like pick up phone, talk to coworker, get water, go to bathroom, answer question.

In your example email took 15 minutes in reality it took 1 minute and I've used 14 minutes to get a coffee speak to an employee about upcoming company bake sale, holding the door for the CEO and getting to the conference room 5 minutes early to meet the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nothing beats that time our company had us filling out 3 different time tracking systems at the same time and complaining that some of us were adding time tracking as a task that required time tracking.

<comment><USER32> And there I was feeling weird having to manage 2 time trackers at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> A very smimple approach previously discussed here. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519819)

<comment><USER34> That's cool! I'd opt for Minetest (a good open source clone of Minecraft) instead of Legos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> At my last employment they had a time tracking software that said that three tasks @ 20 minutes each are 0.99… hours.

Hmm. As a software developer you get really frustrated when you have to deal with this expensive piece of software.

<comment><USER36> I wouldn't be surprised if this was an intentional hack to get around some regulatory bullshit.

>if we don't report whole number cap-ex hours on our return, we'll avoid an audit!

<comment><USER35> Nope.

When the hours of the tasks didn't add up with the daily attendance you had to tweak your data or you couldn't close the day. Either added or removed 1 minute to the work day.

So a work day with 8 hours maybe had 7.98 hours of tasks. You tweak around a bit so that they both matched.

This was a reported bug (incl. explanation from a programmer) that wasn't fixed for a very long time. Maybe it's still broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > It's like the company's way of saying, "Sure, we trust you to do your > job….but–just in case–we're watching you."

This feels hyperbolic. There are legitimate reasons to measure time spent, and it doesn't amount to lack of trust. And similarly, failure to meet time expectations doesn't amount to shirking or lying.

That said, I personally think it's wise to track your own time for a variety of reasons, one of which is to have some defense against someone else's measurements.

I worked at a game studio where the employees were on average reporting 60+ hours of work. The managers wanted to verify the survey data, so they implemented opaque time tracking (meaning they didn't show the employees the data, and they anonymized the data and didn't use it to come down on individuals, only to collect aggregate information.)

The result was that employees were factoring their commutes as well as optimistic expected arrival and departure times, and fairly dramatically over- estimating how much they actually worked. The average was much closer to 40, and 25% of the company was working less than 40 during final production crunch. I personally tracked my own time at the same time, and it turns out I was also working less than I thought. There's no doubt that crunch feels like more work, but measuring revealed a discrepancy between feelings and reality.

<comment><USER30> I didn't realize that most were working 9-5 or some variation or less in the game industry. Do you find on most days you usually work 8 hours and leave. You work an hour extra one day but leave an hour earlier on friday?

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't generalize to the industry, this data point is specific to one studio I worked at. And most were working some overtime, just not quite as much as they thought. Only a minority were working 40 or less.

Personally, I was working much more than 40. I thought I was working 75-80 hours, but it was closer to 60-65 at the time. It legitimately felt like 75 even though I know exactly what 80 hours a week feels like, even though I had worked those kinds of hours for long stretches before that.

One of the issues is that during crunch when people start staying late, often they start coming in later as well, so the day slides. The studio would buy dinner at 7 for the employees staying late, so quite a few people would roll in around 10:30 and leave after dinner. They felt like they were working a lot of overtime because they were staying late, but not accounting for coming in a bit late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I quit 3 jobs in the last 5 years and time tracking by management is high up on the reason list. I will now refuse to work for any organisation that does it.

The code and design quality turns to shit in such places. Everyone is trying to keep to the beat of their allotted time. Here's your shovel. Dig a tonne of soil. You have 2 hours. No one is thinking of hiring a JCB because well thinking about that takes time from your time tracked task.

Places that don't track time probably get better results although they can't prove it with metrics. Compare it to parenting, why aren't we timing nappy/diaper changes? Oh because it's mostly instinctive. A bit like programming!

Sure we need to make sure we are on track but this can be done at much a higher level. Story points used properly fill this goal. Where I work we use them but there is no punishment for not meeting the story points. Not even a frown of disappointment that when we added up some numbers from a random distribution, they didn't add up to some arbitrary number. Story points are a useful indicator, but they are part of a vector of information. We didn't meet the story points because we worked on some technical debt, because ... for example.

So in conclusion don't you dare track my time and pull me in a room because I didn't dig that hole quick enough.

</comment><comment><USER39> cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:viP3hB4...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:viP3hB4HPqMJ:https://www.7pace.com/blog/developer- time-tracking-fails&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

</comment><comment><USER40> I have a problem with these articles often not because I disagree in principle that knowledge workers need to lose autonomy and become mere pawns of management, but because the authors so often argue something like: Our job is so different and special from manual labor that we deserve special privileges and respect.

All workers deserve autonomy and respect, should resist work "speed ups" at management's insistence, and should demand sane working conditions. We should show a united front across all sectors, not try to claim that our job is special.

</comment><comment><USER41> I took the approach of recording the type/category of work I am doing, and time it exactly using a tool I created for the purpose: [https://doug.pacifico- hammond.co.uk/software/hardware/2018/0...](https://doug.pacifico- hammond.co.uk/software/hardware/2018/06/24/the-task-switch.html)

As a lead/director it is rarely useful to know exactly which task I am working on, but better to know that I spend the right % of time on each project or type of work.

<comment><USER42> Nice! When I first saw this, my initial reaction was "cool but why would I do that". Thinking about it - it would be better than most software approaches due to the 'lower mental cost' for logging time.

Even adding a spreadsheet row with macros takes a few clicks, but simply reaching over and pressing a physical button would be the fastest way to do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> My time tracking - LibreOffice calc spreadsheet. ctrl+; to insert date, ctrl+shift+; to insert start/end time. Two columns for project and task name. Takes like 5 seconds to make a log.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd be really interested to know ( I was going to do a Ask HN ) on who has to track their time at work, how big the company is you work for, what detail do you track to and whether you think it's useful and if so, how is it useful?.

I personally work in a semi small product based company and we don't track time, but we have a few "point in time goals" where we need to get a solution sorted by a specific date.

I started with extreme programming in 2000 and used to use the planning ideas and velocity indicators, which is okish, but kind of a blunt tool. However the real mechanism to deal with problems is scope management. So now I just work on the idea of continuous focusing on goals and scope management of those goals. This works pretty well in a small team and time frames that are not too long (2 - 3 months).

However a lot of our development is purely feature based, which is often not time critical, but are scope managed to what I'd call "worthwhile" increments

So instead of worrying about time, my emphasis is goals/focus, feedback on progress and scope management. This tends to lead to good time outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER45> seems very much like native advertisement: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc)

</comment><comment><USER21> > Click to start. Click to stop.

That's the problem right on their website[1]. Developers shouldn't have to waste time manually time tracking, it's been automated already[2]. Unless your programmers' time isn't worth much, you're better off not manually time tracking at all. Due to context switching, manual time tracking actually hurts overall productivity. I've heard people say they get in the habit of manually time tracking and don't think about it anymore, but that's just getting into the habit of getting distracted from the real work: shipping changes.

[1]: [https://www.7pace.com/timetracker](https://www.7pace.com/timetracker)

[2]: Many tools already exist for automatic time tracking.

