Zero-allocation Trie Traversal - <AUTHOR> http://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/11/13/ <comment> psi-squared This is pretty neat! A couple of thoughts spinning off from this:

In the breadth-first traversal example, it looks like the resulting linked list is completely static. By that I mean that you could pre-compute the traversal order and store it into the linked list of 'p' pointers. Then you can traverse as many times as you want just by following the pointers. In fact, as long as you aren't editing the tree, these traversals should even be reentrant and thread-safe.

I feel like you could do the same sort of thing with depth-first search, or any other scan order really: Do one "expensive" (ie, allocating) traversal to build a linked list, then lots of (comparatively) cheap linked-list-following. Or you could even build the linked list along with the trie, and update both when you add/remove elements (if that's much rarer than traversals). For the latter you'd probably want to use a doubly-linked-list so you don't have to do another search to find the "previous" element.

If you are able to allocate extra memory, or can structure the memory layout appropriately, it might even make sense to (re-)pack the trie nodes in traversal order in memory, so that the memory accesses during a traversal are nice and linear. Again, depends a lot on how you're using the trie and what your constraints are.

</comment><comment><USER2> Solution to no allocation during trie traversal is to pre-allocate the necessary data along with each node.

Nice, general solution that could apply for many other problems but hardly zero-allocation.

Thanks for the post!

<comment><USER3> I think you are misreading it, some. Think of it more as "zero allocation _during_ traversal." The point is not "free traversal of a Trie" but another trade off to look at in creating a program. (Granted, one that is at a level most of us are not writing at.)

This is similar, in some ways, to allocation free depth first searches of tree structures. (That is, without a stack.) It is hardly "free" since you have to take care in constructing the tree. However, if you have a tree you will construct once and then want to make sure you can do a DFS without worrying about stack storage, probably a very valuable technique to have in your belt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. How would you use one of these implementations to persist a large trie beyond what physical memory can support?

<comment><USER5> mmap?

<comment><USER4> Yes. But, the trie implementation would need to somehow allocate mmap file address space. Depending on supported size of the trie, may require multiple mmap files. The addressing scheme would need to consider that. If you want the trie distributed, how would you do that? Would you distribute by some function on the key, essentially resulting in N tries?

Also, if you want to support all 256 values in a byte for each byte of the string to be entered into the trie, the whole idea of using a list structure seems inefficient. On average, to find the next byte in the trie would require 128 comparison operations.

<comment><USER6> You could write your own memory allocator, overload malloc/alloca etc. and/or `operator new[]` along with `delete`.

[http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/new/operator_new](http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/new/operator_new)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open Spark Project: Your Music.  Played Through Lightning. - <AUTHOR> http://opensparkproject.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The doors are open on the Open Spark Project, a rare opportunity for musicians around the world to see their music turned into lightning. Cleveland-based performance engineering group, the Tesla Orchestra, launched the Open Spark Project last week, to let people around the world in on the fun of playing with giant musical bolts of electricity. Already Girl Talk (pop mashup star) and others have signed up to enter songs into the project. Thanks goes to Paul Buchheit (Google Employee #23 and inventor of GMail) for sponsoring all this excitement!

<http://opensparkproject.com>

Entries accepted until May 2nd, and then on May 14th the musicians and fans around the world can watch a live video feed at opensparkproject.com as we play selections from the entries on our two giant musical tesla coils. Musicians, come see your music turned into lightning!

Scientists and Engineers might wonder how the music is made. A traditional (non musical) tesla coil involves a series of resonating circuits, building up voltage higher and higher until it discharges through a spark. Part of that circuit is an air-gap switch that lets the first resonant circuit build up a high voltage before transmitting the energy to the second resonant circuit.

Now, replace that air-gap with a set of giant transistors, capable of sustaining thousands of amps of peak current, and you can now control when that spark can fly. Our musical tesla coils resonate around 30khz, discharging sparks that are several meters long. Using the transistors (called IGBTs) to turn that spark on and off at say, 440hz, will result in a 440hz tone, or A4 on your standard piano keyboard. The same holds true for other frequencies, and so the tesla coils can reproduce any note on the piano.

