Desktop App for All Your Email - <AUTHOR> http://inky.com/ <comment><USER2> So, uh, I guess we're not in stealth mode anymore...

I'm the founder; here are answers to some questions people have asked here. By way of background, I'm a hacker who (long ago) co-wrote Crash Bandicoot (1&2) and co-founded ITA Software, which was sold to Google in 2010.

Q: I'm really busy; why should I invest 5 minutes trying this? A: Inky lets you sort your mail by relevance to you; you can train the ML algorithm, but it does a pretty good job for most users out of the box. Inky knows about many kinds of emails, like daily deals, social friend requests, etc., and lets you view these in special folders. Inky's design is minimalist, but don't be fooled: it is a real IMAP/POP client capable of doing virtually everything Thunderbird, etc. can -- and in some cases more (e.g., it makes adding new accounts trivial, and offers a unified inbox on the desktop). Finally, we've architected Inky to preserve your privacy: your email never touches our network, so our employees can't see your mail.

All that being said, you really need to try Inky for a few days to see what makes it (in our view) great. We've invested a lot of time, thought, and iteration into improving the core email reading experience. You'll see, after a while, that essential features that nobody really thinks about like account setup, recipient auto-complete, and unified inbox just work better in Inky.

Q: Is this web site packaged as a native app? A: No. It is a native app with a portable UI built using web technologies. Many hackers assume that because it uses HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the UI, it's not running native code. It is; look in your process table. However, the same architecture does support deployment as a plain web site; that's part of the motivation for using web technologies for the UI.

Q: What do you mean it's cloud-enabled? A: Inky stores your settings -- including authentication information for your mail servers -- in the cloud. This means that when you install Inky on a new computer and log in, it automatically knows about all your accounts. (Security wonks: please see our FAQ page or email us at firstname.lastname@example.com for how we do this safely.) Of course, your mail is also stored in the cloud; email is perhaps the oldest mainstream "cloud-based" service in this sense.

Q: It doesn't discover <major provider>! A: That's a bug. Please report it to email@example.com. Inky's auto-discovery will discover almost anything, including minor providers and mail servers people like me host themselves. But there are still bugs. Please help us find them by reporting them to us.

Q: It didn't work! A: Please report this via firstname.lastname@example.com (yes, we know it's ironic if you have to use another mail client to send the email). It does work for many people, but there are still bugs, and targets (e.g., WinXP) we don't support perfectly yet.

Q: The scrolling sucks! A: We know; we're working on making the scrolling work natively.

Q: How are you planning to make money? A: That's really putting the cart before the horse. We're focused on solving the fundamental problem, which is that email clients are dumb and complicated, when they should be getting smarter and simpler. There are many ways to make money in the email space; we're not worried about making money right now.

Q: But seriously: you're going to data-mine my email and sell the data, right? A: No. Seriously. There are lots of ways to make money in the email space that don't involve systemic privacy invasion.

Q: I tried it, but <thing-I-don't-like>! A: Please email us at <email@example.com>. We're hardly out of alpha at this point and are focused primarily on fixing bugs. Email is complicated; our goals are ambitious; our team is small -- please help us by reporting specific bugs so we can fix whatever problems you encounter.

Q: What about mobile versions? What about exchange support? What about a Linux version? Retina support? Chat? Calendar? Doing my laundry? A: We'd like to get the kinks out of the present desktop version before talking about major new ports. But, of course, your email client is most useful when it runs seamlessly across all your devices, and syncs with all your favorite providers.

Q: Are you just going to be acquired by Google and get shut down? A: No. This is about fixing email; it's not about building something to flip. My last company fixed travel search, and it took 10+ years. (Assuming you even consider it done, which I'm sure the 500+ employees at ITA Software do not.)

Q: I would like to know how it works. A: We will talk more about the architecture and tool chain, which are somewhat novel, at some point later.

Q: Why did you launch if there are still bugs? A: We didn't. People found us hiding in plain view.

<comment><USER3> _Q: How are you planning to make money? A: That's really putting the cart before the horse. We're focused on solving the fundamental problem, which is that email clients are dumb and complicated, when they should be getting smarter and simpler. There are many ways to make money in the email space; we're not worried about making money right now._

Can you expand on this? I agree with your premise that email clients should be getting smarter and simpler (or at least I accept that as a valid premise). Really, though, how do you plan to make money? How do we know this won't disappear/be no longer supported in six months or a year when you get tired of not having any revenue?

<comment><USER2> My previous company (ITA Software) made enough revenue to (rather comfortably) justify the ~$700M valuation Google paid for it. ITA never took in a single cent of advertising money or money derived from selling users' data to third parties.

I believe a vastly better email platform has inherent value, just like a vastly better travel planning system has inherent value. Look at the dozens of ways companies are currently earning their keep in the email sector. It's not the same as Twitter or Facebook, which only have usability value to consumers, and which can only succeed at massive scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Here are some clarifying points on security issues. We wrote up a FAQ for the website, but it's not in the prod version of the site yet. Short version: we really care about this stuff, have worked with cryptography and other security experts, and are happy to explain what we're doing. The analogy to LastPass elsewhere in this thread is apt; our techniques are similar and we'll document what we're doing so you can evaluate them. Here's a thumbnail version:

Inky uses SRP (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol>) to authenticate to the server that stores your credentials. This means that Inky proves to the server that you know your password without actually sending any bits of the password. Deriving the password from the stored password verifier object is thought to be a computationally hard problem, in a similar (number-theoretic) sense that, say, RSA is thought to be hard to break without knowing the password.

Your IMAP/POP passwords and other secure information are encrypted with a key _derived from_ your Inky password. Since we don't know the Inky password, we don't know your IMAP/POP passwords. To add entropy to the encryption key, we use PBKDF2 key stretching. (As an aside: we can't reset your password since we don't know it; that's why we let you set up security question that lets you reset it _from that machine only_ )

About not warning about self-signed certificates: this is obviously a trade- off between on-boarding simplicity and security. When you approve connecting to a site (which we tell you involves sending your password), you implicitly accept the site's X.509 certificate if it fails to validate. From that point on, however, we require the signature to match the certificate you accepted when you added the account; otherwise, we won't connect and we'll put up a warning. I'm personally interested in Tervor Perrin's work on TACK as an alternative to the well-known problems with the TLS trust hierarchy. (These problems have been discussed here extensively.)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for clarifying this. Your notes make me feel much better about sending you my password, and I'm glad you thought about self-signed SSL certificates too.

I still would like a warning to show up before I allow connecting to the server if it presents a self-signed certificate. Even something like this could get the point across:

        +</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
        | </comment><comment>= Inky security warning </comment><comment>=====|
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
        | Nobody's verified the identity of the    |
        | people who operate this mail server. Are |
        | you sure you want to send your password  |
        | to this unknown mail server?             |
        |                                          |
        | [Yes, send my password, and remember     |
        |   this mail server's fingerprint in the  |
        |   future]                                |
        |                                          |
        | [No, do not continue]                    |
        |                                          |
        | [More details...]                        |
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+

<comment><USER2> We'll certainly make it clearer. We've gone back and forth on this internally (design/simplicity vs security/clarity). I agree it should give you some kind of indication that it's not a CA-signed certificate. I'd also like to show EV certificates differently, though I'm not sure many providers offer them yet for mail servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the FAQ: "How much does Inky cost? It's free!"

How are you planning to make money? Coz if you don't make money, then either you are going to sell my data (not acceptable), or you are going to shut down future development.

So again, how are you planning to make money?

<comment><USER6> Ads. It's pretty clear if you read their TOS[1] or Privacy Policy[2]. In particular from the privacy policy:

> _Arcode displays targeted advertisements based on personal information. > Advertisers (including ad serving companies) may assume that people who > interact with, view, or click targeted ads meet the targeting criteria, such > as a particular gender, age group and geographic area._

[1] <http://inky.com/termsofuse.html> [2] <http://inky.com/privacypolicy.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here are my first impressions as a keyboard-heavy email user:

* Created account and added my google apps account. Detection worked well.

* Tried to switch to my google apps inbox by pressing Cmd-2 like twitter clients and other apps with a left bar. No dice.

* Pressed '?' to see a hotkey popup. No dice.

* Pressed 'c' to compose a new message. That worked.

* Tried to figure out how to get back to the inbox. Had to use the mouse.

* Scrolled down, it was slow.

