Microsoft Widens Lead Over Amazon in Cloud Revenue - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/08/03/1-microsoft-widens-lead-over-2-amazon-in-cloud-revenue-6-9-billion-to-6-1-billion/#5762d8f53fc0 <comment><USER2> This is embarrassing for Forbes to have outside, editorial contributions like this. Bob Evans runs a comms consulting business, and it's obvious from his article history that both Microsoft and Oracle are clients. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1)

<comment><USER3> So are you saying the article is misleading? In that case, give us some statistics.

<comment><USER4> Right now, I pay for Office365. I download the Office suite, and I launch Excel to work on spreadsheets. Somehow, this is "cloud revenue" as Microsoft breaks it down.

By that logic, Amazon should definitely count every book I buy for my Kindle as "cloud revenue." This article is just garbage, and is indicative of Forbes doing one of the most notable "set fire to our own previously well regarded brand" acts in modern memory by way of their contributor program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Office365 is great, but, time to de-couple it from "Cloud". The funny thing is that when someone launches a windows server on AWS, MS counts that license towards their Cloud Revenue!</comment>


IppinKa - Connecting buyers and designers of great products - <AUTHOR> http://www.ippinka.com IppinKa is a online store platform where people crowdbuy products in order to unlock them. Each person who buys a product is considered a backer for that product. In turn, the brand or designer has a chance to reward their backers.
IppinKa also runs a blog called Blog of Great Products (http://blog.ippinka.com), where products - not only those on its store - are featured.
Currently in testing stage and looking for early adopters to help test our platform. <comment><AUTHOR> comments welcome!</comment>


Show HN: Table2Site – Create No-Code Websites from an Airtable Base - <AUTHOR> https://table2site.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Table2Site allows you to create no-code websites and uses Airtable as a CMS. You just have to add settings and content to your Airtable base and Table2site takes care of the rest.

It's perfect for "Curated list for X" websites like NomadList or small landing pages.

Examples sites: * [https://table2site.com/site/demo- site-1](https://table2site.com/site/demo-site-1) * [https://table2site.com/site/demo-site-2](https://table2site.com/site/demo- site-2) * [https://table2site.com/site/demo- site-3](https://table2site.com/site/demo-site-3) * [https://table2site.com/site/built-on- airtable](https://table2site.com/site/built-on-airtable)

The product was built after I saw @andreyazimov Sheet2Site. Thanks so much for the inspiration!

I used some of @levelsio projects to base my examples on.

Let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is cool! Nice approach letting users build up sites from components, akin to Lego bricks, driven by a table. Was not familiar with Airtable but I'll look into it now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! If you have any questions or feedback, let me know :-)</comment></comment>


New data supports finding that 30% of servers are 'comatose' [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://anthesisgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Case-Study_DataSupports30PercentComatoseEstimate-FINAL_06032015.pdf

<comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2937408/data- center/1-i...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2937408/data- center/1-in-3-data-center-servers-is-a-zombie.html), which points to this.</comment>


Ask HN: Best UI/UX websites? - <AUTHOR>

What are some good website the provide resources and information for learning about current UX and UI trends in web and app design? <comment><USER2> <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/>

<http://www.uxmatters.com/></comment>


How to Think About the Problem of Corporate Offshore Cash: Lesson from Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://itep.org/how-to-think-about-the-problem-of-corporate-offshore-cash-lessons-from-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> Despite the title, there is little in way of "how to think" or "lesson" in this brief piece: just some summary figures and a rather cursory overview of the most brazenly obvious broad opinions.</comment>


Car Theft by Antenna - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/27037/?p1=A1&a=f <comment><USER2> "There are probably easier ways to steal cars," - yeah by lifting the key probably.</comment>


Azure microservice platform Service Fabric is GA Available all clouds and on-prem - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-service-fabric-is-ga/ <comment><USER2> Just what the doctor ordered: microservices on steroids.

</comment><comment><USER3> Supports stateful microservices. Great!

</comment><comment><USER4> Sweet! So excited to see this went GA!

</comment><comment><USER5> Microservices everywhere!

</comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic news!

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome news!

</comment><comment><USER8> awesome to see this!</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best ways to overcome a defeatist attitude? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I can only speak from personal experience on this.

I find 3 things important: celebrating successes, shore up your mental model of failure, and to try to build mental positive momentum. I will explain.

With regards to positive momentum, it takes a bit of mental energy to start. When I am biking to work or in another time when alone, any thoughts of a defeatist or negative nature I aggressively try to shift to a positive. Example being "man, I'm going to get nothing done today cause I feel tired" can become "I didn't get the best sleep last night but this fresh air is really refreshing, the sky looks really nice today". Once I get started, it's surprising how quickly it sticks and I no longer have to try.

Shoring up my mental model of failure - I guess here if I was thinking about building a side project, instead of "Google has already done it, no point in building it myself" I'd instead focus on "I am going to change my idea a bit and service this niche, and my objective is to learn how to build this, not to win the war against Google". So by picking a personal objective to work towards, personal growth, and in case it does fail, I then still achieved what I wanted.

And lastly, to remind yourself that you achieved a lot as it goes along by celebrating successes. Again, if I am building a side project and I manage to get my first 50 users or something like that, I am going to have a little celebration ritual - doesn't have to be big, maybe it's as simple as "awesome, I am going to celebrate this by going to my favourite bakery and getting my favourite croissant for breakfast this morning" or something like that. It helps to do this to maintain positivity throughout.

Anyways, that's what helps me personally.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to write such helpful reply. I will definitely practice your points. I could really do with a more positive world view.

<comment><USER2> Happy to help if it does, good luck!</comment></comment></comment>


Protecting Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/11/protecting-business.html

<comment><USER2> Dupe!

<comment><AUTHOR> Er.. this isn't the dupe. It seems a bit trite to be saying I posted first but google is doing something odd with their links that come out of google reader and it would appear HN isn't recognizing the dupes.</comment></comment>


Here's the mathematical reason why it's impossible for Trump to become President - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/us-election-will-trump-clinton-win-electoral-college-swing-states-a7402351.html <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I'm actually surprised that you saw this post. It was flagged almost immediately, and I didn't realize until now that it was un-flagged. It was flagged long enough, I suppose, to bury it, though.

I posted it after the election had finished, and it was announced that Trump won. I found it humorous and interesting that the "mathematically impossible" outcome had happened. The only logical conclusion is that either numbers lie, or the fundamental assumption (upon which the conclusion was based) was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER2> is that the same math used for credit default swaps and CDOs?</comment>


The Trabant Is the Best Commie Car Made of Cotton We've Ever Driven - <AUTHOR> http://jalopnik.com/the-trabant-is-the-best-commie-car-made-of-cotton-weve-1788844883 <comment><USER2> > New Trabants had an up to 10 year waiting list, so people tended to hold on > to their cars forever

There was a soviet joke about this. A man goes to the car dealer, and asks for an appointment to buy a car. The salesman replies sure, come in 10 years. "Right, but in the morning or the afternoon?" inquires the man. "Is it really important, in 10 years time?" asks the surprised salesman. "Well, you see, the plumber already gave me an appointment for the morning".

<comment><USER3> There is another one. A Guy from the west orders a trabant, and because he is ordering from the west, he gets to cut the waiting line and immediately revives it. Some friends visit him- asking him how he is satisfied with his car. "Oh, its going to be great- they already send me a paper-model."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most important: It could be fixed by any semi-capable amateur with a stone, garter and some swearing.

Because it was so lightweight, my father could once bring a replacement door in public transport without breaking a sweat. And because it was so simple, he could put it in in half an hour without any prior training as a car mechanic.

If not for the antiquated 2-stroke engine and lack of exhaust filters, it could still be an example for very good, cost efficient and environment friendly engineering.

<comment><USER5> Apart from being a deathtrap and making you deaf.

Dial back your econonsense, please. I was made like it was because East Germany was broke as hell and could not produce much of anything...

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure whether the eco in econonsense refers to economy or ecology but in both possible meanings I would like to hear your math behind the "nonsense".

* gravity costs less than a fuel pump and it rarely breaks so does not need replacement

* recycled material usually costs less than new material, esp. when you consider garbage disposal costs

* less moving parts and parts than can be repaired by amateurs mean less parts overall which means less costs and waste

I don't doubt that they would fail modern crash tests but even that is relative: If everyone is driving a slow "deathtrap" your chances of getting into a high speed crash with a fast moving tank are pretty low.

<comment><USER5> Your chances of being maimed in that cardboard box even in a minor city crash are high, it literally is a deathtrap.

You literally seem to have no idea how any of this works

Those cars are constantly broken. They leak everything everywhere. Serviceability by amateurs goes directly against low emissions. You can't make a clean, 4-stroke engine without high fuel pressure. Modern engines require unimaginable tolerances.

Recycled material is almost always more expensive than non-recycled one, why do you think recycling needs to be forced by law? Eastern Germany had shortages of materials so they literally used anything they could. Do you really think it was inert and harmless? For e.g. soviet bloc used heavily carcinogenic cleaning agent in preschools, hospitals etc.

Sure, you can drop bells and whistles like electric windshields, infotaiment and the like.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure whether you are trolling so this is my last attempt at having a meaningful conversation with you:

> Your chances of being maimed in that cardboard box even in a minor city > crash are high, it literally is a deathtrap.