</comment><comment><USER46> I just went through this with a client. They have something called Team Work which is fine for tracking hours. What wasn't good is they wanted _all_ time accounted for and they wouldn't let you add new tasks, _management_ had to add them. So if you wanted to fill out the task honestly ("changed font"), you would need to get the PM to add the new task. So to record 20 minutes of "new task" would require at least another 20 minutes to find the PM for that project and have him add it.

I eventually solved the problem by telling them I would finish the current project but "this isn't working for me". Poof, no more time tracking requirement.

</comment><comment><USER47> But the best came at the end:

"If you really want to demoralize your engineering team and galvanize their distrust for time tracking and management, then you can use their time sheet data against them.

Call them into a meeting. Pour over their time entries line by line and pick apart how they spent their week."

=> Useless meetings are much worse than useless timetrackers.

</comment><comment><USER48> Haha, Apparently how not to host a website giving tech advice includes having SSL certificate error on the website

<comment><USER13> He had to choose between meeting his sprint "commitments" and keeping the website available. He prioritized just like management told him to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I created [https://www.timecamp.com](https://www.timecamp.com) that can track processes, window titles and url (free). Those informations presented visually can help make better timesheets :)

</comment><comment><USER50> I'll certainly bill my long weekend runs where I get most of my best ideas.

</comment><comment><USER51> we are experimentng with timeular

[https://timeular.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryNJfX4e...](https://timeular.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryNJfX4e6DaIGgOwF1vlpbkEzLcPsXz48jmJcKk17MyWr__I3feUvRoCoBoQAvD_BwE)

It is an 8 (or more) sided shape that you flip to change tasks. The jury is still out as the people who are testing it havent had time to set it up..

</comment><comment><USER52> wakatime! Just dont install the chrome extension haha.. i accidentally logged 197 hours on one customer..

</comment><comment><USER53> I've been pretty happy tracking billable hours with Grindstone.

</comment><comment><USER54> I worked for a Fortune 1000. Built a lead generation system that brings in $100M/year. They brought in time-tracking for our team, so I quit, because I hated it. The lead generation system fell apart without me, the Vice President and Project Manager in charge got fired. Nice job guys.

</comment><comment><USER55> I track my time, too, and my biggest complaint is how long it takes. I think it's a great idea for companies to show _why_ time tracking matters so it doesn't feel so futile.

<comment><USER56> If in the US definitely a company fail to inform. Done properly developer salary supported by time records can help qualify some portion of the salary for the R&D tax credit. At least that's what they tell us where I slave (a $FORTUNE_500)

Where things fall apart for me is logging overhead time, like time spent waking up with the first cup of coffee while reading company emails or doing IT-ish tasks on my dev system. I have no idea how to account for those times that doesn't make a mockery of the "Other" time entry.

<comment><USER57> Ugh. I don't ever want to work for a company where my time tracking has to be so fine grained that I have to log bathroom breaks. Holy shit that sounds like a nightmare!

<comment><USER58> I actually worked for a company where they didn't allow me to have a bathroom break during working hours while I was remoting...such is life as a 53yo developer trying to make any kind of living in this industry.

In fact, I had to log X keystrokes and Y LOC every hour in order to be paid for that hour...talk about being a factory worker.

<comment> 52-6F-62 That model doesn't even make sense to me.

Some of the most productive hours are LOC _removed_.

Counting _keystrokes_?

That sounds nightmarish, man.

<comment><USER59> Gets me thinking. Back space, I can see arguments for it being +1, 0, -1 or -2?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> _(Edit: Yes, I know it 's working now. That doesn't mean it wasn't working, and it doesn't mean this comment is invalid. It just means that it got fixed, perhaps even_ because _of this comment pointing out the problem.)_

I'm getting this:

        Secure Connection Failed

        An error occurred during a connection to
        www.7pace.com. Cannot communicate securely
        with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s).
        Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

        The page you are trying to view cannot be
        shown because the authenticity of the received
        data could not be verified.

Suggestions? Yes, I've read the article via the Google cache.

<comment><USER61> No cypher overlap suggests that either 7pace's SSL settings (server side) are unusually restrictive, or your browser simply doesn't support those settings for other reasons. Could happen on older browsers maybe, or restrictive group policies on Windows, etc. Try a different browser perhaps?

<comment><USER60> Just tried again and it's worked this time. That suggests they had some of their settings wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm not sure I understand the value prop here. It's a time tracking software tool for software engineers? FTE or Contract? The UX also looks like complete shit. Get your stuff together bro, this is the worst pitch I've ever seen.

<comment><USER63> Why are you being so negative, I think the author makes valid points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> /r/iamverysmart/

<comment><USER65> Many products have a key person. It's not really surprising.

<comment><USER27> I wouldn't boast about writing software that "falls apart" by merely not having you around. Not exactly a high quality bar.

<comment><USER66> That depends on why it fell apart, and what he would have done about it.

Here is one possibility. The developer checked on the lead system every day, which mostly ran itself. After the developer left, they checked a few times and then stopped looking at the lead system's reports because it was always good. Then months later another team replaced a key system that the lead system needed. Nobody noticed until sales reports sucked. By the time they fond and fixed it, they lost $X million and the people who got fired got fired for not having followed the recommendation to keep the system monitored.

I've seen variations of that story before. And I've seen companies get hurt because of it.

Now there might be blame for the developer. But there are enough ways that the developer wouldn't deserve blame that I wouldn't assume the worst.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy - <AUTHOR> http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf <comment><USER2> "1. What is the best thing about Unix? A: The community. 2\. What is the worst thing about Unix? A: That there are so many communities."

I can't say i agree. Why are there so many BSD's and why are there even more Linux distros, and why are there so many 'buntus? Well its my opinion that having that many choices is an advantage. I can't stand 90% of the Linux distributions, but some people might think that my choice(Kubuntu) is a bad one, some would say that choosing Linux instead of FreeBSD or OpenBSD is a bad idea. Choice is good, sometimes more choices are confusing, but if you just go for the most popular choices and ignore the less popular ones, its easy to make them. Will we have one unified Unix one day? If it runs gnome i'll switch to vista, no tanks Ubuntu, KDE is MY choice, its good to have one.

<comment><USER3> The Unix culture intrinsically values having so many choices, which is a consequence, I think, of historically being a platform by programmers/for programmers. Some people are picky about tools, and it _encourages them to make their own_. It's highly unlikely that it will unify in any real sense as long as its core design attracts people who bristle at the thought of being stuck using anything besides KDE, or GNOME, or Fluxbox, or ratpoison, or dwm, ...

I think it's a really good thing that different distributions tend to focus on particular goals, e.g. security as a design principle in OpenBSD, portability in NetBSD, being available as a free OS (in various senses) with Debian and Ubuntu, etc. (I really don't want this to turn into an argument about different distros; I know I'm trailing off there, I had a harder time summarizing Debian). Anyway, different foci lead to different discoveries, bugfixes, etc., but _due to the pervasive Unix culture_ they are shared.

