Microsoft made their own IE6-countdown site. - <AUTHOR> http://ie6countdown.com/ <comment><USER2> I think this is great, personally. The only things more I'd wish for from this site:

* It'd be great if it was more clear that Microsoft itself was behind the site (there's just one little logo at the bottom left).

* The home page seems targeted at developers. It'd be great if they had another page targeted specifically at end users spelling out in clear terms why a.) it's bad for them to still be using IE6 (e.g. throw some scary warnings about viruses in there) and b.) what they can do about it (e.g. upgrade or install an alternative browser if upgrade not possible.)

* Now that I think about it, they need another page like the one above but targeted at enterprises. Again, lay out in clear terms all the horrible reasons for using IE6 on the open Internet. Convince them to install alternative browsers on desktops for general browsing and to restrict the use of IE6 to only those specialized applications which absolutely require it.

My wish list is probably already three items too long, so I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.

<comment><USER3> When in doubt: whois ie6countdown.com (edit: I originally misread your comment as saying, "i don't believe it's Microsoft cause the small logo is unconvincing" -- sorry)

        Registrant:
            Microsoft Corporation
            Domain Administrator
            One Microsoft Way
            Redmond, WA 98052
            US
            Email: email@example.com

        Registrar Name....: CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.
        Registrar Whois...: whois.corporatedomains.com
        Registrar Homepage: www.cscprotectsbrands.com

        Domain Name: ie6countdown.com

          Created on..............: Fri, Aug 07, 2009
          Expires on..............: Tue, Aug 07, 2012
          Record last updated on..: Thu, Mar 03, 2011

        Administrative Contact:
          Microsoft Corporation
          Domain Administrator
          One Microsoft Way
          Redmond, WA 98052
          US
          Phone: +1.4258828080
          Email: firstname.lastname@example.com

        Technical Contact:
          Microsoft Corporation
          MSN Hostmaster
          One Microsoft Way
          Redmond, WA 98052
          US
          Phone: +1.4258828080
          Email: email@example.com

        DNS Servers:

        ns1.msft.net
        ns4.msft.net
        ns5.msft.net
        ns2.msft.net
        ns3.msft.net

<comment><USER4> They don't have ie7countdown or ie8countdown.

<comment><USER5> Or just iecountdown :)

<comment><USER6> Without IE, the only other big browsers out there would be Firefox and Chrome, the former largely and the latter wholly funded by Google.

<comment><USER7> Thats ok because after I code for Firefox or Chrome, my work is done and my employer and myself can get onto the next project. The cost and losses having to develop/support all IEs(maybe not 9) is enormous.

There should be a website where all coders go to detail how much extra time they had to spend to make their code work in IE and every six months the site sends Microsoft a bill for lost time & productivity!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was about to "like" the page, but the like button is for facebook.com/internetexplorer. Liking ie6countdown.com means you like Internet Explorer. That's the opposite effect from what I was expecting.

<comment><USER9> Joseph Heller's Guide to Marketing

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know the story behind IE6's huge presence in Asia (especially China)? Why haven't they upgraded? Is it because Windows XP is still very popular? If so, why? Also, is there a popular "native-land" browser, the way Xunlei is the most popular BitTorrent client in the world?

<comment><USER11> Piracy might be one of the reasons. But there is another possible reason - underpowered machines. Unlike the western world, owning a computer is still a luxury here (India). Most people are stuck with old machines where firefox and chrome are terribly slow.

I was expecting India to have a much higher share. But as statcounter's stats[1] suggests, chrome already has ~25% share. IE in general and IE6 in particular are losing market share drastically. This is a welcome trend.

[1] <http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-IN-monthly-201002-201102>

<comment><USER12> What is the Indian opinion of Opera? I've run Opera 9 on 200 MHz, 64 MB machines just fine, where Firefox wouldn't cut it.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if there is a uniform "indian opinion" on Opera

<comment><USER14> While you're at it, I need the phone number for Europe.

<comment><USER15> 555-387673

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This might just be me, but when I scan over a map, my automatic action is to hover my mouse over the countries I'm looking at (I do the same with my finger when I look at a physical map). If I do that here though, the map disappears.

I can't stop myself from doing it. It's driving me nuts.

<comment><USER17> It loads an image over it (which took a while, at least on my machine): <http://ie6countdown.com/images/030311-mapList.png>

<comment><USER16> Yes. Sorry, that's what I meant by disappear.

Would have preferred it if they found another way of presenting that list to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the page: _"As of February 2011, 12% of the world was using Internet Explorer 6, which was 9% lower than the previous year"_

They're using NetApps stats. IE6's share was 21 percent in February of 2010, according to those numbers. That means IE6 share has gone down 43 percent in the past year. I'm guessing the author doesn't know the difference between percentages and percentage points.

</comment><comment><USER19> And then for the irony:

 _Internet Explorer 9 is only available for Windows 7 and Vista. However, we still recommend you download the latest version of Internet Explorer for XP. Get it here:_

That's what I see when I click their "Download IE9" link. Looks like we'll get to go through this all again in a few years.

<comment><USER20> IE8 is going to be the IE6 of today, but way way way worse and for much longer. Talk about legacy code.

While IE6 has been a pain for 5 years, IE8 will be a pain for 15. We will see a HUGE portion of people not upgrading from WinXP.

Really our only solution there is to get them onto a new browser or convince them that this unsuspecting "Chrome Frame" plugin is the right thing to do.

We have to, really.

<comment><USER21> Why will a huge portion of people not upgrade from XP? It's been at long time since you could buy a computer with it preinstalled (unless you specifically ask for it). Hardware attrition, upgrade cycles, and hopefully the end of the global recession should clear out those machines.

Any computer that came with XP preinstalled that is still around 15 years later is going to be so slow that an outdated browser is going to be the least of its worries.

<comment><USER22> Not so long as you think… Microsoft licensed XP for free on netbooks to compete with Linux (netbooks cost maybe twice as much as a Windows license). Summer of 2009, I walked into a Verizon store and they were selling netbooks that, swear to God, had IE6 as the default browser. In 2009!

<comment> T-hawk XP installation packages, even updated through the last service pack (SP3), only ever came with IE6. You have to actively download and install IE 7 or 8. Not too surprising if the netbook vendors trying to compete on rock-bottom price didn't want to pay an installation monkey to do that. If you don't know what a browser version is, you're not a lost sale. If you do, you know you can easily upgrade it and you're still not a lost sale.

<comment><USER22> Is that a fact? I think I installed XP with IE7 straight off the disk once. Maybe it was slip-streamed. Hardly seems like a lot of work for the netbook OEMs to create a slipstreamed install with IE7/8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A good number of people in the tech world hate MS, at least partially, and IE6 has been one of the influential reasons for this hatred. Till date, a lot of people avoid IE like the plague and even the modern IE browsers have suffered because of the tarnished brand image. People need to understand that IE6 is a decade old browser and heck it was a good browser for its time. People not moving away from the browser has been a bigger cause of pain than MS itself. This is a good initiative by Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm guessing there's a high correlation between people running non-legit copies of Windows and IE 6 users.

<comment><USER25> Why do you think so?

<comment><USER24> "Genuine advantage" often breaks updates on any non-legit copy of Windows. Updates to IE usually come through Windows Update.

Non-legit Windows is in 2nd place and has larger market share than all other non-MS OS's, per this:

[http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Compe...](http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple)

<comment><USER25> Last time I checked, "Genuine advantage" validation was not required for installing newer IE, as well as critical updates. It was, for a time, but then Microsoft let installing never versions of IE regardless of Genuine advantage.

The linked article doesn't provide any evidence for correlation of pirated Windows and outdated Windows(or IE).

<comment><USER26> True, but pirated Windows does not allows you to update automatically, and does not updates IE for you. Now, one can always download newer IE from Microsoft's website and manually install it, but chances of that happening are low.

<comment><USER27> It does, last time I checked. It does not allow you to run Windows Update manually, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> While it's a very good thing MS is endorsing this, they are very incongruent. They continuosly state that they love the web, that IE9 will deliver a more beautiful web and all that stuff.

But here we are. We have a 10-year old browser that still has a huge 12% global usage. Ok, that was a huge error, the good thing it's that MS is actually doing something, but are they learning from the past? I think they don't.

What will IE9 look like in 5 years? I think it will likely be just like IE6-- holding back the web. A little less, but still, barely support for basic CSS3 declarations, struggling with HTML5, no offline web applications, with no history.pushState support, using still old web forms and much more.

IE6 was great for its time. We have learned a lot from it, but the one thing everyone gets is that no matter how good you make it, it will get old. That's the real problem, there's no an easy way to upgrade those users or give them an alternative for their needs (like a standalone version for corporative software crapiness). And IE9 is heading in the same direction.

<comment><USER29> Before we get to being stuck on IE9, first we're going to have to survive being stuck on IE8 - the last version of IE supported in XP.

One of the reasons for being stuck on IE6 is that it's the last IE supported by Windows 2000 (and there are plenty of Windows 2000 workstations still out there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Aha! ie7countdown.com and ie8countdown.com are still available!

<comment><USER31> Not anymore. Someone registered 7, 8 and even 9.

<comment><USER32> ie11countdown.com is still available though :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I blame customers for poor adoption, not developers. Its obvious that MSFT would prefer all of their customers update to the newest versions of their software.