I would still argue, when on a bicycle, your survival chances when crashing into a bicycle are higher than when crashing into a car. Same goes for Trabant vs Trabant. Do you have some concrete evidence that Trabant does worse here (i.e. design issues that prevented people from getting out or that turn some parts into lethal weapons when involved in a "minor city crash")?

> Those cars are constantly broken. They leak everything everywhere.

At least not my family's Trabant or those of our friends. Do you have any actual numbers on failure rates?

> Serviceability by amateurs goes directly against low emissions. You can't > make a clean, 4-stroke engine without high fuel pressure. Modern engines > require unimaginable tolerances.

That is a very bold statement only backed by a comparison that does not even apply (a modern 4-stroke engine design vs the used 2-stroke engine). But since 2-stroke engines benefit greatly from direct injection I'll let that pass and just notice that I was not talking about the engine specifically but the overall design and that I even pointed out that the engine they used was "antiquated".

> Recycled material is almost always more expensive than non-recycled one

Do you have any numbers to back that up? And here I'd like to have a breakdown to see where the costs are coming from. In a planned economy it is much easier and cheaper to source recycled or scrapped material (i.e: You know you need 10ton of cotton wool to make X goods in a factory and you also know that you have to scrap 0.5tons. Therefore you just plan on having 0.5tons for further use and collect that with a truck once a month.)

> Eastern Germany had shortages of materials so they literally used anything > they could. Do you really think it was inert and harmless? For e.g. soviet > bloc used heavily carcinogenic cleaning agent in preschools, hospitals etc.

You won. I'm completely traumatized by ~"carcinogens in preschools and hospitals". Well, maybe not, because that was not the topic at all (but I can give you many more great examples of what was utterly wrong if you need them for further "arguments" \- after all, I grew up there). I don't care _why_ we use resources as efficient as possible as long as we do it. Now people carry proper fabric shopping bags "because of the environment1!!!1!". Before there was this joke in Western Germany: "How do you spot someone from Eastern Germany? He is carrying a fabric shopping bag!".

> why do you think recycling needs to be forced by law?

Because the elected representatives think that the majority wants to protect the environment. Or in other words: Because we have arrived at a point where people think it is important to use resources as efficiently as possible. I don't see the importance of _why_ people want to save resources as long as they do it.

<comment><USER5> Wait, so now I have to write a research paper on 5 topics?

You said "it is ecological at heart concept"

1)can't be ecological with 2 stroke engine, EVER

You said "it is great to be serviceable by amateurs"

2) From 1) follows lack of "fixable with whatever".

You need high fuel pressure for good atomization and efficient burn, you need precise tolerances, you need high-grade materials for the engine to not burn fuel like crazy and not produce all kinds of nasty shit. One could go on for hours

Wikipedia claims: The engine produced very smoky exhaust and significant air pollution – nine times the hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxide emissions of the average European car of 2007.

Great ecology.

Another point of gravity fuel feed: guess where the tank is - directly above an aircooled engine. Top marks for safety

On the topic of safety: Yes, being hit by a modern car might actually be safer on a bike than in that thing. Sure as fuck I'd personally prefer that if it was compared to motorbike + clothes.

You might burn. The steering column might impale you. The steering wheel might take your head off. That thing literally folds on itself. It isn't speed that kills you but being crushed into a funny looking ball

The carcirogenic part was just highlight one problem. They used waste from dye production. Do you think anyone even bothered to check how toxic it is? Do you really think that waste from a soviet plant is harmless? They used it because they had no other materials available.

That sweet eco-touchy-feely recycled duroplast? Turns out you can't really dispose of it. (They ground it up and mixed it as aggregate in cement for pavement construction)

About recycling: I meant it has to be required because it usually isn't worth it (especially for normal people, not buisnesses that happen to have it by the tonne)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/low-oil-prices-hurt- plastics-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/low-oil-prices-hurt-plastics- recycling-2016-4?IR=T)

Sure, I can use fabric shopping bags. Just to buy trash bags instead, but whatever makes you feel nice. Most of the time the supermarkets make me use a gazyllion shitty plastic bags for every single loose thing (self-weighting) anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra The problem with those socialist countries is that they failed to evolve. They'll still be making the same car in '85 which was succesfully launched in '65, and nobody would want it any more.

This is perhaps because of lack of competition (there wasn't much common market even between different Warsaw Pact countries) and overspending on military preparing for wars which never came.

[http://jalopnik.com/these-were-your-car-options-in- hungary-u...](http://jalopnik.com/these-were-your-car-options-in-hungary- under-the-soviet-1545678388) this article makes the point that there was some competition. Lucky for Hungary. In USSR there were not.

<comment><USER6> That's a good point. Eastern Germany wasn't doing that bad in the 50s but somehow they got stuck. Even North Korea was doing well for a while.

<comment><USER7> North Korea was doing _better_ than South until 60s, and not too bad even until late 80s. (They even sent aid packages to South Korea once in the 80s, when we were hit by a big typhoon. Largely as a propaganda show, but still.)

It then fell off a cliff.

<comment> guard-of-terra I guess there were no longer any USSR to supply them with fertilizer and other stuff for free, and China retracted some of their support too. And they relied on centralized mechanized agriculture. Which in this closed off society led to a large scale famine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish they hadn't broken their images — they require JavaScript for functioning <img> tags(!).

</comment><comment><USER9> The hungarian joke was: 'When I grow up, I'll be a Mercedes'.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the material used for the outside body work, a kind of plastic also used for billiard/pool balls: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenol_formaldehyde_resin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenol_formaldehyde_resin) and [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenoplast#Verwendung](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenoplast#Verwendung)

</comment><comment><USER11> A beautiful game about this car: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/446020/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/446020/)

</comment><comment><USER12> The USAF has one in their Museum in Dayton Ohio placed in front of several panels of the Berlin Wall. Here's a pic I took years ago:

[http://imgur.com/a/NJ4Hu](http://imgur.com/a/NJ4Hu)

</comment><comment><USER13> When visiting East Germany I always preferred the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartburg_353](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartburg_353) over the Trabant.

</comment><comment><USER14> The Trabant is the ultra hipster statement. It's so bad it's good.

</comment><comment><USER15> the Trabi stinks terribly, lots of exhaust because of the two takt engine, good luck with passing a vehicle inspection with that one. Never mind the shift gear and lack of power steering. However its fans love it because you can tinker with it...

Also the funny part is that the late east german politbureau was driving Volvo cars, eastern block cars weren't good enough for them...

</comment><comment><USER16> They failed to mention my favorite side point: people in East Germany LOVED stickers (Aufkleber). I have no idea why, but Trabis were covered in stickers. We used to joke that they were to keep the Trabis from falling apart.

</comment><comment><USER17> This Youtube channel, Aging Wheels, showcases the Trabant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpIgM6TpwA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpIgM6TpwA)

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of a great commercial... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yiOPgUs1lA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yiOPgUs1lA)

<comment><USER19> Sorry, those are in german language:

This is an east german car magazine episode from 1982, introducing the new model's features: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ynxQF3pd-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ynxQF3pd-I)

Spoof by a german comedian: [http://funpot.net/?id=d2c15d587110bcfa](http://funpot.net/?id=d2c15d587110bcfa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The license plate "OT 92-27" on the picture should be license plate of the of Ostrava district, if i am not mistaken :)

Btw. there was no heating in Trabant...

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1-4GsQa-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1-4GsQa-g)</comment>


First Look: Windows 7 Shapes Up as Microsoft's Best OS Yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/first-look-windows7 <comment><USER2> It was disappointing for them to lead with hints that this is a "really BIG" upgrade, and then decide to only talk about things that would never justify $200.

And if they're going to make a statement like "Finally, Microsoft creates a clean, modern look that competes with Apple's finely designed Mac OS X Leopard", they need to choose screenshots that don't suggest the opposite. Start by not highlighting the bizarre new desktop backgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best yet because it looks pretty? I had a feeling going in this review would be pointless and non-informative. I certainly wasn't disappointed there.</comment>


Show HN: Glui – The simplest way to capture, annotate and share screenshots - <AUTHOR> http://glui.me

<comment><USER2> I've been doing sort of a hand-made version of this for a while. It's a useful trick and one of my favorite quick-blogging techniques.

This doesn't have annotations, but it's a free alternative: <http://grabbox.devsoft.no/>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://collabshot.com/> is free, does the same thing and supports Linux, Mac and Windows.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat, but $5? As an /introductory/ price? I don't have a Mac, but I can't imagine it's that troublesome to capture, annotate and share screenshots on one. I guess I'm just not the target market for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER5> There isn't another app that does it all (capture, annotate, quick share, host the screenshot) besides Skitch, which was bought by Evernote.

<comment><USER6> There is monosnap. Much better than Skitch.

<http://monosnap.com/>

<comment><USER5> Thanks... a link to an app I didn't yet know about was what I was hoping for when I posted my comment. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the difference between this and CloudApp set to "auto upload screenshot" ?

This is a genuine question. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER8> CloudAPp doesn't allow you to annotate the screenshots though.

<comment><USER9> But it has robust backend infrastructure and it has been around for a while.

You know... trivial extra feature vs. maturity and reliability... it's not a hard choice. Besides there are CloudApp clients that support annotations if that's what someone really needs.

<comment><USER7> Also, You can install plugins, called "raindrops" to add a few neat features, or make your own plugins since they have a raindrops API.