* Closed and reopened inky, and apparently it's not taking my password (20 characters long and containing the characters ";*{~?").

I have no idea what my password is actually set to (it seems to have accepted the password but modified it before saving?) and can't log in anymore. Which is fine, because inky's not for me. Lots of promise I think, but the UI is just not responsive enough yet, and I'm pretty happy with GMail's web UI.

</comment><comment><USER8> You mean a new Mac email client that _isn't_ just a LaunchRock signup page & some tasteful Dribbble shots? Amazing :)

<comment><USER9> Which means it will be acquired and shot in the head by Google soon to avoid losing Gmail eyeballs.

<comment><USER8> better than vaporware

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "we're not worried about making money right now."

how many times have we heard that... you mean you're going to sell ads or my data. Thanks, but no thanks.

<comment><USER11> Yes. Got to that point and closed the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Constructive criticism:

1\. I tried adding my @outlook.com email address and I had to manually allow SMTP and POP3 servers. A newbie mom or dad user is not going to know what to do and ultimately dismiss your app. Make it much cleaner so it works "at once" with Outlook.com email addresses.

2\. Scrolling is very slow and annoying. Can you make the scroll use the current default speed on my machine? (Using Windows 7 64 Bit)

3\. Visual bug in the search bar area: <http://i.imgur.com/ybO7G.png>

4\. Clicked on an email and it's stuck on Retrieving for a very long time... still stuck there... :(

5\. BREAKING BUG: I added my Outlook.com email and get this notification:

pop3.live.com told Inky this: "-ERR Exceeded the login limit for a 15 minute period. Reduce the frequency of requests to the POP3 server.."

<comment><USER4> I respectfully disagree about 1. Because of the autodetection, you can't be sure that the server you're connecting to is the right one. You have to double check this _before_ you send your password to a potential attacker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm liking it.

couple of observations

\- The interface is very clean and very intriguing. I find myself going "I wonder how the decided to do that ... didn't think I'd like it, but it seems to work alright"

\- I wish you chose a more attractive font to render emails in. My emails looked alright in postbox but they look crappy in Inky :\

\- I would ask that you offer the option to set the threshold at which we "Automatically add recipients of sent messages to the address book". email clients over the years have made my contacts completely worthless with this email-once-add-to-contacts-feature because there are tons of people I email once or twice and never speak to again, but at some point (5 emails in perhaps) ... its a good idea to add that person to your contacts.

\- memory usage is about 327MB (Real memory column on OSX), we'll see how it does in the next week or so. Postbox is at 815MB, which is one of the reasons I've fallen out of love with it ... that and the Postbox team's seeming mindset that they've gone as far as they can with it.

\- Will also to see how big the index size gets, and how it impacts my cpu usage. Postbox uses 10GB of storage for my 3 email accounts and has my cpu fan constantly blowing hard on cpu idle.

Good first impression. Its seems like a decent email client right now, but I Can't wait to see if you can actually do something truly mindblowing/innovative with it

<comment><USER14> > I would ask that you offer the option to set the threshold at which we > "Automatically add recipients of sent messages to the address book". email > clients over the years have made my contacts completely worthless with this > email-once-add-to-contacts-feature because there are tons of people I email > once or twice and never speak to again, but at some point (5 emails in > perhaps) ... its a good idea to add that person to your contacts.

Settings > General Settings > Address Book > "Mark automatically added contacts important" : "After 5 sent messages"

Is that what you wanted?

<comment><USER13> Its close but not quite the same. I'd like them not to get into the address book at all until after x sent messages.

I guess its just a matter of preference.

<comment> mike-cardwell Perhaps an even better solution might be:

Any people I have emailed at least once within the last two weeks, plus any people I have emailed at least 5 times ever.

<comment><USER2> That's a cool idea; thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm the founder of Peek, where we made a mobile device/app for doing email better. The main comparison at the time was Blackberry and eventually Android. We were a low cost smartphone centered on email and stuff. So with that backdrop, some comments. <pre> TRIED IT, LIKE IT

\- hosted gmail account - set up easily for me

\- sucked in my mail fast too

\- prioritized the inbox pretty ok, but will have to try in the AM when I have more BS mail not just late night 'real' mail

\- UI is a little slow I guess. You need a ? shortcut to prompt keyboard shortcuts

\- I like the approach: just be an alternative UI to the gmail engine. You can coast on their infrastructure. Others are doing this too like Handle, AltoMail, others

TAKE IT FROM ME...

\- Peek also got constantly dinged to "hey, support Exchange!" but we never got far with corporate users even when we bent over backwards to support them

\- gmail was the vast majority of users

\- outlook/hotmail is actually large and super annoying to support. you need a special partnership license with msft and we went and got one. email me if you want help/access. amol at peek dot ly

\- yahoo you can use imap back door. also very large

\- power users: we were a cheap, simple gadget so power users would criticize us on the one hand but then not use us since they weren't going to abandon their blackberry anyway (or android, later). In this case though, it seems Inky needs to work well for power users. So this performance stuff people are complaining about needs to be better

SUGGESTIONS

\- weird that you didn't start with a mobile app

\- a bit weird to create a 'desktop client' that is actually just a web app container (that's what it is right?)

\- efforts like thunderbird or postbox at least "get your mail on your pc" which has a neat quality to it. Inky doesn't do that. What's the advantage of being a desktop app here?

\- the overall betterness of Inky isn't apparent. The UI does resemble the "3.0" looks of a bunch of other mail apps as commenters have mentioned. There are some usability tweaks but also some steps back. I am most excited about the relevance and smart views -- this is the area nobody is doing well yet. The "algo for your email". I guess I need to use it more to see this benefit? </pre>

I'm excited to find my next mail client. I really don't like Gmail and the death of Thunderbird was sad for me. I want you guys to make something awesome!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the shout-out. It's always nice to hear from someone else who's crossed the email Rubicon. Can't disagree with any of your advice. (Did you try to add a Yahoo! account?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was about to register for an account, but after I read that it stores my authentication information in the cloud I've held out. I just don't feel comparable with that, so I've decided not to do it. It would be great if there was an option, _not_ to do this.

</comment><comment><USER17> "capable of doing virtually everything Thunderbird, etc. can -- and in some cases more"

Dude, just no. Don't be one of those founders. Don't get drunk off your own Koolaid. I'm a heavy daily thunderbird user with 10 accounts and at this point in time, with this release, Thunderbird literally does everything better than Inky. Everything. From account setup, to available options, to information density, plugins, sorting collumn options, UI and collumn flexibility, customization, massive options, and about 35 other things. Email is broken not because it isn't pretty, it's broken because there's too much email, too much spam, and a lack of good threading. Common let's be honest, you made email pretty. You mac-afied it. Took out Spam filter and replaced it with Relevant/Not Relevant.

Your design, name, logo, URL are amazing.

However, Inky couldn't connect to my custom domain inboxes like firstname.lastname@example.com and hangs on the "discover settings" page even after I specify the pop and smtp settings. Gmail works fine though. I'm sure you'll fix that quick so I'm not judging you on it.

Also, Inky has a bad case of the "looks over functionality" flu and "hide everything off the screen and call it minimalization" disease that's been going around. Information density is really low. Every message takes up too much space. With thunderbird my inbox fills up my whole monitor and I could skim through my entire inbox in 15 seconds. With Inky every little message takes up so much visual room it takes forever to check my mail. And everything takes more clicks than usual to complete. And clickable icons like checkboxes etc... are too small.

Not to mention, where is the spam button?

If you sing on your own merrits you'll always find fans, but when you compare yourself to Whitney Houston you're just asking for a backlash. Likewise, had you not compared Inky to Thunderbird you would have been fine.

<comment><USER18>
        It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
        Of all things physical and metaphysical,
        Of all things human and all things super-human,
        Of all true manifestations of the head,
        Of the heart, of the soul,
        That the life is recognizable in its expression,
        *That form ever follows function*. This is the law. [1]

[1] [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of- co...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of-contemporary- architecture-fall-2009/readings/MIT4_205F09_Sullivan.pdf)

<comment><USER19> A rule of thumb is not a law. Form doesn't always follow function even in nature and evolution: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0>

Also styles and fads like "minimalism" and "flat design" are forms that do not follow function but are really forms that enforce function. Which is why they're fads and go away after enough people jump on the bandwagon and realize the fad's flaw and limitations.

