Ask HN: Promoting a free niche online tool - <AUTHOR> I've built an online tool that solves a real but niche problem. The tool is free, without ads (and even with ads it would likely make <=$20/month even at full popularity).
Clearly, I wouldn't spend money advertising it. It's also won't go viral (it automates a boring bookkeeping task). It's also not appropriate for "traditional SEO" (relationship building with bloggers, etc) - can't justify the time investment. Basically, it's barely even a commercial project, I'd be happy to just get users.
I decided then that organic search traffic is the way to go, but for that I need at least some links. My naive assumption was that highly-customized posting in appropriate niche forums was the way to go. I figured that since I am "adding value to the Internet" by making something free and useful, it would be well-received.
I was wrong. In most places, I see cold responses about "self-promotion/advertisement", and moderators delete messages in the blink of an eye. Even in places with "nofollow" links. I understand the frustration with ads, but (1) I am very careful to post in highly relevant places (2) I am convinced the tool is unique on the Internet right now - it's not like "yet another advertisement for X", and (3) it's free and its status as a "barely commercial" project is readily apparent.
I could try tricks such as pretending to be unrelated to what I'm posting ("Oh, look at this cool tool I found"), but this feels dirty. I always disclose my affiliation - seems I'm being penalized for honesty.
So, question: What are good, legitimate ways to let people know about a new, free, genuinely unique, genuinely useful, niche tool, keeping in mind that I can probably devote at most a day or two to promoting it?
Not just asking for this tool: I have many other ideas and would like to make them a reality, but there's no point in making them if there's no way of making the target audience even aware of their existence. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> You can post it on Show HN. You can self promote on Twitter. In other forums, you can have a link in your profile and participate as a regular member a good bit and once in a great while link to it in an answer where it is relevant. If you are only answering questions where you feel "link to my Thing" is The Answer, then, yes, you are frequently going to be in violation of some community guideline.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a related anecdote but no advice for your goal of 1-2 days promo then leave it.

Once upon a time I also made some software for a similarly real but niche problem (recording, processing, and building timelapse videos of your work during hackathons). I never promoted it or anything beyond talking about it and using it within the community where the idea was born (in my case, ludumdare when it was still very small). It has actually done pretty well within that context; over the 8 years or so it has been around it has ~50k installs, and it has branched far beyond hackathons -- it made its way onto lifehacker when they still covered real products, there are a handful of completely independent reviews out there, and I get emails from time to time asking for features from a wide range of use cases (everything from documenting cell growth to filming engine rebuilds to tracking video game progress in a modernized arcade).

My only (admittedly weak) advice is to go to the source of how you knew this was a need and share it openly and honestly within a community that is either about that or clearly shares that. From there you'll get some feedback and, if it really does solve a pain point, people will use it and share it. In my story, the flexibility of the product to be useful beyond the initial problem I was trying to solve was also key to its growth - maybe you can do something similar with how your thing works.

I realize that 8 years of being available is the complete opposite of your goal of promoting for only '1-2 days', but I think that amount of participation may not be super compatible with any software these days, particularly for small 'love' projects. How many github projects have you seen that sound nifty but have an empty readme and no commits for 2 years so you wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole? I think you'll get much better results by trickling continued time into the product to make sure people know it is alive - respond to posts/questions about it, fix bugs (or at LEAST comment on the issues), etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a similar problem wanting to promote a site I built recently. I know some relevant forums have a 'self-promotion' section for new products matching the markets the forums serve, but I haven't got much traction thus far.

My most recent idea is to offer free services some might want to utilize and linking/advertising on those sites. I don't know if it'll work yet, but I keep trying.

Hopefully this post will generate some new ideas, I'll keep checking back on this to see what people suggest.

Best of luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe you could approach some experts in the field, humbly present yourself, briefly explain how your tool works and how it can make their life easier, and ask them whether they'd consider a no-string attached test run.

If it's a real niche field like you said, they probably won't get swamped by this kind of emails very much and will get curious.

Once you make a few fans, you could ask whether they can spread the word, or, if they're really into it, they'll do it for you on twitter and such.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a similar problem with a free service I am releasing in the coming weeks. I just asked a guy that writes a newsletter about startups. He suggested I go where the users are of that niche. Maybe you could try Betalist ? Finding people in that niche on twitter would also help. Connect with them then send a few PMs as ask for their feedback.

</comment><comment><USER7> talk on forums, communities where your product best fits. Get feedback, engagement. You don't need a huge market, just one good enough that you can get value and service to. Once you find what that's you can probably charge for whatever is the value.

Best Regards,

</comment><comment><USER8> What is this tool?</comment>


Anyone seen this startup? large claims but intriguing still.  - <AUTHOR>

I was just offered a board role with this startup yesterday. While admittingly interesting you just can't help but be skeptical with claims as large as theirs (billions to charity and still retaining 200 mil in rev, yr 1, amongst others.) However my researchers tell me its pretty sound and they're qualified to carry out something this large. Anyone have an opinion? I don't want to loose out on a huge opportunity because of my skepticism.<p>Www.socialmarketresearchforcharity.org <comment><AUTHOR> I was taught to not judge a book by its cover and I've seen some remarkable stuff with terrible covers. Did any of you read it or just make the immediate cover judgment?

</comment><comment><USER2> Are you kidding me, 2 seconds of looking at that landing page is all you need to know.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like Bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a 'company' from 1996, right?

</comment><comment><USER5> Bullshit.</comment>


The Tree Slider - GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider <comment><USER2> Very nice, but what I'd personally rather have is a two-pane navigator: explore the tree in the left pane, see file contents in the right, a la NERDtree, eclipse, and other IDEs.

<comment><USER3> This isn't [only] two panes, but it gives you the ability to navigate files while still seeing the directory structure: <https://github.com/sr3d/GithubFinder>

It's implemented as a bookmarklet that you can activate on any github repo for an advanced view.

<comment><USER2> That is beautiful, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the animation to be rather annoying.

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks like the sliding transition may also mask network latency; clever.

<comment><USER6> From the Digital Equipment Corporation, VMS Guide to Performance Tuning, from before 40% of the HN readership were born:

      126.96.36.199 Lower the Baud Rate if Terminals Smooth Scroll
        If many of the applications at your site write characters to
        terminals in the smooth scrolling mode … you might consider
        reducing the baud rate [from 9600 to 4800] …  the decrease in
        the baud rate would be barely perceptible to the users.

VT100 _transitions_ come to the rescue!

(Smooth scrolling was at 6 lines per second. Glassy smooth, especially if you kept the line saturated to the flow control limits. But as a consequence it couldn't accept more than about 4000bps of data on 80 character lines.

That particular hint never made much sense to me because it is about saving interrupts and a screen of data took the same number of interrupts at 4800 or 9600. I think it was more about slowing down the users without them noticing to avoid upgrading the computing resources.)

<comment><USER7> "A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires." -Umberto Eco,

who's essay was widely criticized here yesterday for some factual mistakes. He did get one thing right though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess this is a good place to ask, but does anyone know why GitHub opted not to list the file size in the file viewer? Whenever I browse other peoples' code I always want to glance at file sizes to see which files I should peruse first.

<comment><USER9> Maybe because it is difficult to do so efficiently ? It is hard to get per- file information in git, so you would have to be pretty clever to get it working w.r.t. history.

Other bugtrackers which were based on svn had a lot of issues with git because of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would love it if this widget eager-loaded the directory structure for a couple levels (doesn't even need to load the commit data) so that it made the navigation to a specific file/folder even faster.

<comment><USER11> Actually I don't think that's necessary - I'd much rather they focus on making individual loads very fast, instead of pre-loading data. 9 times of out 10, I'm not going to peruse the ENTIRE directory structure even one level deep, so it should only get the data I want.

Also, they would need to store that, and I don't necessarily want my browser storing my entire directory structure (and possibly file contents) for any amount of time other than when I'm actually browsing it.

Try it out, it really is very fast without having to eagerly load anything at all.

<comment><USER12> They could build a page-transition graph: for each page, what are the links that people are most likely to click? This could let them figure out what the top one or two most common next-pages are, and those could be pre-loaded.

That would be more work for the GitHub guys, but I'm pretty sure it would work.

<comment><USER13> Good idea, but _lots_ of work to implement it the right way.

<comment><USER14> Not to mention that the _vast_ majority of Github repositories don't have enough traffic to properly build such a graph.

<comment><USER15> A reasonable fallback would be to look at the proportion of commits that touch files under each directory - the more active a directory is, the more likely it is to be of interest. Still probably not worth it in the majority of cases though.