And the free package covers almost everything that 'Glui' does, for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Www.jingproject.com is a great solution for this as well. One click to upload and url to the annotated screenshot is in the clipboard

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice. Simple applications is what we need 90% of the time.</comment>


Ninite: How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks - <AUTHOR> http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-got-18-000-beta-users-in-4-weeks

<comment><USER2> I'm currently working on this problem right now with my company imVOX (<http://imvox.com/trial.php>). We're trying to finish up our client and slowly pull out of the real 'testing' phase of beta and more into an RC status and have load tests, etc.

Yet getting good beta testers is hard. Many people sign up, use it once, hit a bug and then never return. Understandable, but even emailing people (personally) hasn't been all that effective in getting people back consistently. I probably have 10 people that I can keep going to and know that they will use it again and again and provide feedback.

I've yet to go on a strong blog push yet, but thats probably my next approach.

Other methods to find bloggers: YouTube and Twitter Search. I've also been looking through friend's shared stuff on Google Reader occasionally to mark off ones to contact.

One twist that I have as problematic is that I don't have and 'special codes' to hand out to people currently. We had a system setup like that a while ago, but I think it was slowing downloads a bit so now its just a download link and you register for a (free) account in-client.

In addition for ideas of how to get more testers via blogging (commenting is important I know too), anyone trying it out would be really appreciated. I'm going to have them push the newest build to our download and auto-update servers later today.

</comment><comment><USER3> The target market seems to be tech-savvy. Getting on blogs (with a relevant audience) is much more challenging for b2b and most consumer apps.

<comment><USER4> Getting them to read the blogs - yes. But getting on the blogs is easier, if anything, because many b2b-writer need content. Consumer stuff is different, but doable. What about giving a limited amount of accounts for free, to the bloggers. Not the high-profile ones that get tons of stuff, but the "middle class" so to speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you give more details on how many blogs you've contacted? How many covered you? How did you phrase your email to make it interesting to the bloggers?

Edit: Also, how you computed readership numbers for a blog?

<comment><AUTHOR> We contacted about 30, resulting in around 7 hits. Some of our biggest hits were secondary though, larger blogs would see us on smaller ones and contact us for a demo code.

Our pitch email subject line was a brief description of the product then "- Free demo codes for your readers". The body had a similar format: what we do, here's your code, contact us with any questions, thanks.

Lots of sites have feedburner badges to give subscriber counts. We found one blog that was clearly faking that though. Their traffic to us was way lower than an 80k subscriber blog would send.

The number of comments on posts is a good indicator too. Anything greater than 0 means they've got a fairly big audience.

<comment><USER6> _"... We contacted about 30, resulting in around 7 hits. Some of our biggest hits were secondary though, larger blogs would see us on smaller ones and contact us for a demo code. ..."_

Nice hack and something I appreciate because it's such a simple thing to do.

 _"... Lots of sites have feedburner badges to give subscriber counts. ..."_

Did you try to obtain the stats from each site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pardon the expression, but people are complete suckers for sort of thing.

Given two similar services, one with a limit on registration and one without, you can bet that the one with the limit will garner some sort of popularity just by virtue of being "exclusive."

This doesn't mean it's a bad marketing tactic. On the contrary, it's obviously excellent for exposure... but if it ever becomes a popular service, saying "I was there first" is a huge deal for people. For reference: Lines outside movie theaters days in advance for the Star Wars movies, video game midnight release parties, and 8 hour lines outside Apple stores for a phone.

<comment><USER8> I'd guess that using signup codes is not about merely creating the illusion of exclusivity. I think the real reason behind using signup codes is so you can track your marketing efforts: where did I spend time/money and how effective was it? Without it you are flying blind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's important to note that immediate media coverage and an immediate surge in signups is not always desirable for something just released and it's of course not always a prerequisite for success in the long run.

It's your trending over time that really counts.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd just like to say that you guys couldn't have launched in a more perfect time. I browsed your site when I saw it linked to on HN and didn't think much of it. My mom came home the following day with a new laptop and asked me to install a bunch of software. I quickly remembered Ninite and had most of her stuff installed in no time. It was really great.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just have to say I would use your service...

Definitely going to use this strategy in the future, but hope the reach of this post doesn't flood blogger's inboxes with similar schemes.

</comment><comment><USER12> The approach makes sense, but something about spamming tons of blog owners turns me off.

I've used a similar approach, but only with the blogs that I had either made personal contact with previously or that I frequented.

On another note, your blogroll/Reader subscriptions are a great place to start if you follow other bloggers in your industry. Being an active member of the blogosphere also helps give you some clout.

<comment><USER13> As the owner of a blog that's #1 in its niche in the range of those described (10k-50k subscribers), I'm not against getting unsolicited messages at all _if_ they're relevant and my readers would find it interesting. Indeed, I don't receive enough mail like that.. :)

<comment><USER12> fair enough. You've just given me the confidence to contact as many bloggers as I can (as long as they specifically pertain to our market).

Thanks!!!

<comment><USER13> Be careful though. It's not as simple as just contacting them all. You _really, really, really, really_ need a story that's of the sort _they actually publish_.

I get relevant press releases from time to time that are in my industry/field but are so "corporatey" that there's little my readers would _really_ care about. Twist whatever you have to say into a story that fits the mold of what the blog already posts - it might take reading their entire front page to get a feel for this ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would you mind pasting the link of one of the blogs? I am interested to see how they are framing the promotion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's one: [http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/10/08/how-to-install-the- most...](http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/10/08/how-to-install-the-most-popular- software-on-your-new-pc-all-at-once/)

The general pattern was mention the private code as a teaser, describe/review the service, then give the details for signing up with the code.

<comment><USER15> Have you given up on the Baseshield sandbox concept? I don't see it referenced from Ninite (I'm guessing Baseshield isn't complete?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> good to see someone moving on this idea. I talked with a few people about this exact service a year ago and the general consensus was that if it got big you'd get slammed for violating EULA's. best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER17> Getting featured on Lifehacker.com didn't hurt, I suppose..

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, but Lifehacker didn't cover us until after we launched publicly. We pitched them with a demo code towards the end of our beta and never heard anything back. Judging from the traffic they've sent recently we probably could have gotten 18k beta signups from them alone.

The biggest hits for our beta were sites we never heard of that found us on smaller blogs and reached out to us. Sites like <http://www.dinside.no> <http://www.genbeta.com> and <http://www.walla.co.il>.

I should write about our experience with non-english blogs later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats! That's great. Thanks for sharing your success!</comment>


Rate my startup: Quivee.com - <AUTHOR>

I was tired of emailing myself job listings I wanted to apply to, or leaving my browser open with 18 tabs, so I created a job application management/tracker.  Please let me know what you think! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://quivee.com></comment>


Marketplace to sell ownership of our software? - <AUTHOR>

I, with a partner, developed a Windows application that we would like to sell to a new owner. It's an application for the entertainment industry, and the third partner with all the contacts industry experience has in short not realized his contribution. There is no revenue, just a few hundred hours of development time to save the new owner on a similar project. Is there a marketplace like Flippa for software like this? Or, is there another common way to handle this? <comment><USER3> Two Ideas:

1) Run some paid advertising to get you in front of potential buyers. Who would be the ideal customer (in this case 'ideal buyer') for this asset?

      The benefit of a marketplace is that you find people who are ALREADY looking to buy. That's nice. But many times people aren't aware of the benefits of software. Map out the top 3-10 benefits that the buyer would have. Then run ads which get you in front of them. Sell them on the fact that this application is the answer to their problems. Rather than going through the pain of developing it themselves - they buy from you.

2) Established Marketplaces. Of course you mentioned Flippa. Flippa may not be the best placed for a seller because it's a buyer's market. Also 90+% of buyers there want sites, apps, etc with demonstrated revenue.

Here are some other marketplaces though you may find helpful:

Marketplace.Sitepoint.com

Websitebroker.com

Buysellwebsite.com Aappbusinessbrokers.com Apptopia.com (for mobile apps - <USER2> be able to discover some buyers interested in Windows appications).

Good Luck</comment>


Magnus Carlsen to stage richest online chess tournament in history - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/apr/02/magnus-carlsen-to-stage-richest-online-chess-tournament-in-history <comment><USER2> They will have to be careful about whom they invite because this sadly seems ripe for cheating.

I know there will be cameras on the players and analysis software will be used to catch anomalies, but with this much money on the line I don't think those measures will be enough to discourage bad actors.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not strictly true that chess is the only sport that is the same whether played over a board or online, poker comes to mind, and in fact most board games would qualify.

Regardless, as a chess fan it's great to see them adapt to the current circumstances.

<comment><USER4> Online poker misses a lot of non verbal communication (intentional or not)

<comment><USER5> Live tells aren't taken that seriously or considered a significant factor outside of laymen.