<comment><USER34> Whilst I broadly agree with you, MSFT locking XP out of IE9 would evidence some of the blame being shiftable back to them.

<comment><USER35> Microsoft producing new software for Windows XP is like Apple doing the same for OS9.

<comment><USER36> Windows XP is the most popular OS in the world. 41% market share. OS 9 is a rounding error.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)

<comment><USER35> There are a few possible reasons for Microsoft to put IE9 on Windows XP that I can imagine. The first ones that come to mind (all hypothetical, incidentally): (1) it would, somehow, earn them money, (2) they have contractual obligations to do it, or (3) they get their giggles from updating a decade-old operating system.

1 seems unlikely. 2 also seems unlikely, since if they had a legal obligation to put IE9 on XP, they would probably be putting IE9 on XP. 3 seems deeply implausible.

I suggest that the largest group of people who care about this is not users or companies but web developers. If this is true, then Microsoft has no motive to put IE9 on Windows XP, and plenty of motives not to.

<comment><USER37> >"[...]a few possible reasons for Microsoft to put IE9 on Windows XP that I can imagine."

How about demonstrating that they care about UX of current users. They care about good internet experience and they care that their users don't have to use someone else's free software to still have a vaguely secure and usable internet experience. Or simply just as an opportunity to showcase MS's improvements to their apps and demonstrate the great benefits (ahem) to updating to newer versions of other apps. It could also be a ready advertising opportunity in many countries, have the homepage fixed to an MS page with upgrade offers and info if you're on a legacy OS version. Lastly as a way to softarm Bing as being the default search engine of millions of business users.

Why not design it to work on XP, OSX and Linux from the off? The other browser makers seem to manage it. Perhaps they secretly feel they can't contend in the browser space?

<comment><USER38> IE9 was built from the ground up to use technologies like DirectWrite, GPU Accel. etc. Porting all these to XP would not be trivial. I guess MS wants to nudge people off that platform so that software can start using new technologies instead of getting stuck in 2001.

Anyway, they supported it till IE8 and MS has one of the best track records for backward compatibility(if not the best) in the industry. Just see Apple to see how quickly things are deprecated.

I am sure developing IE is an enormous cost since MS has to be careful about not breaking corporate software. The benefit to them by making it for OS X and Linux would be negligible or even negative (how many would even install it? Most run those OSes because they don't like MS).

<comment><USER37> >" _IE9 was built from the ground up to use technologies like DirectWrite, GPU Accel. etc. Porting all these to XP would not be trivial._ "

Indeed, hence why I asked why not design it to work (even in a limited form) with other platforms from the off. I realise going backwards now is not really possible what I was questioning was the original decision.

>I am sure developing IE is an enormous cost since MS has to be careful about not breaking corporate software.

Couldn't they plug in the past DLLs as other apps do so as to render as if it were IE6 under XP(SP2) or whatever?

\--

OT :you say "Most run those OSes because they don't like MS". Do you think this is true? I'd have thought the majority run OSX for [perceived] usability or possibly lifestyle reasons and maybe Linux for price reasons. Personally I run Linux based on a mixture of ease of usability and price. Despite being vehemently against MSIE (due to time served web developing) I thought MSIE8 was quite good and should it be available for my distro I'd give it a trial despite being pretty entrenched with FF. It's not really me that I'd see them marketing too though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's funny if you have scripts turned off. Apparently, 100% of the world was using IE6 in Feb 2011, which is 9% lower than the previous year.

Nonetheless, very good to see Microsoft doing stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope Microsoft has learned lessons from how difficult it has been to get people to stop using IE6. Mainly, they need to make it easier to upgrade IE.

IE needs to be a standalone application that can be upgraded easily without the risk of breaking everything.

<comment><USER41> They need to learn a lesson about wantonly pushing proprietary technology when perfectly fine standardized solutions already exist. I suspect they haven't learned anything though.

I was going to write something about hoping those developers choke on a bucket of something but decided better of it. ;-) I'm a little pissed after years of fighting with web sites that require Internet Explorer because the developers were retards and used some proprietary MSIE shit.

<comment><USER27> >They need to learn a lesson about wantonly pushing proprietary technology when perfectly fine standardized solutions already exist. I suspect they haven't learned anything though.

I think they did learn. Keep in mind that back in IE4/5 era when most of that stuff was created, they were competing against Netscape 4.

<comment><USER42> If they did learn anything, it has been a slow process. The <canvas> tag for example, was introduced in Safari 1.3 and has been supported in Firefox since 1.5, Opera since version 9, and in all versions of Chrome. Contrast that with IE. The <canvas> tag is not supported by IE until version 9. If you want to do any cool <canvas> graphics in versions before 9, you'll have to use something like ExplorerCanvas at <http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/>, which of course mean more conditional IE comments in you HTML, and more pain for web developers.

<comment><USER27> That is because they didn't catch up that far until version 9.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's very confusing and unobvious what the percentages are percents _of_ : the country's percentage of total IE6 users, or the IE6 users' percentage of the country? Based on the fact that they add to >100%, I guess that the per country numbers you get when you hover the map are % of that country still using IE6.

But then what are the percents on the ring/pie chart to the side? They don't add to 100%, so they're not percentages of the pie (total IE6 users). But China's percentage there (5.9) doesn't match its percentage in the map (34.5). So, 5.9% of what?

This is a terrible infographic.

<comment><USER44> I agree that it's a bad graphic. I think this is what the numbers mean:

On map: percentage of people in that country that use IE6. If there were 300 million people in USA, and 30 million people use IE6 means 10% would show up for USA

On ring: percentage of the world population that uses IE6. If the world population was 6 billion, and 30 million people in USA use IE6, then 0.5% would show up in the ring on the right. It would be better if the ring were bigger, and made to show the 88% of the world that doesn't use IE6 as a gray color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Forget about IE6, countdown to IE7 instead. Still craps up alot of CSS, forcing designers like me to hack around, use graphics instead of CSS, both or create a sub-experience to a large audience.

<comment><USER46> You could just change the start of the HTML snippet from <!--[if lt IE 7]> to <!--[if lt IE 8]>

Then IE7 users will also get the banner ("You are using an outdated browser...")

<comment><USER47> Unless IE8 is running in IE7 compatibility mode, something you as a web developer can not always control, in which case you have just confused a user or made it look like you don't understand what you are doing (his site says I should run IE8 and I already do, isn't he thick!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Some errors:

\- Turkey is purple on the map, despite being within the 1-5% (blue) bracket.

\- According to the map, Finland has 0.7% IE6 users, but according to the list you get when you hover over the map, it has 0.9%

That aside, it puzzles me that the numbers in East Asia are that high. South Korea and Japan are both wealthy countries with a large number of Internet users. Even if we exclude North America and Western Europe, Eastern Europe does far better, for instance, than South Korea and Japan.

<comment><USER49> IE market share in general is higher in East Asia, for a few reasons:

1) In the case of S. Korea, until recently ActiveX was required to do any internet banking (required by law, iirc). 2) Trident is the only major rendering engine that supports vertical text. This is not a big deal for Western users, but might be for East Asia.

I can't speak to the relative market share of IE6 inside the IE slice of the usage pie, though....

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> MS really don't help themselves though. My company won't upgrade from IE7 because they are worried about breaking a legacy,critical web-app. If MS could build a feature into IE9 that allowed you to specify a white-list of URLs/domains (set by AD group policy) that always used the IE6/IE7/IE9 renderer/js engine for the tab it was opened in - boom corporates could start upgrading. It's also holding back adoption of Windows 7.

<comment><USER51> That exists, it's called 'Compatibility Mode'. And by default (at least in IE8, at my current client's deployment) it uses it for all Intranet Sites. You can also use meta-tag 'X-UA-Compatible' to force a certain compatibility ([http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc288325\(v=vs.85\).aspx))

EDIT: Apparently the best you can do for IE6 is to 'emulate IE5,' which actually means 'emulate IE7 quirks mode'. Oh well...

<comment><USER50> Compatability mode doesn't support ie6, and I believe its only for the renderer, not the JavaScript engine.

<comment><USER27> It is for the JavaScript engine too: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/s4esdbwz(v=VS.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/s4esdbwz\(v=VS.85\).aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> new slogan: Only Communists use IE6

<comment><USER53> That would only resonate with Americans, and according to the site already the usage is below 3% so it's pointless.

Plus this kind of slogan implies something along the lines of "Chinese people are evil communists".

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Interesting... if you get rid of China and S. Korea, IE6 is probably less then 5%. I think IE6 is close to becoming a footnote. With IE9 not supporting XP, I'd love to see MS recommend FF4 or Chrome for XP users, although frankly I don't think it would matter... if you're still on XP a modern web browser is the last thing on your mind.

<comment><USER55> "If you're still on XP a modern web browser is the last thing on your mind."

I call BS. Tons of people are still on XP and see no reason to switch. Both corporate and non-corporate alike. XP was selling new licenses at least through last summer (last time I purchased brand new, name brand computers with XP pre-installed.) Those actually counted as Win7 sales from M$ perspective, though.

<comment><USER54> If you're using an OS that is a 10 year old walking security nightmare, I have trouble believing that you also are thinking, "I want to use the modern web". It's like being in the midst of being mugged and wondering, "did I have 3 square meals today?" Sure eating well is important, but using an outdated insecure OS really should be top of mind.