<comment><USER18> Relax Chris, I'm sure it was meant to be inspirational rather than legislative. It's simply the poem that coined the famous cliche 'form follows function'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea of a better mail client, a lot.

I like the discovery/enrollment process.

Not a big fan of the UI itself, or performance after sign up, at least as it is right now. The only element which seems visually distinct to me is the far left menubar; everything else kind of blends together in a too-widely-spaced collection of random boxes, not even lists. I _like_ native OS widgets. This isn't a video game, don't make me figure out some new convention just to scroll a list.

Search is nice (which is the only reason I still use anything on gmail). Inspires me to try to get lucerne working on my own mail again.

Also not really a fan of giving my login credentials to a cloud service for no particular reason. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to keep them within a client only, and just go through the setup each time.

Realistically I'm unlikely to move off mutt (for intensive email use) or gmail (for infrequent use from other machines), but I'll try it again someday.

</comment><comment><USER21> You lost me at "email is broken". Email isn't perfect, but contending "The system is broken, so we built another layer on top of it" makes me think you haven't given this a lot of thought.

<comment><USER22> Indeed. Of all the mechanisms i use to communicate, email is by far the least broken. It's not a walled garden, it's not tied to a device, it doesn't cost anything, nobody blocks it, and the concept of somebody not being on the email network is unthinkable. If only everything could be as awesome as email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would love to hear more about what it's really going to cost me. Ever since Sparrow stopped working as well as I wanted it to, and didn't seem to have any hope of improving, I've been back to gmail's web interface. How are they going to make money?

Totally stoked to have something new to check out in this space though. :)

<comment><USER24> I was planning on using it as the mail reader for a very active mailing list I'm a member of. It doesn't open up threads correctly, so I'm stuck going backwards and opening each individual message.

The design is nice though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really don't like the trend of apps installing to the user profile. Chrome does this too, and I think it's a mistake.

I'm still using Thunderbird because I can't find a nice client with true threading (not the 'conversation threading' that seems to be popular recently). This client appears to be no exception.

</comment><comment><USER26> This looks neat. I've always wished I had a way to sign into all my email accounts without having to set them up individually one at a time. This app definitely needs some work though. It is crazy slow and appears to be a web- app-pretending-to-be-native. Not that that is necessarily _bad_ , but this one seems slow. Also, I can't get it to work at all. I've got my email account set up and it knows how many unread messages I have, but it never loads them. It has been sitting like this for about 30 minutes: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23745600/Screenshots/oxNi.png> and restarting doesn't help.

I also can't for the life of me figure out how to add a second email address.

<comment><USER27> that would be the green plus on the left of your screen shot

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can you offer a paid version? And could you please revolutionize PGP usability so that my grandmother can use it?

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: Devs, please read below for my SSL concerns. Everyone else, give Inky a try; it's a surprisingly nice and full-featured email client hiding behind a deceptively simple UI.

I'll bite. I'm a sysadmin who gets gobs of email per day. Maybe I'm not part of your target market ("Simple! Just works!"), but I'll offer my thoughts in hopes that they're useful.

I've tried it for a bit. Here's what I like about Inky as a mail client:

\- Vi default keyboard shortcuts :)

\- The dialog for adding arbitrary IMAP servers is outstanding. Leagues better than Thunderbird. For those who haven't tried it, you type in your email address, then it looks up the servers in the MX records of the email's hostname. You click an "Allow" button next to the server that you actually intended to send your password to, and it starts using that server. Excellent.

\- AUTOMATIC UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON. Dude. Maybe this is common in other mail clients but I just spent like ten minutes unsubscribing myself from useless things. Click, click, click. It's catharsis in a box. This alone made my brief spin with Inky worth my time.

\- Nice UI for viewing and editing settings. Surprisingly advanced options for eg. caching, displaying and downloading messages, keyboard shortcuts, and so on hidden in the settings.

\- Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised.

Security issues that I _don't_ like:

\- You didn't even warn me when I added my mail server with a self-signed SSL certificate. Sure, the UI does imply that you're not sending my password to that server before I click the "Allow" button, but there's no way for me to even check the SSL certificate fingerprint before I do that.

\- You also didn't let me know _whether_ I'm using an SSL/TLS connection at all.

I expect any decent email client to _loudly_ complain about security issues like these. Inky is a broken email client until it does so.

\- Storing my IMAP password on your cloud server is _not_ OK. I know my passwords are encrypted with my Inky password, but that's exactly what I'm sending you whenever I log into my Inky account. Thus, Inky employees _can_ access my email if they watch me authenticate with your servers. I'm not convinced. You've ensured that adding new mail accounts is stupid easy, so why are you "helpfully" keeping a copy of my password for me? At least give me the option of storing passwords in my OS keyring. I'd like to know more about the security of this system and your motivations for doing this.

UI things that I don't like:

\- Bug: I add a server, then I click on "Compose message," then I add another server, then click back to my message that I previously started to compose. You don't list the new second server in the "From:" dropdown menu, so I thought I didn't add the new outgoing server properly. I have to scrap that message and start composing a new one before both servers show up in the "From:" dropdown.

\- You treat an email thread as a linear list of messages. Email threads have inherent hierarchy and structure. I can't see who's replying to who without expanding the quoted parts.

\- You group emails together by subject. I have 1,000 nightly automated server emails per each server accumulated over the past five years. Please don't group them together like that.

\- In mailing lists, it's conventional to have "Reply All" as the default action, not just "Reply." I'd love if you detected that.

\- Please infer my address book from people in my inbox who sent me things. I don't want to type all that again, and it looks like there's no visible way for me to import contacts. Slurping up contact details when I send messages to people would also help with this.

\- In threaded email lists, there's so much whitespace that I can't tell where a message ends and where the next one begins. For example, how many emails are visible on the right side of this screenshot? <http://i.imgur.com/92cKQ.png>

\- There's also way too much whitespace in the message list. I could only see 10 messages in my screenshot, which really hurts when I'm scanning through search results. (EDIT: I accidentally clicked on the date header and it gives you more layout options to condense things down)

\- This is currently a free product. How are you making money?

It doesn't work on Linux, so I can't use it day-to-day. That said, I really like what you're doing here, and it's certainly a great start. Until then, I'm headed back to Notmuch ( <http://notmuchmail.org/> ) for the time being.

<comment><USER14> Im interested in this space as well so I am curious to poke your brain for a bit, if you dont mind:

> you type in your email address, then it looks up the servers in the MX > records of the email's hostname

The MX records store the server receiving mail (i.e. an smtp server). How does this relate to the imap server?

> AUTOMATIC UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON

This sounds interesting, but how would this work? Often times there are forms that the unsubscribe link leads to, how would it be able to correctly populate and send it?

Furthermore, in my experience, these links dont usually work and the better solution is to forward all mail from that source directly to junk mail. Is your experience different?

> Nice UI for viewing and editing settings. Surprisingly advanced options for > eg. caching ...

Do you actually use these? Do you really care how long a message is cached for? I feel like most of these confuse the average user (obviously not you) and provide little value for the more advanced users.

> Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised

Is this an issue? How does this happen?

> You didn't even warn me when...

What is the average users response to such a warning? Heck, would you know if there were a man in the middle given the warning? I think that this is one of the shortcomings of the PKI: most warnings are false alarms which lead to mistrusting the system.

<comment><USER4> Sure! I don't mind.

> The MX records store the server receiving mail (i.e. an smtp server). How > does this relate to the imap server?

My IMAP and SMTP server happen to be hinding on the same IP, which is mentioned in the MX record. Inky seems to have detected this. Port scanning? Trying common names like smtp.$domain and imap.$domain ? I'm not sure how it does this, but someone got very frustrated when coding it :) and it works quite well as a result.

> In my experience, these [unsubscribe] links dont usually work and the better > solution is to forward all mail from that source directly to junk mail. Is > your experience different?

I'm not sure how Inky discoveres the presence of an unsubscribe link, but the experience is outstanding. Here's a quick walkthrough. Say I want to unsubscribe from this message: <http://i.imgur.com/XlB3X.png>

This message happens to contain a "List-Unsubscribe: <[http://.../>](http://.../>), <mailto:unsubscribe@...>" header, but lots of the ones in my mailbox do, so either it's common or Inky has other special sauce going on.