That said I do think the dynamics of poker change more than most other board/card/table games when going from live to online or vice versa, with my extremely limited understanding of chess, go, and Magic.</comment></comment></comment>


Interesting Corollary of the Power Law in Venture Investing - <AUTHOR> I just realized an important corollary of the Power law in Venture Investing. Basically, think there are so many startups who hire people without ever finding a PMF. And I was thinking how are these startups able to justify their value in the economic world. Like every startup doesn't create enough economic value to hire employees, right. But they don't need to. They just need to convince some VC to raise money. They don't need revenues. They can possibly fail even. But then who loses, if the founders took salaries, employees took salaries, is it the investors? But then you realize, no. Even the investors are fine losing on 9/10 bets if 1/10 is a 10x return generating. Which means the companies which really generate economic value, they just don't create wealth for their employees and investors, but they also financially support so many failed ventures indirectly, hence spurting cycles and ripples of innovation and risk-taking in this world. <comment><USER2> Right. Something similar happens in the R&D departments of every big corporation. Only 10% of the projects become products. But a difference may be that when a venture-capital-backed startup fails the same venture capitalists won't be hiring the same employees? Well maybe</comment>


Lenovo Thinkpad P1 (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/ThinkPad-P1/p/22WS2WPP101 <comment><USER2> Pro-tip: if you're going to market a high-end laptop then don't make the marketing/landing page look like a cheap knockoff with bad copywriting. Apple is the only one who gets this right.

<comment><USER3> Probably unrelated, but I'm interested in why Lenovo insists on appending ® ™ symbols, whereas Apple omits them altogether?

[https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/](https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/)

It really clutters up the text.

<comment><USER2> The whole Lenovo page just feels tacky to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17748776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17748776)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm still favoring the System76 Galago Pro though

</comment><comment><USER6> If this follows Lenovo's pricing strategy, price will go down ~6 months after release.

</comment><comment><USER7> cool computer - too bad its made by lenovo

</comment><comment><USER8> preloaded with windows... next

<comment> King-Aaron Which mainstream manufacturers (i.e. HP, Lenovo, Asus, etc) sell machines like this that _aren 't_ preloaded with windows?

And even with a machine that comes with Windows, is it really _that hard_ to change over to linux? I don't see why this is a point of complaint.

<comment><USER9> The Dell xps line is great.

<comment> King-Aaron Good to know! I've been wanting to switch away from apple hardware for a while now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Change from a quick and dirty rusher to be rigorous and conscientious - <AUTHOR> I'm the technical co-founder of a start up that looks like it has real potential. My partner knows the business domain and is a good salesman and we have a couple of others who help part time.
Every time we release non-trivial features things break on production. Bugs surface regularly and our customers like our system but don't consider it stable, they notice the stream of problems. I think this is the only thing that is stopping us growing dramatically in the next 6 months.
I am a procrastinator. I avoid doing the sensible and important things that I know I should do, such as creating an automated test suite, writing up detailed designs and walk-throughs. I wait until a feature is required and when the urgency reaches a certain point I start working through the night to get it done.
It really hurts me to see myself serving up work that I know is crap. I don't leave myself enough time to do things well.
How can I hold myself to a higher standard.
Ideas :
- I must practice not running away from anxiety and sticking with my work. I think anxiety causes procrastination. - I need to jump on board with testing. We need to create tests for all new code and not worry about whether the tests hit the db, are in the best structure, use the page object model, include headless browser testing or not. I have ummed and ahhed about this stuff for so long, I need to just get started. - I need accountability. I need to arrange scheduled reviews of our development process to check if it's improving. - I need a single place for all tasks, issues, bugs and designs, I will go with Jira. - Every significant feature needs a UI design, some code high level design and a review before dev starts. - I need to stop committing to deadlines. Being a people pleaser I am amazingly unrealistic about how long things will take and set myself up for failure.
All suggestions appreciated.
000000000000000000 <comment><USER2> I know where you're coming from. Had it not been for the company of colleagues who had been doing reviews, test, CI, refactoring sprints etc for a long while to attest to its benefits, I would have become overwhelmed at the prospect of adopting these practices.

Here are some suggestions based on my personal experience :

* Don't try to do it all. Do it a step at a time. Choose what's most important for you and work on that. Maybe it is CI. Which in real terms implies automated building, testing and deployment to staging for every commit. Or it could mean writing tests for the most fragile parts of the codebase. Whatever it is, pick one. Start small. Else you'll end up with just another 10 things that you've _also_ got to worry about.

* Dedicate time, resources and a developer only to focus on this one thing. If your team is small or it is just you, hire someone to get this one thing done.

* If you are not already doing it don't bother with core review meetings at this point. However integrate static checkers/linters in your commit workflow. Then move to a 2 ack process. Then do proper code review meetings (if necessary)

(updates, since I am writing this in parts)

* Don't enforce policies that will lead to frustration but do enforce policies that just might be a bit inconvenient.

* Don't expect immediate improvements but don't stop midway, you'll probably end up in a worse situation than now if you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks devnonymous.

I will make getting a test suite for core functionality my number #1 priority and then investigate static analysis tools and CI.

Do you have any links that explain what a 2 ack process is in this context ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's no moral/ethical/character shortcoming/failure/flaw here.

The company has leveraged technical debt. The leverage has allowed the company to grow. The debt increases the likelihood of bugs. Technical debt is a business decision. It's use is a sign of technical competence, not incompetence.

Customers complaining is better than not having any customers. The business goal is not some bug free codebase.

My random advice from the internet:

      1. Accept technical debt for what it is. A business tool.
      2. Talk to the customers. If stability matters more than
         new features, focus on stability.
      3. If stability isn't your customer's overwhelming priority,
         keep moving forward iterating on their feedback.

What you are doing is hard. The good news is that there aren't grades every three months. It's a marathon not a sprint.

For a startup, technical debt will tend to disappear in one of two ways: the startup shutters its doors or the startup grows to a scale where even original systems with zero technical debt would have to be redesigned. Then you have to build Kafka or Kubernetes or Wasabi.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks brudgers, I appreciate your input.

I think there is some truth in what you've said.

However in my case it wasn't a conscious choice, in fact my conscious choice at many points along the way was to improve quality, stability, reduce bugs that make to production etc. And I haven't done it. So I cannot claim quick and dirty was as strategy. I would have been ok with that for the first 6 months but we are past that.

I want to face up to the fact that I need to change.

Also I have a suspicion that doing things well becomes faster and more efficient than quick and dirty quite quickly.

Thanks for your words on encouragement.

<comment><USER3> I am curious what the business case is for the intended change. It seems to be missing from the described context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> make a backlog of everything. don't take on too much, but deliver what you promise.

1\. critical issues - work on those first

2\. defects and new features

3\. process improvement - spend 10-20% on these or things will never get better.

setup a test environment makes sure everyone is testing.

1\. create a smoke test of critical features

2\. test those and new features every time you deploy

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think this sums up well what I need to do.</comment></comment>


Bringing the Drugstore Home: An Interview with Deanna Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/60/kastner_day.php <comment><USER2> Truly, in academia people will study and right about absolutely anything. I got halfway through that interview before I realized that there was no "there" there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I may be smirking for the rest of the day about "the thermometer as a gendered technology".</comment>


Ask HN: What should you do or avoid when pivoting a startup? - <AUTHOR> Stories welcome <comment><USER2> It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking a pivot is a failure and therefore bad. What's important is that by killing an idea, you're giving yourself a new opportunity rather than chasing after sunk costs.

Fear of failure is very common and it's a huge inhibitor from ever starting- and this is much worse. You want to set the culture that embraces failure for what it is: a time to assess, take stock, and move forward with a better understanding and course of action. You want to encourage faster recognition of mistakes and removing any shame or stigma will make it easier. This pivot is actually a good time to treat the team to a nice meal and celebrate the progress. You've learned and grown together over the course of that journey and enough to know there's something better. This also means that when you talk about this pivot in the future to potential customers and investors, you have nothing to apologize for if you all did your best. Focus on how these experiences make you an even better fit to solve the problems you're focusing on now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pivots are like scientific experiments. You should have a hypothesis that you're testing with every pivot. Business Model Canvas is great for this - just pick something and pivot on that, see if it ends up better.

The goal of a startup is Product-Market Fit, which is where you're exhausted because people are trying to throw money at you and you can't keep up with the demand. If you're the one throwing money at them, you probably have to keep pivoting.

My favorite source of inspiration is to look what people are hacking together, but badly. If people are building Facebook Groups around remote work, that suggests that there's demand for remote work sites. If people are taking months off production to integrate chat into their site, that means the current chat SaaS solutions aren't doing the trick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the 'bad hacks' is actually really dope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't pivot partially. There are varying degrees of pivots of course, but if you are having to pivot because a market or idea didn't work out, commit 100% to it. The worst thing you can do is partially commit where you don't fully push forward in the new direction and try to keep a foot in the old idea/process for fear of losing what little you had.

Partially committing almost always will create a failure, or at least delayed or more costly success. It can be scary to pivot, in fact the more success you've had the harder it gets to pivot but many times it is more important than ever at that point.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pivot before you're desperate (meaning nearly out of cash). Someone else said not to pivot partially, which is bad advice. Some VC-backed companies can do this, but it's usually after a spectacular B2C failure. Most companies don't/shouldn't do it.

A pivot can start as small as a phone call with a trusted client or an employee hackathon. You don't need to throw existing cashflow away to test it out.

If it's vastly different from your old product, create a new LLC and brand. If not, create a new product under your existing name. Either way, reuse your relationships, staff, etc. and start talking to clients.

</comment><comment><USER6> Many of our part-time team members lost motivation after our first pivot. They were first sold on the original vision, and they did not see that same vision in the product we pivoted to. Others believed we pivoted too quickly without fully giving the first product a chance.

So, I would make sure that everyone on the team gets to participate in the pivoting process, including realizing for themselves why a pivot is necessary. Also, make sure everyone realizes that the overall company vision and values are still there, even though the form of the product has changed.