<comment><USER14> I like that idea quite a bit, actually- I'm envisioning a sort of "heat map" UI, where each entry in a directory listing's background color is determined by its commit frequency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And thankfully they didn't screw up the ability to open links in a new tab.

<comment><USER17> Agreed, would like to see this applied to Issues.

</comment></comment><comment> cool-RR Great! I've been looking forward to this feature for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this is better than sammy.js

</comment><comment><USER19> A sliding UI is worth #2 HN spot? Wow.

<comment><USER20> If I'm correct, it's interesting because the transition is done without using a URL fragment (<http://url/#fragment>).

<comment><USER19> FTFA: "Want more? Check out the HTML History API Demo and MDC's Manipulating the browser history documentation. Facebook has blogged about their use of this stuff, and Flickr has been doing it for months on their lightbox view."

So, its not even news. Unless, I suppose, the reader learned javascript in 2001 and feels they don't need to keep up on new things. That's the HN crowd is it?

Fuck, I've been learning javascript for a _week_ and I know how to do this.

<comment><USER21> It's interesting because it's been a major gripe on Github (at least in my circle), and now that they finally have it, we're all happy.

Relax, dude.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airlander 10: is this the dawning of a new age of the airship? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/17/airlander-10-is-this-the-dawning-of-a-new-age-of-the-airship <comment><AUTHOR> This is the kind of future transport David Brin has written about us returning to.

Also, doesn't it look like a giant floating arse?</comment>


Introducing the Nextcloud Box - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.com/box/ <comment><USER2> Oh god the bend radius on those cables. Also atrocious sinking and warping. This is the kind of stuff I have nightmares about. Please if you're thinking of building a hardware project and have never done it before at least consult someone like me. I'll look over anyone in SF's project and give a list of things to worry over for the price of a coffee, just don't do this.

<comment><USER3> Hey there – I'm interaction designer at Nextcloud and did the exterior design of the box (little of the interior as that was indeed done by WDLabs).

We're working on improvements to the box and the bends of the cables are something we take into account. Also the power cable sticking out of the back.

As written elsewhere, it's a reference device, which was then also used by other open source projects like OSMC: [https://osmc.tv/2016/08/announcing-the- osmc-pidrive/](https://osmc.tv/2016/08/announcing-the-osmc-pidrive/)

So being a fully open source project we are happy about any contributions, especially if you are knowledgeable in that field. In any case I will forward your recommendations to the team, so thanks a lot already! (I'm sure they also thought about these things so I'll let you know.) :)

<comment><USER4> Look for right angle usb connectors. They're pretty useful when you're dealing with size constraints like this. I'm honestly kind of surprised that Western Digital didn't have a supplier that you could call up, custom cables seem like a natural thing for them.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, actually regarding the power plug which sticks out we are exploring to use a right-angled cable since lots of people mentioned it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I ordered one of these when western digital announced them a few months ago, it's basically a 1tb laptop hard drive. and a bulky plastic case.

Firstly, the cable layout is frustrating, and requires bending the cables in such away that makes closing the case a pain.

Secondly, the software is very unimpressive, I had the system just stop responding several times, the windows client is rather underwhelming as well.

I just see no real advantages to say combining my own raspberry pi with a WD passport.

Other than the plastic box.

<comment><USER6> Is it cheaper if you buy it this way? That's the only advantage I see.

<comment><USER7> From the description on website, it appears to not bundle the computer, just the case and hdd. So, if we consider the HDD to be 60EURO max, having compared to other WD blue mobile disks (couldn't find the exact model listed anywhere), then that leaves you with 10EURO for the case. The total of 70EUROs may or may not include shipping, I couldn't figure that out without trying to place an order. It's not cheap, but that pricing isn't expensive either. If it includes a Pi 2, then it's cheap.

<comment><USER8> _The Nextcloud box consists of the following parts: 1 TB USB3 hard drive from WDLabs Nextcloud case with room for the drive and a compute board_

It's worded weird, but I assumed the "compute board" is the PI.

<comment><USER7> Strictly speaking that doesn't say it includes one, just that there's room for one. But I hope you're right. I've looked at the PDF instructions and still wasn't any wiser.

<comment><USER5> it does not come with a PI, it's just plastic box, cables, HDD, and screws. (and maybe an SD card with their distro on it)

<comment><USER9> yeah, that is what it is. The price is lower than the separate USB3 hard drive kit from WD so it is hard to argue it is expensive, though.

The OS is put together by Canonical, until now it was based on Ubuntu 16.04 and they'll soon update it to Snappy Ubuntu Core so you get a fully 0-maintenance solution.

<comment><USER7> The disk isn't cheaper than in retail, if you don't consider the case to be worth a lot more than is realistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So you're buying a case and a hard drive, you have to put it together yourself, and it only works with a raspberry pi 2? Seems like anyone interested enough to buy this would just do it themselves.

<comment><USER8> The price is very competitive, getting all the parts + cables and power brick would cost more.

<comment><USER11> A 1TB enclosed external USB HD from Western Digital costs $60 (see NewEgg, Amazon, or whatever's relevant in your country). This costs $80. So, the extra $20 covers a SD card and a few screws to mount a Raspberry Pi (not included)? Doesn't seem competitive at all.

<comment><USER9> The kit to compare it to is the PiDrive kit from WD, which costs alone more than our kit WITH case.

A normal external hard drive risks not working with a Pi. This 2.5" USB drive is optimized for low power usage, esp at startup and comes with a cable and charger which powers both the drive and Pi from a single cable.

Obviously, if you are looking for an external USB drive for your computer, this is all not relevant. But if you want to use it with a Pi or a similar board, this kit is far superior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So a hard drive, one with an onboard USB bridge no less, and a raspberry Pi.

USB performance on Pi is garbage, and you're sharing your storage I/O with the network I/O since they're both USB prehiperals.

This is a terrible idea.

<comment><USER13> It's not a terrible idea in general, I personally think it's potentially a great idea, but like you I do think the Raspberry Pi was a poor choice for this use-case.

Perhaps in the next revision they'll base it around something better suited, such as the ESPRESSOBin:

[http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/09/23/marvell- espressobin-b...](http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/09/23/marvell-espressobin- board-with-gigabit-ethernet-sata-pcie-and-usb-3-0-to-launch-for-39-and-up- crowdfunding/)

<comment><USER8> Specs are impressive but

> ESPRESSOBin will be launched on Kickstarter in the next few days.

 _sigh_

<comment><USER13> The Kickstarter has already started, it's actually less than 24 hours away from finishing.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell- espre...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espressobin- board)

<comment><USER14> This looks like a great piece of HW with a Drobo mini attached. It could be a great daemon/cron/storage box with only one ethernet port, but w/ three it seems they are positioning to compete with the ERL3 from Ubiquiti which has a MIPS-based cpu from Brocade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm trying to figure out what this buys me versus a Synology box running DS Cloud (Synology's "personal cloud" app). With a Synology NAS I get:

* Data on my own box.

* Remote access via the DS Cloud app on devices, or the web app.

* RAID with an external backup drive.

With Nextcloud, it looks like I get:

* Data stored where ever I like, including my Synology NAS(?).

* Some kind of remote access, and it's stored on the NextCloud(?).

* On my own for backups, no RAID.

* No idea on pricing.

If it's dirt cheap, I guess maybe a Nextcloud is an option. But if it begins to approach the price of Synology's least expensive offers I fail to see the value.

<comment><USER9> well it is way cheaper than any synology solution, plus that the whole stack is open source so you can actually trust that it does what it says it does. If you care about privacy and security, that is a plus.

It also will probably be slower than most synology solutions and more manual work - we'd like to improve that of course but that means we need help as this is a community effort, not a commercial thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wouldn't the drive performance be significantly inhibited by RPi's USB 2.0 interface? A small board with SATA or USB 3.0 would be much faster.

<comment><USER8> Yes it would, but a board who isn't inhibited by sharing the USB and network on the same bus and is supported like rPI wouldn't cost this kind of money. I'm quite surprised about the price (70€ with free shipping over EU), which is very tempting for someone who needs an external drive anyway.

I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion of home owned appliances instead of the cloud. Specially with IoT around the corner - those devices should communicate to a home server like this only.

<comment><USER17> > I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion > of home owned appliances instead of the cloud.

NAS boxes are relatively popular, and the major vendors are heavily leaning on making them the "all-in-one" home/soho servers as demonstrated by the wide range of applications available to them:

[https://www.synology.com/en- global/dsm/app_packages/all_app](https://www.synology.com/en- global/dsm/app_packages/all_app)

[https://www.qnap.com/en/app_center/](https://www.qnap.com/en/app_center/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's the thing. If you want storage, you've got to use ZFS or be very brave and use BTRFS. RAID and single drive solutions are not going to cut it. Bit rot is a real thing and assuming you care about your data you want checksums and redundancy. If you don't want to think about it: set up a FreeNAS/NAS4Free appliance. If you do, build something slightly custom. To date, I know of no complaints maimed products that fit this criteria. It is frustrating, but family photos are not replaceable so don't take chances.

