Fortnite Pastoral - <AUTHOR> https://desert.glass/archive/fortnite-reboot/ <comment><USER3> I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Fortnite. This comes both from people who play a lot of video games, and from those who don't play at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Fortnite.

<comment><USER4> I've probably been guilty of that on more than one occasion and can explain 2.5 reasons why.

1) Battle royales suck. The entire genre. I grew up on arena shooters - <USER2> Quakes, your Unreal Tournaments, and so on. Getting booted all the way back out to the lobby to go through deployment again because of a single death _isn 't fun_. It's making me replay the most boring aspect of the game. Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.

2) Fortnite's success killed two games I was really interested in - Paragon, a _gorgeous_ third person MOBA, and a reboot of Unreal Tournament.

Those first two are very concrete and have nothing to do with tribalism. The last one is a bit murkier:

2.5) Fortnite seems to be aggressively marketed towards children, which means its players are probably disproportionately children. Minecraft had this problem too, but it had a single player mode and private servers which allowed you to sidestep it.

That one probably carries the whiff of "kids these days", but when you consider that the game is going to be designed to cater to the average player...

<comment><USER5> These are not reason to diss people who enjoy it. They're merely reasons why you don't personally enjoy it.

(I'd like to point out that you can setup games with your friends where you don't get booted out for dying.)

<comment><USER6> Is he "diss"ing people who enjoy though? Or just expressing why he personally doesn't enjoy it? It read more like the latter to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Articles like this fall into one of two categories: either paid promotion by the author, or the author's unwitting corroboration of Epic's marketing with this game.

Since the beginning Fortnite has positioned itself as a social space, in itself this is not a problem. However, the ability to perform socially is monetized in an otherwise free game. This is emotional and social manipulation at it's finest, and contributes to why Fortnite honestly frightens me as someone who enjoys games.

The marketing for this game has been incredible. In-game events featuring real-life artists. Weekly events which push the dev team to the limits of crunch what has to be almost every day. It pervades any space relating to games. It's presence is unrelenting. It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.

It's the epitome of "designed by committee." It's soulless. It's success was bought and paid for by TenCent and I'm assuming the investment is at least doing okay, considering how much money they continue to pour into it.

I don't hate the game itself. It's aggressively "okay." Nothing mindblowing and certainly nothing meriting the response it's gotten. The response is almost entirely down to the marketing, and I don't like everything else about it. I don't like how it's shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising. I don't like the by-the-numbers merchandising. I don't like the fact that "default" is now used like a slur in schools for the kids whose parents won't buy them digital crap.

I just... I hate this. All of it. I don't know why to a great extent, it just bothers me.

<comment><USER8> > It's the epitome of "designed by committee"

I disagree with this, Fortnite figured out how to deliver a video game in an agile way.

The techniques developed around building and combat are top-notch, the game manages to feel very challenging without being miserable to play. It might not be your cup of tea.

> I don't like how it's shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising

Not Epic's fault. You can thank the tech industry for figuring out how to put ads on everything, I don't see how this is Epic's fault. Don't shoot the messenger when your problem is with online ads.

> I don't like the fact that "default" is now used like a slur

Again, Epic didn't make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn't make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.

<comment><USER7> > Not Epic's fault. You can thank the tech industry for figuring out how to > put ads on everything, I don't see how this is Epic's fault. Don't shoot the > messenger when your problem is with online ads.

That's fair.

> Again, Epic didn't make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who > had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn't > make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.

I mean, Epic didn't make kids shitty, that's true. But they did explicitly create a situation where the ability to express yourself in their social space requires financial investment. Don't tell me that wasn't intentional.

<comment><USER9> > a situation where the ability to express yourself in their social space > requires financial investment

Thankfully adults don't judge each other by the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, etc. /s

<comment><USER7> But _adults have money._ Children do not, usually anyway. They either work chores or more likely, beg their parents, who may not be in a position to spend that money, and if their kids are playing free games, I'd say the likelihood is they aren't.

Selling crap to kids by way of their parents wallets is a time honored tradition in our society. Epic knew what they were doing. All the games like Fortnite do.

<comment><USER9> It's always been like this. Once it was Pokemon cards and a Gameboy, now it's a Fortnite emote.

<comment><USER10> Pokemon cards and Gameboy are more direct. Nintendo never gave away crippled gameboys for free, with an option to unlock features incrementally.

<comment><USER9> You don't remember all the gameboy accessories? The lighted screen especially was incredible back when a backlight wasn't built in. I was jealous of the kid who had the light, the printer, and tons of games.

If you think the kids who didn't have gameboys at all didn't get bullied because they weren't in the ecosystem, you'd be gravely mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For whatever it's worth, Fortnite has taught my son that there are many ways in which you can target self-improvement. This has spilled over to sports and education.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article seems to be fluff that hypes the game (paid marketing maybe?). It's just a new map. The end of season events are the novelty.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting perhaps, but not particularly new. MMOs have provided existing examples of such things. Final Fantasy XIV had an in-game apocalypse (storyline and all) to mark the end of the troubled 1.0 version of the game, which was remade as "2.0", very much not the same game.

</comment><comment><USER14> These virtual worlds are fun to explore. I hope there will be a game or experience (ideally in VR) where we can experience the inside of an O'Neill cylinder.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can't even read the article with the half missing "m"s and "n"s.

</comment><comment><USER16> I dislike fortnite mainly for its aesthetic. It feels like... social media. Highly commercial, attention demanding, fleeting, etc.

Yes I know many other games fit that model, especially things like popular shooters, but fortnite seems to have perfected it. Miyamoto's big moment was figuring out people liked being someone else (Mario). Fortnite feels like a place where you are defined by others. And it feels gross to me.</comment>


My Computer Programmer Career Report/Essay - <AUTHOR> http://codejustin.com/computer-programmer-career-reportessay/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a little essay I wrote about programming as a career.</comment>


Opera 24 for Linux released on the Developer stream - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2014/06/opera-24-linux-released-developer-stream/ <comment><USER2> As someone who was left behind with Opera 12, I have mixed feelings about this.

<comment><USER3> What's so great about Opera 12?

<comment><USER4> It was the last Opera with its own rendering engine. Now it is just another UI for Blink. So sad.

<comment><USER5> While I would love just to have Opera 12 with the Blink rendering engine, I was rather baffled by Operas decision to drop Presto. I though that their core business was: "Making a small, good and fast rendering engine".

That are they suppose to be selling now?

<comment><USER6> Their core business was making browsers in general. Being small isn't that much of an advantage anymore. They can now sell something that works reasonably well on most modern hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Opera really went a step backwards a while back when they switched from Qt to GTK "For better compatibility with desktop environments", while DEs were themselves busy switching to Qt.

I hope they will correct that soon.

<comment><USER8> At least they don't have to use C++

<comment><USER9> With gcc and clang being written in C++, Symbian, BeOS, Genode, Mac OS X IO Kit, Windows 8+ DDK support and WinRT, among many other examples, better accept the computing world is slowly leaving C behind.

<comment><USER8> I didn't mention C.

<comment><USER9> As someone that always been on the C++ side on the C++ vs C flames, since the early days, it comes as consequence of statements like "At least they don't have to use C++".

Sorry if you didn't meant like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Still no customizability? Still no features from 12.xx? Still reskinned Chromium? Why bother? ;/

<comment><USER5> I can understand Opera not wanting to maintain their own rendering engine, except that I though that was their main source of income. What I can't understand is why they release the WebKit/Blink based Opera when they did.

They shipped a version of "Opera" without the stuff that people loved and bet that it was the brand that people loved. I used very few of the features in Opera 12, but I switched to Firefox when the new version shipped because they made it harder to get the privacy settings I want and I can't make DuckDuckGo the default search engine (honestly: Is that really so hard to do?)

Dragonfly, the Opera web developer tool is another thing I would have loved to be able to use, but I will accept that it's a bit harder to port and wouldn't be a day one feature.

What they done in the past 12 version is beyond me, I don't see that adding anything important or bringing back anything that people actually want.

Dear Opera please fix:

\- Customizable DEFAULT search engines.

\- Bring back Opera Link.