<comment><USER7> > Many of our part-time team members lost motivation after our first pivot. > They were first sold on the original vision

Perhaps you grew too quickly? IMO, part of a successful pivot is making sure you don't grow too quickly before you find product-market fit.

Perhaps you pivoted too far? IMO, a lot of early-stage companies can pivot without changing the general vision.

I think it's important that the vision and team are flexible enough that pivots within that vision are anticipated and tolerated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My advice would be when you pivot, to stay in our choose the area that you are personally interested in / have domain expertise in.

Our story: we started with a pretty tech-oriented idea (since we are engineers) in the events space, but then pivoted to more biz-oriented idea - the main challenge became to sell a solution, not to build it.

That worked initially because we were addressing a real problem and we got initial customers, but when things became hard it was much harder for us to stay motivated - there was no tech part we could be excited about and we also knew little about events industry at first, so we had to learn it all from scratch.

So my advice would be always try to choose something where you have that intrinsic motivation that will keep you going, rather than following what feels like the "best" market opportunity at the moment.</comment>


Startups Don't Die, They Commit Suicide - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/27/startups-don%E2%80%99t-die-they-commit-suicide/

<comment><USER2> _"and every day we've continued to win the most important battle for any company: existence"_

That's just it. I had a client a few years back and I thought they were just, well, I mean it sounds harsh but I thought they were a joke.

They were in a highly competitive industry and everything about their product sucked.

I never _really_ took them seriously. But then about 8 months after I'd been doing regular work for them they called me and said "There's a problem with the billing integration on signup". I was like "How did you know?" It was a problem that wasn't immediately apparent and there were no warnings in place on their system to detect this kind of problem. The guy said "well we usually get 5 or 6 signups a day and we didn't get any".

This was astounding to me. I couldn't _believe_ they got 5 - 6 people signing up every day.

Now, 3 years on, they get about 40 signups a day. They have iteratively improved their service, and there's the really killer thing: the markets we're dealing with are HUGE here people. Huge.

I had this little epiphany the other day, about my service 8centsms.com. Here is a service that makes between $500 and $2000 per month - but the bulk of that is from 1 or 2 bulk marketing clients. I want it to be a "personal" messaging solution though.

The problem is, there are only 27 regular users. Pathetic. That's so small it makes me want to cry.

But then I thought about it like this: what if I told you that I had a service that only had 27 regular users (who really love the service). Then I told you that I knew (somehow, theoretically) that those were the only 27 people on the planet who would ever use it or love it, and we'd already signed them up - wouldn't you think that was utterly impossible?

In fact, the presence of 27 users just indicates that there must be more - many many many many more - who would signup and use our service if we marketed it properly. Isn't that amazing?

Don't commit suicide, just exist. Engage with your users and get more signups. If even one person falls in love with your product, that proves that there must be thousands, even millions more out there that will do the same. Because the alternative (that you managed to find the 1 person out of 7 billion that love your product) is so unlikely as to be considered impossible.

<comment><USER3> Why do you want it to be personal, when your money comes from B2B? Why not refocus towards reaching more bulk marketing clients?

<comment><USER4> I agree, the fastest way to gain traction may be to market more to the bulk marketing client list (who clearly see value in it). As the word spreads among them, you may gain critical mass and see your service spread to more general clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a great writeup Justin, but it would lend you even more credibility if you mentioned the time you gave up - Kiko. The only reason I've seen cited in interviews is that Google jumped into the market and conquered it overnight. I don't believe that at all. I think if you stuck to your guns, you could kick Google calendar's ass and be successful despite the initial competitive setback, much like the great examples you give in your article.

Did you get bored of working on Kiko or were you looking for a bigger, crazier idea?

<comment><USER6> I think we could have made something happen with Kiko if we had stuck with it. However, I honestly don't think we were ready as a team to make it happen -- we didn't really understand the market (two kids right of college who never used calendars!). We spent a lot of time trying to come up with ideas for how to make Kiko work (one of those brainstorming sessions led to Justin.tv), but just couldn't think of anything we should was compelling.

<comment><USER5> _we didn't really understand the market_

Quote from your article:

"These were guys with very little knowledge of the tech industry, two designers who had a programmer working with them part time.

....

Even their lead (and only) engineer had moved back to Boston. As a casual observer from the outside, they appeared isolated and discouraged.

....

But they didn't give up. They kept at it."

Like you said, _persistence isn't just key — it is everything_.

I honestly feel that if you have determination, you can make any idea work and make it big. But it helps if you are having fun while doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's see... the "fail fast" meme was pushed out by the "pivot" meme, and we're likely to start seeing more of the "persevere at all costs - see, I did it, so you should _never ever ever_ give up ever!" meme soon.

The only constant I see is "change the meme every so often".

<comment><USER8> All three are facets of the same thing. You fail fast so you know when to pivot, and where to pivot to, and you persevere to make it through the pivot. You can easily add a hundred other adages and cliches to this pile. These are just new buzzwords for old wisdom.

<comment><USER7> Ummm... I don't think the 'fail fast' notion is at all related to the "persevere at all costs" meme I've seen popping up the past couple weeks. The whole point is that the PAAC supporters got the point of failure (or perceived failure) multiple times, but did not fail. Often there's no mention of a major pivot, just that they "kept going".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everything written here is true, but you have to be careful. Following advice like this, any startup, even ones ultimately doomed to failure can be continued indefinitely.

<comment><USER10> Of course. That's what separates good entrepreneurs from "no so good" ones. I think his advice applies to businesses in general as much as startups, its just that established businesses creating new products have more resources to work with. That doesn't change the fact that one of the most important abilities of someone in business is dealing with uncertainty and making decisions without enough information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reading tons of articles about succeeding in entrepreneurship I have learned one thing: it is a rat race in a labyrinth. A few will win; the rest will be consigned to oblivion. And you never know in which group you are until it's too late (or obvious).

</comment><comment><USER12> my view on the article aside, the reason this type of advice is well received by entrepreneurs is because the blood/sweat/tears formula consists of elements we are all in control of (contrary to the outside investment/luck elements that you read about and say, "well hopefully that shit works out"). not a bad thing at all... primary focus should be on elements you can control, with the others being secondary</comment>


Khosla And RRE Lead $16.2 Million Series C In Xobni - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/khosla-and-rre-lead-16-2-million-series-c-in-xobni/ <comment><USER2> I presume there's a lot more to their business model than just an Outlook plugin (albeit a very good one!)?

<comment><USER3> Matt, co-founder of Xobni here. Adam and I started Xobni with the basic idea that google organized the world's public information, yet no one had done that for personal information (Adam's insight - not mine - he was in grad school looking for huge data sets to do stuff with). Not only are the personal data stores much larger than public data (most of which is in email), they also have to be treated different. Google (and products like gmail, google desktop, etc) don't get this. What we discovered after pounding our heads at this problem for 6 months was that Email Is About People and no current email clients understand that. Xobni was born.

We took that concept, and with $12k of YC money in the bank, we realized we would get Zero adoption if we asked people to switch to our new email client. We also realized the largest group of existing valuable email users are on Outlook (it has grown from 500M to 600M since we started Xobni).

So, we took our vision to Outlook via a plugin. People liked it. We solved some existing problems for people like keyword search (note: it is easier to acquire users when you solve a problem they know they have), and sprinkled in features that produce our true vision of organizing information around people and relationships.

Individuals pay for our premium Outlook product (Xobni Plus) and companies license it for their employees (Xobni Enterprise).

However, we've finally started to stretch the vision to new areas. We launched Xobni for BlackBerry - an app that takes our people-centric vision of personal information to the blackberry. And Xobni One, our cloud service that connects the xobni service between Outlook, BlackBerry, and upcoming new platforms.

Add onto that other cloud services (Salesforce.com, linkedin, etc) that you want to access and view from Xobni profiles on Outlook, BlackBerry, and everywhere else you maintain and manage relationships.

Would you like to be on your friend's Facebook page and see the phone number that Xobni extracted for you last time that friend called you on your BlackBerry? I would.

So, Outlook plugin can be seen as a means, not an end. Meanwhile, the plugin is damn useful :)

<comment><USER4> This is exactly why I love HN. Nowhere else could you expect the founders to take time to excite (and educate) us in such detail :-)

Congrats Matt & Xobni. I hope that fund means that we'll get an Apple Mail & Thunderbird Xobni soon. I bet Xobni will good on the iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to Matt & Adam! It is amazing to watch Xobni achieving its dream.</comment>


Show HN: GitPoint – The most feature-rich GitHub mobile client that is 100% free - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gitpoint/git-point <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN community,

Every currently available client that I tried to use was either too simple (single-feature), required payment for the most basic of features (such as commenting on an issue) and/or didn't have the best UI. For all of these reasons, I built GitPoint.

I launched the iOS version of the app two weeks ago and we've already picked up a decent number of users (~3000). With some amazing contributors, we've added a number of new features since then as well as publish the Android version just yesterday!

Please don't hesitate to leave feedback of any kind!

</comment><comment><USER2> Thank you for this app. It was always a problem for me to handle GitHub through a browser on the mobile. works well, without any hiccups so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'm glad you like it so far! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great looking app that almost has all of the features I need.

If yiu could add starred repos to the profile view( maybe in a 2x2 grid instead of 3x1), it would be perfect.