<comment><USER19> While this is likely true at the consumer level, it is not true at the enterprise level. Raid6 is used extensively, and the file hash is stored in metadata, separately. The files are walked periodically to detect and repair corruption. The same is done for parity. This has to be done with zfs too, via zfs scrub. I just don't think you can directly compare zfs with raid, as zfs is a filesystem and therefore implements some of the same things that other companies end up building on top of raid with their own custom filesystems.

<comment><USER18> I did not realize there were RAID implementations that did block level checksums.

ZFS is both a file system and a block layer. You would use RAID + ext4 _or_ ZFS. The block layer parts of ZFS are comparable to RAID and are superior in many ways, including the most important: checksums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, can anyone shed some more light on what "Nextcloud" (the software/OS part) actually is? As far as I can gather it's more or less a fork of owncloud by one of the owncloud maintainers, paired with ubuntu core, and turned into a kind-a-sorta groupware and file server? But for some reason lacking an ldap/kerberos/ad/directory server - so it can't be the _only_ part of a small office network - you still need ldap/AD set-up?

I'm not entirely sure I see the value proposition here.

<comment><USER21> It's a very recent fork of ownCloud, so if you know what that is, most of your knowledge transfers. It's basically self-hosted Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive, with some initial support for other cloud-y things: web-based document/spreadsheet/presentation software and chat/call/video conference being the main two. The value proposition is all in the self-hosted part. If you have a problem with giving a third party access to all of your files, this is a possible alternative. If you trust Google/Microsoft/Dropbox with your files, your life will probably be a whole lot easier letting their massive engineering and ops teams manage servers and software for you.

It's definitely not an all-in-one small office solution, there's no email app.

<comment><USER3> We do have an IMAP app for mail [https://github.com/nextcloud/mail](https://github.com/nextcloud/mail)

You can run that together with a Dovecot for example. It integrates nicely with Nextcloud Contacts for autocompletion and Files for attachments. Testing and contributions are very much welcome! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The box is running Ubuntu Core, which fully uses "snaps" instead of the traditional .deb packages.

There is a post that describes their experience of selecting and implementing with Ubuntu Core for this box, at [https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/09/29/the- making-of-the-nex...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/09/29/the-making-of- the-nextcloud-box/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Looked the document, and the real interesting thing is the split cable used internally, i.e. a cable that splits usb3-micro-typeB into a power-and-usb2, that cable seems neat, is it a customized one only for this product, or a generic cable that you can find on ebay? I happen to have RPI and the same WD USB3 hard drive here and with this cable I can try owncloud without the enclosure right away.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hosting vet checking in:

Sorry but what's cloudy about this? No high-availability, no redundancy. I guess Nextserver just isn't as marketable.

<comment><USER25> It's just the software that is "cloudy." Nextcloud is not being used because of this product, but rather Nextcloud just also provides this box. Kind of like Nextcloud + this box = convenience, but you can just do Nextcloud without it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a side note, AFAIK WD "USB only" disks may pose a problem (in case of issues) because they (or at least most of them) have a form of pass-through encryption, i.e. the data on the disk is encrypted and is decrypted on-the-fly by a chip on the PCB, if a component of the PCB fails, recovering the data becomes very, very difficult even if the hard disk works otherwise fine.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not a good idea. As a personal anecdote, I had my 1TB HP simplesafe drive crash and I lost lot of precious pictures from recent years [Before moving to cloud]. The drive was Western Digital and none of the recovery software worked. You run the risk of drive failures with these and also not easy to migrate data once data grows or hardware evolves.

<comment><USER28> > You run the risk of drive failures with these

All drives fail. Any drive can fail at the worst time. You must have back ups, and you must test your back ups.

<comment><USER27> Agree. That's why I prefer to use cloud as they are replicated automatically.

<comment><USER29> "Use cloud," without more, isn't necessarily backup at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The software seems similar to sandstorm (sandstorm.io). This has a more integrated/opinionated app experience, rather than a software platform for apps of one's choosing? I can live with PHP, but Java is not something I willingly depend on. I suppose if I don't have to diddle with anything, I could live with Java.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does this offer anything that the Lima product doesn't? [1] I bought a Lima, but never actually used it.

[1] [https://meetlima.com](https://meetlima.com)

<comment><USER31> Why didn't you use it?

<comment><USER30> I had an existing Synology NAS, and never ended up getting an external USB drive. And then I guess I was hoping some software would just come out for my NAS that would do something similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is a fork of owncloud

owncloud is nothing but horrible, full of bugs and zero innovation when it comes to file sharing.

<comment><USER33> Hi, Do you know any alternative for owncloud?

<comment><USER32> personally, I use webdav; however there are a lot of good reviews of seafile if you want a true replacement of owncloud.

<comment><USER9> unless, of course, you care about security or a project that is, well, alive... There have been 1 or 2 commits in the last month so I wouldn't bet my data on it.

But I'm hopelessly biassed, working for Nextcloud, so please check github for yourself when you pick a solution for your data - at least look at the pulse over the last week or month before you pick a solution. If you don't know it, here is ours: [https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pulse](https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pulse) it shows you the activity in the project. For comparison, this is bad: [https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/pulse](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/pulse)

Again, I'm biassed, so make your own conclusion, don't rely on mine. I'm just pointing the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Little bit expensive for just a box and a disk

<comment><USER9> Well, it is cheaper than the pi-drive disk alone ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thought this was a pied piper joke

</comment><comment><USER36> No RAID for personal storage?!?

What about a warning stating that you cannot keep your important stuff here unless you want to loose them in a undetermined moment in the future?

<comment><USER37> personal storage of "important stuff" doesn't need RAID, it needs BACKUPS. RAID offers protection only against a comparatively tiny subset of risk factors.

<comment><USER29> I don't know, but in my personal three decades of experience "inevitable disk failure" is not a "tiny subset of risk factors."

RAID is huge defense for keeping "inevitable disk failure" from turning into "massive data loss."

Do you, personally, test backup and restore of ALL of your data that you care about at acceptable loss intervals? Are you sure?

And if your acceptable loss interval is "zero," then redundant _synchronous_ storage across devices in one form or another is all there is.

Backup is a total real-world solution to data loss like antivirus is a total real-world solution to malware and infosec.

<comment><USER37> If I compare the amount of data I could have lost (or have lost) over the years, non-existent backups would have been way more fatal than non-existent RAID.

My post was maybe to strictly worded, RAID _is_ nice and helpful, but it was responding to a claim that it is irresponsible to advertise a non-RAID device for important data, which is IMHO irresponsible itself, because it suggests that's all you recommend relying on.

<comment><USER29> > it suggests that's all you recommend relying on.

No it doesn't. Defense in depth is a thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How useful is a PhD in computer science and/or machine learning these days? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Its useful to have phd because of the research methodology discipline and the classes you have to take to learn Statistics for the final thesis. Having a PhD in computer science almost means you do know how to code with one language, which is definitely helpful when you are building your model in R or Python. Also the fact that you have a broader knowledge in the domain (ideally), gives you the credential to create a defensible model.</comment>


Canon's 5D Mark IV has built-in Wi-Fi and shoots 4K video - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/8/25/12630176/canon-5d-mark-iv-announced-4k-wifi-price <comment><USER2> The article doesn't really cover some of the more interesting yet obscure sounding features regarding image quality, such as "Dual Pixel Raw" which sounds like a proprietary image enhancement technique that I'd really like to know more about:

[https://cl.ly/0g3Z3L2K3S03/Screen%20Shot%202016-08-25%20at%2...](https://cl.ly/0g3Z3L2K3S03/Screen%20Shot%202016-08-25%20at%201.58.24%20PM.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> there is some information about "Dual Pixel Raw" in the official page for mark 4

 _The Dual Pixel sensor's pixels have a dual photodiode construction. This sensor design means the sensor can receive an A and B signals from the subject and to detect any phase differences between the two signals, allowing them to attain focus as part of the Dual Pixel AF system. When capturing the image, the sensor obtains the picture info from the combined A and B image signals. This technology making both focusing and image shooting possible with the same sensor.