And if you bought XP last summer... well that was your call. XP was acceptable in 2002. It's 2011.

<comment><USER48> Come on, have you even used XP since 2002? It is not a "security nightmare" if used (or set up) by someone with a minimal amount of knowledge about computer security. These days, with Microsoft's free Security Essentials package, virtually everyone has a decent security package, for example.

<comment><USER54> Virus protection is just one vector.

WinXP doesn't have several of the security features in newer versions of Windows. And even those it does have aren't as good. Such as buffer overflow protection was updated in Win7, but not since XPSP2 for XP.

It's fundamentally less secure top to bottom. Which is why there is exist many vulnerabilities that exist on XP, but not Win7.

UPDATE: For a concrete example, see [http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2009/03/20/enhanced-g...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2009/03/20/enhanced- gs-in-visual-studio-2010.aspx) \-- added as a result of [http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS07-017....](http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS07-017.mspx) . There are a plethora of these sorts of things that architecturally make Win7 different than XP when it comes to security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Disclaimer: My experiences are based on the current german web landscape, so I don't know if this is true for other countries.

I don't include IE6 anymore in my web pages. If it works, ok, if not, well... too bad. In the last year, no customer ever really wanted to have an IE6 site.

The Problem with a site like this from Microsoft is, it is not the normal household PC which is still running IE6. There might be a few, but that number should be close to zero. It is the big companies, who are not switching to a newer version, because they have special software programmed for IE6 with funny activeX elements and big domain stuff behind so they can't simply flip the switch, and if it works, why should they upgrade? They don't want to throw a whole bunch of money at this problem. Thats sad, but you can't do anything about it...

</comment><comment><USER57> There's an ultimate deadline on dropping IE6 of April 8th, 2014. That's when XP, and consequently IE6, fall out of support. Continuing to support sites for browsers that aren't receiving security updates is actively harmful to users and should be avoided wherever possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> Fun, but I'd prefer if it were simply "iecountdown.com".

</comment><comment><USER58> Sadly, 99% of our clients (pharma-sector) are on IE6 due to corporate policy...

</comment><comment><USER59> It would be great if they start the initiatives to take IE7 IE8 and IE9 off the world and scrap any plans to have IE10.

Hopefully Google Chrome and Firefox will kill IE10 in the womb itself.

</comment><comment><USER60> One of my friends who is a designer, completely sick of IE6, puts this Javascript on every site he develops: <http://ie6update.com/>

Click: _Click here to see a demo!_

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Recently I finished a CSS book, maybe 500 pages long. About 80 or so pages were dedicated to "and to get this to work in IE6, you have to do this hack." IE7 maybe had 10 pages, and IE8/Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera were merely footnotes sprinkled about.

</comment><comment><USER61> Chinese hackers love IE 6. This would be my guess as to why IE 6 has a higher count there then anywhere else. I don't say this out of spite, our site just uses an exception notification system that floods my inbox with tons of bogus requests from china. They can't all be proxy servers and have a user agent indication IE 6. Just a thought, not meant to be negative...

</comment><comment><USER62> Nobody seems to have asked this yet: where is the data coming from? I find it hard to believe U.S. is at 2.9% IE6 usage, for instance.

<comment><USER63> It says right there on the page: www.netapplications.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> If anyone wants to do something with it, microsoftcountdown.com is available...

edit: it's no longer available.

</comment><comment><USER65> They should retire IE7 too.

</comment><comment><USER66> IE6 is not Netscape Navigator 4.

We'll still have to code for it at least through 2012.

Come January 2013 though, all bets are off.

Then we'll have the IE7/IE8 bugs until 2020 (thanks Microsoft!)

</comment><comment><USER67> Hopefully the notion of developing for IE6 compatibility will soon be as laughable as that of designing for Netscape compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER68> "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6"!! (who thought that Microsoft would say this one day)

</comment><comment><USER69> Wondering why the site's in English.

<comment><USER70> What language do you think the default should be for a .com site?

<comment><USER37> The default for Microsoft's .com sites should probably be the user set browser language. If not the default then a prominent "change to $language" dropdown with the sniffed browser lang as a list-top shortcut.

<comment><USER70> That makes sense! I wish the down voters would have specified that rather than down-voting an honest question:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The only people who visit this page are probably already on a different browser.

</comment><comment><USER72> who chose those colors? unknown & 1-5 % are practically the same, out of order and make it next to impossible to glance over the map without reading the numbers.

<comment><USER73> i agree the green color is in between them. The color should be in a gradient proportional to the percentage, and unknown obviously does not fit on that scale. It should be off the gradient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> It says the target is to bring it down to less than 1% worldwide.

What happens to the remaining ones?

<comment><USER75> Who cares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> The most important insight: unless you are targeting Asia (namely China and Korea,) you can pretty much dump IE6 support as Facebook and Google have done. The US number is under 3%. I'd like to see a breakdown of that 3%, but I'd guess it's mostly public schools and stodgy companies.

</comment><comment><USER77> #1 Yay

#2 Korea and China are only heavy (>5%) ie6 users. Whewh I don't support those languages anyways so YAY DEATH TO IE6.</comment>


Clementine: modern music player and library organizer - <AUTHOR> https://www.clementine-player.org/en <comment><USER2> Clementine: all the good bits from Amarok before it began to degenerate.

I love it just for the indexed metadata searching of my local library... I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast.

While listening to music, it usually give me ideas about further music I want to listen to... The playlist in right pane and search-instant filtered library in the left one is exactly the interface that suits that.

Also, the context panes with lyrics and band's Wikipedia page automatically loaded during play are nice.

<comment><USER3> > I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast.

foobar2000?

<comment><USER4> foobar is only for windows..

<comment><USER3> It runs perfectly fine in wine, I am doing this for years.

<comment><USER5> I've done the same, on OS X yet, and had no trouble.

Unfortunately, fb2k ended up being unsuitable for my purposes for other reasons - namely, that it can't handle self-signed TLS certificates, and probably never will be able to because the developer doesn't care about that use case. I still use it at home, but for remote streaming I've found Subsonic to be an amazingly effective solution, not least thanks to the excellent iSub app.

<comment><USER6> Supporting self-signed certs is typically done by ignoring cert chain and trust issues which is a major component of TLS.

A better option is for you to explicitly trust the authority that signed the cert.

<comment><USER5> Well, yes, I'm not completely ignorant of how TLS works, so that was of course my first thought on discovering fb2k lacked any interface by which I could tell it to trust my server cert. That's why, in the process of investigating the issue, I added the root CA cert I'd created, and used to sign the server cert, to the Windows certificate store.

That was enough to stop applications using the Windows TLS stack, such as Internet Explorer, from complaining any longer about being unable to verify the certificate. It didn't change anything about fb2k's behavior, though, which led me to surmise that fb2k was doing something wonky in its TLS implementation.

On the other hand, there's a forum thread from late last year [1] in which the fb2k developer appears to have addressed the issue at least in part, by making it possible to whitelist hosts and thus bypass certificate validity checking. That's...hardly ideal, but it would probably have solved my problem, if it existed four years ago when I last tried to get this working.

The same thread includes more information on the same kind of problem I was having; from it I can surmise that if I'd created an empty CRL and had my root CA cert point to it, I probably would've been able to get it working. Would've been nice to know _that_ four years ago, too. But it looks like I'd have needed to hook the process with a debugger and monitor system calls to find out about it, and I wanted to listen to music more than I wanted to use unfamiliar tools to debug unfamiliar API calls made by an opaque binary blob.

In any case, if I'd gotten fb2k working four years ago, I probably wouldn't have been motivated to keep hunting for a solution until I found Subsonic, which serves my remote-streaming purposes better than fb2k ever will. So however frustrating it was at the time, it's been all to the good in the long run.

[1] [https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,110065.0.html](https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,110065.0.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In terms of library management, I think Beets is pretty hard to beat! I also like the UNIX philosophy, which this seems to violate. I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming, along with the ability to combine with other sources (e.g. Amazon, Pandora) The closest to this I've seen is mopidy-beets, but it is now unmaintained and doesn't seem to have the ability to manage playlists from multiple sources.

<comment><USER8> Seconded. There's nothing that even comes close to Beets in terms of metadata management. Thanks to MusicBrainz, not only does it get metadata right most of the time, it keeps it right by syncing from MusicBrainz to the tags when you tell it to (mbsync).

Plus it'll (reliably) find and embed album art and do transcodes if you want it to.

> I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming

Beets + MadSonic [0] blows everything else out of the water for me. I use DSub on Android and the web UI on desktop (although JamStash and Polysonic are good too).

This doesn't meet your "combine with other sources" requirement though. For that you'd need Tomahawk (which supports Beets and Amazon but not Pandora) [1].

[0]: [http://madsonic.org](http://madsonic.org)

[1]: [https://www.tomahawk-player.org](https://www.tomahawk-player.org)

And EDIT: You can actually use Clementine with Beets through Subsonic/Madsonic as well.

<comment><USER9> I tried DSub the other day as an alternative to the standard Subsonic player on Android since it can play podcasts. I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor …

I like Tomahawk so far for the "other sources" part (also I find the UI easy on the eyes compared to … just about anything else out there), but of course I can't get it to stream from my Subsonic collection :-/

Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?)