Starred repos serve as kind of a code bookmark /read it later service for me and sometimes I like to browse through it before starting a new project to get ideas.

</comment><comment><USER4> This app strikes a good balance between feature richness and UX.

</comment><comment><USER5> The iOS app has been working well for me. Good to see the Android version has been pushed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a million, happy to have Android out so soon since so many people have been waiting.</comment></comment>


"We plan to hide 'https' scheme and subdomain 'www' in Chrome omnibox in M76" - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=883038#c114 <comment><USER3> Hm, hiding the protocol and the host part in the address – what next, hiding the domain? However, the path is hidden already, what's left then?

Seriously speaking: If browsers are simplifying the URI scheme for the alleged benefit of users, how do we expect these users to know anything about addresses? Isn't this rather undermining security than enhancing it? Highlighting significant parts may be preferable to hiding those deemed insignificant. Moreover, regarding https, I personally prefer positive affirmation over lack of warning.

For me, this worked best for desktop browsers with the padlock icon (and, before this, the key icon) shown together with a display of link targets in a status bar as a separate, reserved area. (While allowing pages to overwrite `window.status` was certainly not a good idea.) A consistent display of the authority issuing the certificate of the current page in a status bar like this may be also nice. I'm not convinced that less but more opaque information is the way to go.

Dedicating 20 vertical pixels of virtual real estate to security relevant information may be worth it. It may be also easier to parse than an overloaded omnnibox/location/search/navigation/security/menu bar. Cutting down any information which is displayed too densely right from the beginning won't help the issue. How many bits of information are there in this "everything bar"? Yes, there's still a bit of grouping left, mainly by spacing, but color is mostly gone as a signal in order to make the information density bearable. So users will be applying quite an amount of selectivity when parsing this display, by this inevitably missing relevant information. (That this densely combined display is rather homogenous both for esthetics and acceptance just aggravates the need for selective parsing, which is likely to become a habit.) "We'll pre-filter this for you" isn't addressing the problem, it's rather "living with the outcome".

Edit: A legitimate reason for redacting the host name are extensive names, crafted to exceed the space available in the location display in order to deceive users regarding the identity of the host. Here, abbreviating by an ellipsis (compare text-overflow: ellipsis) in order to fully display the domain may be a way to go.

\--

P.S.: What's the general lesson taught by such redactions by the browser vendor? That it is OK to ignore these things, as they are truly irrelevant? (Must be without significance, since Google told me so?)

<comment><USER4> I guess the direction is appification of the Internet. On your phone, you launch "Facebook" and "Instagram", not /mnt/apps/facebook.apk and /mnt/apps/instagram.apk. Likewise, on the internet, they want you to visit "Facebook.com", not "[https://facebook.com/index.html"](https://facebook.com/index.html").

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's about products for the most. (Also, what happened with human readable URLs? Even, if you'r driving your single page app on fragment identifiers, you could route them internally based on the path info.)

On a more generally level, I think, it's probably more about amplification vs augmentation, the kind of human-computer symbiosis, what this dialog really is. (Actually, I do prefer Licklider over Engelbart.) Take for example a middle-aged worker in India, who has now one of those new, cheap, not-that- smart phones on a $2/month mobile plan. S/he connects to streaming services via voice search and communicates by the press of a single button. For the first time in her/his life, s/he's able to reach out on her/his own. This is certainly empowering. There's much to be said in favor of such interfaces on devices like this.

However, Licklider's vision of a human-computer symbiosis was of a completely different nature, of partners in cooperation on equal levels. This was not about amplification in this sense, it was about mutual comprehension and directing work flows, with the later heavily depending on the former. This is the desktop environment. Here, simple amplification models are ultimately doing more harm as they may be convenient.

Now, where are the growing markets, what should a company care about? However, this may be a question and an answer too simple. When will our Indian worker gain access to a laptop? The answer may be quite well, "never". Is this still the same market, the same product, the same network?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And this way you won't know if your page is AMP, or just a webpage (since amp follows www in things they are hiding).

I strongly suspect that this (and the eventual goal of making the whole web hosted by Google) is actually the rationale behind the decision.

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972)

Also, training the user to treat the URL as text, so that you search for domains (type "amazon" instead of "amazon.com"), is better for them. The "URL" bar is for Chrome also a search bar (and every domain you enter is sent to Google "for search suggestions").

<comment><USER6> Yes, I also believe this is the primary reason Google is doing this. They want to hide urls with referrer tracking, AMP URLs, and other such things from the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For Google, there is no money to be made when people know how to enter URL in a browser's address bar. Money is on users searching for a company using a name each time they want to visit a company website. That way Google can bombard users with adverts. When they click on those adverts, Google get paid. Now companies will be forced to advertise using Google AdWords. So that they can appear on top of the search list. Otherwise Google will show ads of their competitors first.

<comment> move-on-by Also there is terrible URL usability with google AMP pages. Google has every reason to do away with URLs as a user tool. I might be going off in the deep- end now, but if there are no URLs, why ever leave google.com at all? AMP is basically an early opt-in of rebranding the internet as google.com. Of course its all being done in the name of security, speed, and data-saving. Truly altruistic motivations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So apparently Google rolled out an update where they 'm.domain.com' turn into 'domain.com' in the omnibox. In what world is this acceptable? How can they assume that 'm.' always means mobile and 'www.' is the same as the root domain for all hosts?

Let's assume that you have a blog platform offering subdomains for each user and 'm.blogplatform.com' is available. Now, any user can get that subdomain and impersonate the homepage because Emily from Chromium decided that eliding parts of the URL without any spec is a reasonable decision.

<comment><USER9> I hate to break it to you, but if you allow www.companyname.website, companyname.website, and m.companyname.website to be owned by different entities, your users are already being phished.

<comment><USER10> Tumblr have a url scheme where subdomains are user-owned.

[https://m.tumblr.com/](https://m.tumblr.com/) != [https://tumblr.com](https://tumblr.com)

When they initially decided to hide the "m" subdomain, [https://m.tumblr.com/](https://m.tumblr.com/) was shwon as tumblr.com.

It's not the only website with that issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure why everyone is so up in arms here. I don't see how this change is detrimental to the web or somehow good for Google. Hiding the "[https://"](https://") seems like a perfectly fine idea as long as there's a clear way to distinguish between https and http pages. Safari's done this for a long time; https pages display a tiny padlock icon and http pages display a much more prominent "Not Secure — " prefix (i.e. the obvious display is when you're insecure, which is the right way to go about things).

Hiding "www" seems less meaningful. I'm not really sure what the motivation is there, beyond the fact that the "www" prefix is mostly just aesthetics. My best guess is they want the url to start with "google.com" instead of "www.google.com", except that's not helpful from a security standpoint at all and might be slightly detrimental, if it trains people that the very first word they encounter is the most important, as paypal.whatever.com is not in fact paypal. But a lot of domains already elide the "www" anyway.

Of course, in both cases I am assuming that putting focus on the URL bar will display the full URL.

<comment> dao- > Of course, in both cases I am assuming that putting focus on the URL bar > will display the full URL.

It won't. From the issue tracker: "The full URL is also revealed by clicking twice in the URL bar on desktop," in other words, merely focusing the URL bar won't be enough.

<comment><USER11> How does that work? If you put focus on the URL bar but it doesn't show the whole URL, how are you supposed to edit it?

<comment> dao- On focus you can only copy or replace the URL, not edit it. You need to click a second time to edit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its all fine until you have to explain to your loved ones how to read domains and the difference between an email link with random-server-name.paypal.com vs. www.paypal.random-name.com

If we remove meta data like this from everyday browsing maybe it will be harder for people to even grasp the idea of how domain names work?

<comment><USER13> Telling people to look for [https://](https://) as a way to indicate that they're secure isn't good enough. There's nothing stopping a malicious party applying an SSL certificate to www.paypal.random-name.com. Browsers need to inform users based on actual information that they have (eg the SSL cert, reports of malicious domains, etc) and display _that_ to the user.

Essentially Google know more about the state of a website than a user can learn from the domain alone, and they should display that to the user. Once that's happening the various parts of the domain are less important. The downside of this is that it increases Chrome users reliance on Google.

<comment><USER14> So basically a brave new word where google will decide what is a good and a bad website. Great.

<comment><USER15> That's what they wanted when they pushed Let's Encrypt. https meant something before, since a certificate was expensive and required proof of identity. Yes, those methods weren't infallible, but they were good enough. Now we've lost that with free https.

<comment><USER14> EV certs required that. DV certs never provided that sort of security.

<comment><USER15> Of course they did. When you paid with your card they knew your identity. Unless you were carding which is a pretty serious crime.

<comment><USER16> > When you paid with your card they knew your identity.

Who's the "they" in that sentence? As it stands, a certificate reseller knows that the Paypal account "firstname.lastname@example.com" paid for a SSL certificate for "www.unrelatedcompany.TLD"

The certificate itself tells you nothing about who paid for it - it doesn't even tell you which email account was used to confirm some level of association with the unrelatedcompany.TLD domain.

<comment><USER15> Then PayPal has the data and LE can follow the trail. Because it's about LE being able to tell who actually bought the certificate, telling me end users can't do that is kinda moving the goalposts.

<comment><USER17> There are certificate authorities all over the world, and many of them not in jurisdictions that would share data with your law enforcement.

<comment><USER16> Q1: What kinds of serious crimes involve law inforcement needing to chase up who's behind the purchase of a SSL certificate, anyway?