Still, that avalanche of necessary choices will probably keep it thriving in different niches from a system designed to have a consistent face for everyone. It's harder to teach people to use, harder to market, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _by making all hardware equivalent, good software enabled bad hardware._

An excellent point.

<comment><USER5> Is it really? High-end X86 server hardware is quite good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compared to most architectures, X86 sucks pretty badly. Thanks to good compilers, though, you don't have to care about the lameness of the instruction set (eg, there are ambiguities in the encoding that need to be disambiguated by register prefixes, there are lots of subtle and pointless variations in the instructions, etc.) Good software lets you pretend that the instruction set you're using isn't actually complete crap.

<comment><USER5> It's definitely the conventional wisdom that X86 is inferior to MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC, but I rarely see that opinion backed up.

There is a lot of legacy crap tacked on to X86 instructions, which X86 CPUs don't actually execute directly. There's also legacy crap built into other instruction sets, like register windows in SPARC, predicated instructions in ARM, and bloated call frames on PowerPC.

Can you be more specific about what you don't like about the X86 architecture?

(A couple years ago, you'd have an easy win with "the bus").

<comment><AUTHOR> _Edit: Some people seem to have missed my point; in summary: x86 is ugly (and below is why I think so) but we don't care because compilers enable us to just forget about what ISA we're using. This is a good thing. This is the way it should be. But it's also an example of what the OP was talking about -- bad hardware design (in this case the x86 ISA; the actual hardware is quite good) not mattering because software is sufficiently good_

Sure. Some of these I'm not 100% sure of, so I hope I don't make myself look too stupid (sorry, don't have access to the docs right now) but here goes:

      - Too few registers
           Mostly fixed in x86_64, but still an issue if you
           want to support 99% of the machines out there still
           on 32 bits

      - Overlapping register classes
           This makes the register allocator's job much more
           difficult, since not only do registers interfere with
           other registers which hold the same mode of varible,
           they sometimes -- but not always -- interfere with
           other registers of the same class.

      - Irregular instructions
           If you use some registers, they're encoded
           in less bytes than others, so the optimizer/allocator
           has yet another parameter to take into account.

      - Fixed registers for integer multiplication/division
           You're forced to clobber %eax/%edx and one other reg of
           your choice. This causes more spills than it should,
           and makes the job of the register allocator harder.

      - Way too many jump variants
           I think I counted 63 variants of the instructions,
           and you can encode the same one multiple times, which
           gives you hundreds of ways of encoding a jump.

      - Complicated encoding
           First, it's a variable length encoding. You can have
           one, two, or 3 byte instruction opcodes, with various
           prefixes and suffixes.

      - Ambiguity in some cases
           Instructions can sometimes take the same initial byte
           sequences as a prefix, despite not actually having
           that prefix switched on; when decoding you have to
           figure out the rest of the instruction before you
           decide if you've got a prefix.

      - Useless Instructions (minor annoyance)
           x86 has lots (and lots) of instructions that are
           unused by compilers, are slower than simply doing
           the smaller instructions that they are composed of,
           but are still around for compatibility. Sure, it's
           needed, but do I have to like it?

Really, x86 implementations these days are quite good, but the instruction set is not pretty. x86 has more cruft than most other architectures out there. It's certainly not impossible to write a good compiler for it, it's just a whole lot harder, especially when it comes to doing register allocation. (x86 isn't even too painful to write by hand!)

<comment><USER6> I think you're overstating things. Generating x86 output from an intermediate language really isn't that bad. Is it what you would come up with if you were designing an ISA from scratch, but it's hardly rocket science either.

More to the point: the real determining factor for "CPU uberness" isn't the ISA at all, it's the process technologies. Modern x86 CPUs aren't exactly handicapped; in fact they're pretty much the best parts you can buy in almost all major market areas. Other architectures at this point are increasingly niche parts: very low power (the ARM family, although Intel is moving into this market as we speak), or very high parallelism (Sun's Niagra, IBM's Cell), etc... If any of the stuff you're complaining about really mattered, it ought to be a competitive advantage to someone, no? But it's verifiably not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fully agree, but I was asked for why I don't like the x86 architecture, so I gave an answer.

Current x86 CPUs are pretty awesome when it comes down to it. the ISA is quite hairy, and that makes writing tools for them quite a bit more painful than for, eg, mips, but because compilers are good you don't feel the pain from using x86 anymore, so nobody cares -- or should care -- that they're actually using x86.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> from the pdf:

 _cat . doesn't work anymore (readdir vs. read)._

Does anyone know when this last worked? I'd love to install whatever version of UNIX had this and see the output from it.

<comment><USER5> It's binary gibberish. It's also the answer to an old DE Shaw interview question --- how do you tell whether you're on an NFS-mounted filesystem or not? ("cat ." will fail on NFS).

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Was there no 'mount' command, or for those of us who like to save commands, 'df .'?

<comment><USER5> Not in terms and conditions of the question, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another excellent point: C. C is absolutely wonderful for writing low-level code like kernels, device drivers, and language interpreters. For anything else, it is atrocious. The problem is that these two spheres require drastically different tool sets. Kernels and the kind need to be exposed to the underlying implementations because they need to manipulate these low level devices. Application software on the other hand should be completely insulated from such low level details of the system.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, that conventional wisdom is a little hackneyed.

I'm not sure most folks would call C "wonderful" for low level code. It's warts are well known, and really don't need to be there: the structure syntax is needlessly complicated (. and -> are separate operators for no good reason); the calling conventions are backwards to support a varargs facility that almost no one understands; they underspecified the type conventions, leading to perennial confusion about the sizes of ints and longs or the signedness of char; etc... If you were starting from scratch to write a language to live in the same space, you probably would fix most of those.

But conversely, it's not "atrocious" for "application" code either. Plenty of good software has been and will continue to be written in C. It's probably a poor choice for code that handles mostly string data. It's doesn't have a whole lot of advantages for an architecture with lots of parallelism (i.e. one which doesn't need to worry about single-CPU performance issues). Since those two criteria generally define "web development", you don't see a whole lot of C used for the kind of problems YC startups work on. Just recognize that those defined a _very_ limited notion of "application", and that lots of people in the real world are working on "applications" for which C et. al. are very useful, eminently practical languages choices.

Really, C is there to abstract the CPU. If the CPU has an instruction to do something, you'll probably find it as an operator in C. If it doesn't, you won't. If your problem is appropriately targetted at that level of abstraction, you'll think C is great. If it's not, you won't. I guess that's hardly a surprise.

<comment><USER10> I've worked on a large client/server property/casualty insurance application written in C. I've also written programs and middleware in C++, Java, Perl, and Smalltalk.

C is great for getting the CPU to do something at a somewhat low level, but still having some ability to abstract. If you want lots of abstraction my experience is that C++, Java, and Smalltalk are much better choices. Of those, C++ gives you the most leeway for getting yourself into deep trouble that's hard to debug. Smalltalk allows you to blow up or lock up the world with one errant statement, but messing with those parts of the library is rare, and you can get everything back anyhow because your source code and every change to the image is kept in something like a transaction log. Java gives you a lot of the benefits of Smalltalk, but saddles you with a syntax that was designed to allow low level programming with somewhat high level abstraction, even though you aren't doing the former and want the latter in spades.</comment></comment></comment>


Intelligent and Data Driven Bowling Machines in Cricket - <AUTHOR> https://crickytics.com/using-data-driven-bowling-machines-to-better-train-batsmen/ <comment><USER2> Cool concept! But what this doesn't take into account is that in cricket, the previous balls may have set up the batsman for the dismissal delivery.