<comment><USER8> > I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of > my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so > caveat emptor …

That's really odd. Perhaps it was precaching extra tracks? I haven't had any issues with it, certainly not 1.5GB of data (although I have unlimited so likely wouldn't notice anyway).

> Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with > Tomahawk?)

I found that regular Subsonic just wasn't moving much at all. Madsonic seemed to have active development.

I haven't tried regular Subsonic with Tomahawk but Madsonic certainly works for me. I also hooked it into a Beets server without any issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like Clementine as a streaming music player and use it quite extensively for playing and discovering Digitally Imported's streams without having to browse through the site. I really like DI's downtempo station for work, and I like that Clementine is cross-platform so I can use the same player on my work and home systems. Kudos to the team for having such a broad and deep selection of streaming providers integrated into it.

My one complaint is that the music library paradigm in Clementine doesn't feel cohesive, so unfortunately it is relegated to streaming music for me. I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering. This is even (or especially) true for streaming stations, in order to try a new one out it must be added to a playlist. If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library.

<comment><USER11> It seems super likely that you don't want to click on each track as the prior one finishes so a queue is needed.

It would seem then that playing directly from the library would be functionally identifical to adding everything you click on to a transitory playlist.

In fact you can more or less use it like this with a single playlist that you either clear or just keep adding to.

Seems like that would work better if there was an option to start with a blank playlist or trim the playlist automatically so that only the last x tracks were shown.

What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist.

<comment><USER10> >What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist.

I don't like having a transitory playlist, I find it to be cluttering. It should play the next track in the library (or shuffle). If I make a playlist, it's to group similar music together.

I would like to be able to double-click on a track in my library and then tune out again until I don't like the music it's playing, rather than managing an interim playlist and having to intentionally add the album I want to listen to into it.

<comment><USER12> I love the "playlists" though I rarely save them. In my preferences I have double clicking from the library add to a new playlist. Usually I just double click a whole album, it immediately starts playing in a new playlist and I can shuffle it or loop it as I see fit. That one song on the album I don't like? I just right click and "remove from playlist", now I don't hear it. Sometimes I'll search for a keyword or artist and select all now I have a playlist with everything that artist worked on. Maybe if I've been adding and removing stuff from the queue and I like the way it's feeling I'll save it for later, or just leave its tab there for a couple months till I'm bored with it. I always keep a "dynamic" playlist tab open for when I just want a shuffle across my whole library. If I see something coming up I don't want to hear I just delete it (or reshuffle the whole thing which doesn't affect the currently playing song).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This UI is horrible IMO. Open Source projects could really start to embrace UX designers instead of 100% programmers. A slice of orange has a slider...really? :P

<comment><USER14> Arguably, Clementine is a counterexample to your argument.

Many years ago, the Amarok music player was very popular on Linux; I used it extensively, as did many people I know, even though none of us used KDE (the desktop environment on which it was built).

Then, the Amarok developers decided to revamp the project for version 2; using newer technologies, removing bit-rotten code (apparently, due to the large userbase, there were many "drive-by patches" from one-time contributors, who were never heard from again) and, most significantly, completely rethinking the UI.

If you dig around a little, you can find a lot of documents following this process, e.g. from the (now defunct) Amarok blog [https://amarok.kde.org/blog](https://amarok.kde.org/blog)

The result? The snazzy, powerful new music player known as Amarok 2 [https://amarok.kde.org](https://amarok.kde.org)

Yet, a huge number (most?) users abandoned it, the Amarok 1 codebase was forked and renamed to Clementine, and years later this "horrible" music player is still going strong; so much that it appears on the front page of Hacker News.

Personally, I tried Amarok 2 for a while, but never really liked it. These days I use cmus ( [https://cmus.github.io](https://cmus.github.io) ) but my non-technical partner prefers Clementine. The only problem we've had with it is trying to use a RaspberryPi as a file server; building the player's database over a networked filesystem is painfully slow. It would be nice if there were some way to create the DB on the RaspberryPi and send it over to the machine running Clementine; but I've since been looking into Beets and MPD.

<comment><USER15> I used Amarok 2 for a while, but I was outraged by its ridiculously high memory usage (nearly 100 MiB for a library of ~3000 songs at the time). I moved to MPD shortly after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've gone through every music program on linux (including Celementine) and found the only one possessing sanity across the board to be QuodLibet [1]. Everything is simple, customizable and no behavior is forced on the user. I used to use rhythmbox before it was dumbed down for Gnome 3's sake.

[1]: [https://quodlibet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](https://quodlibet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER17> When I ended up back on Windows for work related reasons a few years back I tried a ludicrous amount of music players.

Not much was better than Winamp, even after all these years, until I found MusicBee. Nothing else comes close. Clementine was OK, but clunky.

When I replace the laptop, at some point this year, and go back to a Mac, I have no idea what I'll use for music. It won't be itunes. I need an OSX Musicbee port!

</comment><comment><USER18> The "features" section on right of homepage says: "Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player"

The [Github Page]([https://github.com/clementine- player/Clementine/wiki/Portabl...](https://github.com/clementine- player/Clementine/wiki/Portable-Devices#introduction)) says "iOS (iPod touch, iPhone & iPad)" is unsupported.

Is there any programmatic interface to write tunes to my iPhone and also atleast read (metadata) and delete songs off my iPhone?

<comment><USER19> Because it's a proprietary undocumented interface we are limited to reverse engineering, but efforts do exist: [https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/MobileDevice_Library](https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/MobileDevice_Library)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The most irritating thing about Clementine (I assume its the same for other players too), aside from its visual ugliness, is that if you play song from Spotify you can't scrub, just play and pause.

Other than that it's still probably the best GUI music manager/player on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER21> I still haven't found a suitable MusicBee [0] alternative for Linux. It's the only thing preventing me from switching. [0]: [http://getmusicbee.com/](http://getmusicbee.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> How is performance these days? Last time I tried it, the app felt quite sluggish.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me or is there no way to delete all your playlists all at once?

<comment><USER24> playlist -> clear all, something like that

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, that option is not there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ctrl-F "Match" No results found.

Still not usable, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER26> Pity, no support for Google Music.

</comment><comment><USER27> I will happily continue using iTunes over anything that uses a slice of citrus as the volume slider.

<comment><USER28> ..and I will happily not use iTunes at all. A music player unable to play FLAC (a free codec) that was released 14 years ago.

A nice operating system with a bad media player.

<comment><USER5> Not only a bad media player, but one which the OS ties so tightly to the keyboard's media control functions that there seems no reliable way of prying them loose.

Not my biggest OS X annoyance, but easily in the top five.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is Apple sticking with AT&T? - <AUTHOR>

It seems as though the exclusive arrangement with AT&T has been holding back sales of iPhone and with the news that it's now limiting new features it's somewhat shocking that Apple isn't opening the doors to other carriers.<p>Assuming that Apple isn't stupid, why have they stuck to the exclusivity agreement? <comment><USER2> To reach the biggest worldwide market, Apple has to stick with GSM. SIM cards make it easy to take your iPhone anywhere in the world, and embracing a standard like GSM makes it easy to sell to customers in Europe, Asia, and South America.

If Apple left AT&T for Verizon or Sprint (leaving AT&T for T-Mobile would be a step backwards as far as networks go), they'd have to retool the iPhone for CDMA, and lock themselves into a market only used by a dozen or so countries. The alternative would be to have separate CDMA and GSM versions of the iPhone and iPad, or world versions with both CDMA and GSM, which would increase cost.

As much as it pains iPhone lovers everywhere, AT&T makes the most sense for now

<comment><USER3> Even if they didn't want to make CDMA version, they could still release it for TMobile AND AT&T, there's no reason they have to only be on one carrier in the USA.

<comment><USER2> If you allow two carriers to sell your phone, they are eventually going to compete on price, driving the price (and profit) down.

If Apple allowed both T-Mobile and AT&T to sell the iPhone for $199, people would make the comparison and see that AT&T has the better network (as scary as that sounds). T-Mobile would have to compete, and since it would cost billions to improve their network, their only real option is to sell the iPhone cheaper than the competition. so they offer the iPhone for $149. AT&T responds by lowering their price to $99 to compete with T-Mobile, and so on, and so on.

By restricting the iPhone to one carrier, Apple only has to compete with itself (when it releases a new version).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _holding back sales of iPhone_ When has apple ever been about selling huge numbers of anything? Apple has always been about selling a small number of very expensive things. They stick with AT&T because it is the most profitable per unit sold thing to do.

 _now limiting new features_ Apple has never been about selling great features, unless there was a compelling look at me scenario (just look at the history of graphics cards on Macs.)