\- Bring back DragonFly (When you have the time).

If it saves time you can drop:

\- Speed Dial

\- Stash ( Serious question: Who needs that? )

\- Discover, see question regarding Stash.

\- Theme support, see question regarding Stash.

<comment><USER6> You claim they shipped a version without the stuff people loved, but Speed Dial was one of the most popular features in the old Opera. Speed Dial is one of the features that define Opera.

Seems you don't quite represent most Opera users?

<comment><USER11> speeddial was added to opera fairly late on.

<comment><USER6> 2007:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_brows...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_browser#Speed_Dial)

Doesn't really matter, though. Doesn't change the fact that it's a signature Opera feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last Opera release for linux was 12.16. That's about 12 skipped updates (I just assume, I'm not familiar with the actual opera versioning) and that's unacceptable. What guarantee does Opera give me that this won't happen again and I won't be stuck with outdated browser for a year?

<comment><USER13> Opera switched from their own engine, Presto, to using Chrome's Blink engine. They probably won't be switching engines again any time soon.

<comment><USER10> They didnt switch engines, they dropped their browser entirely and skinned Chromium.

<comment><USER6> No, they didn't skin Chromium. They made a new interface on Chromium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > not all of us want proprietary operating systems

Not sure if these people want to use a proprietary browser.

</comment><comment><USER15> Opera, please open source the discontinued Opera 12!

<comment><USER16> I'm still sticking with 11/12\. It's pain to use any other browser. Performance is worse, ux is worse, basic functionality is missing, weird bugs everywhere. Now I use combination of Opera, Firefox and Chrome (for js heavy apps like gmail). Eventually want to switch to Firefox.

It's really sad they let everything go and made just another dumbed-down featureless browser.

<comment><USER17> Precisely. I just tried this out.

      + It opened all the tabs from my Opera 12 session
      - It lost all my tab groups: seems it doesn't support them
      - It ate up RAM to the point I had trouble moving my mouse cursor

I, too, still use Opera 12 everywhere it's still usable, and Chromium for the rest.

I don't need a Chromium replacement. I need an _Opera_ replacement, preferably with all the shiny new features (in terms of compatibility, standards support and performance) that Chromium has. Opera 12 isn't perfect, but if it had been in development for the period of releases 12-24, it certainly would be the only browser I'd need to use.

It's a shame _Opera themselves_ can't be motivated build a worthy upgrade to their own browser. Without Presto, and the same innovative spirit that brought us tabs, speed dial, mouse gestures, Opera Link, etc., etc., what exactly is their USP?

<comment><USER16> I think they were bought by someone (an UA or PL company I believe) and many of the core people left (or were let go). But don't quote me on this, I've just read in a random discussion as you do now.

<comment><AUTHOR> They weren't bought but in the past few years the CEO and founder left the company and they did make some acquisitions, including in advertising (mobile in particular) which is where a significant portion of their revenue now comes from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Who would have expected that? Maybe this can be a userfriendlier alternative to Chromium? All that is missing: opensource it.

<comment><USER19> Well, it's basically just Chromium, so I doubt it would ever be more user- friendly, and effectively it _is_ open-sourced.

<comment><USER18> Well there are 2 features I really miss in Chromium (which are implemented in Opera now): * easily Add/remove websites from the speeddial * closing the last tab won't quit the browser (this annoyed me the most)

<comment><USER20> Last time I used Opera there was no way to change the default search engine. That was a deal-breaker for me.

<comment><USER21> The saddest part about that is that opera was the first browser I knew of that allowed changing the default search engine in the first place, about 13 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ironically, this happens the day after I finally stopped using Opera. As a long time Windows and Opera user, I finally switched to Ubuntu a few days ago, and frankly wasn't so surprised to find out that Opera is not even supported. All the things that made it good died with 12.16 and this was just the last drop in a sea of users' tears. Now, having it suddenly available again, I don't feel like going back there anymore. Goodbye, although I can't help but feel the real goodbye was said a long time ago -- what came after was just denial.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does it still come with mail and bit torrent clients?

<comment><USER24> No. IRC and RSS/Atom also not supported.

<comment><USER23> Then they should call it Opera 3.24, or -1 and count backwards from hereon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> one CAN switch the default search engine in Opera 12 (which is good, because i ain't switchin'.)

a) drop down the search bar and pick manage search.

b) pick the provider you want as default and hit edit.

c) hit the details button.

d) select the tick boxes for "use as default" and "use as speed dial".

</comment><comment><USER26> WOW! I never expected they would do it. Shame it's still Opera 24.

</comment><comment><USER27> The incompatibility with websites on old Opera was enough for me to temporarily switch to Chrome. Now I'm making freaking extensions which bring some Presto features to it so it's more usable until Opera makes some significant changes to the new browser...

</comment><comment> mike-- There is package for rpm-based linux?

<comment><USER28> It's only packaged for Ubuntu for now. But you can try to follow these instructions: [https://gist.github.com/ruario/99522c94838d0680633c](https://gist.github.com/ruario/99522c94838d0680633c)

<comment> mike-- Many thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to not be bored doing a similar project in my company? - <AUTHOR> I'm in robotics, less than a year of experience. My team worked on a project and we are almost finishing. My company sold the same technology to a competitor, so basically, we're gonna do a similar product, with a big chance it's gonna be the same (words from my manager).
I understand, it's the best case for the company and it's how a company grows but more selfishly, won't I get bored ? Of course I didn't see every aspect of the project, of course I don't know much compared to the whole but I'm afraid my manager will assign me at the same tasks, since I'll be faster doing them.
I am always seeking challenges and this is how i don't get bored. From my point of view, the only way to not be is to be fast enough to be on tasks that should be assign to colleagues having more knowledge. If I'm fast enough, they'll may be busy and thus I'll have the task assigned.
I feel I worry for nothing but I'm not sure. How can I make the best of this situation ?
Edit: there is a contract close, so we had to "restart " <comment><USER2> Is it really exactly the same product? I mean same != identical. Even though, maybe you could speak with your manager about the situation and how you feel about it? Say that you want to learn new things and not be assigned the exact same tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> The software components will be identical at 90% (10% will be improvements) and the hardware ones will be exactly identical with no doubt. I thought about it a bit during the night and maybe the best I can ask to do is to make a process of automatizing the creation of such project. I can learn, have a complete new challenge and make it a win-win situation for me and the company

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, the purchaser forgot to put in a non-compete clause, it would seem. You could insist all the software be done in Rust this time... or get the company to allow twenty percent of time for personal projects.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it. Why don't you sell the product you just finished to the new customer, instead of re-doing it from scratch? Is there some sort of contract clause or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there is a contract clause for the product.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: We are looking to "adopt" Android apps - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN Community!
We are currently working on a mobile analytics project focused on the Android platform.
In the spirit of the lean startup philosophy, we want to be able to run live tests of our assumptions with real users, and iterate really fast.
Given that a lot of applications that were developed are now abandoned for a lot of reasons (did not grow big enough, developers moved on to other projects), we thought this might be a good opportunity for us to "adopt" one or more of these apps for us to play with.
The applications that would be the most relevant for us are apps that are already developed and have a considerable, organically attracted, number of daily active users (over 1000). These apps are general purpose and keep the user engaged for a longer than average period of time (for instance a news reader app is better for us than a one time use BMI Calculator).
If anyone is interested in receiving a small financial compensation for a project that would otherwise be abandoned please let us know by sending an email at: firstname.lastname@example.com
Thanks! <comment><USER2> So you are looking to purchase users so that you could debug your tracking software on them? Excellent plan.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I said earlier, we don't sell or give any information to anyone, nor we collect data that can uniquely identify any user. All data (time on screen, geo, time, locale) is used internally as part of our analytics app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You may be a legitimate company with the best of intentions, but after recent stories about people purchasing chrome extensions to abuse the update process by silently changing them to inject ads into pages it would be only natural for people to view requests of this nature with suspicion. You should probably provide more information than a gmail address.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are two app marketplaces:

[https://flippa.com/](https://flippa.com/)

[https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home](https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home)

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried some other marketplaces, but the quality of apps there is not very high. We would prefer an app that solves a real problem.