Any noise that you can turn on and off can make music this way, and the DIY Maker community is full of musical projects that use printers, hard disk motors, you name it, all in the name of music. We happen to like making music with giant bolts of lightning, and we hope you'll enjoy it too.</comment>


A Guide To Hacker News For People Who Aren't Men (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/a-guide-to-hacker-news-for-people-who-arent-men-5737bc3e68a <comment><USER2> Caveat: I think it's valuable to avoid creating threads that devolve into flame wars over gender politics, and largely respect the decision of moderators to flag these articles as a result.

However, I'm a woman, 21 years old, and I've been a Hacker News member since 2014 and a reader for much longer (perhaps since I was 11 or 12?). I passed 500 karma years ago. I lament that I cannot easily connect with other women over our use of this medium, because this article alone gave me a lot of valuable advice and more things like it would definitely help me feel more welcome in the community. It's a complicated situation and I think dang and sctb have done a laudable job of splitting the difference in this space over the years, one that more internet moderators of tech spaces that want women to participate would do well to emulate.

<comment><USER3> I don't really understand what "welcome" means. Historically on the internet people are simultaneously "welcome" and "not welcome," i.e. people discover places of socializing and choose to participate or not. In my decades of socializing on the internet, most places are hostile to some degree. I also wouldn't bother to complain, because hostility is an unavoidable part of human nature, even hostility toward hostility. Some set of people within a given community will be "nice," and some will be "mean." Most people inhabit some indefinite point on the nice-mean continuum. It would be ideal if comments like "females suk lol" were removed, but something tells me that's uncommon.

I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern activism) suggests a few things:

(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic (2) The operators should signal that they care about me/my demographic (3) The operators should preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic (4) The operators should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics (determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)

This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

<comment><USER2> >It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?). Spaces that prioritize making religious white nationalists feel safe are not interesting spaces to participate in in general (check out the front page of Gab (edit: I think I meant Voat) if you need a sense of what I mean).

It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these suggesting I want preferential treatment from moderators. If my original post wasn't clear: I think the moderators are basically doing the best job that they can at weeding out obviously sexist, racist, and otherwise unproductive comments.

So, I'm not really complaining about how the space is moderated, I think it's at a pretty stable equilibrium and I'm pessimistic about it getting much better than this for women, with what it prioritizes (primarily, open discussion about controversial topics, so long as it remains civil, even when one side is expressing repellent views in a civil manner). Obviously, this is not disqualifying for me, because I'm still here, and I have a lot more karma than you.

However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.

<comment><USER4> > That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white > nationalists feel safe,

As a white, religious person, - but not a nationalist: I always felt safe on HN and I hope most HNers are OK with that as long as I play by the rules?

Why shouldn't everyone feel safe as long as they play by the rules?

Edit: I'm not hurt. I'm hoping to get a better worded explanation from you :-)

Edit 2: The reason why I ask is because sentence is quite absurd and cannot be what you mean. Just try to imagine someone saying: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," here on HN.

<comment><USER5> You are arguing in bad faith. Obviously one should be made welcome no matter whether they're white, a nationalist, religious, or all of these, but it should be easy enough to infer from context that this is not what the parent comment was about. It is about making clear that this welcome does not extend toward making other groups feel unwelcome, that is, toward _prioritizing_ that welcome over others.

<comment><USER4> > You are arguing in bad faith.

I'm not. I also read and re-read it too.

One possible explanation could be that I'm not a native speaker.

However if anyone wrote: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," I'd flag it instantly as I originally did with this before I unflagged it and asked instead because while I think some kind of nazi crap could write that I don't think that is what she means.

Edit: also I think it is bad for the conversation to state as fact that I argue in bad faith. If you'd be kind enough to rewrite that I'll also try to remove this edit.

<comment><USER2> What I meant was that white nationalists feeling safe in a space (particularly them feeling safe expressing white nationalist views) is a decent heuristic for that space being poorly moderated or of poor quality overall. At the very least I'm not interested in the content of that space and I find white nationalists repugnant.

<comment><USER6> Just for clarity's sake: I spent a year monitoring HN (somewhat primitively, but with automation) for white nationalist content, and I stopped because it's become increasingly clear that the site itself finds white nationalism repugnant.

Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned for this stuff.

It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't flagged by the time Dan saw them.

What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join! Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.

I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

<comment><USER2> > I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room > to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it because of the reputation, though. It's been an invaluable space for me in learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be improved, specifically because of what you mention.