After clicking the unsubscribe button, it offers to unsubscribe via "automated email" or "via the web": <http://i.imgur.com/c7KXj.png>

If I click the first, it offers to send this message for me: <http://i.imgur.com/c63fY.png>

If I click the second, Chrome pops up with the unsubscribe link: <http://i.imgur.com/DUGGk.png>

I don't know if this works just for messages with a List-Unsubscribe header or if it's scanning the body text of the email. For the record, that mail had "If you do not wish to receive further communications like this, please unsubscribe [here.]"

Other mail clients: Please copy this mercilessly!

> Do you actually use these? Do you really care how long a message is cached > for?

Sure, they're confusing for average users; that's why they're in the settings. No average user ever opens the settings, but I like that they're there. They've thought about a lot: if I send mail to people who use terminals and text-mode email all day, I appreciate being able to turn off settings like "Convert dashes to unicode characters" and "Convert emoticons to images as you type." Lots of people who use mailing lists will gladly appreciate the "Put new text below quoted text in replies (bottom-post)" setting. And I can turn off sounds and notifications so I don't get distracted by my mail client.

Yes, having these really does provide value for advanced users. (Erm well, for me anyway)

>> Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised

>Is this an issue? How does this happen?

I've tried mail clients that download all the mail, mark it all as read, and then promptly delete it from my server's inbox, either due to misconfiguration or poor design. Inky is a "thin" IMAP client, so there's no reason to add much client-side state. Everything you do to a message is immediately applied to that message as it exist in the server's copy -- marking it as read, moving it around, and so forth. This has the disadvantage that it probably won't work if I disconnect, but I like the uncompromising philosophy of _not touching my mail unless I tell it to._

> What is the average users response to such a warning? Heck, would you know > if there were a MITM?

It's the burden of the mail client to word the warning in such a way that it tells users what's happening without scaring them away. For example, I'd love if clients say something lighthearted in the warning message like "If you're at a coffee shop right now, please wait until you get home to check your mail; something phishy could be going on..." to give people an intuition of what they should do while encouraging them use their heads.

The reason why people trust PKI more than they should is because we teach them to click through scary certificate warnings. Thunderbird throws "UNTRUSTED CA" jargon at your users' face. They just want to check their mail, so before long, you've conditioned to treat the "Confirm security exception" button as a "Make my problem go away" button. It takes them to your inbox _without any visible consequences,_ so they think to themselves that the scary certificate warning must not have been a big deal.

Still, though, any warning is better than nothing. At least if someone's account gets stolen because they clicked through a PKI warning, they might have some idea when it happened.

Right now, Inky does not warn me if I add a NEW server with a self-signed SSL cert. If an attacker can be there right when I'm setting Inky up, I've just given him my password. (Read dmbaggett's security clarifications elsewhere in the thread though; it's not as bad as I originally thought it was)

<comment><USER14> Wow, thanks for the insight and the effort in the response!

> terminals and text-mode email all day, I appreciate being able to turn off > settings like "Convert dashes to unicode characters" and "Convert emoticons > to images as you type."

Emails are normally sent with a mime type of multipart/alternative with two subtypes of text/plain and text/html. Therefore, for your terminal using friend it would simply look at the text/plain version instead of the html version. Im sure you already know this, but what I am trying to illustrate here is that I believe that all of these details should be managed by the technology as in this case: the client which has a hard time displaying images etc should use the text/plain version.

> "Put new text below quoted text in replies (bottom-post)" setting.

This is interesting. I remember when I was in a corporate network I got about 300 emails/hour from one mailing list. Now, the client I was using then had a view that looked like a forum where you could see an email and its responses below and indented. When I wanted to follow a thread, having bottom posting was annoying because I'd have to scroll through the quote. On the other hand, If I were jumping between threads, then it was useful. I wonder if there might be a better approach which separated the quote from the response and allowed the client to display the quote when necessary.

Do you understand my line of thinking or am I entirely crazy? Are there any options that you feel cannot or should not be managed by the client? Do you believe in this idea that the client should do as much as possible?

As far as the security stuff, I'll try to break down my thinking.

Variables to account for: valid/invalid, same as known/different from known, self signed/trusted signer/untrusted signer/unsigned.

Errors in each variable mean different things and have a different chance to occur under normal conditions. For example, if the cert is plain invalid (e.g. the trusted signers signature is incorrect) this almost certainly indicates malice as opposed to the cert being different than what is currently known. This is opposed to having an untrusted signer or a self signed cert where it is possible (and almost likely) to have occurred either out of ignorance of the issuer or their simple denial to pay large sums of money for a valid cert. Furthermore, it isnt entirely uncommon for servers to switch their keys due to some security hole such as a problem in the key generation algorithm. Since the PKI provides no express way to state: this server is switching its keys, we simply take it on faith. You might think that this is unnecessary since we trust the signer, but CA's have been compromised before.

The problem of no visible consequences I feel is also mishandled. If you get the initial warning at a cafe and you click through and then later at home, you get a trusted signer different from what you had at the cafe, a warning should pop up that your information was probably stolen at the cafe so you can at least change your passwords.

There is a hidden problem here of dns hijacking. This is actually done commonly at "pay-for-your-wiki" places. They do not have the intention of stealing your information, but they will case security problems since they will pretend to be google.com or whomever else until you pay for the internet. I suppose that the browser should check the entity of the cert and if different from the requested entity, treat it as a redirect. This whole situation, however, requires more thought.

All in all, I feel like technology is burdening the user by trying to make the user understand the technology and not the situation. Sorry if I rambled too much, but what do you think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Going to give this a try... however it appears you do not have native exchange support?

I'm a bit skeptical of the UI though, so will need to give it a try. What looks good to a UI designer may not necessarily be a boon to my productivity. I.E. There is a lot of wasted screen real estate in the example image I see on the Home page, thus the info density of that email list is low.

Anyway - Ill give it a go and see what its like.

Will there be a mobile app to compliment? If I like the UX of this, maybe I'd want the same UX on my phone...

<comment> mike-cardwell Adding Exchange Web Services support to an email client for the sake of supporting one extra server seems like a lot of extra work for very little benefit. Especially when that server can be configured to allow IMAP connections like the rest of the World uses.

<comment><USER30> People still use IMAP?

<comment><USER4> How do you get your mail? HTTP? Telnet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Small nit: auto-discovery doesn't ask for your full name, so outbound emails headers will not include your name, which (in addition to looking woefully unprofessional) also is a spam trigger.

Fancy suggestion, related: since email@example.com seems to be a convention these days, consider automatically setting the user's full name during auto-discovery if it conforms to that syntax.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback. When you compose a message, if you don't have a full name set, Inky will suggest some options. We didn't prompt for full name during the on-boarding process simply to streamline things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nicely executed tour and feature set. I like! A couple suggestions:

1\. Some Gmail shortcut issues:

\- 'o' and <enter> should open a message if I'm scrolling the message list. They should expand or collapses a conversation if I'm in message view.

\- 'y' should not delete. It's a context-sensitive "remove from current view" in Gmail, which in message list mode means archive. In any context, it never means delete.

\- 'p' and 'n' should go to previous and next conversation when in message view.

\- Several others: [http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594)

2\. There's a slight disconnect between what I can do with keyboard shortcuts and mouse. The one that bothers me most is I can click in the right (message) or left (message list) panels, and the shortcuts will now be focused on that context (e.g. if focused on left, j/k scrolls the message list, but if focused on the right, j/k scrolls the message). However, there doesn't appear to be a way to switch focus between left and right using the keyboard; instead, it appears you must switch to full window message view to get the message view keyboard shortcuts to work, and switch back to side-by-side view to get the message list shortcuts to work.

Two ways to solve this:

\- Have a setting for whether opening messages goes full window or stays side- by-side. This way, when I press <enter> or <right>/<left> (or 'o' with Gmail shortcuts), the message list will stay to the left but the focus will switch to the right. This is what appears to happen when I click my mouse in the message area while still in side-by-side view.

\- Or, have a new keyboard shortcut to switch focus between message list and message focus. This way users can also process email in the side-by-side view (scroll message list, open message but stay in side-by-side mode, scroll message itself, jump back to message list, etc.). They can also continue to use the current method of opening messages to a full window.

3\. Might be tough to make cross-platform, but have a setting to register a global hot-key to bring Inky to the foreground (and minimize if active). This is one feature that makes it soooo easy to make a desktop program that I need to go in-and-out of often a regular go-to product (notes program, music player, desktop switching, etc).