<comment><USER4> So you're looking for high quality abandoned apps? I think you're looking for a needle in a haystack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not work with apps/projects that are still active?

I was thinking of NewsBlur, whose app is open source, I think.

</comment><comment><USER6> It might be a good idea to post your privacy policy here, otherwise people will assume you're up to no good.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't sell any information to anyone, nor we collect data that can uniquely identify any user. We are interested in users' actions, time on screens and so on. This is why we wouldn't prefer games. But as I said, games would be ok as well if we cannot find other apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are you interested in Android games?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are mainly interested in general purpose apps, but games would be ok as well.

<comment><USER7> Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Squawk – Walkie Talkie for Teams - <AUTHOR> https://www.squawk.to <comment><USER2> This is cool. I can't wait to try it out!

Crazy Feature request: One of the things I've wanted for years out of a software based walkie-talkie like this is manual audio spacial diversity control (a.k.a. 3D audio). That way I can have multiple simultaneous channels, but be able to change the position (left/right/forward/45deg/etc) and the volume of each feed so I can have situational awareness with all channels while being able to use my brain to separate and focus on a particular channel.

These kinds of systems are often marketed to dispatch agencies, mission control, government/military customers, etc, and are super expensive[0]. I've never seen a consumer-grade version of 3D audio like this, but that would be super beneficial to ad-hoc communicators in disasters, scanner enthusiasts, public event coordinators, county/city-level EOCs that can't afford expensive systems.

[0]:[https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24741/new-3d-audio- wil...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24741/new-3d-audio-will- allow-a-10-pilots-to-hear-alerts-come-from-the-direction-of-the-threat)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The tech in the link is awesome...might be above our pay grade.

<comment><USER3> It's definitely doable. Dolby Axon (which shut down a few years ago) had positional voice chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hooray! I have been holding out hope for more push-to-talk apps on desktop platforms. It's such a step up from always-on listening. As an audio engineer, I grit my teeth every time there is microphone feedback, echo, or other audio issues on group calls, and these generally don't occur on PTT apps because everyone tends to be muted most of the time. And if it does start happening, the user more easily realizes what they did wrong because they correlate it with the button press. In fact, even if the user does not realize what they did wrong, others on the call can identify the source because "it's only happening when Jane speaks." I can't tell you how many times I've been on a call with feedback where the person who is causing it is complaining about it to the group without realizing it's their own fault and others on the call don't necessarily know, either. This never happens on PTT calls. There's also the obvious privacy benefits, as it avoids the issue where people speak without realizing they are unmuted. PTT is better in nearly every respect. I'm very excited about this.

I do have some questions that the website doesn't answer for me:

1\. What about screen sharing? Seeing the word "collaboration" implies to me that I should be able to do so, but it's unclear. In the screenshot of the app, I see an icon or two in the right-hand sidebar that might be relevant to this, but they seem kind of generic.

2\. What about mobile devices? I routinely do Slack calls where one or two people are on their phone for various reasons. It would be useful to know if that is supported or will be at some point.

3\. I want to know more about the encryption. As you're probably aware, there has been a lot of controversy over the security of Zoom. In particular, there is an ongoing lawsuit related to their false claims of end-to-end encryption. [1] I think any new product, especially a chat app, that claims to be end-to- end encrypted really needs to show us the details of its protocol and stack, and ideally open source as many parts of that as possible. Does it use the Signal protocol? The site says "Squawk groups are invite-only and end-to-end encrypted." But which parts are E2E encrypted? The group membership? The message content? The message metadata? Everything?

Lastly, it would be great if you could add the app to Homebrew Cask, as it's my preferred way to download and manage apps on macOS.

1: [https://gizmodo.com/zoom-accused-of-misrepresenting- security...](https://gizmodo.com/zoom-accused-of-misrepresenting-security- measures-in-ne-1842756394)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to see we're not the only PTT fans out there.

1\. Screen sharing is next on our list, it's the thing that we want most ourselves.

2\. This is definitely not mobile optimized. It does work-ish on mobile phones, but it maintains long-lived webrtc connections so it's not ideal (we ensure these are not transmitting when muted, but we have a keep alive protocol which ensures they don't die, and would be harsh on mobile batteries).

3\. Squawk uses webrtc, which is e2e encrypted by default. Additionally, we don't use any SFUs so we never have the audio unencrypted. All link negotiation and audio transmission are done entirely p2p and thus completely e2e encrypted.

<comment><USER5> Is there a plan for (at least self hosted) SFUs for firewall transversal? I imagine in some corporate environments that'll be necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have TURN servers setup for NAT traversal...but they don't terminate ssl like an SFU does.

<comment><USER5> That's great to hear. Having battled webrtc in the past it sounds like your team is doing a great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think anyone ever truly wins the war against webrtc

<comment><USER6> I feel in the thread from feross lie some synergies. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23408831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23408831)

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually use simple-peer. feross is great, suggest having a look at his repos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So I'd have this running and then anyone from work can just start talking to me and I'd hear it straight away?

That sounds like a nightmare to be honest. How will you ever reach any level of concentration this way? Even the thought that someone could just start talking to you would probably ruin your chances at getting in any sort of flow.

Also, it feels like only a small step away from a form of work surveillance. "Where were you? I was talking to you on Squawk".

Unless my assumptions of what this is are completely wrong. There isn't much to go on on the page.

<comment><USER8> Think of it this way, if you are sitting in the office then anyone can come talk to you in your cube. I think it can be great app if you keep it running during fix hours like 3 hrs in the afternoon when anyone can come and ping. Rest of the time you dont have to keep it on.

<comment><USER9> think of it this way, most knowledge workers are finally free from being constantly interrupted by people who just feel like stopping by to chat, or don't really know or care that you're focusing on something. Now, there's a tool to bring that back!

<sarcasm>It's only like 15 minutes to get back on task after every single interruption. That won't hamper productivity at all. Much more important for me to get instant answers and boredom reduction whenever i feel like it. </sarcasm>

<comment><AUTHOR> I get that. I have plenty of time where I zone out of Squawk. But there are definitely projects/periods where I need to constantly be checking in with a dozen people and various subsets of that dozen.

If that's not a problem you face, then Squawk is definitely the wrong tool for you.

<comment><USER7> > If that's not a problem you face, then Squawk is definitely the wrong tool > for you.

Either that, or you are solving 'that problem' the wrong way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all - open beta of a tool we created for ourselves during lockdown. We got sick of trying to replicate the effortless comms we had in the office, and hated managing a half dozen always-on Zoom/Slack/etc calls. So we built Squawk.

<comment><USER10> Are you planning to open-source this? Will it become a paid product? Is it P2P or are you hosting it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not planning to open source it. Some features down the road will become paid but the free version will always contain at the very least what you see today.

The heavy lifting is done P2P falling back to our TURN servers if NAT traversal is necessary.

<comment><USER11> That's good to know; you should put that information on the web site. Especially the part about the business model.

Another thing I'd like to know before considering downloading the app is system requirements. A lot of people aren't on the latest version of Windows/MacOS yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I saw the capitalized Teams in the heading, I was excited for a minute, because this would be a great add-on for Microsoft Teams. Alas it appears to be 'yet another thing to install and run in the background'.

Any plans to provide the functionality as an add-on for other communications apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - we're looking at integrations with other apps, but the walled gardens make that difficult unfortunately.

I hear the frustration of downloading another thing - I've changed the landing page to make clear you can access in your browser at [https://app.squawk.to](https://app.squawk.to)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> See also Zello.

It doesn't have the e2e stuff afaik, but works on all major platforms, including mobile. They also have a native desktop app (not Electron). As far as I know, it's used a lot, mostly by drivers for Uber or similar services. I haven't used it for a couple of years now, but it's worth giving it a go.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sugestion: volume normalization, compression (as in audio effect, not as in zip). A lot of people have shitty mics or change their distance.

</comment><comment><USER15> FYI Squawk team, there seems to be an issue with your main email. I tried to contact you can got this back:

> Hello,

> We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (hello) > may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. > A few more details on why you weren't able to post:

> * You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.

> * The owner of the group may have removed this group.