During Dual Pixel RAW shooting, a single RAW file saves two images into the file. One image consists of the A+B combined image data and the other only the A image data. This means the Dual Pixel RAW files contains both the normal image and also any parallax information, which can be measured and subject distance information extrapolated. As Dual Pixel RAW images contain two images they are therefore double the file size of normal RAW images._

[http://www.canon.co.uk/cameras/eos-5d-mark-iv/dual-pixel- raw...](http://www.canon.co.uk/cameras/eos-5d-mark-iv/dual-pixel-raw/)</comment></comment>


Microsoft hopes its technology will help Americans trust voting again - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/22/tech/microsoft-election-guard-voting-test/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> _Most security experts agree that creating a truly unhackable system is impossible._

 _" There's nothing that I can do — that anyone can do, for that matter — to ensure there's no meddling," said Josh Benaloh, the senior cryptographer at Microsoft who developed the mechanism underlying ElectionGuard._

 _For that reason, ElectionGuard is designed to be "tamper evident."_</comment>


Pole reversal estimate, less than 100 years - <AUTHOR> http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/content/199/2/1110 <comment><AUTHOR> This has been something that fascinated me the first time I heard of it, the North and South poles of the planet shifting. Recent work on sediments in a lake have given a much better estimate of the time it took and reduced it from "less than 1000 years" to "less than 100". Further, the lack of sediment showing inter-pole positions means it might have been practically instantaneous. That would be a pretty wild thing to live through.

<comment><USER2> How would it affect daily life other than compasses being wrong? Would humanity even survive it?

<comment><USER3> The standard answer is that the magnetic field protects us from part of the radiation that comes from the space. I tried to find a good source with more information. I'm still not sure, perhaps it's only a myth.

This page says that if there were no magnetic field, the atmosphere would absorb the radiation anyway. (I vote for this, but I'd like to see more info.) [http://www.sciencebits.com/NotReallyAProtection](http://www.sciencebits.com/NotReallyAProtection)

These two pages say that the magnetic field provides protection: [http://www.windows2universe.org/glossary/plasmaspheric_gain....](http://www.windows2universe.org/glossary/plasmaspheric_gain.html) [http://www.askamathematician.com/2014/07/q-how-does- earths-m...](http://www.askamathematician.com/2014/07/q-how-does-earths- magnetic-field-protect-us/)

<comment><USER4> But a shift in polarisation wouldn't include the field to disappear at any time, would it?

<comment><USER3> From: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal)

> _During this change the strength of the magnetic field dropped to 5% of its > present strength._

> _The magnetic field will not vanish completely, but many poles might form > chaotically in different places during reversal, until it stabilizes > again.[_</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Censors Firearms Products in Shopping Search Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.outdoorhub.com/news/google-censors-firearms-products-shopping-search-results/

<comment><USER2> _4) Google Shopping should be compatible with Google's brand decisions.

Google Shopping must be compatible with company brand decisions. Our company has a strong culture and values, and we've chosen not to allow ads that promote products and services that are incompatible with these values._

Too bad. The 2nd amendment outlines your rights with regard to the government; it creates no obligation on the part of private vendors who do not wish to support particular activities.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, darn. A useless Google product is ignoring a highly profitable industry.

Next they won't let oil companies use Google Wave.</comment>


Tesla Q1 earnings report [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/2964432284x0x752463/4d500edc-fd71-4b5b-8b60-542f73d9c64e/Q1%2714%20Shareholder%20Letter%20final.pdf <comment><USER2> I had no idea getting a license plate for a vehicle in Shanghai was so expensive. Apparently they use an auction system: "Shanghai officials have put in place a complicated—and expensive—process to purchase the right to add a car to the often-gridlocked roads of this city of 23 million people. To register for the license auction, prospective car buyers must put down 2,000 yuan as good faith money. In exchange, they get a disc loaded with software they can use to bid online. After a couple of rounds of offers, the government figures out the highest price it can charge to completely sell out the year's new allotment of licenses. Lottery participants who had bid at least that much then get to pay for their plates." [0]

0: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-25/in-china- the...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-25/in-china-the-license- plates-can-cost-more-than-the-car)

<comment><USER3> Wait till you see Singapore's COE prices... To get a car there, you first pay 50-60K USD for a certificate, then you can go to the dealership and buy your car.

<comment><USER4> Why would you want a car in Singapore?! how much would you pay to the occasional cab?

just checked online, if i walked from downtown to the airport it would be 2h :)

<comment><USER5> Status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Took delivery of a Tesla yesterday, only a few weeks after getting a comparably priced Mercedes Benz for my wife. I will just say that I think the Tesla money is well spent and the MB money is wasted on a company that makes a nice car but seems to be stuck 10+ years in the past on a lot of fronts.

The Tesla costs too much but it feels like the best way to support getting our planet off of petroleum which is the cause of so many problems. So I don't begrudge the price.

It's damn fun to drive. I won't hold my breath for any of the incumbents to do a decent job of making an electric car - maybe Porsche.

The electronics alone make the MB look ancient. The MB nav isn't touch screen, uses a ludicrous scroll wheel and is almost useless. Meanwhile, I've got an enormous touch screen with a pinch/zoom google maps system. This part has nothing to do with being an electric car.

If they can come out with a more affordable suv or sedan I think they will change the world of cars and driving. I'm thinking that all the rest of the car companies are basically hoping they die and they can go back to business as usual with the oil companies as best friends.

<comment><USER7> The Germans will say you need to take your eyes off the road for far too long to be safe in order to operate a touch screen, compared to using a scroll wheel with tactile feedback........

<comment><USER8> Until they will start using touchscreens and then all of a sudden they are perfectly safe...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tesla is taking a beating in after hours trading despite beating projections. What's the reason?

<comment><USER10> They beat low-balled estimates but not the "whisper" numbers, increasing costs, cash-flow negative for 2014, ongoing share dilution, etc.

The stock was priced for perfection, so it will feel downward pressure on every bump in the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Buy $TSLA for earnings in 2020, not Q1 2014.

<comment><USER12> They are already priced for their earnings in 2020. Buy them for their earning in 2050.

<comment><USER13> I'm buying them tomorrow to gambool, bc price will go back up

Feels like buying bitcoin really

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If net profit is more important than gross revenue, why are companies valued at multiple of revenue instead of their profit?

<comment><USER15> Because investors have no clue how to value growth companies, because interest rates are low and because some prominent growth companies with no profits have been on a non-stop* share price rampage for 14 years. The revenue multiple pricing of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter et.al. is cargo cult finance. No one really knows how much these companies will eventually earn, so some commentators have come up with a plausible after-the-fact metric that sounds good in a soundbite.

A company is worth the present-value adjusted sum of all its future earnings, and that is it. How to guess, discount and risk-adjust this number is a different question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tesla shares are down 7% in afterhours trading on this report

</comment><comment><USER17> buy on the dip

</comment><comment><USER18> Down 6% Its a buying opportunity.

<comment><USER19> Be careful, the whole market is getting wrecked.

<comment><USER20> that is do to Fed comments, has nothing to do with long term</comment></comment></comment>


Functional programming's smugness problem  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sdtimes.com/m/apparticle.aspx?id=36534

<comment><USER2> dupe <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858079>

but a good read anyway</comment>


2008 Sichuan Earthquake Likely Man-Made - <AUTHOR> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/12/2008-sichuan-earthquake-likely-man-made/

<comment><USER2> Speculation on this area apparently isn't new [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4434400...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4434400/Chinese- earthquake-may-have-been-man-made-say-scientists.html) [2009]. Very interesting I haven't heard of that before, it's possible, it seems [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir- induced_seismicity#Re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir- induced_seismicity#Reservoirs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Man-made? More like man-triggered:

"The Zipingpu reservoir's apparent _triggering_ of the Wenchuan earthquake is an unprecedented case of reservoir- _induced_ seismicity that presents huge challenges for scientific theory."

There is way too little potential energy in that reservoir to cause an earthquake on that scale.

</comment><comment><USER4> > The Chinese earthquake that killed 80,000 people in May of 2008 most likely > was not an act of God, a study released today has found.

I can understand that for some strange reason is the phrase "act of God" in the USA law system (it is, right?). But why is it in a scientific paper?

<comment><USER5> The paper itself does not contain the word 'god' at all.

<comment><USER4> Ah, OK, I thought it was a citation. It certainly looked so with that styling.

<comment><USER6> It's from the press release, not the paper itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Weird. I felt the quake in Beijing while we were interviewing someone. Crazy to think that it could be manmade and still felt that far.

</comment><comment><USER8> please believe this absurdity if you are a moron.</comment>


Android Economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2012/04/02/android-economics/ <comment><USER2> > I just don't know how to adjust this value so by leaving it at the average, > I can avoid introducing more assumptions.