<comment><USER2> Thanks; these are great suggestions. You can see all the keyboard shortcuts with F1. (We'll make ? work for this as well.)

The key bindings are all configurable (by us, for now, maybe by everyone eventually -- if anyone wants that). We'll work on improving them.

<comment><USER32> '?' works for me on Windows. Though please allow me to press escape or '?' again to hide the shortcuts. And switch focus to the popup and let me scroll it with j/k and up/down.

Another suggestion: 2 clicks for "Load Remote Images" is a bit annoying, particularly because on other email platforms it's one click, and I have a fair amount of senders where the "from" email address changes with each email, making it impossible to select load always. And for some senders I selectively decide to load images. The popup every time with text and settings is too heavy. Make this a single click link ("Load Remote Images"), and next to it add a gear icon with the drop-down settings and "Why is remote content risky?" info. If a user presses the "Load Remote Images" link, load the images and change that link to a label for the image loading settings gear, e.g. "Remote Image Settings"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The only features I need an email client to have is extreme speed and nice search. No desktop clients for mac have both right now. This isn't fast enough but i'll keep it installed and check for updates in a month.

<comment><USER34> I use mu [1] (via mu4e) on my Mac, and it's plenty fast and has great search. Admittedly, it doesn't look like Mail.app, but it works great.

[1] <http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Glad to see a DC-area startup get a mention here on HN! I had the pleasure of meeting Dave (Inky's CEO) at a Microsoft meeting not too long ago. He's a real smart and friendly guy. I wish him and Inky great success.

</comment><comment><USER36> Issues I noticed:

\- when creating inky account, typed in my desired login name, it said it was already taken, then changed to ok on its own.

\- notes view didn't recognize my notes taken with notepad on an ipad, and tagged with "Notes" in gmail.

\- wasn't clear how to enable the different views when you're not in the tutorial.

\- email threads don't include my responses, is that intentional?

Some other thoughts: Zimbra had some interesting ideas around deeper inspection of email, like looking up part number in inventory databases if they appeared in the email. They also allowed you to write plugins to parse and do interesting things with the email.

</comment><comment><USER37> Didn't work for me. Added account, and sent a welcome email, but I wasn't able to actually look at my inbox in the app. Loaded folder structure correctly, but no actual emails.

Looking for where I can delete my account.

<comment><USER38> I made an account, it worked okay, but it's just not as pretty or useful to me as the Win8 Mail app on my Desktop. Also looking for where to delete my account, but I can't find it...

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Please add PGP and S/MIME support to your TODO list. All the major desktop clients have support for both of these, either natively or via plugins.

You could even sync the encrypted keychain between installations.

<comment><USER39> +1 for that feature. I think that the niche for good-pgp-support email client is still not completely occupied. Only couple of programs/extensions are doing this job: 1\. Enigmail (thunderbird plug-in) 2\. Prolly Outlook 3\. Mailvelope (chrome extension, AFAIK)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I would like to see the source code for this.

It looks like JavaScript files are archived (maybe encrypted?) in binary files, resources.dat, f_0000a-f_00009, and maybe in data_0-data_3.

Anybody wants to take a look?

<comment><USER14> the f_0000x files are different resources, the first one is a PNG file, the next few appear to be javascript. None of them however are archived or encrypted in any format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Easy Sorting and Filtering

Inky's sorting and filtering is easy, requiring only two controls in comparison to the complex table layouts seen in other email clients._

And yet, the complex table layouts are nowhere _near_ sufficient for me, and I still get a couple hundred poorly-filtered emails daily. How does your two- control one handle a few thousand emails per day?

<comment><USER41> "How does your two-control one handle a few thousand emails per day?"

A few thousand emails per day?

You're sooooo the target demographic.

They'll be able to show you ads for products able to deal with the problem that getting thousands emails per day is ; )

Seriously: you're 0.000000000001% of the people using email and I don't think they should focus first on solving _your_ issues ; )

<comment><USER6> Probably not. Work at a small, software-based company and you end up dealing with lots of email, period. Server notifications, bug reports, user feedback, third-party service provider emails of all kinds, and all that happens before personal emails or ones between employees.

But, outside of that, my 5 accounts tend to get a few dozen per day, a handful more if I don't do any filtering. And they're specifically targeting people with multiple accounts. If this doesn't include work volumes, what does it include, and why do they have multiple accounts? It's not targeting the 99%, period, because it's not part of the OS or Office suite, so who are they targeting?

<comment><USER42> I've felt for a few years now that server notifications, bug reports, etc, should almost never go to email clients.

Sure you can use email to generate the ticket, but they need to go into a CRM / bug tracking system of some kind. Otherwise everyone ends up overwhelmed with meaningless repetitive emails, like it sounds is happening with you.

<comment><USER6> These are server notifications and bug reports that have gone through a couple bug tracking systems, and the new and/or exceptional exceptions generate emails. They (and I) could do better at filtering, and some tracking services are better than others, but it's one of those infinite time sinks that has generally not paid off beyond where I am now.

While great in theory, I haven't yet found a single bug tracker that provides reasonable deduplication that doesn't e.g. cause a new issue when the SLOC generating the error changes, just because you added a method to the class. Even allowing me to group two apparently-distinct bugs together manually would be an improvement, both for tracking history and severity, but I haven't found any. They're all too aggressive at grouping X, Y, and Z when they shouldn't, and make 20 piles of A. They are infinitely better than receiving an email for every single one, but still a headache, and they still generate too many false alarms to hook directly up to automated systems.

Then there's also that outright _failures_ that need to immediately be fixed, and semi-unexpected things like insane responses from Facebook, are all useful to track. _Unexpected_ rises in relatively normal Facebook errors can denote problems on either end, possibly fixable in some situations, while seeing a jump in quantity might imply something. If you don't track them continuously, you don't even know if it changes, so 'fixing' / suppressing them completely is hamstringing yourself. So ideally whatever I use would track fix-this-now and investigate-if-it-changes. I haven't found any that do.

Not that I've looked at too many, much less subjected them to large-enough workloads to be sure they're actually an improvement. Wiring up a new bug tracking and notification system (possibly from multiple sources and languages, and setting up paging when major problems happen, etc) is pretty non-trivial. But if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them, and might even try one or two out professionally this year :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can you port this to Metro? Would love to sitback on my couch and reading through all my emails on my Surface.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's urgently worth knowing that "for security reasons", the folks at Inky will refuse to "delete or deactivate your Inky account," even at your request. I find that completely and utterly unacceptable.

<comment><USER2> Hi Mike,

I replied via email to you as well, but it's worth stating the same publicly for the record, and so others know.

There are really two cases we need to handle here when a user wants to delete his/her account:

1) the user knows his/her Inky user id and password 2) the user doesn't know one or the other of these

In the first case, we can give users the ability to permanently delete their accounts by adding a control in the settings panel. We haven't done this yet, simply because it's dangerous, and we want to make sure we get it right (both in implementation and design) so users don't accidentally delete their accounts — or worse, introduce bugs where Inky corrupts our database and deletes or damages some else's account. We'll put this capability in at some point; we just haven't done it yet. (We were not really intending to launch yet; that sort of happened without our expecting it, because we got a bunch of press that we weren't looking for yet — which is good in some ways, but bad for things like this where we frankly aren't quite ready.)

The second case is trickier. If the user doesn't know his/her Inky user id or password, we have the security issue of needing to verify the person's identity when they ask us to delete the account. Ultimately we'd like to use two-factor authentication for this, but that costs money (for the associated text messages to/from the user's phone) and involves some implementation work as well.

In either case, we could try to manually modify our database and remove the user's account. But we don't have a process around this yet, and my worry is that it could potentially damage the database when someone makes a mistake.

What we're telling users now is that if you remove all your email accounts, you leave a shell Inky account that has no sensitive information left in. Our hope is that this is sufficient until we figure out the right long term solutions here. (Note, too, that we can't reset your account password if you forget it, because it's encrypted with your Inky login password, which, by design, we can't get access to.)

We know this isn't ideal, and we're going to work on fixing it. But we're really not trying to be nefarious here. In fact, unlike virtually all other companies offering consumer internet communications tools, we've made privacy and security one of our three primary principles — it's part of the "safe" in our "smart, simple, safe" motto.

EDIT: we'll make this a FAQ on our site as well.