Classic example is bowling bouncers followed by a fuller delivery. In this case, just throwing a yorker on the bowling machine would probably not get the batsman out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, Thanks.

I had this in mind as well.

If you are a bit familiar with Machine Learning, what I did was train a LSTM neural network and gave it previous 3 balls and the wicket ball and trained it to generate balls in a sequence like a bowler.

I just did not post this since I am tinkering with this idea and will post it later.</comment></comment>


We hear you: Better commenting coming to YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2013/09/youtube-new-comments.html

<comment><USER2> Internet yesterday:

"YouTube comments are the cesspool of the internet, and you will lose brain cells by reading them"

Internet today:

"Anonymous and uncensored YouTube comments are the only thing standing between us and a dystopian surveillance state overseen by Google+"

I understand there are there are tradeoffs, but so much of the hate seems to be arbitrary anti-Google ranting.

<comment><USER3> * anti-Google+ ranting

is what you meant I think :)

It _is_ a bit amusing how Google+ can do no right. From my point of view, everyone I know uses Facebook and no one uses Google+, so that's the only reason this feature doesn't serve me at all.

<comment><USER4> Does everyone really have such a hard time creating multiple google accounts? Google makes this as accessible as possible, or maybe people don't like Google+ for some other reason? I don't really get it either.

<comment><USER5> I'm not allowed to name any of my G+ accounts "sep332". Which sucks because that is my primary online identity.

<comment><USER6> That's only if you base the Youtube channel on a G+ profile, if you base it on a G+ Page you can name it anything you like:

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323)

<comment><USER3> Why should he be forced to create a "Page" rather than a normal "Profile"? No service should lay down rules on what you want your username to be. That's only one of the ways Google+ fails abysmally, as skud and other people have demonstrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No, Google does not hear it's users, they just want to lock everyone in their ecosystem. No, please, I don't want to see comments from my 'friends'. No one asked for this. All I'm hearing is how everyone hates the Google+ integration. Eagerly waiting for a new video host that doesn't push 'social' down your throat.

<comment><USER8> My thought exactly, if they "heard from us" they would hear that we absolutely loathe the new interface and would like them to try to fix it or make something else (I wont say revert, they never will)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been pretty reluctant to comment ever since I created a Google+ account and it switched to my real name. I've never had too terrible comments, but I just don't want my real name anywhere near YouTube comments. I've never seen the value in comments there. Early on in YouTube's history it was a real community building tool, now it's just terrible.

<comment><USER10> I agree. Seems their strategy is to offer some teaser feature/product/whatever and the only way to access it is to create a new Google Plus account. So now I have THREE separate Google Plus accounts. Personal, Business and now YouTube. I would just delete YouTube but I have thousands of views and my Adsense account is linked to that. I'd like to make more content for YouTube but they make it difficult to manage multiple accounts for multiple channels. For example, I don't want my abstract painting videos associated with my primary business, that would be bad for my business. If I make another channel, I think that means I need a separate email address, separate password and a separate Google Plus profile and then logout, login, logout, login, there's got to be a better way. I'd put my art videos on Vimeo but YouTube has all the traffic and I'm a YouTube partner! That's just the tip of the iceberg.

<comment><USER11> You do not need a separate account for a new channel; just go here and click 'Create a new channel': [http://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher](http://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher)

<comment><USER12> Well, until they decide _Good news everyone, we just made even easier to engage with your viewers by linking all other videos of your account in 'what else to watch by..'_. There's a good reason for parent to use separate accounts.

<comment><USER6> Under the hood Youtube channels based on Google+ Pages actually belong to a separate Google account so its unlikely.

Even if in the universe where they lost there heads and did do it, G+ pages are designed to support multiple owners so you're not locked in since you could just chuck it over to another account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm co-founder of CueNotes. We all agree YouTube comments are broken - we've been working on making YouTube comments social, higher quality - and a better overall experience. Like being able to view and add comments _while_ you're watching, and timed comments that "pop up" at the right time. Give it a try, we'd love your feedback: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cuenotes/kgnmfppmh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cuenotes/kgnmfppmhpnoogejhkadapflcbegjacf)

<comment><USER14> Hey everyone, I'm also a co-founder of CueNotes. Try installing the chrome extension we built and then watch this Limp Bizkit video with comments by Fred Durst: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx9n-1ginEc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx9n-1ginEc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comment sorting-by-best only works if the best comments are actually good comments and there's no bandwagoning. Considering the fanbases of famous YouTubers such as RayWilliamJohnson and PewDiePie, this could actually make things _worse_.

But atleast the new comments will be _functional_ , which alone is an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if "better commenting", or just another attempt to integrate G+ into every Google-owned property.

The part about floating "engaged discussions" to the top is interesting. One hopes the algorithm distinguishes between "ongoing informative discussion" and "blazingly active flamewar".

<comment><USER4> Can we stop claiming that Google+ can absolutely not be usefully implemented in other Google products?

<comment><USER16> Nice strawman. Did I claim at any point that g+ is "absolutely not [useful]"? No need to start white-knighting for Google.

<comment><USER4> "Not sure if "better commenting", or just another attempt to integrate G+ into every Google-owned property."

"Nice strawman."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I never found YouTube comments problematic. On the contrary: they are the closer to a universal, democratic, ununcensoredsensored dialogue we have ever achieved as a planet.

There's racism, sexism, nationalism etc? That's exactly because those also exist in the world. That's what makes YouTube comment threads democratic and uncensored. It gives people living in their microcosm and social bubble a chance to find out what other people believe and think.

It's also the visual nature of the medium: unlike a blog post or some web essay, a video can attrack visitors from more walks of life, more ages, more countries, more educational levels, and more perspectives. Even the language the video is in is not an absolute barrier (people can still enjoy what's shown without it).

<comment><USER4> I've written some terrible crap on youtube that I don't feel are authentic representations of what I think/ who I am.

<comment><USER17> Well, you might not think they are, but if you wrote them then that's how you felt at the time, so they do provide an authentic look of part of you (which you might have outgrown, but that's beside the point).

<comment><USER4> I think people are compelled to act certain ways in certain environments. I wouldn't say the same things to my family as I would to my friends and vice- versa. If you're in a cesspool, you're not afraid to throw shit because everyone's already subsumed in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I appreciate that we're long past this point, but I'll say it anyways:

I don't want comments or social--I just want to watch my damned video and be left alone.

EDIT: Has anyone ever really said, "Man, my whole day was made better by that comment on YouTube! I'm really glad I could be part of that!"?

<comment><USER19> It really depends on what you're on YouTube to do. For me YouTube is my #1 Social Network and has been for many years. Comments are a big part of every video, a place for you to interact with those who watch your content. A place to get ideas, feedback, and just add a personal touch thanking people for engaging with something that took you a lot of work to produce or something you really wanted to share.