This is a fallacy of assuming the midpoint equals the centroid. The correct way to handle absence of key information is to widen the error interval, not to assign zero weight to unknown factors. Either those factors have some partially known weight limit and you can estimate a range for the average, or those factors have completely unknown weight and you cannot make any rational estimate of the average.

<comment><USER3> In business estimates, this is how it's done. You leave the reader to construct the error margins by clearly delineating the assumptions. The magnitude of the error bars would be left to his judgment anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google have an incentive to downplay revenues for this purpose, so I would imagine that everything possible is removed.

<comment><USER5> While they certainly have incentive to downplay revenue for the purposes of paying Oracle, let's not forget that all of the contributing revenue factors would be legally discoverable. I think that we can assume that the numbers contributed in court reflect the revenue fairly accurately - Fortune 500 companies tend to have lawyers whose degrees don't come in specially-marked boxes of cereal. Also, Google has a lot of very good incentives to state their revenue exactly as is legally relevant (albeit, not a penny more, in this case).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great analysis. I would be very interested to see the standard deviation of Android revenues/device/yr compared with Facebook ARPU. Obviously this is laughably unobtainable, but it's fun to speculate about who has more upside compared to the mean. I wonder what the 95th percentile generates?

On a side note, has anyone thought about what Mail.ru might do before and after the Facebook IPO? Sorry if that's off topic.

</comment><comment><USER7> No one has provided any evidence at all that the $544 million figure (itself essentially invented) is in any way a subset of the $2.5 billion "mobile run rate". From a purely rational perspective, there is no reasonable reason why Google needs to include in-game advertisements, or web ad revenue, in Android revenue.

Does Microsoft include Google search revenue in Windows revenue? Does a purchase of a hat in Team Fortress count as Windows revenue?

I suspect -- with no more evidence than anyone else -- that the $544 million is but the sum of partner payments for the Google applications or accelerated access, added with Google's cut of the Nexus line revenues. Advertising, though....Android itself has zero advertisements. I don't see ads in Google Maps, gmail, or in any system service or function.

<comment><USER3> I think what's salient is where that number is relative to Apple and Google's revenues per iOS device, which also don't include in-game advertisements or ad revenue.

Edit: Miscomprehended the derivation, see reply below

<comment><USER7> Those derived values are _based_ upon the likely erroneous assumption that I just detailed. How does Google make any money on iOS devices if you excluded advertisements? Quite the opposite -- they pay Apple to be the default search engine.

<comment><USER3> I see the point you are trying to make now, but I'd like to offer two points about why this revenue derived from the lawsuit might include ad revenue estimates:

1) I would imagine that regardless of whether it is in Google's interest to count ad revenues in their public reports of profitability, it is most certainly their internal metric for profitability. They simply must have some metric for deciding if the Android investment is effort is worth pursuing, or if certain Android strategies can be considered successful. Would Rubin's declaration that Android is profitable be true if he were only counting early access fees, and Nexsus sales, etc? I don't have the numbers, but I would doubt it.

2) The 3 to 1 profitability of iOS against Android seems to make some sense if you consider that iOS, as of October, commanded over 3x the mobile traffic share of Android. (see <http://bit.ly/tHlYe6> )</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Private equity-backed staffing firms try to derail surprise billing law - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/upshot/surprise-billing-laws-ad-spending-doctor-patient-unity.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is completely expected behavior from two firms that have been found to "use out-of-network billing to significantly raise the amounts they are paid." [0]

[0] [https://www.nber.org/papers/w23623.pdf](https://www.nber.org/papers/w23623.pdf)</comment>


Stack Overflow for Teams - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/teams <comment><USER2> Seems like "yet another tool to try to offset the problem of requirements, code, and architectural decisions not being adequately documented for future staff to understand." Sometimes I wonder if software teams should add technical writers embed with developers, architects, QA, and BA assets to actually document All The Things and keep documentation up to date. Yes, that will mean re-writing documentations as people change their minds in response to business needs but it would provide an historical record that answers "How the hell did our systems end up looking like this?" which seems to plague every organization that hires programmers to write custom code. Sometimes it's hard to give the developers who wrote the code the benefit of the doubt that they made the wisest decision based on all known variables at the time. I'm certainly guilty of questioning the intelligence, breeding, motivations, etc of the programmer of an app I had to modify once... only to realize that _I_ had written the code in question four years previously. Eventually I remembered why the feature had to be coded that way and wrote a 1200 word comment section explaining why the feature was written the way it was and how one should orient their state of mind to understand and edit the logic. And I further apologized for the clusterfuck of code that the feature was and left my personal email address in case a future programmer wanted to berate me for it. And three years later I did get an email from someone saying they had been laughing for ten minutes because they had gone from "WTF?" to gradual understanding as they read through my verbose description of why... ending with laughter that I was willing to take whatever vitriol they had left over via email so they could vent and get back to work. Whether that dev updated the comments to reflect their changes is something to which I have no answer.

<comment><USER3> Pushing the need for clear documentation is a battle I find myself frequently fighting. Many devs just aren't sure how to prioritize it or write it, and even worse, many seem to have absorbed the idea that code should be self documenting and that comments are a code smell.

Whoever is responsible for the idea that comments are code smell deserves to receive all future vitriolic emails from anyone who ever stumbles into a complex nest of undocumented code and has to figure out what the hell they're looking at.

<comment><USER4> Whoever thinks comments are a code smell has probably stumbled into a nest of documented code where the documentation was out of date and didn't refer to the latest code in question, causing intense confusion. Comments can certainly be helpful but there is nothing to guarantee that they will be up to date or even useful.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Had to port a 2k perl script with gigantic comment blocks written in German. Eventually I recreated the intended functionality with ~150 lines of JS after painfully google translating everything. JIRA references would probably be lost completely by the time I worked on it.

<comment><USER6> So it was less than 100 lines of actual needed Perl code in that script? ;)

<comment><USER5> More around 800 of sloc. At least I haven't had to preserve bugs. There were also red herrings in the comments, leftovers as the script was tweaked to fit business requirements. Imagine blocks like this spat around randomly between code blocks...

      ###############################################################################
      #                                                                             #
      #                               DAS IST CODE                                  #
      #                                                                             #
      ###############################################################################
      #                                                                             #
      # Das macht Dinge. Ja, ich habe diesen Übersetzer eingegeben, nur um etwas    #
      # einfügen zu können. Hoffentlich ist dies nach einer doppelten Übersetzung   #
      # noch lesbar. Wenn nicht, dann fick es einfach. Nett, es geht gut zurück.    #
      #                                                                             #
      # Natürlich wurde Interpunktion und Rechtschreibung gebrochen. Es war um das  #
      # Jahr 11, als der Übersetzer nicht über die gesamte Politur der künstlichen  #
      # Intelligenz verfügte, so dass eins von acht Wörtern nicht übersetzt wurde.  #
      # Zum Glück funktionierte es sogar mit Code, obwohl es nicht zu kompliziert   #
      # war. Andererseits sind Deutsche ziemlich zurückhaltend (oder waren, als     #
      # diese besondere Monstrosität gemacht wurde), um Englisch zu lernen, so dass #
      # selbst Variablen in der Muttersprache sein mussten. Ich verließ das         #
      # Unternehmen rund 3 Monate, weil ich eine Legacy Monstrocity (es war nur ein #
      # gehacktes Addon-Skript, das von einem Plugin-System in einem                #
      # Unternehmens-CMS lief) reparierte, war nicht meine Sache.                   #
      #                                                                             #
      ###############################################################################

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading.

I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.

<comment><USER8> SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant.

I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there are several hundred articles on the New York city. And one that Google links first is copy-pasted from Encyclopedia Britannica, 1913. And every single day several kids from elementary school start a new one."

SO is torn between essentially ambiguous goals, providing fast on-site answers and being a reusable knowledge base. And it's good with the latter only because of Google. Without Google it will be no better than fast on-site answers on Slack.

<comment><USER9> I think SO and pure documentation would serve two separate purposes. Sometimes documentation is better for something like an internal library API or related information. But on the other hand, sometimes having a an SO-like place where I can go look up a question related to a quick thing I'm trying to do would be useful. Say I don't remember the process to build the latest version of a Java package and upload it to an internal repository or something, it might be quicker to find a related quick Q&A type doc for that rather than digging into dense documentation on a variety of things.

<comment><USER8> And here comes the question of maintainability. For the code, we are trying to have a single repository to avoid duplicates and to have just a single place to make changes. That's what a wiki is good for. Whereas for such a dispersed knowledge base it would be hard to keep all these atomic questions up to date.

The front page for Teams boasts it's better than your "stale wikis and lost emails" but in reality there are much more stale answers on SO than anywhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Over the years I've concluded, reluctantly, that the _ONLY_ documentation solutions that matter are the code, revision control logs and issue trackers.