> * You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post.

> * This group may not be open to posting.

Looks like google apps group configuration issue.

Related support article:

[https://support.google.com/a/zumaltd.com/bin/topic.py?topic=...](https://support.google.com/a/zumaltd.com/bin/topic.py?topic=25838)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that. G Suite groups are a pain, I'll look into it. Feel free to email me directly at email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if a "dispatcher" model might be interesting for this, like an old style minicab/police service. Then people could use squawk-scanners for the channels they want to listen into.

It could get annoying if its on all day, SOMA FM provides an interesting police scanner with audio mix which is an oddly relaxing soundtrack [https://somafm.com/scanner/](https://somafm.com/scanner/)

Are you going to add some jargon, the stuff that made CB radio kooky back in the day?

<comment><USER17> See also [http://websdr.org](http://websdr.org) for ham radio listening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool! Might give this a spin for our live-ops response team.

You should fix your meta description tag on the landing page :) I just pasted it into slack and got a...less than useful preview.

<comment><AUTHOR> On it! Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like the idea. Push to talk is a proven concept when a lot of people work together and should stay informed (e.g. fire fighters). I see a huge potential for it...

</comment><comment><USER20> Pricing?

Also: similar (from yesterday I think) [https://www.walkie.chat/](https://www.walkie.chat/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Free

<comment><USER20> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks really good.

Is it possible to mark yourself as away? I could see it might encourage the expectation to always be present on the receiving end.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you mute yourself, everyone else can see you muted. But statuses are on one of our upcoming sprints.

<comment><USER22> > mute yourself

The homepage describes it has push-to-talk; is muting yourself distinct from not pushing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, muting is on the receiving side: when you mute a group (or global mute) you won't hear anyone, and they can all see that you've muted and aren't there.

The push-to-talk is on the sending side. So when you're not pushing, your mic is muted. And when you click the mute button, your speakers are muted.

<comment><USER22> Oh I see, muting a group rather than yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of Pragli [1] but without the animated avatars.

How sustainable is this project? I see it's not open sourced, but there is no pricing page either?

Also, how are the connections made, P2P or through a central intermediate server?

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22134329](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22134329)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question: there's no pricing page at the moment because we'll always offer the current functionality for free. We have some enterprise features (freemium) that we're planning, but we also won't charge for those until lockdowns are lifted.

Squawk is webrtc based (audio and data) so it's mostly p2p (except for tracking the swarm).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Feedback: Where's the video demo? I don't want to install it to see it in action and decide if I want to install it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Much appreciated. That's highest priority for me. Misstep on our part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just a heads up, but your header description appears to be from the template you used.

"Aptonic app landing page template helps you easily create websites for mobile apps, product landing, promotion and many more."

I linked to your landing page in Slack and that is what showed up

</comment><comment><USER26> What happens when you have incoming audio from two different groups?

Can you select a particular group to use PTT?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a tricky problem, and we have a couple of ideas. But currently if we're having a longer chat (double clicked will latch-open the mic) then we mute the other groups. Anyone else in the other groups will be able to see that you're muted.

We're contemplate auto-muting other groups when you have incoming audio. Would love to hear your thoughts as well.

<comment><USER27> When I played milsim games like Arma, a useful feature was to have my "squad channel" in my left ear, "command channel" in my right ear, and separate keys to PTT for each channel.

<comment><USER28> Did you find anything with those features already? I have a very similar scenario and I'm currently exploring what is available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a video of it in action?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's not at the moment. I will sort one out in the coming days (too late for our HN moment unfortunately). Apparently we're not the best marketers.

But it's just like a walkie talkie: press the group you want to talk to, and everyone hears you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome! Great idea - if you are looking for feature requests, it would be great if you could also create only bi-directional channels on demand. Basically like a Star Trek communicator...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Definitely looking for feature requests. I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean quick/throwaway groups?

<comment><USER29> I just meant more - 1<>1 channels. So I could say : sqwark Dave and it instantly creates me a 1<>1 channel with Dave of he's available.

Also just noticed the second download link lower down the page doesn't work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yeah that's on our todo list. At the moment, we tend to create groups like "Person A / Person B" but it's not ideal. The plan is that you can also Squawk anyone inside a group 1-on-1. Screen-sharing is next on the list.

Download link fixed...thanks!

<comment><USER29> Cool, yep that also works. Another awesome thing would be the option to run a speech to text algo on the conversation and have it transcribed into the channel log so if I miss the conversation I can catch up on things. But also you would need an 'off-the-record' Mode if you wanted to complain in private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great idea! Switching the model from idling in one channel to being in multiple groups at the same time is a good idea.

Do you have plans on releasing a binary for Linux?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Yeah we definitely will release linux (it's electron based so no reason to leave linux out). It works better as an app but you can also access it in browser at [https://app.squawk.to](https://app.squawk.to)

<comment><USER31> +1 for linux support. This is a great idea we would like to test as a confined/work for heom team, but most of my collegues (including myself) is using Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How is this any different from a local Mumble server?

</comment><comment><USER33> How does it compare against Mumble or TeamSpeak?

<comment><USER34> Mumble is entirely Free Software and self-hostable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hey @zumachase - was hoping to get in touch but the contact email on your homepage is bouncing. (email@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER36> interesting app for the "corridor conversations" that have been lost with everyone Working from Home. It definitely needs integration with other communications apps, as its important to know when to switch context from another medium to PTT. Seems like it becomes a feature for Slack, For Teams.

<comment><AUTHOR> Typically, it's switching from PTT into another context: we often start short conversations, and then realize there's more work to be done and we slack the results of that to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why not mumble?

</comment><comment><USER38> I look forward to an AppImage for Linux.

<comment><USER39> Isn't Flatpak preferable?

<comment><USER38> I prefer AppImage because it has no requirements on the host other than basic libraries like libc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> >... end-to-end encrypted...

How do you verify that you are connected to the person you think you are connected to?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a handshake before you accept a connection to anyone. Each peer generates a keypair and sends the public key to our servers (which they're authed with). On connection, peers receive the public key from the Squawk servers, and perform a handshake to verify their identity. This all happens p2p.

<comment><USER41> What happens on failure?

<comment><AUTHOR> A failure would indicate some sort of malicious actor, so the connection is logged and rejected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> How does this compare against Zello?

</comment><comment><USER43> Website needs javascript to even display something -> ignored.

</comment><comment><USER44> How does this compare to something like teamspeak?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is like being in many teamspeak channels at once. It's also built on open standards like webrtc so you could easily integrate into a squawk swarm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I love it! Any plans to integrate it with Slack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely in our plans

<comment><USER45> Great, I'll stay tuned!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Finally, something better than Zoom.

<comment><AUTHOR> We built this specifically because of Zoom fatigue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> looks good!</comment>


48 Hours Left: Crowdfunding Amphetamines Research & Metrics to Date - <AUTHOR> http://www.perlsteinlab.com/round-table/anatomy-of-a-crowdfund-the-homestretch

<comment><AUTHOR> Ethan Perlstein, as Princeton research fellow is crowdfunding his research on amphetamines. So far, he's raised raised $18,246 from 258 donors, and needs $6,754 to complete the fundraising.

This is one of the first hard science crowdfunding campaigns I've seen, and I believe if successful, can be a testament to the power of crowdfunding to support scientific research in the future.

The researcher has promised to provide regular updates on his research in an open-notebook fashion, and the preliminary metrics of the crowdfunding campaign may represent the diligence with which he is already assessing his efforts.

We can help support the cause here: [http://www.rockethub.com/projects/11106-crowdsourcing- discov...](http://www.rockethub.com/projects/11106-crowdsourcing-discovery)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you monitor your AWS costs? - <AUTHOR> With the increasing usage of automation it's getting more and more easy to deploy a lot of cloud resources and the cost attach to it increase as well. So I wonder how do you keep track of it ? <comment><USER2> Early and often. When designing a system, you have a choice to use AWS for all of it, some of it, or none of it. You need to calculate the tradeoffs of AWS (increased price) over other solutions. Just like you think about which database to use, or how to cluster components, you should also think about how much deployment will cost.