That being said I absolutely can't stand google's continued attempt to force people to link google plus to youtube and am iffy on what this new change will do, but I am all for making the comment section more useful especially since they just took away our ability to respond to a video with a video (video responses).

<comment><USER20> Which videos do you watch? Where is this mecca of decent comments on YouTube? 99.9% of the comments I read are _awful_.

<comment><USER19> I watch a lot of vlogs as well as skits, music, short films and some gaming videos as well. I make vlogs myself mostly and between my several channels have over a quarter million subscribers.

<comment><USER20> So basically you're obliged to commend the quality of your comments? :P

Heh, I kid I kid. I'm glad you've got a good community there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why not embrace the fact that YouTube has the best worst comments on the Internet? I'm sure moot has shed a silent tear when witnessing a YouTube troll that surpasses even the best of /b/. There's certainly some kind of postmodern digital street cred to be garnered there so run with it Google! It'll never happen on Google+ that's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER22> Better commenting, maybe. Better comments, almost certainly not.

</comment><comment><USER23> Better commenting? They've already done it: "safety mode", which hides all YouTube comments.

</comment><comment><USER24> I deal with this by using the Chrome extension "YouTube Options" [1]. It takes a bit to setup, but it works pretty well by filtering out various fluff crap like comments, increasing the video size etc.

1 - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube- options/bd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube- options/bdokagampppgbnjfdlkfpphniapiiifn?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER25> The most interesting part of THESE comments is how many people were nodding in agreement until they saw the word "Google+".

</comment><comment><USER3> We hear you: You said you wanted Google+ hamfistedly shoved down your throat for youtube comments, and we gave you what you wanted. Yay!

Pretty sad that funny top comments like "15 people fell into the well cause this is Sparta" on Youtube videos are going to be replaced by my grandmother commenting "Wow, this film is really violent."

[wow, probably downvoted by the one person on HN who likes Google+ :)]

<comment><USER25> you're fortunate its only one downvote. I'm no G+ fan but you do realize your comment is exactly how people mock Facebook and get downvoted to oblivion.

<comment><USER3> Well your comment says it better "The most interesting part of THESE comments is how many people were nodding in agreement until they saw the word "Google+". reply"

Guilty as charged. I don't want to be pushed towards using some ghost town social network to comment on a video for laughs. Facebook is different, people actually use it by choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have decided to quit youtube since google is forcing me to create a G+ account.

Is there an alternative of Youtube to upload private or unlisted videos? How is vimeo?

</comment><comment><USER27> Wait, Google heard its users? I guess persistence and yelling help... better late than never huh?

Now if only they could hear the real bug reports too...

<comment><USER28> And yet they have been deaf about merging Google+ accounts with YT accounts.

<comment><USER29> That has to be the most annoying and aggressive product push I've seen in a long time. The way they hide the opt-out button is really obnoxious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The best commenting experience on YouTube is already available through the CommentSnob browser plugin. No action by YouTube necessary.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone know of good competitors to youtube?

</comment><comment><USER29> A couple years ago I Adblocked the comments section on YouTube and never looked back. I recommend it!

</comment><comment><USER32> YouTube is a content hosting site, it is not a social networking site (or at least it doesn't do it well). Google+ is a social networking site, not a content hosting site (or at least it doesn't do it well). See the pattern?

I never want to interact with any content where it is hosted, I always want to interact with it where I found it. That means G+ or Facebook or Tumblr.

To my purposes, the separation is a severe annoyance. I want to be able to engage everyone on all facets and see how they are engaging back. I may not necessarily want the three crowds to interact with each other, as I have curated my followership differently on each.

Incidentally, Google+ does an amazing job of letting me control how my followers interact with each other and how I interact with them via Circles. But G+ users don't interact as often with my content as Tumblr users do. I have 5 times the followers on G+ than I have on Tumblr, but I get 10 times the shares and likes on Tumblr as G+ (so that seems to mean that engagement is 50 times higher).

</comment><comment><USER33> If you build it, they will EFF U UP!

</comment><comment><USER34> What do I want to see at the top of comments? Something well thought out. Personal isn't the same as important.</comment>


CloudBoost.io – Parse and Firebase and Algolia all combined into one - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudboost.io <comment><USER2> The links to the JS SDK in your documentation aren't working

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for broken links. Let me fix this ASAP. :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your Dropbox hacks? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested to hear interesting uses for Dropbox accounts outside of the normal occasional file share. Do you keep your entire working documents directory in Dropbox? In what unique ways are you using the service or have you heard of others using the service? <comment><USER2> I use a development environment and language called LiveCode (<http://www.runrev.com>) dropbox allows me to keep my plugins and libraries for the IDE at a common place. This way, all my LiveCode instances in multiple machines in different offices are always in sync. Not unlike putting your .emacs and site-lisp in there or something similar.

I also use it as a poor man processing queue for some of my personal tools where a machine will place a file in a specific folder and another worker machine will notice and pick it up and further process it saving it to a different place where a third machine will do its job, like an assembly line (and the machines are in different countries), quite easy to setup for very simple tasks

</comment><comment><USER3> I use dropbox and LAMP together to 'distribute' small projects.

Basically I install dropbox on a linux box, and use apache's mod_vhost_alias to automatically map incoming requests to the correct folder. Most of the time I use sqlite as DB storage so the file stays in the dropbox folder.

When I want to put changes online I just copy/paste the files. Of course this is no way of working when you have bigger sites or sites that have a lot of db changes, but when you get there you better find more suitable hosting then the one I have anyway.

I like this way because the dropbox folder is synced with my netbook and macbook as well, so my setup is quite portable!

</comment><comment><USER4> A small trick: Because Dropbox can only watch and sync one directory, and because I don't want to move all my stuff in that directory, I create symbolic links to the stuff I want sync'ed in the Dropbox directory.

<comment><USER5> Unix newbie here: can I do a similar thing on Windows? Shortcuts do not work

<comment><USER6> type 'mklink' into console. only on vista and newer.

<comment><USER5> Man i wish I could give you 10 upvotes, you have just solved my only issue with Dropbox. I have like 4 machines that I work on regularly and this has now allowed me to sync all those config files you cannot easily move e.g. iTunes including the iPhone backups, Chromium user data.

Thank you so much!!

<comment><USER7> More info here:

[http://lifehacker.com/5154698/sync-files-and-folders- outside...](http://lifehacker.com/5154698/sync-files-and-folders-outside-your- my-dropbox-folder)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Install Dropbox and symlink to your server's webroot, share a project folder for your application code. Makes your live 'deployment' instant as file->save.

</comment><comment><USER9> I keep a huge bash_profile with lots of aliases in dropbox and then load it on the real .bash_profile of my computers with: ". ~/Dropbox/Configs/bash_profile"

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually keep most of my files in Dropbox, which lets me keep everything the same between my desktop and netbook. I add the appropriate Dropbox folder to my Windows 7 libraries, and that makes it feel the same as saving documents in the normal Documents folder. Then, I keep portable apps in a Dropbox folder so they're synced between machines as well. Works great for me!