</comment><comment><USER5> probably because there's profit in exclusivity.</comment>


German FITZ 'running bike' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/08/would-you-ride-a-pedal-less-fliz-running-bike.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This only makes me wish (industrial) "designers" were required to take more mechanics/biomechanics classes. Or, at the very least, iterate a few times before deeming their design worthy of public purview.</comment>


Ask HN: Underwater cell phones? - <AUTHOR>

I've been spending a lot of time swimming lately, at least three hours per day. Unfortunately as of today I can no longer be inaccessible to the outside world for so long, and need to find a way for important calls/txts (mostly txts) to catch my attention when I'm swimming laps. I was thinking some sort of a bluetooth device, but I'm not sure the distance would work, since I'm both underwater most of the time, and at random points along a 50-ft pool.<p>Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2034585,00.asp>

Looks like an underwater phone, but no bluetooth. I think your problem is not with technology, but setting reasonable expectations for accessibility. You could let people know that you can't be reached for the next few hours when you start your swim. Alternatively, you can stop and check your phone every half hour or so, and let people know that you can't respond right away, but you'll check messages regularly.</comment>


Ask HN: Comparing IoT (Internet of Things) cloud services offerings - <AUTHOR> I'm a bit surprised that searching HN I didn't find any thread on this. I'm starting my own list of services and related details and prices around what's known as "cloud services for the Internet of Things" or in other words services for enabling devices to exchange messages with some secure/managed cloud storage, collecting information, preparing dashboards for such data, managing deployment and access right to devices. Anyone already done or in progress on this? Think of Amazon AWS IoT to name the most evident. <comment><USER2> There are lists like this, but they are quickly getting out of date. The most recent entrant is Google Cloud Core IoT service.

Every major cloud (Axure,AWS, GCP, Bluemix) has managed IoT service now + many niche or IoT-specific ones, like GE Prefix.

AWS IoT is the best for now, but it may change in the future.</comment>


Ask HN: Your Amazon Glacier strategy with versioning and de-duplication on *nix? - <AUTHOR>

Command line, or GUI (preferred).
Something that just sits in the background, monitors change and keeps backing up the change (while taking care of the de-duplication).
What do you use? (I know Arq which I believe has been covered more than once here)
And how do you use it? What is your backup frequency? How do keep the cost minimal? Is it too frequent, or seldom - as in few snapshots a week?
Have you every had to restore? If yes, could you find a way to minimise the price of retrieval?
I've around 700GB of personal data that I just want to be sitting there in Glacier for the worst case scenario.
(PS. Yes, I've looked at Tarsnap and it doesn't work for me). <comment> java-man Might this work for you? [http://goryachev.com/products/secure- archive](http://goryachev.com/products/secure-archive)

Also, what was wrong with Tarsnap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Even though it doesn't seem to have de-duplication I'll have a look at it. Also it shows thumbnails and all that means it will do constant fetches which is very costly in Glacier iirc or iiuc.

Why not Tarsnap? Tbh I don't have a concrete reason except that I am not comfortable with it - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809397).

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Just out of curiosity, why does Tarsnap not work for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not a geek, nor some uber nerd. Tarsnap seems to be designed exactly for them. I once asked about a GUI of Tarsnap in one of the threads on HN few months ago and the very mention was heavily downvoted. So, I just think I don't fit in the _fan-circle_ and honestly I am fine w/o it.

Another reason is price. I will put a good amount of data there lying unused for a long period so the extra dollars shall count a lot and since I'm searching for a client that would have de-duplication that one benefit would be settled too (as I've heard Tarsnap has de-dup).</comment></comment>


Physics wonder boy to test Einstein theories - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/09/physics.nima/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

<comment><USER2> He's in his 30s; young but not exactly a "boy...."

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I were smart enough to understand theoretical physics but this article reminded me of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.

It seems that string theory is coming along just nicely - it's mind boggling to think that the world consists of 11 dimensions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, well, I guess it's about as good as I'd expect from a CNN article attempting to talk about relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory. Which is to say: all over the place, without any substance whatsoever. PR piece for CERN maybe?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm .. is it really accurate to say he is testing "Einstein's theories"?

<comment><USER6> No, not really.

Well, not in any useful sense. Not any more than you test Einstein's theories every day when you get up in the morning and find yourself getting pulled down by gravity.</comment></comment>


The Netflix Tech Blog: Introducing Lipstick on A(pache) Pig - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/06/introducing-lipstick-on-apache-pig.html <comment><USER2> This seems cool. But I'm still confused whether or not the name is insulting.</comment>


T.S. Eliot's day job at Lloyd's Bank - <AUTHOR> http://therumpus.net/2012/01/a-peaceful-but-very-interesting-pursuit/

<comment><USER2> Someone should write a book just about the day jobs (and sources of income generally) of famous people. It's hard to imagine an aspect of history that's more overlooked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently when Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize, one of his colleagues at the insurance firm said "What – Wally a poet?"

<http://www.kevinstevens.net/writings/wallacestevens.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would perhaps not infer too much about Tom Eliot's feelings towards his day job from a few letters to a worried mother an ocean away and a polite resignation letter. Even Eliot's letter to Ezra Pound, which expresses quite a different view of his work at the bank ("Of course I want to leave the Bank..."), must be read with some suspicion because of Pound's, shall we say, _strong_ opinions about banking and finance.

I would be surprised, actually, if no dissertations have in fact been written on this topic. The Pound connection alone makes that unlikely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any dissertations presumably would lack this material, because Eliot's letters are only just being published. That's what's behind the OP and a good many recent posts about the renascent Eliot.

It's astonishing that Eliot's letters are only being published now (and then only a small, early fraction of them). The reason appears to be that his second wife, who was much younger than he, is still alive and exercising tight control of his legacy.

Pound's mentorship of Eliot is well known, of course. What Pound doesn't mention in the letter where he praises The Waste Land as the poem of the century is that he himself had edited it practically to the point of co- authorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without PacBell, Scott Adams would never have given proper birth the Dilbert or The PHB. He said that he kept that job long after the success of the comic book just for the source material. He was particularly amused when somebody from a comic (who was being made fun of) would ask him to autograph their particular strip.

OK, different league. But same sentiment.

</comment><comment><USER5> > we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance

No he did not. He was a corporate vice president of two large insurance companies. The man was no Ned Ryerson.

The writer of this article needs to call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one.

<comment><USER6> Did he start as a vice president?

<comment><USER3> He started as a lawyer to an insurance company. To say that he "sold insurance" is a bit of poetic license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article butchered the very first line:

Even after he published, Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank.

<comment><AUTHOR> They've since fixed it. There's also this solecism: "nobody wants to think about the poet [...] pouring over actuarial tables". Though it's true I don't want to think of my favorite poets destroying perfectly good actuarial tables by pouring over them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: We just launched our new realtime photo widgets - <AUTHOR> http://skylines.io

<comment><AUTHOR> We just launched our new realtime photo widgets, enabling anybody to embed live pictures on their site, together with a new site. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback! (I'm the co-founder of Skylines).

</comment><comment><USER2> sorry if it's a naive question, but... what's the use-case for this?</comment>


Ask HN: Which books have helped you to become a better Lead Developer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I learned so much about structure and organization from [https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-XML-Schema-Charles- Goldfar...](https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-XML-Schema-Charles-Goldfarb- ebook/dp/B0095VVQTE/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=xml+schema&qid=1595646905&sr=8-1)

I learned the value of utility from Nicomachean Ethics in that it establishes a value hierarchy starting from the fragment: _that which exists for its own sake_.

I liked this book for establishing ethics as the basis for rapid growth in business: [https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies- Others/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies- Others/dp/0066620996/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=good+to+great&qid=1595647219&sprefix=good+to+great&sr=8-1)

A lot of people struggle with CSS. It's not hard but it take some solid practice to master. This is the best book: [https://www.amazon.com/CSS-Pocket- Reference-Visual-Presentat...](https://www.amazon.com/CSS-Pocket-Reference- Visual- Presentation/dp/1492033391/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=css+pocket+reference&qid=1595647349&sr=8-1)

Honesty is important. Brutal honesty forces changes to culture and everybody wins. It forces you to act with ethics for the welfare of the group: [https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray- Dalio/dp/150...](https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray- Dalio/dp/1501124021/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=principles+by+ray+dalio&qid=1595647457&sprefix=princi&sr=8-1)

Fear of innovation is a form of hecklers veto, more so when popularity or a majority is threatened. Originality, even when wrong, is always more important: On Liberty.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anything by Tom DeMarco, particularly "Slack" and "Peopleware". They changed my views on how to set people up for success in the workplace and how to manage my own time</comment>


Spam is back - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/2498/spam-is-back <comment><USER3> Ironically, the problem of spam has created another weird problem. I'm not sure what's the right kind of thing to describe them, so I'll call them the ambulance chasers of the email world. But that doesn't sound right. Some kind of leech, patent troll, and mafia rolled into one?

Last week, one of my organization's user email accounts was hacked. It started getting used to send out spam. We caught it pretty quickly and updated the password so that the spammers couldn't use it anymore. But it was too late, we got listed on several spam blacklists. As such, all emails from our mail server started going into recipient mailbox spam folders. OK, we just get ourselves off of the spam blacklists, right?

Most of the spam blacklists gave us one of two options. First option was to manually request removal, some of them required sending an email to confirm what had happened and why we're confident the problem didn't exist anymore. Easy. Second option was to wait as their service monitored our email services to confirm if we were still sending out spam. If after a few days they confirmed that the spammy behaviour had stopped, we'd be automatically removed from their blacklist. Annoying wait, but reasonable methodology.