<comment><USER44> This is not a good situation to place the user in, but, given that, this is the best answer I could've expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> They should add more info on email protocol support. It only says "Add Any Account", and mentions IMAP and POP. But it has a picture of an MSN Butterfly, is there deltasync or Exchange?

<comment><USER46> No Exchange support.

<comment><USER4> My school's exchange server also listens for IMAP connections. It worked fine for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is that UI supposed to be "Metro"? Because I don't care much for it.

</comment><comment><USER48> It looks awesome, and only by the screenshot I can tell it's way better than any other alternative for windows. I'll surely give it a try. Nevertheless, it's downloading at 10kb/s...

</comment><comment><USER30> Font rendering is horrible and I don't like lack of contrast.

You may have younger eyes than I do.

Example of what I mean: <http://i.imgur.com/DlsEy.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER49> Blurry as heck on my Retina screen. :(

Also freezes after I add my Gmail account, saying "Loading..."

I DEMAND A REFUND!!!!!!!!!111

I kid, I kid. I'm going to stick with Sparrow for now, but will revisit this in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER50> My two cents? I think this takes the "flat" aesthetic too far.

</comment><comment><USER51> How is this cloud-enabled? It just looks like an email client.

<comment><USER52> Based on their feature list, it stores your email addresses and passwords encrypted on their servers, with your inky account password being the decryption key. The idea being that you can just login to your inky account on any computer and it loads all your email accounts.

<comment><USER53> Not at all a fan of this. I guess it sets them up to do a web service later on, but it's seems a little aggressive and unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I just don't see the point of storing my email settings on your servers (even if encripted). I'd rather pay for an application that keeps everything on my device.

</comment><comment><USER55> No Linux support? Aww.

<comment><USER56> I know. Can we not get ONE email client for the desktop that isn't Thunderbird? I'd pay money for this if it was on any Linux distro.

Geary is the closest thing to date but I don't think it's production ready.

<comment><USER4> Do you like commandline mail programs? There are several good ones. Stringing them together is a lot like like clicking together lego blocks: one for downloading mail, another for editing new mail, another for sending mail, another for searching mail, ...

Takes a while to set up, but I'm far happier with my offlineimap+notmuch+emacs+msmtp mail stack than I could ever be with Thunderbird.

<comment><USER56> I was never able to stick with the terminal for email. The last time I tried though was with Pine in 2003 (ha) so maybe I'm due for a 2nd chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Tried to use it, but even if I type all IMAP and SMTP information, it did nothing after showing the "Inky is trying to discover your settings" message.

</comment><comment><USER58> Why would I switch to Inky from my current email client? I love the idea but I don't see the value. Good luck though!

</comment><comment><USER59> It's pretty good. Needs to be a bit more sleeker and designed nicer, but looking forward to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER60> The problem I have with desktop email clients now is the lack of rapportive and boomerang.

</comment><comment><USER61> Hmm, I have IMAP enabled and this isn't connecting to my Gmail. Any possible fixes?

</comment><comment><USER62> How does it store mail locally? standard Unix mboxes or some proprietary format?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't. This is a pure IMAP client; ignoring the cache, mails are not stored locally on your machine.

<comment><USER62> Obviously you don't ignore the cache.

<comment><USER63> If it's a minimal cache, though, you might as well.

This is probably the single main concern I have about this -- I've spent chunks of time away from home where I find an internet cafe, sync up email (send and collect new email), and go -- then take the time to read and write email later (while offline). This method would be pretty broken if long conversations were missing most of their history.

If the vast majority of my email is actually unavailable when I'm offline (or experience connection problems, etc.) that at last partly defeats the purpose of having a native email client at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> There is no download link if javascript is disabled on a User's browser.

</comment><comment><USER65> Mac client _really_ needs full screen support before I'll use it.

</comment><comment><USER66> Features are great, but looks a bit blurry in retina display.

</comment><comment><USER67> love playing with this on the desktop...any hope of an iOS client anytime soon?

</comment><comment><USER68> Where's the download link?

</comment><comment><USER69> this looks awesome - going to give it a whirl.

</comment><comment><USER70> I was going to try it out but they have no Linux version... sad

</comment><comment><USER71> This came out of nowhere and looks cool. What happened to <http://dotmailapp.com> by the way?

EDIT: WTF this is not Retina and when I hit Create Account, it freezes at "Inky is starting up" screen. I think app is not native, seems like it has a webview inside the application. I get Back&Forward options when I right click. LOL.</comment>


Fast Rendering; not Server Side Rendering - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/meteorhacks/fast-render

<comment><USER2> Are there ever clear downsides to fast rendering?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not much. If you ask it send a lot of data, then initial HTML will get too big.

Otherwise, it's a good approach.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

Also you are Sri Lankan right? My mom is Sri Lankan and grew up there, so I am always happy to see another Sri Lankan thriving!</comment></comment></comment>


Good Way to Learn Assembly Language - <AUTHOR> I am sure I am beating a dead horse but I see so many recommendations but sometimes it is hard to sift through them and get good info. I would like to learn assembly language and want to know where a good site or tutorial would be to start learning. I would like to learn assembly for linux and eventually windows as I want to start doing some programming with pi, etc... I started to learn C# and stopped at global variables, etc... but I think it would make me better to understand the under the hood mechanics of everything. I have not done any work in linux per se so I am not sure what assembly comes with it and eventually I would like to learn x86 and x64 and would eventually like to be able to reverse engineer products for my own education. Any help would be greatly appreciated as it seems there aren't many resources that I can find. <comment><USER2> I went the other way. I started programming in assembly for the 8080, Z80, and MSDOS.

When I hit later multi-user operating systems Like UNIX, Linux and Windows I discovered that I wasn't able to access the bare-metal like I was used-to previously.

That's when I started using slightly higher-level languages like C, etc.

My suggestion: Pick a fairly simple 8-bit CPU like the 8080/Z80 to start with. Find a CP/M emulator. CP/M has several different assemblers ranging from the simple ASM to a macro-assembler MAC to a relocatable macro-assembler M80.

You will find lots of small programs on the CP/M archive sites to pull apart, play with or re-write.

Then progress to 16-bit assembly under MSDOS. Once again, there are plenty of websites with ASM files to look at, analyse and rewrite.

After that, you should have a good idea yourself as where you should need to go next.

</comment><comment><USER3> Write a simple chess program. The rules are easy but require some thought. Displaying a board is easy but requires some thought. Writing an alpha-beta search is easy but requires some thought.

By the time you have a simple working chess program that couldn't beat a child you have learned everything you need to know about a programming language. You have to write an algorithm, handle input, handle fancy output, etc.

This is the first program I write whenever I start on a new programming language. I know WHAT I want to do, I just don't know HOW to do it in the new language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where should I start with assembly though? What programs should I be using? where do I find them? which ones are good and which ones are bad? I originally thought assembly language was just 1 or 2 different languages and as I research I am seeing otherwise. I just started reading a book I found called the beginners guide 4 reverse engineering if that helps to show where I am at so far.</comment></comment>


Yvolver Wants to Gamify Your Games - <AUTHOR> http://launchdfw.com/news/yvolver-wants-to-gamify-your-games/ <comment><USER2> "Coming Soon: Buying Games - The Game

Earn point by buying games! Why are you playing the game you just bought? Play me, the game about buying games. Buy another game! You should just start another game if you're going to buy stuff in it! You shouldn't play those games, it's a waste of time! They don't give you Buying_Games_the_Game_POINTS!"

I know it's an exaggeration but, as you can see, I'm not a fan of gamification.</comment>


IPhone 5S: How safe is your fingerprint with Touch ID? - <AUTHOR> http://scinotions.com/2013/09/according-to-apple-your-fingerprints-are-safe-with-touch-id-but-are-they-really/ <comment><USER2> This article doesn't really answer the question it poses. Unless there is some huge security flaw that cannot be fixed, this marks the beginning of mainstream fingerprint recognition. Other companies will quickly follow suit. Yes, fingerprint technology has been around for a while, but it's always been either an optional accessory or used in a niche case where heightened security was required. Apple's use of fingerprint as ID is new and groundbreaking in this context.

There; I've said more of substance than the author said in his whole article.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems like Apple has been clear about the security of your fingerprint on your iPhone. Could the NSA be hacking your phone and retrieving this information? Nothing is impossible, but probably not if Apple has done what they describe.