</comment><comment><USER11> I export encrypted backups of PasswordSafe into Dropbox's magic folder. This serves as a convenient automatic backup.

</comment><comment><USER12> I recently used Dropbox to collaborate on an appengine python project with a friend and loved it. Since python is interpreted we didnt have too many issues with working on the same file at the same time (no compilation errors).

</comment><comment><USER13> My Dropbox folder has replaced my documents folder entirely. I also save preferences and sync files within Dropbox, so I can run the same program (say, 1Password) from multiple computers with exactly the same data.

</comment><comment><USER14> git --bare init

and push to it, then can share with collaborators, use from different computers or use it just as backup.</comment>


Are you reading the article or straight to the comments? - <AUTHOR> i have to admit that I mostly (like 99%) of time go firdt to the comments before I even think about clicking to the article..<p>what about you? <comment><USER2> Straight to the comments. I would only read something if it's less than a screen-long and still contains something I'm going to find really valuable or exciting. If it's longer than that I am to be convinced it's a text of exceptional value and quality before I decide to invest my attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> I check the top comments first because a lot of times they make me realize the article is not worth reading. Sometimes the top comment is a one-line tl;dr, or just explains clickbait.

This is even more important for any news regarding science: there's always a comment from someone who actually read the paper and then explains what the article got wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> Often, I'm checking the comments first to see whether reading the whole thing might be worth my time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Comments first on HN. I use shutup.css to hide comments on every other website.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most of the time I just read the article.

When I do read comments, it's almost always after having read the article.

</comment><comment><USER7> Comments before all.

</comment><comment><USER8> I skip to comments</comment>


Tesla Model S and BMW i3 fall short in IIHS crash test - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-bmw-i3-fall-short-of-iihs-top-safety-pick-plus/ <comment><USER2> Surprising in the case of the Model S, especially as Tesla has previously bragged about crash test scores[0]. I wonder if the Model X really is the "safest SUV in history" as Tesla claims? It's worth noting that in the 2016 Tesla shareholder's meeting, Musk said that the discontinued Roadster was "completely unsafe".

Even modest cars like the Chevy Malibu and Ford Fusion manage perfect scores on the IIHS small overlap test. I expect the Tesla's heavy weight will help safety in the real world though.

I wonder if Tesla will respond with one of their trademark combative press releases?

[0] [https://www.tesla.com/about/press/releases/tesla-model-s- ach...](https://www.tesla.com/about/press/releases/tesla-model-s-achieves- best-safety-rating-any-car-ever-tested)</comment>


Amish Hackers (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://kk.org/thetechnium/2009/02/amish-hackers-a/

<comment><USER2> The term "hacker" actually originates from the farm. I have had trouble finding reference to this fact, but Woz says it's so, so I believe him. Back in the day, they had single steam engines they'd rig to run pumps, farm equipment, bailers, etc. The ultimate hacks.

<comment><USER3> The ways they transmitted power from the engines to where it was needed was pretty cool too: [http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/02/the-mechanical- transm...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/02/the-mechanical-transmission- of-power-jerker-line-systems.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In his book What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly spends quite a deal time talking about the Amish. It's a good book asking an interesting question.

</comment><comment><USER5> I suddenly want to create a pneumatic computer. Or at least pneumatically- powered. Just to see if it's possible.

<comment><USER6> It's quite possible: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flow_computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flow_computer)</comment></comment>


Iowa insurance market collapse could ground young entrepreneurs' dreams - <AUTHOR> http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/health/2017/06/11/iowas-young-entrepreneurs-early-retirees-ditching-their-dreams-insurance-collapse-looms/370967001/ <comment><USER3> Obamacare, the proposed trump care, its all a failure.

Get rid of the employer sponsored plans, that makes no sense at all and makes me hesitant to lose my job because my health relies on it? That is simply absurd. Get rid of this. I'm so frustrated with the healthcare here and I don't understand how Washington can't come up with any real solutions

<comment><USER4> Single payer has been proposed many times and works well in the rest of the first world.

Edit: Don't forget to vote every November.

<comment><USER5> What about drug R&D in those countries?

For all the issues of the US healthcare system, one thing it has going for it is most of the new developments in medicine comes from the US.

<comment><USER6> Great for pharma stockholders, terrible for American citizens.

Let's stop subsidizing drug R&D for the world on the backs of US citizens who are being squeezed to death by Washington and a for profit healthcare system.

<comment><USER5> That's a fair argument but I'm more interested in how much R&D happens under single payer systems.

<comment><USER6> Does the NIH and NSF not provide a pipeline for drug research in the US?

Did you know the CEO of Mylan, the company that makes epipens made $98 million last year? Is that reasonable?

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/31/investing/epipen-mylan- chair...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/31/investing/epipen-mylan- chairman-98-million/index.html)

<comment><USER7> Well the board felt it was reasonable, and I'd expect the board of a publicly traded company to know more about its finances than me.

The question was about how much R&D happens in single-payer counties, _not_ how much one particular CEO made. I am a proponent of single-payer health care in the US but responding to unrelated, valid questions with, "yeah, but this one person made a lot of money and that makes me mad!" is ridiculous.

<comment><USER6> That CEO only made that amount because of FDA regulations related to the manufacture of generics, as well as her family connections.

[http://amp.timeinc.net/time/money/4502891/epipen-pricing- sca...](http://amp.timeinc.net/time/money/4502891/epipen-pricing-scandal-big- pharma-politics/)

My point is that the entire for profit healthcare system in the US is broken, and it's time to burn it to the ground.

<comment><USER7> > _responding to unrelated, valid questions with, "yeah, but this one person > made a lot of money and that makes me mad!" is ridiculous._

<comment><USER6> Waste is waste, and must be eliminated from the system with extreme prejudice.

Excessive profits are waste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The part in all of this that has bothered me more than anything is that it's a diversion to mask the real problem: healthcare service and products are unsustainably expensive.

Casinos use chips and vouchers to distract gamblers from actually grasping just how much money they're playing with. Health insurance sure feels like the same thing, but it's even worse in that when you're in need, you're not always in a state of mind to make rational choices nor are those choices even adequately defined prior to receiving a bill. Why is this acceptable? Since when are contracts entered into under duress admissible? I suspect it's probably a massive success on the part of lobbyists.

I don't know the solution, but I can confidently say it's probably not reached by tackling the insurance side of healthcare. Maybe the current system needs to collapse under its own weight before a new approach even stands a chance? Unfortunately, it's probably more likely it'd just receive a government bailout at taxpayers' expense so it could continue the status quo.

<comment><USER9> Healthcare services and products are unsustainably expensive in the US. This is not quite true in the rest of the world. Part of this is economic and structural, and part of it is American psychological and societal problems with letting people die when they are going to die (end-of-life care is hugely expensive and we even love treatments that do not necessarily lead to increased lifespan, because we'd rather feel like we're doing something medically than actually take evidence-based steps that might include doing nothing). Part of it is that "healthcare service" in the US includes the amazing overhead charged by private insurance.