Then the annoying ones. One spam blacklist would not remove us for a week, though we could expedite the process by paying them $106 USD. Otherwise, we have a week of going into people's spam folders. It's a friggin racket. Dare I say even extortion? The other annoying spam blacklist said that we could not get removed from their list because we were on several other spam blacklists, including the blacklists that required us to wait a few days for them to monitor our email behaviour, AND the spam blacklist that wanted us to wait a week if we didn't pay $106 USD. So we're on one spam blacklist for a week due to not willing to pay extortion fees, and on the other spam blacklist for a week because they're too meta to develop their own spam blacklisting mechanisms and just follow what other blacklists are doing. The meta blacklist annoys me more than the extortioner. Why are they checking whether we're on other spam blacklists? They should be depending purely on their own capability to identify spammers, not the capability of other organizations. Why do they even exist? There's no value added by being meta here.

It really annoys me.

<comment><USER4> Just like DDoS attacks are forcing websites to hide behind a small number of major services like Cloudflare, spam is forcing email users to consolidate into a small number of well-known platforms like Gmail and Outlook. It's just too much hassle otherwise.

But unlike in the case of a website using Cloudflare's DDoS protection to fend off attacks, someone who gives up running their own mail server and signs up for Gmail isn't doing so in order to get any direct benefit from Gmail's spam filter. (Open-source spam filters have gotten good enough that they often do just as good a job as Gmail, if not better.) It's almost entirely because of the insane hassle of dealing with third-party blacklists as you said. Google and Microsoft should give them a medal or something.

Many of the blacklist operators are highly moralistic, too. You'd think they were on some sort of holy crusade against the ultimate evil. Of course you are partly at fault for e.g. not enforcing strict password policies on your users, but a small percentage of users are going to get hacked no matter what. I wish the blacklists would redirect at least 10% of their moral outrage at the danger of centralization that they're so willingly facilitating.

<comment><USER5> For many on shared hosting with Cpanel, spamassasin isn't good enough, I don't want to even deal with spam, much of it needs to just go to a black hole

<comment><USER4> That's an issue with shared hosting and cPanel. Most of those servers are configured so terribly that they'll probably mark their own outgoing email as spam if they set up their spam filter any stricter.

I don't like black holes, they're impossible to debug when something goes wrong. All email should be either rejected at the SMTP level or delivered to a mailbox (even if it's the spam folder) so there's a clear indication of what happened to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That constantly animated squiggly line is surprisingly annoying.

Please: do not animate things like that. Animation can be good when triggered by user interactions, to signify state transitions, but simple gratuitous animations can be quite annoying.

<comment><USER7> I liked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the flipside, junk calls provide more opportunities to deploy "Lenny": [https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

<comment><USER9> I've never once been able to successfully deploy Lenny (or other equivalents such as the Jolly Roger Telephone Company) against a spam call. The calls are always from a recording, not a person, and after I put them through to Lenny (which is an annoyingly long process on an Android phone -- press add call, unlock phone, select Lenny, hit "call", wait, hit "merge", then mute myself) they always just hang up pretty quickly. Anyone have any idea if there's some way I could be using it better? Press a key to get through to a person, maybe, and then deploy Lenny?

<comment><USER10> This. I get a bunch of robo calls that appear to be for no purpose - there is no way to get a human on the other end of the phone (they just disconnect when you express interest in what they are selling). It's almost like the call itself is a scam, but not on me - like the call centers that offer this service are getting paid to make the call and not the conversion, so they dial my number and play a recording but have no facility to do more than that. Super frustrating.

<comment><USER11> They could also be checking to see if a human answers so they can sell your number or target you later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You know why spam is back? Because it works! I didn't get my head around this until late when I started my own company. Mass contacting people is one of the easiest and successful ways. Of course, if you have the time and resources to do targeted marketing it's better, but what happens when you don't and you are an engineer who sees one or two opportunities to mass contact people?

<comment><USER13> Perhaps we should spam people asking them to ignore spam, until it stops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The robocalls I get are so poorly done that I wonder if they even make money. I tried chatting them up a bit after being transferred to a real person and they have no sales skills. That's if you can even talk to a real person...the transfer often fails.

<comment><USER15> The robocalls are dirt cheap. Even the people aren't that costly. You only need a few suckers.

<comment><USER14> Really, though, they don't even try. I played the sucker really hard. They never got to the part where they ask for money. I think there's a large amount of amateurs just flushing money down the drain because it's cheap and they have no idea what they are doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Spam never went away. I've had good success flagging calls using Hiya app. Most carriers have partnered with Hiya to provide a free version of the app in the App Store. AT&T's is called Call Protect.

</comment><comment><USER17> My life was awful until I started blocking numbers on my phone.

But the "spam is dead" message is totally misleading. Email spam is still pretty much alive and well. Try running an email server yourself or even publishing an address handled by Mailgun online.

Or, if you want some laughs, look at [https://spa.mnesty.com/](https://spa.mnesty.com/)

<comment><USER18> Perhaps a better way of stating the thesis is that spam felt like a largely solved problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thoughts on nomorobo? Ive been thinking of signing up.

The spam calls are ridiculous. I have to keep do not disturb on 24/7, but some have caught on that they can call twice in a row to get through.

<comment><USER20> The problem with blocking numbers in bulk is that phone numbers are recycled all the time.

If you block 500 numbers and then you apply for a job and the person who wants to call you back about the job just got a new prepaid phone, you might be blocking their number.

<comment><USER21> If your potential employer is using a burner phone you might have worse problems than robocalls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Phew, I thought they were talking about email spam coming back. This article is a bit clickbaity, and sorta tricks you into continuing to read until you figure out it's talking about social media, telephone, and SMS spam (by giving examples of people making progress against email spam, talking about email spam being a thing of the past).

As a small email system operator, I have seen spam fluctuate greatly. In my case it accounts for around 99% of connections, and 95% of successful connections (valid reverse dns, working STARTTLS), but today it only accounted for about 10% of successful connections. Miraculously, I have seen penny stock spam in 2017.

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently got a call about my student loan debt, which I have zero. The script these people follow is incredibly terrible. I played along with the person asking questions, "oh, so which student loan, with what bank?"

"chase?" no, "wells fargo?", no, "bank of america?" no and then the person hung up on me.

<comment><USER24> I think you need to consult this matter to lawyers or law firms. I just read an article that talks about similar fake debt collectors problem at [https://www.lemberglaw.com/monitronics-tcpa-lawsuit- settleme...](https://www.lemberglaw.com/monitronics-tcpa-lawsuit-settlement/). There are so many complaints about them in these past few weeks. Hope this helps.

</comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron I don't really know if spam ever left, for it to be 'back'.

Though I do want to make a comment on the advertising in this site - I really, really like it. They're big graphics for those Macallan Rare Cask ads, but they are designed nicely and aren't "in your face", even though they are extremely prominent.

I like this.

</comment><comment><USER25> There is also a new form of spam in 2017 (and even before), that's the notifications that we get from apps on our mobile phones. Does every app ask our permission before pushing notifications (for example at night when you try to sleep) ?

And every other website asking to push notifications on the desktop ?

And every Messenger bot ?

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been getting spam google calendar invites. It's insanely annoying - <USER2> idea how to stop it.

<comment><USER27> [https://www.labnol.org/internet/prevent-google-calendar- spam...](https://www.labnol.org/internet/prevent-google-calendar-spam- inserting-new-events/2900/)

<comment><USER26> Not a great solution tbh. I do want to see events I haven't responded to in almost all circumstances - colleagues etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised no one here is talking solutions. The fundamental problem is someone can connect to me and I have no way to trace it back to an organization who I can charge/sue.

The first step is to start adopting standards that aren't free either in cost or in compute. For email, this could be as simple as requiring proof of work before accepting an email. For private telcos requiring the ability to charge the company connecting to my number would solve most of these problems too. I'd love spam if I had the equivalent of an 80's era 976 number.

<comment><USER29> The solution is to not allow connections from unknown numbers, that is numbers which are not in my contacts. You can do other things like add CAPTCHAs, etc but really if I don't know you, I probably don't want to hear from you, in any capacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't press the space bar to page down on this article. I am using Chrome on a Macbook.

:-(

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a longform ad for a book.</comment>


Product Hunt – Golden Kitty Awards - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/golden-kitty-awards-2018#lifehack <comment><USER2> How does one vote for maker of the year?</comment>


We Cannot Let the Government Decide What Is True - <AUTHOR> https://dontsteponsnek.com/2016/12/13/we-cannot-let-the-government-decide-what-is-true/ <comment><USER2> Done. You're welcome.

Next imaginary problem?</comment>


Ask HN: New Years Resolution(s)? - <AUTHOR> I want to know what your resolutions are for 2009. I know these lists are bullshit most of the time, but what's the harm?
I'll start first:
- Get Healthier (not just losing weight, but eating better and drinking less soda/sugar drinks)
- Learn how to use Photoshop
- Read more Marketing/Business/Entrepreneurship books that I tend to push off/forget about (the pile under my desk)
- Start blogging...(again)
- Start coding again + learn a new language (I'm thinking Python)
- Make a full time income online and move out (currently making a part-time income)
- Get onto the HN leader board (long shot)
I have more but I want to keep the list short and knock off one at a time. What's on your list? <comment><USER4> I don't do new years resolutions, and it has been my policy since I was a kid.

My rationale: if you want to change your life or do something, don't procrastinate - start right then. Putting an arbitrary date on things you want to do never made sense to me. You just have to write it down and then follow through.