A lot of the paranoia on Reddit and even HN seems misplaced to me. Federal and state governments already have large fingerprint databases. Most of you probably don't even remember when the police visited your grade school and taught the class about finger printing. Guess that they were collecting. So it's possible but unlikely that the federal government will collect your fingerprint data. However, we KNOW that the federal government is widely collecting communication metadata. This information is a much greater threat to freedom than your fingerprint. Both datasets are identifying, but one reveals a lot of additional information - about your lifestyle, habits, politics, speech, ideas, etc. The fingerprint conveys none of these.

The government has lots of ways to identify you if they want to. Most of these methods of identification are MUCH easier to implement than fingerprints (communication metadata and patterns, face recognition, license plate tracking, etc.). In the end, making a cell phone call is more convenient but less secure than other types of communication, but we accept this trade-off. The trade-off for using a fingerprint to facilitate dozens of daily interactions with your phone seems possibly more favorable in terms of privacy.

<comment><USER4> I feel like the mention of the NSA and PRISM in this article is so tangential to the issue as to be misplaced. Why mention the NSA here when there's no evidence or reason to suppose that they'd want to mass-collect our fingerprint data specifically? I mean, I suppose anything that is sent over the internet might be intercepted and stored/analyzed by the government but it's getting to the point where NSA and PRISM are just popular buzz words adopted by anyone and everyone trying to make a name for themselves in the tech community ("check out my app that pokes fun at the NSA and PRISM issue", "5 reasons I will be protecting my data from NSA/PRISM").

I'm not saying there's no threat to privacy here just that there are a lot of reasons other than the NSA and PRISM that make data privacy important and that we should be focused on the larger issues.

<comment><USER5> I agree that the shoe-horning of NSA / GCHQ into every possible thread is tiresome.

But are you aware that US Government already collects and stores very many fingerprints?

Here's a 2008 Reuters article: ([http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us- security-finger...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security- fingerprints-idUSN2538685320080325))

> The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs > of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, > officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of > $1.7 billion.

> [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the > fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said.

> More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the > screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the > attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said.

They fingerprint vast numbers of people, and use "detection of criminals" as a reason, but don't seem to catch that many people.

See also DNA gathering - the UK has a huge horrible DNA database. It's easy to get on that database (be arrested) and hard to get taken off that database.

I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprints were being stored by some government agency somewhere. Not sure that'd be NSA, because there's not much they can do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article appears to contain very little substance, and basically just asks the question, asserts that "nothing is safe in the digital world", and provides no evidence or argumentation.

Don't get me wrong, I think fingerprint scanners are probably broken until proven otherwise, but this article does nothing to enlighten anyone...

</comment><comment><USER7> Just like with passwords, Apple probably keeps a salted hash of your fingerprint instead of the real deal.</comment>


The Great Filter: What the absence of alien life means for human survival - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGaD8XILWFc

<comment><USER2> i think you got this completely backwards</comment>


At what point during development of your startup is it ok to start losing sleep, friends, socializing?  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I've found that becoming more disconnected frees me from wasting time. In college, the time spent socializing can become a huge and excessive waste of time. Granted, I'm bombarded with "you have the rest of your f___ing life to work" (one of my professors pulled me aside and told me that), and the usual "you should make college the funnest time of your life!" (according to the hippy generation of people who probably just miss getting high during their youth and being rebelious)

Anyway, I consider what people tell me and then make my own decisions. I'm slowly disconnecting myself from my friends, and I don't see that as a bad thing. I see it as a way to focus my concentration entirely on my startups.

It depends on how much you value your friends versus how much you value your startup. You're going to marry one of them, so you'll need to figure that out at some point.

Some people say you can do both, but it's like getting married in my opinion. Once you get married, you can't keep hanging out with all your old friends like you always did. You're committed to someone (or your startup) from that point on, and unless you really put in the time and work at it, it probably won't work. I can think of very few things that work by just casually doing it on the side (ie Facebook). Even in that case, Zuckerberg is an entrepreneurial individual and had a strong interest in programming.

This is all coming from a college kid who has never been married, though. I speak not from experience, but from observation ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Change your idea into one your friends would be interested in. I'm socializing more now.

Start losing sleep tonight, then two days from now decide whether it was a good idea or not. It depends on you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Never. Think about what you are asking. The probability of anyone's startup succeeding is miniscule. And if doesn't succeed and you've sacrificed friends and who you are, what have you become? Miserable.

Don't let a business and money consume your life.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel like ive invested way too much time to slow down... But im actually out with friends at whiskeys in boston... First time in months. Getting hammmered... Wohooo

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You have to keep some balance, I think. Tone things down some, sure, but:

1) Your body needs sleep.

2) In the end, you'll probably just waste time you would have spent with friends here or somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER6> Generally, sooner the better. But here is the twist: if your startup is part of the social network bandwagon, you can't get THAT disconnected from friends and the outside world.</comment>


Grubhub stock halted after report Uber is eyeing a takeover - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/12/grubhub-stock-halted-after-report-uber-is-eyeing-a-takeover.html <comment><USER2> Uber's balance sheet, as of March 2020: "The company has said it has $10 billion in unrestricted cash and as much as $1.5 billion committed for mergers and acquisitions"

[https://www.pymnts.com/news/ridesharing/2020/uber-sees- cash-...](https://www.pymnts.com/news/ridesharing/2020/uber-sees-cash- position-as-downturn-defense/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is likely to be all-stock and I see headlines coming in now saying that as well.</comment></comment>


HN Not so much "Hacker News" anymore - <AUTHOR> I've read HN for several years and thought it was a good source for news regarding programming/developing/upstarts and general new technical stuff. I had a hard time to read all interesting articles that was linked to.
But now, most high rated articles are none of those areas. Usually there are one or two articles worth reading.
Top today for example are: Being homeless a struggle, even with a $100k job offer (seattletimes.com)
How cash is carried across Congo (economist.com)
The Human Hemisphere (radicalcartography.net)
China's Gold Army (bullionstar.com)
Guide to the Largest Ocean Carriers in the World (flexport.com)
etc.
Sure these articles could be fun to read. But then I rather find them in some other forum such as  reddit. But these articles has fairly little to do with "Hacker News" to me.
Just saying... <comment><USER2> I disagree with you. Look at this list of HN stories that are categorized as "best". Notice the date/timestamps of these. Many programming/tech related stuff posted recently

[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

also, hacker news is not intended to be only about tech or startups. It is about anything that good hackers find interesting.

I am very happy with how HN works overall. Can it improve ? Sure. But I wouldn't ditch it today for anything else. Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't "best" mostly mean the highest voted content? Just because there are more people voting today, doesn't mean the content is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I forgot what the guidelines were so looked them up:

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

"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic."

</comment><comment><USER5> IMHO, because of these articles, HackerNews becomes a community of smart, well-adjusted human beings - not just a bunch of geeks trying to consume the latest tech news - and this is the primary reason I stick around.

<comment><USER6> I agree. With many stories posted on hacker news, in particular economical ones, I first read the headline, then have a look at the comments, then the actual article. Usually the top commenters easily outsmart the original idea of the article and get fast to the bottom of the topic. It's very helpful context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a site somewhere that shows the front page of HN when you joined. You should try it.

HN has never been limited to tech news; that thing in the guidelines has been there for at least 7 years.

The political stuff is annoying, and I've started to flag it and I'm making more effort to not post in those threads.

But if anything HN doesn't need every single post from techcrunch / techradar / venturebeat / pando / etc, which tend to poorly duplicate each others content.

Your point would have been much stronger if the examples of articles you think don't belong here were bad, but those are all interesting.

<comment><USER8> A link to that service:

[http://bemmu.github.io/hncakeday/](http://bemmu.github.io/hncakeday/)

The day I joined (a while ago now) has a few stories about bees, home ownership, chili peppers, the Chinese central bank calling for a new reserve currency and how markets aren't failing.... 2008 I think.

<comment><USER9> I just used that tool, the date I joined (October 8, 2014) there was only one non-programming/tech related article which was at 22.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tend to agree (though I appreciate divergence from time to time).

The real value (for me) in HN (and Reddit) is the _discussion_ (as opposed to the articles themselves).

HN is somewhat unique in having a diverse and (usually highly) technologically literate user base, often generating interesting and thoughtful discussion on a range of tech related subjects.

The discussion on these OT posts is limited by comparison. Experiences and insights are replaced by speculation and conjecture.