Create massive comment blocks to explain things if you have to but put it all there in the code, next to the things that matter. Then it has half a chance of still being accurate. And, you know exactly _where_ the documentation is. If the code becomes obsolete and is removed, you naturally strip out documentation that is no longer relevant at the same time.

Revision control log messages are _important_. I _so_ hate lazy messages; if you change 5 files in random ways and your message is "fixed bug", I think you should be fired. If it's in the issue tracker, your log had better mention the number. Add a paragraph daring to _explain_ what the hell you did so I can read a sensible log history and figure out what happened when.

Issue trackers are useful for capturing every relevant detail, especially new information that is found while the bug is being investigated. The bug might come up again, and details can help to sort it out.

<comment><USER11> How do you fit deployment doc in code ? And tutorials ? General graphs of the architecture ?

Because an API reference is a very poor doc.

<comment><USER12> Ideally your deployments _are_ code. And tutorials are part of your website 'code', or integrated into your project (and thus 'code'). General graphs of the architecture would be docs in your code repo (and thus 'code' too). I'll admit tho that it's pretty sensible to just not consider some of those as 'code' and thus conclude that documentation outside of the code is important too.

But the original commenter is also probably right that 'second hand' documentation is probably the least accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm excited at the potential this has to organize your own internal information that normally lies stagnant on a wiki (or heaven forbid, email) with no context of whether it's still valid or useful to anyone. It seems like it would be particularly useful for organizations with a distributed work force.

On the other hand, so much of StackOverflow's value comes from the economies of scale at hand, and I'm uncertain how well the model scales down to small sized teams or even medium sized companies.

<comment><USER14> There was an open source version of Stack Overflow that I set up internally a few years ago at a previous company. I was the only one on the team who actively used it, but even then I found it useful as it was a place to squirrel away these useful little pieces of information you come across and don't know quite what to do with. I ended up coming back to find stuff I'd put there a few times and was starting to refer others to questions here and there.

Then after a couple months, just as it felt like it was getting some traction, the server got wiped out accidentally by our server team and there were no backups. I never got around to putting it back up.

I hope not having your knowledge base arbitrarily wiped out by careless admins would be a feature of this service.

<comment><USER15> What tool did you use, and would you recommend it? I'm considering that route for project-relevant questions my students have.

<comment><USER14> I believe it was this:

[https://github.com/dzone/osqa](https://github.com/dzone/osqa)

But not positive. I vaguely remember it was a Python product. Not sure I can recommend it. I remember it not being nearly as polished as SO and not sure it's being actively maintained.

It's a shame that you can't use Stack Overflow itself constructively for this. I think Stack Overflow usage would be a great lesson for any introductory class. Just teaching new devs how to write a good Stack Overflow question is an invaluable step in problem-solving, even if they never post it.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I fear a good part of that lesson would be "the talk" about navigating the tricky culture of Stack Overflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So the biggest reason why I can see this succeeding is because of onboarding. In fact, I'd say that's the killer feature. It takes one person going through a development environment setup process to be really useful. They'll ask a lot of questions, get the answers...and then the setup process is suddenly really well documented without anyone having to go through the trouble of documenting it without knowing what to document.

Since new employees are expected to ask questions on how to get things working, using SO for Teams is natural. Then, explanations that would normally be sent in pieces over IM can be recorded.

The information still ages, but aged information on the right track is infinitely better than nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER17> Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" is only half the price. [https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions](https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)

<comment><USER18> It's only "half the price" if you ignore the cost of Confluence itself. The Atlassian people are also historically awful at building out features that make hosting their products easier (for example, they've ignored a request for a "read only" mode for about 12 years now [1]).

The simple fact that it is a product that is made by someone other than Atlassian is a huge selling point.

[1] [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-6390?page=com.a...](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-6390?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Aall- tabpanel)

<comment><USER19> FYI that we're implementing read-ony mode in our data center product line, and we've also got various knowledge base articles for how to achieve this should you need it:

      https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-make-confluence-read-only-311920317.html

In any software, you've always got old requests that haven't been filled. We're just public about it.

StackOverflow has the same issue here: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature- requ...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature- request?sort=votes&pageSize=15)

Many top requests are 9+ years old.

<comment><USER20> I have never had the opportunity to tell anyone at Atlassian how much I love Confluence. There are so many cool technical feats that improve my experience, like being able to open an embedded spreadsheet in Excel and having it update the version on the page when you hit save. So many things that aren't natural for the web are seamless, like indent levels and accepting pasted images. So many organizational tools like excerpts and child view macro. So many usability features like attachment versioning and keyboard shortcuts.

It takes a great company to make such a great product so easy to use. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My question is, is this better than your self-hosted wiki? At least that's cheaper and isn't a vendor lock-in. Sure wiki doesn't have the best possible UI and the UX might be too so-and-so. If I were in a position to buy this kind of service I'd still want something more out of it.

Maybe if it offered a way to export Slack threads into SO as questions so they wouldn't get lost. Sure you could generate those questions manually from the thread and maybe prune them a little but I've found mostly people are too lazy for extra-work like that. Anyway that's my first impression, take it as you want.

<comment><USER22> If your goal is to post problems and associated solutions, yes it is better than a Wiki.

First, it gives you a template to post in - you are not given a blank page and told "document this"

Second, it encourages you to document single, smaller, focused pieces of information. You're not being asked or expected to write a multipage document, you're being asked to write a single entry in what essentially is a crowd sourced FAQ.

One thing the SO approach also does is that it respects the content that each person posts. If I post an answer, only I can modify it. Nobody will modify my answer to reflect what they think, and make it seem as if I was presenting a different solution that what I suggested. What people with alternative ideas CAN do though is post alternative answers, or comment on my answer with suggested changes.

<comment><USER8> If your goal is to post, then SO is excellent. But if your goal is also to read, there are questions. Nobody ever tried to use Stack Overflow without Google yet. given all its bell and whistles are intended for those who want to post, there are questions yet to answer.

<comment><USER23> I use SO without Google sometimes, in this way: I search for a phrase or tag, and read the 20 - 30 highest upvoted questions & answers about that — and I learn a lot, sometimes things that I didn't know, that I ought to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stack Overflow largely relies on Google Search, but for private teams it won't be available. And internal search is just unreliable.

Also I fail to see how answers on SO for Teams are supposed to be less "stale" than your old wiki articles.

For me, at least our corporate wiki is more organized, without duplicates, whereas Stack Overflow's modus operandi is largely relies on creating thousands of duplicated questions.

</comment><comment><USER24> >team member has been fired for posting off-topic question

</comment><comment><USER25> Do you think we'll get the "closed as primarly opinion-based" flag squad on SO for Teams too?

<comment><USER13> Actually this brings up one of the things I like the most about this SO for Teams idea - it could also be used as a sort of slant.co substitute, where a large dev team is trying to settle on a common programming language or persistence framework, and each person can register their opinion or vote on an existing one.

After N days, the whole group decides to select the option with the most votes. Since voting is anonymous, everyone can give their honest opinion, or even vote for multiple.

If you don't like the "opinion-based" close reason, you can just not use it on your team.

<comment><USER25> It was a weak joke concerning the usual complaints about SO and because I thought it was an on-premise offer, not integrated in the main SO site. As said below, there's no flagging in SO Teams.

If you need anonymous voting for decision concerning language/framework, I think you have a big problem: it would mean individuals are afraid of voicing their opinions regarding a technical choice and that's not something that can just be solved with a tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> An open source alternative I've used in the past is Askbot: [https://askbot.com/](https://askbot.com/)

It's built on Django, and covers all of the standard Q&A features that I've needed to use.

<comment><USER27> Site doesn't work, refuses to connect. Adding www. tells me it is an invalid cert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Joel wrote a blog post about it, detailing how it currently works:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing- stack-o...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack- overflow-for-teams/)

It was already linked on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985574)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm sure I'm ignorant of other reasonable options, but this one is quite appealing as a small co, even if only used by one person. Just yesterday I was thinking about better ways to store easy-to-find answers to those dang tech issues that pop up once every six months. "How do I install pip manually on OS X with xyz constraints?"

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm confused by the pricing. Is it $10 a month for up to 10 users and then additional $5 per new user?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion. Your assumption is correct. $10 month total for the first 10 users (so, regardless of whether you have 3 users or 9 users, it's still $10/month). And then $5 per new user after that.