<comment><USER6> It's hard! Like, I don't think it's reasonable to say "the site needs 6 more Dans" because it's hard enough to find one Dan that no other site like HN has managed to accomplish it.

I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard to take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that the comment highlighted in this article [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973) is already downvoted and flagged by the community. It has even a warning comment added by dang (that is the mod here) (and the warning doesn't use the usual polite tone).

</comment><comment><USER8> I am always a bit surprised how often people call hacker news toxic. Has that word changed or am I just to old and jaded? I mean, sure, it's opinionated, it's got quite a few blind spots, it's a bit rough around the edges sometime. But the only comments I would really call toxic are already dead [0]. Now, I am not saying hacker news could not be nicer, but many people here seem to at least try to make reasonable arguments and I have yet to see it devolve into shouting matches like so many other places on the Internet. Maybe I just read to many Forums back in the day, but Hacker News by and large seems civil enough to me.

This is of course enforced through the only thin sheer of community, where you really have to look out for peoples usernames to get even an idea of who you are talking to. While probably beneficial in this regard, I often wish there were some sort of avatars or other features to more easily recognize people from thread to thread.

[0] Though it is interesting, that among the dead comments is nearly always one that just seems harmless and often even a valid argument. So turning dead comments to display seems kind of important to not miss those. I wonder what is up with that?

<comment><USER9> I think it depends where you hang out on HN. I also think it is civil for the most part, but there are a few threads I have been apart of where I was shocked at the racist, homophobic, sexist comments coming in. They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the first place.

<comment><USER10> > They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them > appearing in the first place.

Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done? I can imagine a few policies that would reduce the chance of such comment even appearing, such as:

\- Some problematic comments could be instantly removed algorithmically, e.g. by having a list of forbidden substrings/regexps. Trying to avoid that list e.g. by intentional misspelling would result in a manual ban. (And the misspelling would be added to the list.)

\- Moderation could be so strict that even a hint of heresy would result in a ban. If you merely seem like a person who probably would say something racist or sexist in the future, let's ban you before you actually do it.

\- The values embraced by the website should be expressed by (e.g. anti-racist and anti-sexist) slogans at the top of the page, along with explicit warnings against heresies, so that people would immediately know which opinions are allowed and which are not.

I do not really think any of these suggestions is good. My question is, without them, how can you avoid the situation, apparently very unpleasant to some people, where problematic comments sometimes appear, even if they are soon downvoted/flagged.

(I suspect than a combination of the second and third option is what the author of the article would like to see. But I'd rather hear it explicitly from people who mean it.)

<comment><USER11> >> They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the first place.

> Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be > done?

I don't think much more can be done. On a public forum where literally anyone can make an account and post, there's no way to control what content appears, and you can't accurately assess the community by that. The tail of the internet is long, and the bottom of the barrel is deep.

You have to assess the community by how its immune system reacts. It has to be enough if, after a while, the worst comments are downvoted and/or flagged. Unfortunately "after a while" takes time, perhaps several hours, and in the meantime many readers encounter the worst shit before the immune system has gotten to it. Some of those readers are shocked—understandably, because it's shocking shit. Some of them don't understand the dynamics well enough to read the situation accurately—they just think "OMG Hacker News said $SHIT". And some of those take to Twitter and post shocking things, and another scandal cycle repeats. At this point there have been so many scandal cycles that I can at least say that it's second-order trauma to run into them. They used to upset me for days.

If you stop and think about it, it's clear that this is the price for hosting a public forum—there's no way to avoid the shit. The best we can hope for is an ever-improving immune system. HN's immune system—consisting of users, software, and moderators—at least functions reasonably well, and there's room for it to get better.

It's easy to forget the good side of having a public forum: anyone can show up to post, regardless of who they are or who they know. If they have something interesting to say, they automatically and instantly belong. This is precious. It's how we get magical threads like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862) (still on the front page), where the founder of a beloved publisher gets to talk to his devoted fans 20 years later.