Certainly before Obamacare, private insurance companies spent about 30% on overhead (enrolling & dropping people, advertising, dealing with referrals, arguing with hospitals and doctors, auditing people, hiring lawyers to get someone else's insurance to pay for treatment). That's a lot of money and it figures into "healthcare costs" in the US.

We spend so much more than any other country on healthcare, so much more.

You are absolutely right that "the current system needs to collapse under its own weight before a new approach even stands a chance". I believe it will take people dying publicly to make the US consider a change. First we will be bamboozled by the "freedom" and "choice" we'll get with the new plan, foremost the choice not to have coverage or care at all :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always wonder why, in all the coverage about health care and insurance groups "pulling out" of the marketplace, no one seems to want to state the obvious:

* Insurers are not pulling out of the insurance _market_.

* Insurers are pulling out of _selling to individuals_.

* This is happening because selling to large groups (like entire companies) is easier/more profitable.

* It is easier to sell to larger groups because you have greater numbers across which to amortize risk.

* The _largest_ group of Americans one could envision selling insurance to is... _ALL_ Americans.

So, by pulling out of the unprofitable _individual_ marketplace in order to focus on selling to larger groups, these insurance companies are practically shouting at us what anyone with half a head already knows: single payer is the _only_ practical, efficient, and cost effective solution for universal coverage.

<comment><USER11> I know what you are getting at here but almost any individual market at the state level is going to be bigger than almost any entire company from a risk pool amortization perspective.

Given that, your fourth bullet point would point in the direction of insurance companies preferring the state pools to selling to companies one at a time.

The problem with the state pools is not (for the most part) one of size, but of adverse selection.

<comment><USER10> I'd actually be interested to see the numbers. Obviously, as you say, it's not just size but also the risk profile of the group...but add to that the fact that this pool is being split between as many companies as are selling on the marketplace, I wouldn't be surprised if size is part of it.

Regardless, if _universal_ health coverage is a goal, the only way to _truly_ amortize risk is to have everyone in one pool. Anything less pits some very perverse incentives against an inherently inefficient market. It's no wonder no one wants to participate!

<comment><USER11> Even small states like Iowa (total population ~3 million) are going to have 10s of thousands of people on the individual exchanges. That's bigger than all but very large corporations (who tend to self insure anyways).

I hear you about universal health coverage. I've come around to the idea that we should have it at the national level above some sort of cap. I think free markets can still work when it comes to your annual checkup or small expenses like a broken arm or a monthly prescription for non esoteric drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's worth noting that Iowa is in particular trouble because of a single patient that costs ~1M a month[1]. In a relatively small market you end up with an unstable situation when there are more than 1 insurers because none of them know if they will have to take on this very expensive patient in any given year.

1\. [https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/04/21/catching-the- fallin...](https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/04/21/catching-the-falling- knife-in-iowa/)

<comment><USER12> How exactly do you run a $1 million/month health bill? In EU that would mean one open heart surgery/heart/lung transplant done by world class specialists flown from all over the place every single month.

This sounds like a scam.

<comment><USER11> Apparently the patient is a teenage boy with hemophilia. I'm fairly confident that it isn't a scam.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation- now/2017/06/01/io...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation- now/2017/06/01/iowa-teens-1-million-per-month-illness-no-longer- secret/360919001/)

<comment><USER12> Hemophilia Federation of America: "A million dollars per month is something we've never heard of," sure makes it sound like a scam, maybe by hospital?

<comment><USER11> Given that the insurance companies know exactly who the patient is, exactly what treatments he is receiving, and exactly when and where they are happening it seems like it would be pretty easy to uncover a scam if there was one. And they have a lot of incentive to do so!

<comment><USER12> Would you consider $1 mil/month a good incentive to scam?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Iowa has only one ACA insurer left and they are raising their rates 43.5%.

Basically providing Obamacare was hemorrhaging so much money that Wellmark and BCBS left, leaving a single payer, that ACA users are forced to use.

[http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/health/medica-to- stay...](http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/health/medica-to-stay-in-iowa- sell-marketplace-plans-in-2018-20170619)

<comment><USER14> Did people actually think ACA was sustainable or anything but a payout to insurance companies as it was passed?

Knowing that insurance companies can willingly just abandon the market makes the ACA even more of a joke than one would have originally thought.

And no, before anyone tries to suggest it, temporarily insuring a few million poor people and people in poor health (at the cost of fucking over young and healthy people) is not a success.

<comment><USER15> > Did people actually think ACA was sustainable or anything but a payout to > insurance companies as it was passed?

Well, they thought it was the former (in part because of the ways in which it was the latter; a sustainable public service not provided directly by government typically involves payment from the government to the service providers.)

Much of the collapse and withdrawal is due to payments they were mandated under the ACA not being funded by Congress (resulting in a giant stack of lawsuits and at least one $200 million+ judgement against the government in favor of an unpaid insurer), with the deliberate intent of causing a collapse of just the kind that is occurring. (And the recent acceleration is that exacerbated by additional uncertainty deliberately injected by the Trump Administration with the intent of producing exactly that result.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's probably the main factor preventing me from quitting and working for myself. Crazy high medical insurance for a family of 4. That and educational savings for kids.

"Free" medical and college would cause a hell of a disruption that corporations would not like.

<comment><USER17> Do employers really negotiate that much lower health insurance rates compared to what a self-employed can get?

<comment><USER18> 1) yes 2) you are assuming that it was even possible to buy health insurance as a single person prior to the ACA. I actually tried and found it incredibly difficult.

<comment><USER17> So what realistic options did self-employed have before the ACA: either pay for an expensive insurance or be uninsured? What did most typically choose?

<comment><USER18> (Obivously the IAMAE note applies here)I choose uninsured because I was young...and dumb. There were some options out there, especially for add on things like dental and vision. Insurance was available, but it was hard to find as an individual and very expensive in my experience. COBRA was an option but was still tied to a previous job and had limits.

As an entrepreneurship scholar, I see health insurance as one really strong limiter of entrepreneurial activity in the US. The lack of single payer significantly privileges those with the means, the young, and those without children to conduct entrepreneurial activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I read the article, I wonder how viable the business really is. The business started in 2015 and he's still below the poverty line: "He needs the subsidy, because he's taking only about $17,000 in salary per year from the fledgling engineering company."

I attempted to run a company prior to ACA. Because I had a pre-existing condition, I had to buy COBRA. This forced me to get something running within 18 months. I also paid much more than "$100 per month" for my insurance.

18 months went by and I was nowhere. With the ACA, I might have lasted a few more months; but I'll never know if I would have gotten anywhere. Either way, after 18 months I did not have anything close to a viable business.

I think it's important that people are able to start businesses, and health insurance should not be an obstacle to that. There's a fine line, though, between fair access and an outright subsidy of a fledgling business. It's hard to see where that line is when reading this article.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have an employer sponsored plan through the small business (25 employees) that I work for. The rates the company pays has gone up around 10% a year since I started working here. Two years ago, rates were going to go up 35% but the company found another insurance provider and (after polling employees) went with a higher deductible plan to keep the increas just under 20%.

This does not seem sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER21> This isn't just an Iowa issue. When I talk to early stage entrepreneurs looking to raise seed capital healthcare is almost always one of their biggest concerns - both for their own families as well as the impact it will have on recruiting the necessary talent.