<comment><USER29> thanks I know you're probably targeting larger companies but for small teams there's a big difference between $10 a month and $5 per user per month :p

<comment><AUTHOR> absolutely :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Slightly offtopic, I recently looked at all top free internet websites/services that I use and wondered which of them I would miss if advertising dollars dry up. For me, it turned out to be stackoverflow and Google. I truly hope stackoverflow is a profitable venture at this point. I hope they have been trying various avenues to make money but no o no one has any info on profitability. Job ads pay well, but there is fierce competition there.

</comment><comment><USER31> We've been running this in beta for a couple months now, happy to answer questions about it. The SO team has been super helpful during the process.

<comment><USER32> What did you have in place before this (wiki, Slack, Yammer or something like it) if anything?

Is this better than finding the right person to ask, or posting in slack or something?

In my org we have a wiki on topics and if that fails an "experts" list with people to contact for further help. There is also a yammer group for asking questions, but that is rarely used. I think this could be helpful, but whether or not it's worth the cost would be a question for someone else.

<comment><USER31> Our documentation is split up between markdown files in-repo and a wiki (Confluence) with lots of assorted information. Interestingly we do the same kind of thing with an "experts" list, but with a focus for on-call engineers so they know who to contact if something's broken.

A lot of people still have a natural inclination to just post their questions in chat - probably because it's lower friction than typing up a question and then posting _that_ in chat. We've been trying to shift this by re-posting people's questions in SO and answering them there. It's been mostly helpful, but I'd say we still have a ways to go in shifting people towards SO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can this be connected to Active Directory?

<comment><AUTHOR> not yet. but supporting SSO options is on our near-term roadmap. however enterprise edition does support AD/SAML out of the box. stackoverflow.com/enterprise

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have thought about building this so many times. I think there is a need for it, particularly for non-technical teams where processes don't evolve that fast, but adoption will be hard to ignite.

<comment><USER22> Agreed - this is for many kinds of people, not just technical people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is an interesting play but doesn't seem like a good fit.

The examples on the front page: "how do I connect to our database", "what kind of email templates do we have". Are these questions that you're going to get multiple answers for and I'm going to upvote the best and/or select one as the "selected" answer. I would think this would be a sign of dysfunction in most cases. And how does the gamification play into it? (maybe it's a secret bus- factor detector.)

It seems like a regular wiki/knowledge base would be a better fit for this kind of knowledge. How would the SO structure help.

A related note, I wonder if you can disable the "Soup Nazis"[1] feature or it's too deeply embedded in the psyche of the product.

[1][https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php](https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php)

<comment><USER29> I think searching and linking to existing questions (internally and externally) would be useful.

<comment><USER35> The useful parts you name sound a lot like a wiki.

<comment><USER36> SO is a wiki. Except that instead of writing aimless documentation, you can document exactly what people are asking about.

Which makes it better than just about every wiki I've used at a company or Github repo which just get out of date because they are so arbitrary and unfocused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How easy is it to migrate your data out of it and into something else?

<comment><USER38> This was essentially my first question - who owns the data?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Has anyone tried one of the open source clones sich as question2answer?

[http://www.question2answer.org](http://www.question2answer.org)

</comment><comment><USER40> So much of the core mechanics of SO relies on SEO and a community of volunteer moderators, neither if which really exist in a corporation.

I suppose if a company had a paid librarian function, this could be successful. But in that case, even a normal wiki would probably work.

I seem to remember an article from Joel or Jeff many years ago describing why this exact model won't work. Can't seem to find it now though.

</comment><comment><USER22> Pushing my message again, but if you've not done so in a while, visit [https://stackexchange.com/sites#](https://stackexchange.com/sites#) and look at how many utterly non-technical topics are covered by this model. The application of the system is about far more than just traditional software development.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think it's a mistake to look at this from the perspective of software developers. It's called "Teams" because it's for teams - which can be anything from software developers to facilities maintenance people. It's for teams that have questions (and answers), not for software developers who have questions (and answers).

By way of experience with this, we run an internally written Stack Overflow clone of sorts for a large industrial printing product we make. It's meant for people in our organization who have questions and are looking for answers. And as such, there are no "wrong" questions.

For example, someone might ask, "I'm traveling to the San Diego site - what's the most convenient hotel to stay at?", and create a new tag for "san-diego", "recommendations", and "hotels". Or they might post about "Top-of-form mark detected too close to the previous frame" using tags like "print-engine" and "top-of-form".

For us, both types of questions are very valid and "on topic" questions to post in our internal stack.

When we first launched our stack, we imagined it as being a kind of "crowd sourced internal knowledge capture" tool. But a real evolution in our thinking has occurred, and we've found that most people use it to post questions and answers at the same time. In other words, they've solved a problem and want to share the solution. And SO's "question/problem statement" followed by "answer/solution" template and framework makes it very easy for them to share this knowledge. Contrast with a wiki for example, where they are presented with a blank page and told to "document this issue".

One feature we are considering is the idea of wizards for certain types of posts. For example, if you are posting an answer about equipment work that requires opening electrical panels, we probably should have a warning about only doing this if you are certified for it. So the wizard idea might say, "Is this a solution that relates to electrical safety?" Checking yes automatically appends some boilerplate text with a caution about electrical certification.

We've also found that the voting up/down feature isn't that useful. People just don't do that voting stuff, nor do they really care about their reputation. What we are going to do is replace the vote system with a simple, "Did this answer help you?" type approach. It's literally the same thing, but with a different way of asking it. Because we don't actually do "down" votes, a "Yes" is a vote up, and a "No" prompts the user to post a comment explaining why it didn't help them, assuming it was what they were looking for. Was the answer not clear? Was it wrong? Did it not work? Is the information out of date? This kind of feedback (via comments) will help answer authors evolve their content to be better.

</comment><comment><USER41> At least the frequency of questions getting closed without any sane reason will be lesser than Stackoverflow.com

</comment><comment><USER42> Continuously surprised at the lack of basecamp in these conversations. Seems like still the best tool to me.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Rest easy knowing that your Team's data is secured in a dedicated network and logically separated into its own SQL schema. Learn more about our security policy. "

If its using logical separation on a shared SQL server, then is it really a "dedicated network"?

</comment><comment><USER44> I want to create a public Stack Overflow, just using the engine but rebranded as my own QA site.

<comment><USER45> They used to do something similar to this, but then co-opted all the popular sites and shut down the rest. They had a parenting one that was pretty successful - probably because Jon Skeet was prolific on that one as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I feel like holding out single sign-on for a separate Enterprise tier priced at "Contact a sale rep for details!" is a mistake. Heck, I feel like any "contact a sales rep for details!" pricing tier is a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER47> Why use this when Discourse is free? It is an open source product that lets you store all the data in your own database. And it's by the same guys, too.

<comment><USER13> Because Discourse is a message board, not a Q&A site?

Not bashing Discourse at all. In fact I wish I saw it in the wild more often.

<comment><USER47> A forum is nearly there. With open source, all you need is a third party plugin to turn it into what you want:

[https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted- answe...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answer- plugin/30155)

<comment><USER13> That plugin hardly turns Discourse into a full fledged Q&A site. It merely adds a button to mark a specific post as "The Answer". While that may be sufficient for many, there is a reason that StackOverflow has tags, tailored search, reputation, closing, etc. That's what they are selling with that $5 price tag.

<comment><USER48> It's funny you refute that forum add-on, as it is a good add-on, but it's also just an add-on. A band-aid, not a solution. Too often I see the selected answer "pulled up" to the top, but it's actually just the tail-end of a longer conversation, where the context of the conversation is critical to understanding the answer itself. Not to mention that comment responses (to both answers and the question itself) are interwoven together like a big bowl of spaghetti.

Meanwhile, I think StackOverflow, while great, is not living up to it's potential. I'm currently brainstorming/prototyping a StackOverflow alternative that covers the Q&A scenario, but adds support for more advanced features. If a question is opinion based, then you could have answers categorized into sides. Yes or No would be a common example. React vs VueJS vs Ember could be some side options in a question. OOP vs FP vs Procedural could be sides for another question. What is the right way to X can have a different answer depending on your "side", or it could be that the sides themselves are in disagreement. Sometimes it's nice to see and understand why another side prefers X. Let both side's top answers stand side by side at the top. Another idea is improved connecting of similar, but unmergable, questions. Another idea to connect questions by dependencies. A user could select some premises before asking, debates could be derailed less often by linking debunked arguements to their open debate page where there could be a large chain of custody on each element and nested prerequisite showing why it's wrong. Prerequisite could also be a word definition ("theory" is a random shower thought in some contexts, but in other contexts it's an explanation backed by so much evidence it's a strong candidate for established fact that could only be replaced by an expanded explaination, not an alternative one). Prerequisites could also be an axiom. In addition to questions, there could also be "claims". "Answers" to claims would basically be supporting evidence or refuting evidence.