I don't know if you guys remember, but 6 years ago, just before he handed over HN to us, pg implemented a feature called "pending comments" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304)) in which comments were all placed into a queue to be approved of before they would appear in the threads. This is a technical solution that would actually work to prevent the worst shit from appearing here. But it sparked a huge firestorm and the first thing that I did on taking over HN was to roll that back. It was clear that the community didn't want it (not so surprising) but also the social critics of HN, the kind who write articles like the OP or post critiques of HN on Twitter, felt that it was elitist and would put too much power in the hands of entrenched users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I'd love to downvote comments like: "Males have evolved to extract resources > from the environment. Females have evolved to extract resources from males." > But for a long time I couldn't.

Yes well, because you didn't have enough magical points. Other HN participants had more magical points and downvoted that comment to oblivion. This isn't a good example to show how HN is sexist.

> That's nice but like many well-meaning men they can't seem to realize that > more sophisticated forms of sexism cloaked in fancy language ("women are > biologically programmed to XYZ") aren't any better than the crude type.

I'd like to think I'm well meaning and don't get that. Are you saying the phrase "women are biologically programmed to XYZ" is _always sexist_? What about "men are biologically programmed to XYZ" \- is that also sexist? Why? What about "turtles are biologically programmed to XYZ"? Or "plants are biologically programmed to XYZ"?

Where is the boundary between what's ok and what isn't? (I am biologically programmed to ask these questions.)

<comment><USER13> I fear there's a deep anti freedom of speech sentiment in her complaint. Why is it not enough to reply with your alternate opinion and engage in a discussion about such issues? Why such emphasis on attaining an ability to downvote, if not to stamp out dissenting views? Such censorship should be reserved for malicious comments that are intended that way.

I'll probably get downvoted for this, which will be ironic. HN is becoming tiresome with these discussions.

<comment><USER6> Because it takes far more effort to carefully rebut a slur than it does to make it, and if you let it stands as is, you've lent it credibility. We all intuitively understand this, which is why overt arguments in favor of crimes against children (which arguments do occur!) are instantly flagged off the site; we don't entertain them or carefully rebut them, and practically no one on the site expects us to. It's just that a noisome faction on the site does expect us to entertain slurs against women.

<comment><USER14> For a similar example in a different site, see [https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians- subre...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subreddit- banned-holocaust-deniers-and-facebook-should-too.html)

"In this endeavor, deniers focus on many minor and obscure details and leave out crucial context. It takes them little effort to formulate a wrong assertion, but it takes historians a long time and a lot of words to refute one. Our early attempts to engage on these points have shown that length and nuance do not play well on the internet and do not interest the deniers. The point of JAQing off is not to debate facts. It's to have an audience hear denialist lies in the first place. Allowing their talking points to stand in public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been a Hacker News user since August 2007, and I still don't have the ability to downvote. For many many years I didn't even know it was possible to downvote.

I guess I'm not posting enough, but I didn't really feel any need to obtain the karma even after learning about downvoting was a thing. After reading this, I feel more obligated to get above the threshold and help weeding out in the comments.

<comment><USER16> You need around 500 karma.

<comment><USER17> I think you need exactly 501. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER16> I dont know, who cares :)

There also seem to be 2 treasholds - one for topic and one for users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The flagging system on HN is terribly broken. I sent this to dang a while ago on the subject:

I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that this is to make it so that users cannot downvote until they have demonstrated some understanding of the community and an ability to fit in with its norms.

However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is basically a super downvote in several respects:

\- It works on comments _and_ posts

\- It works on direct replies to your own comments

\- Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely

\- A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been removed, whereas a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted.

It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is available to users 16 times sooner than the neutered version. I feel like HN has a problem with flagging being abused for censorship - this might provide an explanation.

Food for thought.

I won't disclose the response without his permission, but dang: if you're ITT, feel free to share.

</comment><comment><USER19> Although my account is recent, I've lurked HN for many years, almost daily.

I'm not dismissing the experience in the post, and I'm more surprised by it since I rarely find examples of open bigotry or sexism in the comments (although I noticed that in recent years some discussions are getting very polarized).

People in here seem to me to be open to rational discussion, and, yes, you do get controversial opinions, but mostly I think people are open for discussion.

<comment><USER2> It's gotten better over the years, to the moderators' credit, but it's still very difficult if not impossible to have civil and compassionate discussions about articles like this here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > On Hacker News it is used to remove content from the front page that people > simply dislike. Often this means content about sexism in tech

I think the main reason these posts are flagged is because the discussion turns toxic quickly, and not because users are adverse to these posts.