I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but hopefully I'm getting my point across. I enjoy technology and business discussion from all skill/experience levels, including JavaScript noobs and emerging businesses. I can't really say the same for amateur discussion of general topics.

</comment><comment><USER11> HN has all kinds of stories, you just need a nice filter to use it. May be you need to use a different interface to HN. HN has APIs for some time. Even when it not had them, people have hacked up nice stuff like [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/), which I use regularly, for at least last one year if I remember right.

I find that on different days, I want to read different kind of stuff. And when you use a _trend preserving_ interface like hckrnews, you can review everything, since your last visit, and read the stuff you like - tech or non- tech.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can you or anyone give links to posts about tech or startups that you feel should have had a discussion on HN, but didn't?

We definitely don't want any of HN's classic themes to become under- represented. But (a) people have been posting complaints like this for many years (which doesn't mean that they're wrong, just that it's hard to tell) and (b) they often appear in response to a few days' fluctuation in content, which happens naturally from time to time. If we get a surge in good general- interest submissions and that coincides with a dearth of major tech news, the front page is going to look different—but not because HN has changed.

Sometimes when people say that tech stories are less represented on HN than they used to be, I look at other sites (e.g. Techmeme) to see if they're covering anything notable that HN has missed. The answer is typically no. If anyone has an idea for how we can answer this question more systematically I'd love to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER13> A quote from the Jargon file:

"Contrary to stereotype, hackers are not usually intellectually narrow; they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even interestingly on any number of obscure subjects -- if you can get them to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.

It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent."

While I agree that technology should remain the major focus of HN, I also find it important to keep up some diversity in the discussions. The most prominent character trait of a hacker is probably curiosity, and what kind of curiosity digs down into its little cubby hole and refuses to contemplate the world outside?

</comment><comment><USER14> I would prefer that stories which hit the mainstream news ( e.g. NYT and Washington Post) didn't appear. HN has most value for me when submitters dig- up interesting stories, on any topic, that Big News ignores or just doesn't see.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes, and HN is so much better because of it.

This is not "Startup News" anymore. I wouldn't read that.

<comment><USER16> It's not so much "Startup News" but new technology coverage and technical articles. "Startup News" sounds more like stuff you'd read at Tech Crunch which are more trendy and fruitless IMO compared with articles often found here on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had missed the homeless one, just opened to read! That looks really interesting.

I am really happy with the balance between tech and interesting stuff in HN. That's why I read it daily.

</comment><comment><USER18> There are guidelines for HN - the guiding light is "satisfies ones intellectual curiosity"

The link is at the bottom of the page.

The problem is ... Whose intellect?

</comment><comment><USER19> > Top today for example are: Being homeless a struggle, even with a $100k job > offer

Seems pretty on-topic for me.

> How cash is carried across Congo

Start-up ideas.

The other maybe not quite on topic, but interesting. Startups are not only about the tech-stack. The social side is very important too.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would say: HN is about technology startups. Technology startups use technology to change human context. To understand new developments there, you need reports about three things: Startups, technology and human context.

</comment><comment><USER20> As long as the political stuff stays out, especially the indirect stuff, I am fine with whats on the page provided it makes me think or gets me up to date in what is happening business wise.

</comment><comment><USER21> Complaints like this were quite regular on the good old "Hacker News" so I conclude that HN is still "Hacker News"

</comment><comment><USER22> I started reading HN because I thought I was joining a community of hackers -- technical people who were using their skills to make their way in the world. I came here specifically because of startups. At the time (HN was new), people who participated were supposed to be better-known by the YC folks and have a better chance of getting into YC.

Not only did I not get into YC, the conversation quickly became "stuff that hackers like". Folks got tired of marketing, business models, coding, and other detailed startup stuff. Startup stuff became less about "Hey, I'm doing X, how does Y work?" and more about celebrity bloggers. Then MSM posts, then the rags, and so forth.

Now it's like a reddit-lite. I'm not complaining, just pointing out that yes, there has been a big drift from where it started to where it is today.

And if anybody knows where the new HN is, please email me. Sure would be nice to hang out someplace like that.

<comment><USER7> Make it. Seriously, you could start with a private invite only sub-Reddit until you get enough users to move to your own site. Have you and a couple of trusted friends as mods and you can shape the culture. Seed it with stories and posts that you want to see.

Search HN for people who think there's not enough start up stuff here and invite them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> nergal, I totally understand your concerns... The question is that the meaning of a "hacker" in this community has changed. Now it is more of a positive than a negative word. As a person who reads "Hacker News" everyday, here I'm looking for everything that would be interesting for me as a human being, that will be original and out of the box. Here I read news about life hacking and that break the usual concepts, about discoveries in science, etc... Technical progress is changing everything so fast that now it is really easy for a normal guy like me to get into science and make some applications related to brain waves for example.

Despite from straying away from the literal meaning of the words "Hacker News" I think now this website is serving far higher goals. This also gives it great power and heavier responsibilities.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's the evolution of the community. When Reddit first started, it was mostly tech related; however, now it's filled with every conceivable topic you can imagine. I find HN to have much better comments than what you would find in Reddit.

<comment><USER25> Yet HN totally feels like Reddit recently (mostly the Ask HN topics)

<comment><USER7> What? Currently there's an announcement that an immigration lawyer is going to provide advice; this meta thread; a question about safety of contributing to privacy tools like tor; a question about stock options when leaving a company; a question about solving binary challenges in Capture the Flags; a question about recruitment tools used by start ups.

There is a question about books - there are enough questions about books that someone could generate small amounts of passive income by scraping all the threads and listing the books on a nice clean site with affiliate links.

Which questions on AskHN do you think should not be there? Which do you think are poor quality?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If those stories reach front page, that means the hackers of hacker news find the interesting and on topic. It's only like that because people up vote them. It's not hacker news you have a problem with, it's the "hackers"

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm fine with reading non-tech news. the problem is that hackernews doesn't have a category feature. so you see everything mixed together. but if it had a category/tag feature, it would be another reddit.

</comment><comment><USER28> Software is transforming so much of the world that a modern discussion about "hacking" almost has to include these items. Maybe there could be some kind of tagging / category feature

</comment><comment><USER29> The balance of people on HK shifted from entrepreneurs to wageslaves, so the content shifted accordingly. No offense to anybody, currently a wageslave myself.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you decide to resubscribe in the next 10 days, HN will take 40% off your subscription price! Just use coupon code "UNICORN" at checkout.

</comment><comment><USER31> This was never "Hacker News", but rather "Bay Area Nerds Drinking Too Much Startup Kool Aid".

The only thing that has decreased over time is the number of Lisp related submissions.</comment>


Show HN: Gitkit – Toolkit to build Git push workflows with Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sosedoff/gitkit <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone wondering what this is: it's tool to build flows like "git push to X". I've built a few internal tools that use this package, mostly for deployment purposes similar to Heroku (but based on Docker).

The toolkit consists of 2 pieces: the server (http/ssh based) and push receiver. The server component provides the git repository endpoint and permission handling, and the receiver piece allows to setup the logic flow, like what to do with the push and ability to read the push tree structure and run some commands against it.

I've created this package some time ago, but decided to post just now, maybe someone will find it useful.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> I've also created a bunch of work-flows using git repositories, and hooks - for example updating DNS via git repository pushes. So this looks like a nice project, but I see some open merge-requests and issues, and I wonder how active your project is?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few issues and PRs that i opened myself, but aside from that there weren't many contributions from other developers. I can't really say the project is under active development, but it's definitely useful enough, at lease for my use cases.</comment></comment></comment>


Rotating Metal Knot Reflecting a Panoramic Google Street View using HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.clicktorelease.com/code/streetViewReflectionMapping/#50.82391321550944,-0.13888517358395802

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if the title isn't the best it could be, I wasn't sure how to title this. Once you see it, you'll see it's a little hard to explain in a sentence. =)</comment>


SEC Intelligence Released Deal IQ - <AUTHOR> SEC Intelligence is pleased to announce the release of Deal IQ.  Deal IQ is enabling Law firms and other professionals to find contracts from SEC filings, therefore helping them in contract drafting and negotiation.
SEC Intelligence is making products that derive meaning from the unstructured content of the SEC filings.
For more info visit : http://www.secintelligence.com <comment><AUTHOR> Also helping in due diligence process within the context of Mergers & Acquisitions, by providing access to all the agreements that have been SEC filed for a company.</comment>