"How much will this cost" should not be calculated as an afterthought, but rather from the beginning, at the same time you're answering all other architectural questions.

If you've calculated the cost from the beginning, you may as well track costs in your monitoring code and metrics system. For example if you've had 10 VMs running the last hour, log the price of them to your metrics system. Then you can graph prices along with any other metric and see how bottlenecks drive cost.

Try to anticipate the bottlenecks of your system, and see if there's an easy way to avoid AWS for those components. That is, if you're an image host, you probably don't want to pay per GB of bandwidth at AWS when you can pay per capacity at any dedicated/colo provider.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Cloudability. [https://cloudability.com](https://cloudability.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the question for most cost/time services. Most of them refuse to put in a real time meter or hard stop after x usage. It goes against their business model. They much rather argue overage than limit usage from their side.

</comment><comment><USER5> www.parkmycloud.com</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about Smart TVs? - <AUTHOR>

All the usual suspects are talking about Smart TVs at CES. Everyone is waiting for Apple to make their move in this space. Analysts are talking up the size of the market over the next few years, but it's still relatively small and very fragmented.
1. Do you think TVs really are the next big form factor?
2. What are the prospects for Smart TV apps?
3. TVs have two main features: a) they're big screens, and b) they're receivers for high-quality  video content. Add internet access, the ability to run arbitrary software and (in future) touchscreens and the possibilities of both increase. Lots of people are thinking about expanding on b), eg apps for viewers to socialize over TV programmes. What about a)? Will we see TV apps that make use of the form factor - eg, allowing multiple people to work or play together? <comment><USER2> My life is much better with my Google TV box (Logitech Revue).

I watch more Netflix.

I watch more regular TV. The "TV & Movies" app gives me a Netflix-style list of movie/show covers arranged by genre... based on what's currently playing right now. The search button lets me type a few letters of a show I know is on now and quickly switch to its channel. I could never remember all the 3 digit channel numbers before.

I watch more YouTube because the app is so easy to use, it's got a little button that tells it to only show me HD videos in the results, videos almost never buffer unlike on a PC, and I can't tell the difference between a 1080p YouTube video and live HD TV.

It makes any TV I plug into it an Android device. Android Market and all. I use a couple apps regularly.

It eliminates 3 remote controls. The Revue can power on and off my TV, AV system and set top box... plus do every other function on their remotes, down to digging through settings menus -- all the intelligence of Logitech Harmony devices that cost more than the Revue does. It saves me time and money -- don't have to press "power" 3 times to turn everything off when I leave a room.

I want one for every TV in my house. A TV without Google TV feels dumb now.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have had "smart TV"s for a while now in the form of wiis, Xboxs, and PS3s attached to a big screen with the only difference being additional cost for the secondary box. I have as of yet to see anything engaging outside of streaming content aka netflix or hulu(not counting their primary function of games.)

</comment><comment><USER4> These might become the new PCs, but locked down. You trade convenience for privacy.

My TV for example, has apps for twitter, facebook, netflix. It has skype (they want me to buy a $150 proprietary web cam to attach to it). To use all those it makes you connect to the internet (it has WiFi as well). However before you can enable WiFi it makes you agree to a bunch of stuff. Technically it is capable of spying on us. What we watch, when we watch, who we skype with (if we'd choose to buy their webcam add-on), what we talk about on facebook and so on. It is rather scary. It also auto-updates. One day I turned it on and all its widgets and apps looked different. Law enforcement potentially could turn on the skype camera add-on and use it for a total big brother type surveillance.

<comment><USER5> "Law enforcement potentially could turn on the skype camera add-on and use it for a total big brother type surveillance."

Um... you have a cell phone right?

<comment><USER4> I know but this is yet another thing. And it is exactly the idea from 1984.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Smart TV's are clearly the future... we're sitting at a similar point to right before the original iphone was released. Several companies are taking a credible shot at a smart TV, but no one's done it "right" yet. Obviously, everybody's waiting for Apple.

Everything else aside, what's the killer app for a smart TV? It's the HBO app, or the CNN app or the Arrested Development app... it's the direct delivery of content from producers to consumers, and cable companies better be ready to pivot away from delivering content to delivering data, or else.

What will a apple tv look like? I suspect it will basically be like an embedded Google TV (passthrough HDMI with Apple stuff overlayed), but done in typical Apple fashion.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unlike smartphones in 2006, I think it's clear what TVs need to do. The problem isn't technological, but political/financial.

TVs just need to do what they do now, but better:

1) HD/3D movies, TV, games -- all on deman 2) Remote/Voice/Gesture/Expression/Tablet/Phone interaction 3) Fewer wires, especially for audio 4) Bigger and cheaper 5) Recommendations from social and coll filtering (I want them split out)

The real problem is almost purely, how do you get on-demand HD content (movies/tv/games) on the device at a reasonable price and logistically easily (I don't want to have to pay Netflix, Hulu, Comcast, Spotify, Microsoft, Valve, etc... -- just one place I pay and I get service for everything).

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the Smart TV features should be built into a set-top box rather than the TV itself, and the TV should be used as just display. Think about 5 years from now, when you are not quite ready to upgrade your TV, but your "smart tv" is now incapable of the current features. The more expensive a product is, the slower the rate of innovation (ex cars, TVs, appliances..)

<comment><USER8> I agree. I'm a firm believer that the TV itself should remain fairly stupid while the peripherals get smart. I love that i can hypothetically pop a roku stick into my carry on and make my hotel TV smart for the duration of my stay.</comment></comment>


Rascal: a Haskell with more parentheses - <AUTHOR> https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2017/01/02/rascal-a-haskell-with-more-parentheses/ <comment><AUTHOR> I thought to submit this while reading two comments in the Eta discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13376724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13376724) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379629)</comment>


Facebook Pushes U.S. Morals on World  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1684864/facebook-pot-marijuana-leaf-ban-legalize-it

<comment><USER2> It has little to do with the US and more to do with its customer base. It's doing what it needs to to make the majority of them happy. If banning an image pisses off a few and pleases most, they do it. It's really simple, and it's what any reasonable business would do.

The fact that marijuana and breastfeeding are 'protected rights' in other countries doesn't mean a private site has to allow images of them. Ever.</comment>


Ask HN: changing my site's domain name - <AUTHOR>

I have foo.com and Foo Inc. wants me to change it to phoo.com because of a trademark infringement. I want to go ahead and do it. Have any of you had to change a domain name on an existing site? What's the cleanest way to do it? A cheatsheet or any list of gotchas would be much appreciated.<p>Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Easy and 1st: 301 redirects for as long as you can. Negotiate!

Medium later: A link somewhere on the page saying, for some period of time: "Dear visitor, were you looking for oldfoo? Click here."

Harder and even later: Check the referer to see if they were coming for the old content

</comment><comment><USER3> Trademarks are per area of commerce, not absolute.

McDonalds can stop you from running a McDonald's Hotdog Shop, but they can't stop you from running McDonald's Plumbing.

Before you capitulate - is Foo a very obscure word, or is it fairly common?

Are you blatantly cybersquatting?

Are you using the site for anything?

If so, is you area of commerce overlapping with Foo Inc.'s?

Is Foo Inc. willing to buy the domain off you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes there is overlap and I'd like to go ahead and change it. I guess I should clarify that I am looking for the technical mechanics of going about doing this as efficiently as possible.

<comment><USER4> Other than the usual?

-Buy new domain

-Point new domain at server

-Notify users of the change

-Surrender old domain

I've never dealt with this sort of thing before, but I'm not aware of special mechanics for the situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If your site relies on traffic from search engines I would recommend using 302 redirects (temporary redirect) for some time. When the search engines have updated their results to show your new domain switch to 301 redirect.

The reason you don't want to jump right on 301 is that your old results will probably fall off immediately.

At one time using 302's was a suspicious sign in the eyes of the search engines, but that is no longer a problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> Search your site for absolute links to your own content (<http://foo.com/something>) and change them to relative links (/something) before you do anything w/ the domain.

</comment><comment><USER7> If they are big, and you are legit, make them pay for it. You can probably get $15k for it. OTOH if they are small or just plain nice, give it to them, esp. if it is not a big money maker for you.