<comment><USER5> So you've inspired my New Years Resolution - no more New Years Resolutions. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two things come to mind:

1\. Reach profitability with tarsnap. (This shouldn't be hard... I'm almost there already.)

2\. Be a better friend to my friends. (This will hopefully be easier once resolution #1 is achieved, due to lower stress levels.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I plan to

1\. Be able to jog for 10 kilometers

2\. Make a video that reaches 500.000 views on YouTube

3\. Release at least one more app that brings in $2000 or more a month

Modest goals are easier to reach, and a goal that cannot be measured is no goal.

<comment><USER8> Your first goal is a great one. The third may be also. But the second one? It's impossible to determine how good a video is based on the views it receives. The masses generally _don't_ like the top-notch high-quality videos, they like bland-and-generic above everything.

When I was 13, I got together a group of friends and released a video on Newgrounds that hit 100,000 views - quite a lot back then! The video itself was terrible, though: the fact that more people have seen that than anything else I've done online is not exactly a fun thought for me. And when you look at other popular videos, very rarely are they really smart, clever things. At best they're "cool." You don't have many instances of people creating something thoughtful and enlightening and getting half a million views.

While measuring goals is a great thing, possibly figure out how to make a more useful goal for the video. Possibly even just "make X videos." The more you make, the more you'll learn about making them, and the better you'll end up with.

<comment><USER7> The point of the video is the page views. One of my philosophies is this - <USER2> don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart?

If my goal is to create an intellectually stimulating video, then I would work on that. While that is a worthy goal, it's different from trying to create a video that has a lot of hits. I'd actually say that for the average user on this site, considering that most of us have university degrees, it would be much harder to create something that appeals to a person who only has a very basic education than it would be to create something that would be appreciated by people that went through the same educational system that we did.

It's great to be smart, but that does not mean you should insulate yourself from the human condition. It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures.

If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think.

<comment><USER8> _I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart?_

They're better because they're lucky enough to be born with greater faculty for comprehension. I understand you not wanting to appeal _exclusively_ to bright people, but don't make the mistake of putting down bright people because they've got something going for them.

And you missed my point. You can't go out and easily devise something that will get lots of page views. To quote Roger Ebert, a person in a funny hat is not funny unless they don't know it's a funny hat. Look at the big YouTube "indie" successes and you'll see the the biggest ones are usually entirely unintentionally up there. The laughing baby. The kid playing Canon in D on his guitar. Yeah, they're great videos. But you can't put up a video expecting it to reach a certain threshold. And if you make videos specifically to meet said threshold, you're fighting against greater odds than if you just go out trying to better yourself as a filmmaker.

The point I was trying to make, more succinctly, is this. You can't rely on quantity. If and when you get that many views, it will be entirely by accident on your part. The only thing you _can_ control in your videos is quality. And, incidentally, quality means a better chance at getting quantitative views.

Quality isn't about "pleasing smart people." It's about bettering yourself through mastering the skills required to make a film. You can go out and make shoddy film after shoddy film and eventually hit a lucky break, or you can go out and try to make your movies as _good_ as possible, and when you get your break it'll be more deserved and, for that matter, attract a better crowd. (When I made my big Harry Potter redub, I got IMs from "fans" for a long, long time. I still do, on occasion. It's incredibly annoying because none of them have anything more to say than "make another one just like that last one," and I've given up on the scene entirely. Later works I've done have attracted much brighter, interesting people, and that's a reward unto itself.)

 _It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures._

There is intelligence in simplicity. And not all simplicity is good simplicity, either. Don't let that let you think that there's no such thing as quality. There's eating a piece of fruit as opposed to eating a gourmet meal, and there's replacing the gourmet meal with a Big Mac. Both simpler, but with one there's something significantly lost.

 _If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think._

You're only ever going to understand your own mind to any significant degree. If you become popular, you most likely won't know exactly how you do. If you _do_ understand it, then you'll derive from the experience either a knowledge of a gimmick - "These people love me acting stupid, let's do it again" - <USER3> you'll understand it because you're creating a quality experience. It's why the best way of making a good movie is to adhere to your own standards and to focus on making, plain and simple, good movies. Any other way is riskier and will eventually demean you. Quality, on the other hand, always has an audience.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your points, but your points depend on the context. If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films.

The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film.

Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike.

To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not.

<comment><USER8> _If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films._

I prefer Beckett and I've lost my top hat, but I'll argue back as to quality. "Enjoyment" is subjective, "quality" is not. To take humor as an example: a fart joke is extremely generic, requires no thinking, and therefore can be utilized by anybody equally. For most people older than 15, this means fart jokes lose their value in humor. It's not that a fart isn't funny, it's just that it's old and it's been used again and again. Compare this to the opening of _The Metamorphosis_ , in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find he has become a giant beetle. Yeah, there's an artistic point to be made about him losing his soul and humanity, but MUCH more obviously, here's a guy who's just turned into a bug. The first we hear of him, he's a bug. That's hilarious! It would be less funny if it suddenly became a comedic gag used by everybody, but as it stands it's rare and it's clever. Fart jokes _can_ be clever, but most of them aren't. And, for the record, most surfer dudes are a lot more sophisticated than they get stereotyped as.

 _The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film._

No, the problem is that people assume that another person's opinion matters. _Fact_ does - some humor can be argued very formally - but that's not the same as a title meaning anything. I like HBO shows because they allow more freedom to the creators, but I think that Fox's Arrested Development beats the pants off Curb Your Enthusiasm, despite (and _because_ of, in this case) censors, shorter episode lengths, and more restrictions on content. The Arrested Development DVD set contains an episode that's longer, more risque, and with censors removed, and it's less funny. So HBO's format wouldn't work for the show.

 _Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike._

Of course. Real intellectuals don't do that. Roger Ebert doesn't do that with movies. Harold Bloom doesn't do that with books. (Bloom does insult lots of books - he hates Harry Potter - but his arguments are based on logic. While I like Harry Potter, his scathing criticism made me think much more about my liking it. I was suddenly more critical and judgmental, and just happened to find it wanting. Bloom dislikes postmodernism, though, despite its artsy airs.) However, what you're doing is responding by saying there are no standards at all, and that's just as heinous as saying that there are predefined standards in given genres. The proper response is to _develop your own taste_. That doesn't mean disregarding taste entirely. It means deciding for yourself what's good and what isn't.

 _To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not._

Au contraire! (Sorry, by the way: you picked humor and music as your two arguments, and those are two things that I spend a lot of time delving into, and I've already got a lot of these arguments rounded out in my head. Hope you don't mind.) Country music is defined by simplicity: the melody is simple, the instrumentation is simple. The lyrics - simple. Jazz music, meanwhile, is inherently complex. It requires a lot of skill on part of the musicians. I've played the flute for over 8 years, and I'm still mediocre at jazz improvisation. Meanwhile, jazz also deals with very complex tempos and melodies. As a result, it's got much more range in style - musicians have got a lot more to work with, and they produce more fascinating pieces.

I'm not at all a jazz fan, it's not my style of music, but at the same time I can intellectually acknowledge what's going on, and I like listening to certain jazz artists a lot. I've yet to find a country musician that really does interesting, nongeneric things. I like a few _folk_ artists: Bob Dylan does some interesting stuff with his instrumentation, and he's got an incredibly unique sound; Sufjan Stevens takes folk and minimalism and creates some beautiful orchestrations. I don't have any country artists I can say the same about.

The people who listen to country almost all to a T are less diverse in their music than jazz listeners. This isn't because listening to jazz makes you smart. Some jazz fans are pretty stupid about their music. At the same time, though, if you like music for _music's_ sake, and you give everything a chance, you find that certain genres have much more to offer than others. Jazz is one of the most unique in that it shares few elements with any other style of music. Country, on the other hand, is the opposite: it deals with the bare essentials of music style, and so elements of country appear in rock and even in some strands of orchestral music. A local band, Fountains of Wayne (they had the hit Stacy's Mom), has a few songs that borrow heavily from country. When I'm in the mood for that sound, I go to them, because there's nothing that "pure" country has to offer that I can't get from their few songs. There might be more to country than I think, and if so I'd have to judge that other music on its own merits, but at the same time, your assuming they're equal intellectually is hardly right. In fact, I'd counterpoint you by saying that your saying everything is equal is _just as much an instance of fencing things out as assigning arbitrary values without thinking,_ because you're not giving each item a chance to make its case.

The intellectual box is very often full of shit, because not all intellectuals think. What I ask is that you don't deny the value of intelligence just because some morons try to fake it. At the same time, don't deny the value of quality to yourself. If you do, you will find that you will churn out items of much lower quality than you are capable of, and the only people that flock to you are the people who agree with you that quality doesn't exist. Then you'll realize you've created just as awful a box as the other camp - and worse, your box isn't creating anything for anybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A new slinkset for New Year's resolutions: <http://resolutions.slinkset.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions, much like I don't believe in a state of "I _will do_ something." You won't do something if you aren't already doing it, unless a major force compels you.

Going to the gym and having a healthy diet is not a "new year's resolution." It's a lifestyle. You have to do it for your entire life, otherwise why even bother starting?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my resolutions is to move out. From your logic, since I'm not already living on my own and I don't have anything forcing me to move out (getting kicked out, etc) then I won't ever move out. You're discounting self- motivation from your equation. I want to move out, I have set my mind to it and have started putting the pieces together to do so, therefore I will.