PEOs help early stage companies to a certain extent, but for a pre-revenue company the cost of healthcare is almost always going to be a significant burden that funnels valuable cash away from the product and shortens the runway. But without a decent benefits package, start-ups have almost no hope of attracting key talent especially if those prospective employees have kids, so they (and their investors) are forced to just suck it up.

Healthcare in the US is a ticking time bomb with the potential to significantly impact our long term growth (if it isn't already). Unfortunately we're in a situation where for-profit insurance companies, for-profit health networks, and for-profit pharma companies are all fighting for their share of the pie while pushing increasing costs onto the average consumer. I wish I knew what the fix was - other than an unattainable single-payer system - <USER2> we need to find something and find it fast.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is all such bullshit. Single payer has problems, but it works well and is a _whole_ lot cheaper in terms of % of GDP as implemented in places like Italy. Also in Italy you have a decent, parallel private system where you can simply call up and ask how much basic stuff is. I once got some chest X-rays and a consultation with an ear-nose-throat doctor for 150 Euros out of pocket (oh, and I got to do both the day after I called). They apologized because it was so expensive. I barely kept a straight face.

</comment><comment><USER23> The people who claim to be protecting your freedom are shifting the economy into the worlds largest extortion play.

Its maybe the penultimate stage of a truly free market.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got a letter from my insurance provider saying they're pulling out of the local market in 2018. I pay full price directly, no subsidy, not through any exchange, it's very expensive and I've poured tens of thousands into premiums over the years.

I can't help but relate the entire industry to a ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER25> >I can't help but relate the entire industry to a ponzi scheme.

In what way is the insurance industry a fraudulent investment operation where the operator generates returns for older investors through revenue paid by new investors, rather than from legitimate business activities?

Seriously, I feel that phrase to be misused so often it has lost all of its original meaning. /rant

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Basically, do we want to send the signal that entrepreneurship is for everyone, or just the rich and healthy?

<comment><USER27> Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It is for people who take risks. And yes it takes being healthy, because it is a stress which even most absolutely healthy and young people can't endure. And preferably rich because it sucks being left at the mercy of investors.

<comment><USER28> You're implying that the risk a young, healthy person takes is entirely within their control, but even a healthy person can get hit by a car or get injured in some way unrelated to their "fitness" level.

The reason we need to fix health care is simple: if you are dying or seriously injured, and you don't have health insurance, you are going to the ER regardless and someone, somewhere will end up paying for it. Let's all be adults about the situation and just implement something that works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> test

<comment><USER30> It worked. Are you botting?</comment></comment>


Intel Patent: Byte swap operation for a 64 bit operand (award for obviousness?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7047383.html

<comment><USER2> I believe the reason we have both big and little endianness is due to some idiotic patent way back in the day. One company managed to patent big endian byte ordering, so others decided to use little endian to avoid licensing it.</comment>


Bash aliases for git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/algotech/dotaliases/blob/master/doc/bash/git_aliases.md <comment><USER2> Love it. Very comprehensive. That said - I'm afraid of namespace conflicts and would probably use a "git" prefix instead of just "g".

Also - I find "grm" (rebase master) somewhat confusing with "gr" (git rm). or even a common alias for "grep". Perhaps "grb _" for "git rebase _"

<comment><AUTHOR> Initially I taught the same about the namespace conflicts but after using it for a long period I am confident that I can get over it. The git status command is definitely my most used command so it worths to have only one keystroke. You can play with it and see if works for you also.

Regarding confusions, you may be right (especially at the beginning), but after some time all used aliases will get hardcoded into your muscle memory, even the longest alias (gprom).</comment></comment>


Microsoft releases first (major) app for iphone (OneNote) - <AUTHOR> http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/onenote-mobile-for-iphone-HA102466133.aspx

<comment><USER2> This isn't their first app at all.

They've already released Windows Live Messenger [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windows-live- messenger/id3761...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windows-live- messenger/id376196406?mt=8)

as well as a Bing client. <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bing/id345323231?mt=8>

<comment><USER3> Don't forget Seadragon. I believe that was Microsoft's first iPhone app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick review: first thing I noticed is that not all graphics are "Retina"-ready and it shows; their use of the UITabBar is pretty bad IMHO (tapping an icon never switches to a tab but flips or slide to a different UIView; some navigation is inconsistent (e.g. you go to recently viewed, see an item, the back button brings you back to a different view); you have a bunch of "Unfiled Notes" that you apparently can't file: it's syncing the info somewhere so I imagine that the desktop app allows you to rearrange these notes, but not being able to do it inside the app means that the app in itself is not usable; someone asked: I can't find a way to do OCR on pictures taken.

All in all, meh. At first sight, it reminded me of Evernote, but I think it's missing what makes the desktop version of OneNote interesting: the ability to take notes however you want by just clicking somewhere. The size of the iPhone doesn't really allow for that so I can understand. But if you're not using the desktop version, it looks like this is no special note-taking app.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the nice features of OneNote on the desktop is the ability to paste in an image, and then right-click and do an OCR operation using "Extract Text from Image".

This article doesn't mention it at all, but it would be a great thing to see on a mobile (even if it included a cloud round-trip).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Besides the major CAD/CAM/CAE softwares, OneNote was the only software I really missed after moving to Mac/iphone. It is great for note-taking in general and made by one of the most innovative teams at Microsoft.

<comment><USER6> AutoCAD for Mac came out of beta stages recently. It is still rather clunky in usage. The GUI is also in need of a little love, but it works. Revit for Mac can't be that far off.

Vectorworks (used to be called MiniCAD) for Mac is still excelling in areas AutoCAD seems to have forgotten about. Its 2D drafting is unparalleled, although use in a multi-user environment is lacking. There is also ArchiCAD; a system second only to Bentley. Once one adapts to the different method of drafting in these apps they rarely want to go back to ACAD, if only for import/export checks.

Much like moving from Word to Pages... annoyingly odd at first but much more productive once learnt fully.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm more on the mechanical side of CAE and would kill for a professional FEA package for the Mac (eg. Ansys, MSC, Abaqus et al).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just went to try it out, but I get "Login failed, error 400." If you look at the reviews, you'll see this is a widespread failure. This is not the way to launch.

<comment><USER8> I've heard that it's due to server load. Try it again.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, but it still doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Read the reviews. You need a windows live login and there are a bunch of issues logging in to the app after registering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yet, it still feels like a "hell-freezes-over" kind of scenario, no?

[EDIT] Considering that OneNote is part of Office, a major cash-maker for Microsoft.

<comment><USER10> Not really, The title of this post is wrong in saying that this is the first app from Microsoft. They have already released Bing, Messenger and Tag reader :)

<comment><USER11> And before (I think) those, they released some kind of experimental app that dealt with large photos or building a bigger picture from smaller photos or something like that. I can't remember what it was called right now, though. :P

<comment><USER12> Seadragon. See e.g. [http://gigaom.com/apple/microsoft-releases-seadragon- iphone-...](http://gigaom.com/apple/microsoft-releases-seadragon-iphone-app/) .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>