In the pre-Internet days my company name was a registered trademark and we leaned on another another to change their company name. They did. My unlawerly opinion is that a (tm) isnt worth spit, but(R) has some real meat behind it.

<comment><USER8> 15K for a 3 letter domain? That doesn't sound right

<comment><USER9> I recently inquired for the cost of a particular four-letter domain (an english word) and was quoted $25k.

I didn't buy it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Assuming that Foo Inc. has not presented any demands as to when you have to cease control over foo.com, what you want to do is to set up a HTTP 301 redirect to your new domain phoo.com and leave it indefinitely. Human traffic will probably adapt to the new domain relatively quick, but search engines can take a while to update all instances of foo -> phoo even though 301 means "permanently moved".

</comment><comment><USER11> Great domain name first of all.

Could you not maybe use an extension e.g foopeoplesearch.com or thefoosearch.com for the moment. Build an audience and then possibly fight to use foo.com?</comment>


Lions are less likely to attack cattle with eyes painted on their backsides - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/lions-are-less-likely-to-attack-cattle-with-eyes-painted-on-their-backsides-142488 <comment> 867-5309 reminds me of the scene in Barbar:

[https://100bookseverychildshouldreadbeforegrowingup.files.wo...](https://100bookseverychildshouldreadbeforegrowingup.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/dsc02885.jpeg)</comment>


Best source for knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://ittitle.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think about this project?</comment>


Dustmotes: Wireless Sensor/Actuator Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sbasu3/dustmotes-wireless-sensor-actuator-network

<comment><USER2> Brilliant stuff! Hack the physical world with peanut sized motes :)</comment>


Tesloop offers city-to-city autonomous travel in a Tesla - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/17/tesloop-offers-city-to-city-autonomous-travel-in-a-tesla/ <comment><USER2> Hopefully I'm totally wrong here, but it sounds like this 15-16 year old kid had a cool idea, and a ton of investors and angels jumped in and started running the show? I hope he doesn't get screwed out of this.

<comment><USER3> I think this is working out to be a better situation for him than doing it on his own. Since he's still in high school it's very hard to actually run a company especially one that operates in multiple states and inherently needs a lot of management to run. I'm his father and we are working hard to ensure that everything is structured in a manner that works well for everyone involved.</comment></comment>


Booking.com Targets Airbnb's Market - <AUTHOR> https://join.booking.com/?p=1 <comment><USER2> Does anybody know if booking.com offers a developer REST API? I've been wanting to integrate them with a travel service I'm working on [0], but I haven't been able to find an API. I'd be interacting with their systems server-side, not client-side like a lot of other "partner" programs.

[0]: [https://alpacagetaways.com](https://alpacagetaways.com)</comment>


Google CEO Sundar Pichai: 'I don't know whether humans want change that fast' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/07/google-boss-sundar-pichai-tax-gender-equality-data-protection-jemima-kiss <comment><USER2> I like the pet where he says that paying taxes is to hard but then in the next paragraph talks about inventing a machine that can think like a human. Seems like a great guy!</comment>


The Register slams OpenSocial, OpenID and Google Gears - "destined for the dustbin" - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/dziuba_anti_revolution/

<comment><USER2> I couldnt have said it better. Get past the whining and hyperbole... but try and prove anything he said wrong.

OpenID- pipe dream. Clickpass is the only shot of making it work.

OpenSocial- Anyone actually make real live open social apps? Anyone making a real business or gain with them? At least facebook apps were able to do that for a good while.

Gears- Not sure why this is lobbed in there, except for the fact it isn't too widely implemented.

<comment><USER3> Gears will win out of the sheer will of force -- a.k.a Google's war chest. Considering that it's only been in development for about a year makes calling a pipe dream premature.

OpenSocial and Android both plays the heel to the the bigger and better counterparts. But like all things in life, it's much better to have decent alternative than none at all. They may not ever achieve dominant positioning but they don't have to, no one will outright give up on them.

OpenID is just weird but god bless those folks that keep wanting to get a crack with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> My first reaction was "no - gears has been out for _ages_ "... but no, you're totally right.

Gears + Android might be an interesting play for Google as well. [http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-up- you...](http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-up-your-mobile- web-applications.html)

<comment><USER4> Wasn't the sell for Gears originally offline apps? And now it is supported on a mobile phone... which has always-on internet access...

<comment><USER5> This makes it even more useful. Bandwidth on a mobile phone isn't unlimited and it can be extremely slow loading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your headline is wrong, it's "Ted Dziuba, that guy who swears a lot while making macho comments about technology, slams x, y, and z".

That's not to say his arguments don't have merit, just take it with a grain of salt because he's getting an article on The Register /because/ of of the highly-critical-invective-filled-pretty-funny-to-read style. See also: Zeropunctuation reviews of video games.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh no. Some guy at The Register was able to point out 3 new technologies that haven't seen wide adoption. The world is ending. Google is a one hit wonder. San Fransisco is just a bunch of dumb hippies. OMG.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry (I'd love to poop on this) but this little gem:

"Therefore, if you collect a bunch of Web 2.0 engineers in San Francisco, the inevitable outcome is the OpenSocial Foundation: a nonprofit organization that only exists to support an API for programming social network applications."

Is hilarious. +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Good to be able to rant rant, nicer to somehow get links to even the silliest of them. His complaint about the buzz behind web development this days renders your use of "Web 2.0 engineers" an absolute absurdity (talk about having drunk the "Kool-Aid" you're complaining about). As for APIs, all developers use tools they find accessible and productive. Those they don't, they don't use. A string of social networking sites have brought in massive amounts of profits; it would be silly for the market to ignore that. However a particular Google product/service fares is always irrelevant, when considered against the bigger picture of their continuing growth and success as a business.

If he's asking why we should care about OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears, he's a little too late; I don't care, not enough to find any interest in his post beyond a fascination with it's complete separation from anything relevant or substantial. Perhaps he'd like to complain about Google Web Toolkit next? I suppose he may have already. In any case, good job riding the Google hype to get hits on content so completely pointless!

Congratulations to Aaron Holesgrove for his comment also. His amusement at watching a company, whose search and ad SOFTWARE has so utterly blown away the competition and dominated the market, do something as bizarre as act like the software company they've ALWAYS been, is a fantastic blend of lack of comprehension and emotional reaction to hype.

This response was a mandatory attempt to reclaim the time lost here with a rant of my own, only tailored to the specific absurdities at hand."

Seriously! Who keeps posting these silly little blog entries that don't say anything? They are listed as though they contain valid content, and then are so short and pointless that it's impossible to abort reading them before they are over (and the stupidity is experienced).

If these somehow keep making it to the front page, I'm certainly going to leave this site out of my routine entirely.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is about the winiest thing I've ever read with no real content.

"Unfortunately, excitement died off quickly as people remembered that they don't really give a shit about social networks."

Really? So, those 100 million or so for facebook myspace and orkut don't count?

<comment><USER11> They care about one social network at a time, at most.

People don't give a fuck about anything social outside of Facebook. Not most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, OpenSocial has been a dud."

This is just plain wrong. Although maybe some of the issue comes when you compare things to search+ads. When compared against those, perhaps things look 'dud'. But taken alone they are successes.

<comment><USER13> MySpace uses OpenSocial: [http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/default.aspx?G...](http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=19)

MySpace has _how many users_ again? Even if a tiny percentage of them interacts with OpenSocial, I would hardly call it a dud.

Also:

"There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING."

That is a _lot_ of users that someone can reach with an OpenSocial app. If this is failure, I want some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _"Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, > OpenSocial has been a dud."_

Talk about one's perspective being waaaaay off.

Gmail, Reader, Maps, Chrome, Groups, News, Orkut - all of these products have clearly been duds when you consider how profitable Google's search + ads business has been.

Then again by that same yardstick you could say that 99.99% of online businesses are complete duds, even though there are a lot of them out there that are quite profitable.

Look at Orkut, when compared to a Myspace or a Facebook it is an absolute dud, however with some perspective it is among the largest social networks in some of the world's fastest growing economies (Brazil, India) - not a bad position to be in whatsoever.