I totally agree with you that getting healthy/losing weight is a lifestyle change, but you have to start at some point. It's something I am working to continue into the new year, not just a task to work towards starting Janauary 1st.

You don't have any goals in your life?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the sense of "If it isn't actionable and quantifiable its a delayed failure rather than a goal:"

1) Go to gym 100 times for at least 45 minutes.

2) Sell $30,000 worth of Bingo Card Creator.

3) Take money from customers for 2nd project. (sales > $0)

4) Not disclosed.

5) Reduce food budget to 1/2 of current level.

6) Declare income resulting from wages of exactly zero yen/dollars for December 2009 to appropriate tax authorities.

<comment><USER12> _4) Not disclosed._

Ooh, now we're curious!

<comment><USER8> It's a marketing strategy on his part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I believe New Year's resolutions are like the fast food of goals/personal development: easy to come up with, may make you feel better in the short-term, and like fast food.. exit your system quickly.

Do yourself a favor and work towards your goals every day. Even fifteen minutes a day accumulates compound interest over time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mine are really similar:

        - Get Healthier (not just losing weight, but eating better and drinking less soda/sugar drinks)

        - Read the piles of books on my desk

        - Start blogging

        - Learn a new programming language (C/C++/Objective-C, and the OpenGL library)

        - Make a decent income online where afford to buy a brand new Macbook Pro without putting it on a card I can't afford to repay...

        — Start a totally bootstrapped company

<comment><USER14> Oh yeah, forgot one:

        — Get dressed most days; when working from home, its so easy not to get dressed until the
          late afternoon or even not at all, but doing so limits my productivity substantially!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why wait until the new year?

Why not push away from the keyboard right now and go spend 15 minutes on something that will move you closer to one of your goals?

You'll feel a lot better, and you'll be 3 days ahead of the game. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Ask this girl out.

<comment><USER17> Don't wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> \- live healthier

\- learn Python (I wrote this one before I read the 5th item of the above)

\- save/invest more money

\- spend less time on HN

\- figure out how to monetize my free time and then do it

\- set up linux and mac os x boxes in addition to my windows box

</comment><comment><USER19> 1680x1050

<comment><USER20> For those who don't understand the joke, Herring means Computer Resolution.

I tried to figure out what he means for at least 5 seconds and I admitted that I laughed.

<comment><USER17> -5 for this? Stop downvoting him/her.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. I didn't get the joke at first; the explanation was worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Instead of having a ton like last year and failing, this year I'm just going to have one resolution:

\- Waste less time

</comment><comment><USER22>
      * Attend lots of comferences/meetups
      * Get funded
      * Launch paid for product
      * Grow advertising revenue
      * Sell the company
      * Profit!!

</comment><comment><USER23> It's funny how similar some of mine are. Or maybe it's not funny at all, maybe that's why we're all here...

\- Start blogging again

\- Learn Python properly (I know a bit, but would like to be comfortable/fluent)

\- Lose some weight

but also (and these are optimistic/long-term, but hey):

\- Really work to grow my client base, further my business's reputation, etc

\- Release one of my as-yet-unfinished SaaS apps for some passive income

\- Get an office and my first employee (currently freelancing from home office)

<comment><USER24> I'd delay the office as long as possible for almost all software-only shops. It's a PITA, a distraction, and an additional expense. Once you grow to a certain point and NEED the space, or if your home situation is too distraction-filled, then go get an office.

Too many people are hooked on the idea "if I can work in my PJs, it must not be a real job". If that describes your (or your family's) opinion and you can't change it, you might have to, but look at an office as a necessary evil, not an indicator or predictor of successfulness.

Edit: clarified that I meant renting real estate not just "the last" which could be employee or office.

<comment><USER23> Good point. Don't really have room for anyone else to work here though, unfortunately, so if I add anyone then an office is basically a necessity. I do agree with what you're saying, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> \- get things done instead of thinking what new year resolutions I want for next year.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- getting things done instead of listing an item declaring the un-usefulness of writing a list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Read HN only on Saturdays (or some other fixed day of the week). I can easily waste 2 or 3 hours a day to "keep up" with the news, this is ridiculous.

Trying to learn something truly worthwhile by reading the news is a bit like trying to learn by watching TV or trying to get rich by buying lottery tickets: sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, and even if you succeed it's not quite as edifying as doing it the _right_ way (ex: learning useful knowledge by reading books or getting rich by starting a company).

I'd be interested to know if there's some day of the week where the stories are usually the most relevant.

</comment><comment><USER26> -Finish popalerts, & popschedule -Get portfolio site together -Figure out first year C corp taxes due. -Develop better communication and public speaking skills. -Make more connections with outside web consultants. -Wake up to the sound of an alarm. -Stop arguing with my girlfirend -Drink more tea, less coffee -Make Lists, get organized -Build large business web concepts (coke, nike, honda,...) -Paint more -Drink less

</comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Finish writing my current desktop app

2\. Incorporate (probably as an LLC)

3\. Sell copies of said app to people in exchange for money.

4\. Relax more.

5\. Exercise more.

6\. Visit more places and people.

7\. If steps 1-3 work, buy Wil Shipley a drink!

8\. Spend next xmas in Munich.

<comment><USER28> Don't incorporate too early. I did that a year and a half ago, but things came up and I wasn't able to actually start the business. After the setup fees, annual state franchise fees, registered agent fees, and dissolution fees, I'm down $700 with nothing to show for it aside from this little nugget of knowledge.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the tip. I plan on incorporating after I've finished the app and am ready to sell it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I have made a decision recently.

If I'm going to continue consulting instead of working on a startup next year, on the side I'm going to work on something technical and fun, like an automated .NET Ocaml-to-YUI Data Access Layer. Something where I can learn and create a framework to use in a startup later on.

</comment><comment><USER30> \- Quit smoking \- Learn UI (CSS and Photoshop) \- Excercise daily \- Release my two side projects and turn them into profitable products. \- Learn a new programming language (not sure on this one) \- Publish some pending drafts to ACM \- Publish some articles , long due, to selected magazines \- Asking this girl out

</comment><comment><USER31> I have decided to focus on personal growth. I made this list some days ago.

Personal qualities

Goals:

\- Non needy

\- Non pleasing

\- Give value

\- Accept other peoples value

Method:

\- Be faithful to own values

\- Base in own self recognition, not others opinion.

\- Accept the importance of signal values

\- Don't do or say things that undermines my own status.

Excercise:

Goals

\- running, cycling, swimming, workout.

Method

\- Sign up for several amateur races (running, cycling, triathlon)

Professional:

Goals

\- improve self promotion

Method

\- Blog, Network

Startup:

Goal

\- Launch my project

Method:

\- Keep on working? (I've rewritten it two and a half time)

\- Freelancing pays the bills

Friends:

Goal

\- Keep old friends, but focus on making new friends.

Method

\- Actively engage in other people lives, don't need "invitation".

Dating:

Goal

\- Date more girls, or meet potential long term girlfriend

Method

\- Dating sites, Social activities, Bars

Sailing:

Goal

\- Participate in as many regattas as possible (I bought a sailing boat last year)

Method ?

Happy new year!

</comment><comment><USER32> It's not a New Year Resoultion, but certain goals/milestones that I'd like to see achieved :

1) Develop some Social Networking Applications for Facebook etc.

2) Learn Cocoa Touch for iPhone and Develop Apps.

3) Learn a MVC framework like Django/RoR in and out.

4) Be consistent with the gym schedule and get some muscles :)

5) TBD soon :)

</comment><comment><USER33> 1.Work through Stroustrup's Programming: Principle's and Practice Using C++ (always good to review the basics)

2.Write an app and sell it for enough to replace my current income

3.Train for and run the Bay to Breakers

4.Achieve "Archer" level in recurve style archery.

</comment><comment><USER28> 1\. Get my on-the-side business up and running and decide whether or not it is worth investing more time in. 2\. Add 20k+ to my savings. 3\. Improve my BASH knowledge. 4\. Travel more. 5\. Waste less time (TV and web)

</comment><comment><USER34> Learn how to code because some idiots did not figure that computer science should be thought in elementary school just as Mathematics, Biology, etc...The plan HTML>CSS>Javascript>Python or PHP

</comment><comment><USER35> \- do more marketing for SmartFlix and HeavyInk (I hate doing it, but it works)

\- I started lifting again three weeks ago - keep doing it.

\- Get to the range more often to practice and carry my pistol more often day to day.

</comment><comment><USER36> Same as last year...

\- Lose weight \- Learn C \- Don't waste (too much) time \- Get shit done

I did pretty well on the last two in 2008. Hopefully I can keep it up while making the first two happen.

</comment><comment><USER37> 1\. Collect underwear

3\. Profit

</comment><comment><USER38> Ship.

</comment><comment><USER39> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403013>

</comment><comment><USER40> Learn a functional programming language. (Maybe Haskell, but I'm open to other ideas).

</comment><comment><USER41> Not making resolutions. Whatever happens, happens.

</comment><comment><USER42> Do better next year.

</comment><comment><USER43> Remember peeps, good goals are measurable and specific.</comment>