<comment><USER47> What is a way to reach you?

I thought of making a site like this called [https://findmeaning.in](https://findmeaning.in)

And basically it would consist of claims and evidence linking to other claims — and automatically calculating scores based on votes for claims. The hardest problem would be to prevent sybil attacks, collusion and so on, that could compromise the voting system. Perhaps the score system would need to be based on something entirely different than voting, such as random polling to leverage the wisdom of the crowd ([https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/...](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so- you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent))

If you are interested, message me greg+hn then the at symbol then qbix.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Was anyone else hoping to see a Stack Overflow plugin for "Microsoft Teams"? That would have been very cool.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not sure if it's worth it, but this struck a chord with me:

>No more digging through stale wikis

</comment><comment><USER50> Totally misread the title and thought it was for "Teens". LOL

<comment><USER51> The concept of "Stack Overflow for Teens" seems like a parody goldmine.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Alexa mute button is not hardwired - <AUTHOR> I recently plugged in my Alexa and quickly pressed the mute button while it was booting up. The mic icon turned red and then later in the boot process the mic light turned off again all by itself. I assume this means that some software in the Alexa system can turn the light on and off at a minimum, and maybe even the mute functionality itself. <comment><USER2> Anybody who puts one of these devices in their home and expects to be fully in control of it or not being spied on is deluded.

I'm not saying they're wrong in their expectations, I definitely have an expectation that I won't be spied or eaves dropped on in my own home as well. But that's why I don't put an always on mic that is sending everything it records off to a US company on us servers, running software no-one can see the source code of.

Seriously, it boggled my mind how you an expect the Facebook telescreen or the google/amazon spy mic to respect your privacy when we know the business model of these companies and the potential for abuse. Even assuming they didn't want to spy, they could easily be compelled to by an alphabet agency and you'd never know.

And for what? So you can order more coffee from Amazon without lifting a finger, or so you can pause Spotify without pressing on the remote? Come on...

</comment><comment><USER3> No modern device will have truly 'hardware' buttons for anything, unless the device has no microprocessor (think electric iron, kettle, hedgetrimmer).

It leads to a smaller simpler design to simply hook all switches and lights into a CPU and have software control everything. It lets the UX be decided later in the design process, it allows the design to be modified to other usecases more easily, and it simplifies the testing required for each device produced.

Having 'hardware' switches also tends to be significantly harder to design. For example, a hardware mic switch might bounce when switched, and cause voltage transients which damage the ADC. Such things are very hard to predict before the design is produced, and might only affect a small percentage of produced devices meaning it gets missed in testing.

<comment><USER4> The Librem 5 claims to have hardware switches for the radios, and it's not even out yet.

Yes, most modern devices don't have these switches, and yes it's more expensive to put them in, but hopefully it's not completely going away. I like knowing that something is off (software can fail, whether intentionally or unintentionally), and I'm willing to pay a little extra for that.

I hope we haven't completely ignored lessons from Spectre/Meltdown. Trusting the CPU isn't acceptable, so certain things should have a hardware shut-off to ensure malware can't break through (e.g. Purism's laptops have hardware switches for the camera and other components, which is awesome given the Snowdon leaks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the reasons I got a Tap vs. an Echo was because it required push activation and wasn't always on. Imagine my surprise when this functionality was added via a software update and entirely configurable via the Alexa app.

There's a color it glows when it is on since it is battery powered and that actively drains power. That isn't much comfort since that light is also software activated.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I didn't realize that the validity of this statement is not widely confirmed.

I'll post back here if I find any info to confirm or deny this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not surprised.</comment>


Open Whisper develops meta-data minimal encrypted profiles - <AUTHOR> https://signal.org/blog/signal-profiles-beta/ <comment><USER2> The fact that this is a major feature announcement for Signal underscores an important difference between Signal and competing "secure" messengers. Virtually every Signal competitor has nicer "profile" support. But there's a reason for that: Signal goes through contortions to make sure they're not storing a database of sensitive metadata.

An even better example of this is Signal's Giphy support. Most of us on HN could add Giphy support to a chat application in a day or two, and plenty of chat apps have done exactly that. But that's not what Signal did: Signal runs what is an effect a VPN for its users to access Giphy through, so that Signal can't see what you're searching for and Giphy can't see who you are.

This is one of the things that makes HN discussions about how much nicer other messengers are so aggravating. A lot of those messengers --- really, most of them? --- don't really care about your privacy. They would much rather get to market quickly with new features, even when those features mean their servers are loaded up with gigabytes of sensitive metadata.</comment>


Flunking Out, at a Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/business/flunking-out-at-a-price.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "What kind of losses might the taxpayers incur? Let's do some arithmetic: Corinthian students received approximately $1 billion a year in federal financial aid. So if default rates on the last two years of aid were to rise by 20 percent, that would generate $400 million in losses."</comment>


Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support - <AUTHOR> http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-sync-now-with-push-gmail-support.html

<comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm missing something, but the iPhone instructions (<http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=apple>) tell you to add an Exchange (ActiveSync) account in your iPhone settings, rather than modify your existing Gmail account.

This is fine and dandy, unless you already have an Exchange account configured, e.g. for your work email. When I went to add another Exchange account, my iPhone told me that "Only one Exchange ActiveSync account can be configured."

Maybe there's a way around this, but Google's dire warnings suggest there isn't ("Important! Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone, existing data may be removed from your phone.")

I'll be Googling for a while, but helpful suggestions are appreciated.. (and no, 'suck it iPhone n00b' is not helpful... :))

<comment><USER3> The problem is that it appears Google is using ActiveSync. ActiveSync allows you to sync calendars and contacts as well as your email; so you run into a contention problem - which account is the winner for your calendar? For your contacts? Etc, etc.

It would be nice if the iPhone would let you pick which account owned which data, but I don't think it's sophisticated to do that right now.

So; if you really want to use Google's ActiveSync OVER your exchange server's ActiveSync, you may be able to configure your Exchange account to use IMAP instead of ActiveSync. I don't think you'll have any luck with 2 ActiveSync accounts for the time being.

(For whatever it's worth, I'm in the same position as you; if anyone hears about a way to get multiple ActiveSync accounts running, I'd also love to hear about it.)

<comment><USER4> The Palm Pre does this nicely already. I wonder if there is some sore of licensing situation that is preventing Apple from implementing multiple exchange accounts or Apple just doesn't think that their customers need multiple accounts.

<comment><USER3> I would guess it's the latter. I mean.. we don't even have MMS yet, and it was huge news when we got copy & paste.

<comment><USER5> I can use MMS (and tethering) on my iPhone with Rogers in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now, if I could only have more than one Exchange account on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why would anyone want to be notified whenever they get an email? People are already incessantly and compulsively checking their email every few minutes, to the detriment of their sociability.

This makes email less fun. The few seconds of anticipation when you hit the refresh button on the email client and it starts downloading emails are enthralling; Did that girl from Match.com reply? or is it yet another spam from Amazon/Dell?

<comment><USER8> I hate the idea of being notified of each individual message. Considering how often it's an automated e-mail or somebody copying me in to something rather than something actually useful... well, for my use of e-mail it's a pointless distraction.

Still, I wouldn't mind having the unread count on my iPhone's Mail icon be accurate, instead of a half-hour out of date. I'll probably enable this sometime soon and continue to leave new mail notifications off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How to sync multiple calendars with iphone for Google Apps

[http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple- calendar...](http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple-calendars- with.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Just enabled it on my iPhone. Verified with test emails. Joy...1 year and 2 months delayed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, just started working for me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks!

And so drop the start ups that tried to mimic push email with push notifications..

<comment><AUTHOR> As if they didn't see this coming...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> __* I would hold off on adding this to your iphone for now. It's very slow and buggy.

</comment><comment><USER12> 502 Server Error when trying to set it up on the iPhone...

<comment><USER13> Emails are very slow to load on my iPhone, and my contacts still haven't synced. Kind of crappy really.

EDIT: It updated my contacts and email seems to be working alright after about a half hour or so. I assume Google is just getting slammed by iPhone users at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The messages in my "All Mail" folder appeared after a fairly long delay, but I'm still not getting any messages appearing in my Inbox.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 I wonder if this is related to the fact that my Blackberry hasn't received any of my Gmail messages since this morning

<comment><USER15> Same here, and probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not bad, except it does the Gmail "delete" = "archive" thing. Any idea how to make "delete" = "delete"?

<comment><USER17> Gmail labs advanced imap controls lets you configure that. I'm not sure if it will work with this though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm finding that even with my Nokia S60 phone ("not yet supported" according to the Google PR stuff) I'm getting Gmail pushed to my device. Worth trying if you haven't already.</comment>