> _No, a revolution means that somebody gets beheaded._

Well, then if that's the case, Google's search was definitely not a revolution. Sure it was an innovative product, but I still see Yahoo running around with a search team and with a still sizeable chunk of the search business (~25% isn't anything to scoff at whatsoever)

</comment><comment><USER12> Gears seems a very strange choice to put in here, especially now Chrome is out.

<comment><USER15> Because it has failed (thus far) to make a substantial impact on the way people use web apps.

How many people have it installed? How many sites have it enabled? What apps/sites exist & are popular that wouldn't be useful/popular without gears? What apps/sites exist that are replacing installed apps thanks to gears? For an example to count it needs to include more people outside the top 5% of internet users.

Personally I wouldn't call it a dud yet. It's mostly for readers, online office apps & calendar. These are used mostly by the top 5% anyway, so it'd be hard to take a stab outside that segment with Gears. Mail is the online app that has penetrated, but those that need off-line mail generally have a client installed already. It'll take time to move them since 'you don't need to install a client' isn't an incentive if you already have one. But this is a pretty big change they're trying to pull off. A lot of people are going to have trouble even finding gmail without a Google search.

Like I said, I wouldn't call it a dud. I wouldn't call it a success either. Like the post says, Chrome might bring it all together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Note that this article was written by the same guy that is behind Uncov.

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I missing something with the whole "OpenID is hard" thing? As far as I've used it, OpenID has pretty much consisted of going through a fairly normal registration with the open ID provider, getting a login name url, and then just using that at sites that support openID.

At most, it's been marginally more complicated than a normal ID, but it saves me the trouble of creating yet another new account at every little site that seems like it might be interesting to check out for a few minutes.

<comment><USER18> This is the thing: the "yet another new account" thing isn't a problem for real users. Real users use the same damn user/pass on every site. This is terrible for their security, but it just works.

<comment><USER19> Of the minority of users who have enough accounts on web applications to care, only a small fraction have accounts they care about that are ever likely to support OpenID.

I don't think most users see this account/password thing as one of their major Internet challenges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> IBM has had a tool for building off-line web applications for many years. [http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/dols.ht...](http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/dols.html) It works OK, but never really caught on even among customers who already have Lotus Domino. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem. So I'm not surprised that Google Gears uptake has been slow.

</comment><comment><USER21> Gears has huge potential. I have no idea why that's in there.

<comment><USER15> Because it hasn't reached it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many cloud / SaaS services do you use? - <AUTHOR> I recently did an accounting of the number of services I use, and it's more than 10. And I'm a three person shop. How many do you use and how big is your team? <comment><USER2> We use surveyking.com to build and send out surveys for our HR department and collect customer feedback. If you are sick of survey monkey surveyking is a great alternative with the best reports I've seen so far.

We use Google apps for email hosting for our company mail. They are easy to use and manage.

Sendgrid for our email campaigns. I can't tell you how much less of a hassle it is to use them than try to keep your server IPs off spamlists.

Trello for task management. Their drag and drop interface is awesome to track progress.

Slack for instant messaging. Their premium version has everything we need.</comment>


Show HN: Noteblur – Recurring meeting tracking made easy - <AUTHOR> http://www.noteblur.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is still in Beta but i've been developing it on and off for a few months. Over the weekend I think I finally got it to the point where i'm comfortable making it public. Any feedback/criticism on features, usability or design would be welcome!</comment>


Show HN: Top Publications - <AUTHOR> https://toppub.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised there wasn't a list of Publications available on Medium, so I decided to build one!

Just passed over 300 Publications. The list is ordered by the number of followers, and I'm working on adding additional sorting/filtering options.

Still looking for more publications to add to the list, if you have any suggestions please add a comment.

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks super handy for finding new publications to read on Medium. My only suggestion is to make the list sortable by topic -- and it looks like you are already working on that.</comment>


Creating a New Business Model for Cartoonists - <AUTHOR> http://www.gkogan.co/blog/creating-new-business-model-cartoonists/

<comment><USER2> This is, specifically, a business model for single-panel cartoonists. Strippers may be able to use it, graphic novelists like me definitely won't be able to.

gk, you might get some useful ideas from looking at [http://www.cagle.com](http://www.cagle.com) \- it started as Daryl Cagle's personal site but it's morphed into pretty much a political cartoon destination site, complete with a similar licensing thing.

Also worth looking at: Brad Guigar's webcomics.com, or just grab his two books on making a living from comics. He's tried a lot of things over the years doing a strip.

There's also the subscription model. Usually this is the domain of porn, as "being able to buy stuff on the net" currently tends to overlap with "is old enough to look at drawings of sexytimes". Slipshine ([http://orgymania.net](http://orgymania.net)) is a good example of this; it's got a constant stream of work from a lot of cartoonists.

Hiveworks [http://thehiveworks.com/index.php](http://thehiveworks.com/index.php) is also interesting; they have an ever-growing network of longform comics. There's a lot of cross-promotion, and a few people whose jobs are solely to deal with maintaining sites, buying external ads, and whatnot. They claim to be able to get a new artist up to making a living off their comic in about a year now.

Personally I'm doing a mixture of Kickstarter and Patreon right now; I'm a graphic novelist, and my work is best read in chunks at least the size of a chapter, if not a whole story. So I use Kickstarter to fund printing a pile of books for existing fans, and to sell to new fans at cons and online, and I'm starting to experiment with using Patreon to get paid by the page.

..I didn't mean for this to be a long post talking about other successful business models I've seen in cartooning, but here we are! Good luck with your gag cartoon syndicate, gk.

<comment><USER3> You should totally link to your work. HN encourages self-promotion and damn.. I went to your profile, found a single link to a .. well .. graphic novel(?) and was blown away.

Amazing work, I'll see if I can get my hands on the previous release somehow.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, graphic novel is the right word. Thanks! It's at [http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/](http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/) to save other people who may be curious from going through those multiple steps; it's about a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend.

You can order a copy of volume 1 (of 3) from my online store, 2 is at the printers after a lot of delays, mostly on my end, mostly because seasonal depression.

<comment> andrey-p Love the use of infinite canvas and colour. (I haven't managed to go through it all yet, but it's been bookmarked for later reading.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just want to add: This was inspired by Patio11's documentation of Bingo Card Creator over the span of several years. I learned a lot from reading that, so I wanted to do the same with this project. Any questions or suggestions on what to write next are welcome!

<comment><USER4> Thanks, hearing I helped someone get into business always makes my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone who wonders how stock photography sites stay in business (it seems like a marginal business), I have a true story for you:

A friend of my spent weeks doing the graphics for a national marketing campaign for a new laptop (I think it was Dell).

The laptop maker selected 6 photos from a major stock photography site to put into their ads. The photos were _totally_ innocuous. We're not talking about the photo of the student trying to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The photos were, for example, a smiling woman sitting on bicycle, a guy jumping in the air with his arms open.

The laptop maker $60,000 to license the 6 photos. (My friend got $7,000 for 7 weeks of work.)

I'm not sure if my story makes a point, but it seems like you have to price discriminate severely at the high end (really soak companies like Dell) and not expect much money from the _New Yorker_.

<comment><AUTHOR> You raise a good point. Someone in the comments here asked how I arrived at the current price structure, and my answer was basically: price discrimination.

For the time being I just have a contact link for companies with >501 employees, but maybe in the future will have some sort of automated pricing structure even for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks similar to what happened to the stock photography business over the last 10 years with the rise of microstock websites.

The field really opened up to a lot of then amateur photographers who couldn't sell to one of the big name stock agencies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like a great idea. One comment though. The preview pages load slowly for me because all the cartoons are loaded at full resolution (800px width) and then greatly scaled down and cropped on the client (to around 253px with). Browsing pages full of cartoons would be much faster on my slow TWC internet if you could serve prescaled comics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this suggestion. I'll get this done as soon as the tide of visitors gets through... Don't want to break anything right now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a really cool concept and looks nicely executed. Great work! Please keep us posted on progress if you can.

I'm interested to know how you decided on pricing being based on # of employees in the organization. Can you expand on that decision?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Ah, licensing fees... That is a mysterious and strange world of pricing, and deserves a full post of its own. It's still something I'm trying to nail down, and will document it as I do.