Q2: Can't the bad guys just buy a pre-paid debit card with cash if they're that desperate to cover their tracks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The worst part:

> We've worked with other browser representatives to incorporate URL display > guidance into the web URL standard ([https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url- > rendering-simplification](https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-rendering- > simplification)). The URL spec documents that browsers may simplify the URL > by omitting irrelevant subdomains and schemes in security-sensitive surfaces > like the omnibox.

Google is trying to make this obfuscation a standard.

<comment><USER19> > security-sensitive surfaces like the omnibox.

Yes. It's security sensitive. Any incorrect or misleading information placed here can trick a user proceeding with actions they otherwise would not.

So we should let the URL-bar present the unmangled URL and nothing else.

<comment><USER20> The "security sensitive" information in the URL bar is horrible.

For TLS you need to look for the presence of a single character. For most people, "[http://"](http://") and "[https://"](https://") are both gibberish and remembering which one is good is not obvious. For domain names you now need to look past all of the subdomains since mybank.evil.com isn't safe. But don't look all the way to the right since that is usually full of gibberish and everything after the "/" isn't trustworthy either. Oh and watch out for homoglyphs too.

URLs suck for security.

Also I bet you are upset that port numbers aren't included in the displayed URL too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Industry wants you to open apps and click buttons and links, and not worry about such things as bothering with what the URL may be, or gasp, even typing in or editing your own URL. That's too complicated and dangerous for 'normal' users apparently according to them.

<comment><USER22> Wondering how far they can take this. How long before we read that "Google will replace URLs with the Google search terms you can use to find the page you're viewing"

<comment><USER23> Sounds like the I'm feeling lucky button will finally be used and abused by Google. I already hate that search is merged into the url bar even in Firefox if I type an internal hostname sometimes instead of trying to resolve it googles it or duckduckgo's the damn hostname even at times where it ends in .com from an intranet url I dont understand why its so stupid in those cases either, Chrome being worse than Firefox in this regard. I dont mind it on mobile where real estate on my screen is already expensive.

<comment><USER24> From a quick google (ironic, I know), you can disable this by disabling `keyword.enabled` in the `about:config` menu. If you still want a way to search without manually navigating to a search engine site, there's also a setting in `about:preferences` to add a separate search bar to the browser interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> On Chrome for Android, the URL is not editable unless you press an edit button, which displays a text box. I imagine this is another step in that direction, and if you click "edit", the text box still shows the whole thing.

Compare with how email headers work in gmail. You don't see email addresses anymore by default, but there's a dropdown that shows them.

<comment><USER26> Are you sure this is the case for everyone? On my two android devices, tapping on the address bar still opens the keyboard for direct editing of the URL. I've never seen the behavior you're describing on Chrome for Android, although I concede it may be geofenced or something of the like.

<comment><USER27> This is what it shows for me on latest Chrome when clicking the address bar while on Wikipedia: [https://i.k8r.eu/WIPPrQ.png](https://i.k8r.eu/WIPPrQ.png)

You have to press edit for it to put the address back into the input field

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just use Firefox! And then install Firefox on your friends' and family's computers too, and set it as the default for them. Spread the word...

<comment><USER29> Firefox has a nasty history of following chrome's choices

<comment><USER23> Yeha they merhed the URL and search boxes. I am not a fan. Now and then my browser thinks a local hostname is actually a search term.

<comment><USER29> Fortunately you can undo that in firefox (separate boxes -- ctrl-l for location, ctrl-k for search, and disable the "search if not a url" option), but it's not the default, and that leads to more and more people using bing to search for google to then search for facebook, as they have no concept of the idea of a URL (or indeed a program, a file or a directory) :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Didn't we already go through this last year?

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-69-kills-off-www-in- url...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-69-kills-off-www-in-urls-heres- why-googles-move-has-made-people-angry/)

<comment><AUTHOR> They delayed the rollout after people spoke out against it:

"In Chrome M69, we rolled out a change to hide special-case subdomains "www" and "m" in the Chrome omnibox. After receiving community feedback about these changes, we have decided to roll back these changes in M69 on Chrome for Desktop and Android."

I don't think there's any going back this time around...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> On the chrome://flags page, these prefs are found under

#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme / #omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url- trivial-subdomains / #omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-path-query-and-ref / #omnibox-ui-one-click-unelide

<comment><USER32> That's the nerd pacifier. They will remove those flags eventually as they have always done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The omnibox never seemed like a crowded part of the interface, did they do any kind of user testing where they found people were confused or annoyed by this '[https://www'](https://www') prefix? Or is this just one team's sense of aesthetic ?

<comment><USER34> People who don't understand URLs will use search to find sites. Obviously I've no clue why Google would be motivated to encourage that behaviour. Must be their sense of aesthetic.

<comment><USER35> So your claim is that simplifying URLs, which on its face seems like an attempt to make them _easier_ to understand, is secretly intended to make them hard to understand?

Forgive me for being skeptical.

<comment><USER36> I don't doubt that Googlers believe this is a useful change, but that belief is borne out of their own vested interest in deprecating traditional web navigation. That's really the best light you can put it in, considering how utterly user-hostile this decision is.

<comment><USER35> The best light you can put it in is that removing unnecessary parts of the URL makes it easier for less advanced users to understand what the URL consists of, _helping_ them use "traditional web navigation".

To be fair, Google _has_ previously experimented with hiding the entire path part of the URL, which does hinder URL-based navigation by making the displayed text unusable as a URL. However, that's different from this change, where typing the displayed text into a browser's URL bar would normally get you to the same page (unless the site is configured strangely).

<comment><USER37> > _removing unnecessary parts of the URL makes it easier for less advanced > users to understand what the URL consists of, helping them use "traditional > web navigation"._

How? If the users are supposed to learn "what the URL consists of", how removing and hiding all but one piece of it helps?

It's like saying, "to make postal addresses easier to understand, we'll hide everything except the recipient's name and surname".

<comment><USER38> If I want to go to facebook, all I need to write in the address bar is "facebook.com", but the displayed address is "[https://www.facebook.com/"](https://www.facebook.com/"). A naive user would believe that they need to write the entire "[https://www.facebook.com/"](https://www.facebook.com/") instead of just the short version to navigate to facebook, which is too cumbersome for them so they just use google search to find it instead.

<comment><USER39> That is site-specific behavior. It depends on a redirect from [http://facebook.com/](http://facebook.com/) to [https://www.facebook.com/](https://www.facebook.com/) which may not exist for all sites. If the user wants to end up at the proper page without risking an insecure redirect over HTTP then they _do_ need to type the entire URL.

I would support making HTTPS the default when a URL fragment is entered without an explicit scheme, and site operators should just drop the obsolete www domain name prefix. However, the _browser_ should not be masking the full name of the site you're visiting. At the very least it should verify that www.example.com and example.com resolve to the same IP address(es) and use the same TLS certificate before presenting them as equivalent, though that still doesn't guarantee that they have the same content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Safari has been hiding protocol and path for years. I don't care for it, but I also don't think its a conspiracy to destroy the web as we know it.

<comment><USER41> You can disable this behaviour, and its all right there when you go to click on it. Presume you mean on mac btw, cos I using safari on ios and I can see the full address right in front of me. No protocol spec but a lock icon at least

<comment><USER35> The way Safari does it is a lot nicer UX. In Chrome, the URL scheme is always hidden, but if you press copy it magically copies the full URL to the clipboard – as opposed to the actual displayed text. In Safari, the URL scheme becomes visible once you click on the URL bar, so what you see is what you get.

That said, I dislike the default behavior of hiding the entire path until you click, as opposed to just the URL scheme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It increasingly grates on me that Google seem to want to ruin the internet using their browser monopoly in service of their ad revenue.

<comment><USER42> Don't let it grate on you, just use Firefox. The only way you're going to influence their development direction from the outside is to choose a non- Chrome based alternative.

<comment><USER43> Please change my mind. Besides the 1% privacy gain and some more free RAM when using firefox over chrome. Which are the key/killer arguments for firefox, NOW?

That chrome can become shit in the future is not to be discussed...

<comment><USER44> While it's better now in many ways, some of which you've already dismissed, the future matters now because our choices now effect our options tomorrow.

In a way, with your browser choice you're effectively voting for the internet you want in the future.

If that's Chrome and, despite the practical benefits of using Firefox, you trust Google above Mozilla to work in your best interests, then use Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Chrome is getting more and more user hostile. At the moment you can't inspect a site's certificate without going into developer tools.

Terrible decisions, the developers should be ashamed.

</comment><comment><USER46> Hiding the scheme is a dangerous path, because users then have to depend on browser specific indicators of https, or other secure schemes.

I think it's a bad idea for that reason, and for another higher level reason. As a developer and sys admin before that I've always tried to assume my users are smart people and try to educate them about what they might not know, instead of assuming they are dumb and attempting to PICNIC-proof software/systems. I think hiding the scheme indicates an assumption that users are dumb and need to be told what to do. I've seen reporting on other indicators of this from Google over the last decade (e.g., Google Reader's sunset, Google+, working with China's censors, and others).

FYI, PICNIC = Problem In Chair Not In Computer

<comment><USER47> > _PICNIC_

I believe the more common term is "PEBKAC":

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/PEBKAC.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/PEBKAC.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why must we continue to insist on dumbing down our presentation of technology. Instead we must insist that users rise to the occasion.

We are all inextricably linked to technology and yet I wonder if the newest users even know what a file extension is; because we hide that by default for some reason now. How many people have been the victims of phishing because an alias is more prominently displayed than the actual domain which the email originated from?

I'm ready for a return to function over form. Do not hide information from me. If I suspect that your product development is driven by the lowest common denominator then I will look for alternatives.

http and https are distinct and as such cannot be hidden; you could replace them with icons (barf) or ports (unlikely).

www.site.com is a subdomain and is again distinct from site.com with the 'www.' omitted. Just because they tend to resolve to the same server does not mean that they must.

Let's just call PI 3 because those decimals are an eyesore.

</comment><comment><USER49> About 15 years ago we, the techies, killed the IE6 super monopoly (they basically had 100% browser market share). We installed firefox on any device we could get our hands on.

Guess it is that time again.

</comment><comment><USER50> Gotta say I'm not a fan of browser hiding information from the user

<comment><USER51> That was my first instinct as well but, you know, at some point if you don't know what it means and you aren't going to bother to find out, extra information is just noise. Green locks and red slashes are probably enough.

<comment><USER52> That's bullshit IMO, people learn all sorts of complicated stuff in video games through embedded tutorials. There's no reason a browser couldn't do the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Sigh. Many new comers to web development learn by observing, this will take that away. Www and https handling requires explicit configuration. Unless the intent is to not let people type in www or http, but what happens when they do and it's not handled correctly?

</comment><comment><USER54> I'll play devils advocate. I'm fine with this being default assuming there's an option for advanced users to disable it. 95% of Chrome users will not notice or care about this change, and in fact will make things simpler for them in the long run.

Also, seriously people, ditch www. subdomains already. It's not 2002 anymore. I cringe so hard when I see that crap in print ads and billboards.

<comment><USER55> > ditch www. subdomains already

Sweet, unless you use any other subdomains for web pages, or want to in the future.

Usually you don't want cookies for domain.com to affect api.donain.com, admin.domain.com, test.domain.com etc.

I actually love www subdomains - the origin tells you it is a website.

<comment><USER56> > I actually love www subdomains - the origin tells you it is a website.

It lacks that connotation for the regular user.

<comment><USER57> I don't think so. Let's say you have one of the new TLDs for your site, say "new-york.florist", a nice domain. It's my belief that writing "new- work.florist" on your ads, business cards or merchandise will not let regular users know that it's a domain name. Writing www.new-york.florist will help indicate that this is your website.

Adding all the new TLDs have made the www prefix more useful than ever.

<comment><USER56> Or we could put `[https://`](https://`) in front and the www. is redundant.

<comment><USER55> Let's say you have your business advertised on your vehicle.

Put www.somthing.com on there and it is obvious to most how to find your business online.

[https://](https://) is ugly and longer IMHO.

<comment><USER56> Wouldn't you place it next to some other contact details? A regular person can deduce it's a internet address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Hiding "www" subdomain looks like an ugly workaround for missing support for DNS SRV records in HTTP/browsers.

<comment><USER59> Good news on that front.

To do a bunch of new things browser vendors want, they need to put more stuff into DNS. For example eSNI needs keys in DNS, and HTTP/3 (HTTP over QUIC, which is the new encrypted transport protocol) wants a way to discover HTTP/3 availability before connecting with TLS.

So at IETF 105 last week there was stuff pinging around about the idea of a single new record, perhaps just for HTTP or perhaps more, that wraps all this stuff up, with all the SRV features too.

The DPRIVE work is having the effect of reducing the pressure to not use DNS, because crappy DNS servers break all the time when you add new things, but DPRIVE servers are operated by people who actually know what they're doing so that isn't a risk, and eSNI in particular makes no sense without DPRIVE, so why not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> URLs are one of the few things the modern web has retained that has allowed it to be truly interoperable across different devices, platforms, and walled gardens. If we loose the URL, we loose the web. I don't like this at all.

</comment><comment><USER61> A lot of the comments here are about Google's motivations for doing this, and it seems the consensus is they want to hide URLs so that users don't notice as Google swallows more of the internet.

A couple question for those with this point of view:

1) Do you think users notice when they are using AMP articles today, even though the URL has not been hidden yet?

2) Do you think it would actually matter if they did notice a Google-hosted URL? Would they boycott Google or change their behavior somehow?

3) Do you think Apple has the same motivations as Google? Safari has been hiding www, scheme, and path for a while now. Do you think they have any valid reason for having done this?

4) What do you say to Google's stated reasons for making this change (simplicity and security)?

<comment><USER32> I think the point is that Google wants fuzzy boundaries between things that were never fuzzy to begin with, until they started confusing people - <USER2> they intended to or not.

If you asked any person- How do go to your favorite website before the omnibox, they had a clear set of steps that worked. If you asked them, how do you search for recipes they had a clear set of steps for that too.

Google's omnibox/(aka keyword logger) made that boundary fuzzy and made it confusing for people. Earlier, people very quickly learned to recognize what is and isn't a valid url, because an invalid URL simply didn't work - this was a very very useful skill/knowledge to have. And every-time you had a typo you noticed it immediately. But then Google insisted on merging the URL and search bar and started correcting their typos and mistakes and people started losing this knowledge/skill. So now.. a lot of non technical folks I know type the url in google's search box in weird ways .. like "wwwfacebook" or "facebook .com" or other typos. So now, nobody actually knows what a valid URL is. That makes them easy targets for phishing and scamming. I'm not blaming this entirely on Google, but they did play a part. Google doesn't seem to realize how they're fucking up things even if that is not their intent.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972)

They rolled this out 10 months ago but rolled it back after community backlash.

</comment><comment><USER62> This hurts younger generations. They will become more and more oblivious to how things work. They will be forced to "trust" someone that knows better instead of having the knowledge to decide themselves.

For those that become engineers, it will take even longer to untrain all the handholding they've had to endure.

If the web is apparently so damn complicated maybe we should rebuild it to be "simpler" instead of hiding it how it works. I'd prefer to leave it exactly how it is until there is a clear reason to revisit the design.

</comment><comment><USER63> Reads like folks at Chrome are just making work to have work because the senior leadership has no vision. Needs to be addressed before they burn through the goodwill they've built up.

</comment><comment><USER64> This seems like a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER65> By all means, hide the truth from the users and flat-out lie to them. After all, what's it of their concern which site they are browsing? The main thing is they see the ads.

</comment><comment><USER66> Good reason to de-Google my existence. When an evil thing is actively trying to destroy the Web in a way even Microsoft didn't, it's time for that evil to get destroyed.

</comment><comment><USER67> What a toxic, user-hostile idea.

The Chromium team desperately need new leadership.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems this change hasn't rolled out on Chrome 76 on a Mac. I don't see any change.

(I don't have it on Android yet.)

</comment><comment><USER68> Can we all start moving back to firefox yet?

</comment><comment><USER69> hiding www. seems like a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER70> No. This is really god damn annoying and stupid. The protocol is not distracting and www is different from non www.

</comment><comment><USER71> What a stupid idea.

</comment><comment><USER72> yeah, whatever, it's too late anyway.

</comment><comment><USER73> again??

</comment><comment><USER74> So instead of fixing their tab interface which is terrible if you have hundreds of tabs they rather choose to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place, gj chrome team

</comment><comment><USER75> This is unbelievably dumb.

<comment><USER76> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So google wants to replace the URL in the URL bar with a URL which is semantically different. What could possibly go wrong?

Seriously. What kind of incompetent, lazy people are working at Google these days? Because clearly nobody gave this any real thought.

</comment><comment><USER77> Remove protocol? Sure an arguement could be made that showing it is redundant giving the lock symbol appears when HTTPS is enabled. But removing sub domains like m. and www. isn't really cool.

I already hate the fact that chrome on mobile totally removes the URL when you focus the navbar, sucks if you want to go to some other subreddit etc.

</comment><comment><USER78> both changes are great.

www must go, it's a remnant of the past, the sooner the better.

protocol is not a detail that should be ever exposed to the end user, at least not in text form. visual cues "you're safe" or "your connection isn't secure" are much more effective.

<comment><USER3> Post addresses should go away. "You're at home" or "you are away" displayed on your smartphone lock screen should do. For the rest, there's Uber. – I'm not so sure that this is how real life works. Understanding addresses (post or electronic) is an important part of liability and a sound mind. Also, how do you identify authority, if you do not know about uniforms or IDs?

<comment><USER78> a) you're confusing addressing something with presenting the address; b) you're completely (possibly intentionally) ignoring the context, which is all about specifically "www" part, the trivial non informative part that is just a historical artifact.

i'll let you sort out the rest.

<comment><USER3> If in doubt about the historical context of the "www" subdomains: This was, when dedicated services were run on dedicated machines (or rather, dedicated network interfaces). "www" was just a default appellation (much like a well known address on particular services) for a server running W3 services. I don't see, why there isn't a use case for dedicated service domains anymore. (Not everything is WWW.) There's no magic to this and has never been. (The magic is in the port number as encoded in the protocol portion of a URI.)

Regarding the context of the example, all this is about navigating and about communicating how to navigate. Real live addresses tend to be much more messy, but they are bearable and users have been able to operate them for what is now several centuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Google doing more evil again. Fuck everyone working for this company. The devils minions is what you are.

<comment><USER76> Could you please not break the site guidelines when posting here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>