Quite simply, it's price discrimination. I arrived at these numbers by imitating what others are doing and adjusting slightly based on my own assumptions.

A large company is assumed to get more utility out of an image than a small company, is therefore charged more. For example, if a large company uses a cartoon in a newsletter, that newsletter is presumed to have a larger circulation than the smaller company's newsletter.

I'm not convinced this is the best pricing structure to go on, but I decided to start with this and improve it as I go along. Will certainly write about this process (and results) soon.

<comment><USER9> This is great. What about a "blogger" subscription plan that is affordable for an individual like me? As someone who blogs frequently and would like to incorporate more imagery, I think I could convince myself to pay something like $30/month to use 4 pictures a month. (one per week)

<comment><AUTHOR> Love that idea. Since I'm using Stripe for payments, this should be fairly straight-forward to setup. May I email you an update when this is available?

<comment><USER10> As a blogger I'd also be interested in this. Email is in my user profile :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds like an awesome idea. Really clever.

<comment><USER12> What have I missed - isn't it "just", as he intimates, a cartoon focussed version of a stock photo site?

FWIW I didn't find it particularly hard to find business type cartoons on shutterstock, [http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-807910p2.html](http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-807910p2.html). There prices are £29 for 12 downloads (for small/med jpeg - for comparison with the post about using images on a personal blog).

[I've used them in the past for some website art and may have an affiliate link somewhere for them, can't recall]

I'm not saying it's bad, seems to be nicely executed; just that a few comments seem like "wow, totally awesome concept" which make me think I'm missing something?

<comment><USER11> Yes, I think you are. You may be paying too much attention to the technology. Two clever strokes in this idea:

* Identifying huge excess inventory in the market for cartoons and generating value from it

* Positioning cartoons in a manner similar to premium fonts, for bloggers and online publications

I have in mind (it's not my idea mind you) a Javascript blob one would stick on their blog, like you would for the HF+J fonts, and then an interface for picking cartoons (or themes of cartoons) out for individual posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I have in mind (it's not my idea mind you) a Javascript blob one would stick > on their blog, like you would for the HF+J fonts, and then an interface for > picking cartoons (or themes of cartoons) out for individual posts.

Is there an example of this, or could you please elaborate? I'd love to explore this idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool. Cartoons meet stock photos. The problem I'm seeing is that some cartoons sometimes are tightly coupled to a specific topic, and may be seasonal. Especially current events/politically/socially related cartoons and satire. IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point, and I'm dealing with that issue by bringing more cartoonists onboard (tapping into their unpublished cartoons). I'm looking to double the inventory within a month and then 10x it after that... I want 90% of keyword searches to result in at least 5 cartoons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think that this is great, and I'm definitely excited to use this for my blog posts in the future.

That said, I am hoping you bring on a few dozen of your peers because right now your comics are heavily weighted towards certain categories. Diversity would be a huge asset.

My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all" substantially bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the captions without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Pete! I hope you do use a few.

As you may have seen in some of the comments here and on the article, people are requesting a subscription option (eg, pay $xx per month to use up to N cartoons each month). Would you pay for something like that?

> Diversity would be a huge asset.

Good insight, and I completely agree. That is why I brought onboard a second cartoonist, and will be inviting more soon. Within the next month I hope to double the amount of cartoons, and then 10x it the following month.

> My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all" > substantially bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the > captions without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.

Thanks for that suggestion. I always wondered what's an ideal size to make the thumbnails, and whether to allow page scrolling (next/prev when you're on an individual cartoon page), but this is the first time someone's mentioned it. So now it's definitely on my to-do list.

<comment><USER14> I suspect that a subscription system would make some very happy, but I'm an informal blogger and I'd prefer to pay a bit more to use them when I need them.

As far as feature requests go, I suggest keeping it super simple for a little while until you get a sense of which ones are "I have an idea" vs. "I can't use this unless".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great idea.

 _You 'll automatically get a high-quality image file of this cartoon._

What is the resolution? I also can't find the text of the license.

<comment><AUTHOR> The downloaded cartoons vary from 1200px wide to 1800px wide, so large enough to look nice and sharp in almost any publication or blog. If you're looking for something larger (say, for a billboard ad), just get in touch!

I'll be adding the license terms some time soon, thanks for bringing that up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do you recieve a commission when other drawers' cartoons are sold?

(And one thing: If you sell your cartoon to a magazine which doesn't allow further publishing then you still have the same problem for this cartoon to not be able to publish/sell it again. But for your other (not sold to a magazine) cartoons this would definitely be a benefical platform.) I think your idea could be working ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Chris, thanks for the note.

Yes, the business model for _me_ is that I receive a percentage of all licensing fees, while the majority goes to the cartoonists. (Currently about 3/4's of the cartoons there are mine anyway.)

Regarding the issue with magazines: They don't care what you do _after_ publication, they only care that they're the _first_ to publish it. So you have it slightly in reverse. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Love this idea and the execution, comics are definitely taking that step into iStockphoto territory which is so great for cartoonists. The web really opened up lots of comic artists and revenue models. This is also happening big time with 3d assets on stores like Unity Asset Store.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi It is awesome!

I wish you would add small FAQ about how to publish on your page. Even simple "How to submit?" "Currently we are sadly not accepting new work. You can always subscribe and we will let you know when things change" would be cool

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks! Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add this very soon.

In the meantime if you have single-panel cartoons to submit please shoot me an email (greg[at]gagcartoons[dot]com)! I'm definitely looking to expand the inventory with high-quality work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think there is a very, very viable opportunity for something Steam-like for comics.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.comixology.com](http://www.comixology.com) kinda does that? It's very much about single issues, rather than larger completed works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Awesome! I may at some point get one or two

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! I added a special deal to the post:

> "This week only, HN visitors and everyone else get a 2-for-1 when you > license any cartoon on GagCartoons! How to get it: Just license any cartoon, > then email me and tell me which second cartoon you'd like."

<comment><USER20> thankee. I'm trying to not spend needlessly this month so I'm afraid i'll have to miss out though.

good luck though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be nice if you had a subreddit and published new entries to the subreddit.

You'd have a nice way to highlight popular cartoons, and i'd have a new source of funny/interesting content.

</comment><comment><USER22> two questions:

\- can any cartoonist sign up to sell cartoons using this platform? \- can you allow cartoonists to sell under more permissive licenses like CC-BY?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dalek,

> can any cartoonist sign up to sell cartoons using this platform?

There's no automated system to manage this, but it's in the works. Right now a cartoonist has to email me and tell me they're interested in posting their cartoons. Then I'd batch upload their cartoons and get them all set up.

Are you interested or know someone who is?

> can you allow cartoonists to sell under more permissive licenses like CC-BY?

Hmm that's a good question. I haven't thought about allowing artists to set their license options, but now I will think about it.

<comment><USER22> Great! good to hear that you're thinking about. I would definitely urge you to offer a range of licensing options -- flickr, youtube and all major content hosting platform have supported this in the recent past, and I can tell you from experience that it will help you build momentum among a certain class of both cartoon producers and consumers who care about this stuff. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


How a tattoo affects your job prospects - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/08/economist-explains

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the desire to get a tattoo, it seems that everybody that is my age and younger has one. I only know a handful of people that don't.

Often when people talk to me about their tattoos I feel they are trying to externalise their identity. Does that make it the equivalent of a "look at me, I need attention"?

<comment><USER3> At first maybe, but it really is an artform. Most people i know have with tattoos use them to tell a story of sorts: a life event, a homage to an influence to their life, and/or recognition of someone they deeply care for (kids/parents/whatever).

<comment><USER4> A lot of people have an unartistic collection of disparate doodles haphazardly located on their body. There are 21 year olds who have covered significant portions of their body like this, and it looks lame and ridiculous.

There are also a lot of very artistic tattoos, too, but I don't understand the fascination with covering most of your body in permanent, expensive artwork. Who you are today is not who you'll be in 20 years (hopefully).

Regardless, it doesn't affect me, and in 20 years society will most likely have flipped polarity again anyway.</comment></comment></comment>