<comment><USER5> The discussion on this post itself was not toxic, and it has been immediately flagged anyway. Clearly some users very much are adverse to these posts.

<comment><USER20> You don't usually get feedback on your intuition so quickly, but it looks like I was wrong, and Melissa was right.

<comment><USER2> In your defense it's already teetering on the brink, so I think it's honestly a difficult decision to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I worked in an office few years ago, we were mostly mens and a certain kind of (in my opinion) toxic jargon was developed there.

It might be an unpopular opinion but I do think that when men and women are at the same place the chances the environment will be come toxic is way lower.

I wonder if it will happen in online community such as HN or even /r/programming on Reddit.

<comment><USER22> I 100% agree. For most of my undergraduate, the male-female ratio was a close to 40:60 (yes there were more women in my undergraduate maths classes than men, sample size ~400-1000). When I moved overseas to study Part III in Mathematics at Cambridge, the male-female ratio soared to about 95:5. This was the first time I was in an absurdly male dominated environment since my karate classes in primary school and I found it to definitely be more toxic. My experience thereafter has been the same: more balanced environments are healthier and less prone to toxic weeding of viewpoints.

<comment><USER23> How do you know that the males in the 40:60 class didn't feel that the environment was "toxic" in the other direction?

<comment><USER22> I don't recall this being a problem in 4 years. Men weren't put down or treated in derogatory ways because they weren't women. If I try to enumerate typical toxic behaviours, it certainly wasn't the case that any of this was systematically disadvantaging men. Contrast that with modern work environments ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would love for the author to share some of the comments she thinks were unfairly flagged.

<comment><USER25> Keep an eye on this thread. I would not be at all surprised if it is flagged! Sometimes you'll see that posts with a ton of upvotes still slide down the front page very quickly and disappear. That's because users are flagging the post.

EDIT: this post has been flagged, 30 minutes after it was posted. So if you're looking for an example, look no further.

<comment><USER24> It's a good example of something being flagged because it's a baseless claim with no evidence-- one that tries to use an unarguable fallacy as a winning argument: "You're silencing me because I'm X", not because you're just wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are you serious? Was this article really just FLAGGED? Was it flagged just because the article mildly criticises Hacker News and it's moderators for not having enough diversity?

<comment><USER27> It's clickbait.

<comment><USER28> I don't agree with what some of what the article says, but it certainly doesn't seem like clickbait. It appears to be an honest expression of someone's opinion and attempt to help others navigate shortcomings they see with HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ironically, this submission has now been flagged so won't appear on the frontpage anymore, only had about 25 minutes of visibility before disappearing into the ether.

<comment><USER30> The hckrnews.com client doesn't hide anything

<comment><USER31> P.S. the hckrnews guy is [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wvl](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wvl) Using his site for your username feels a little scummy.

<comment><USER30> I couldn't really think of a username when I signed up and this is the first thing that came to mind. I'm willing to change it to something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'd quite like HN to be completely free of anything to do with sexism, racism and politics.

<comment><USER33> I'd quite like tech to be completely free of anything to do with sexism, racism and politics, but it turns out it's part of the world.

<comment><USER34> The thing is discussing it easily ruins the mood of feeling productive when opening HN.

Also the benefit of discussing the same mindless discussion over internet where you already know the points of both sides are minimal in my opinion. There are better ways to spend time to benefit the minorities/females than discussing it here.

<comment><USER35> Why does that discussion "ruin" the mood?

Who is doing the ruining?

Who benefits by lack of discussion?

(My view is that silence on contentious issues benefits the status quo.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there a level of karma that upon reaching allows the user to get email updates to replies to submitted news or comments?

<comment><USER34> That seems like a good weekend project idea if there is no such system now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My feeling over the last 2 years is HN has largely steered clear of topics related to gender, as they lead awful comment threads. That's an impression which implies the HN moderators have adopted this policy. And in general I think it's a good. thing - there's enough discussion of gender in tech elsewhere.

<comment><USER27> That's not true though, the various gender gaps have been discussed here endlessly. I'm baffled when anyone says there's not enough discussion of these things when they dominated HN for months at a time.

<comment><USER2> What there isn't a lot of discussion of is how the space functions in a holistic sense for women, but so it goes for other groups as well. I don't think "more discussion" is what this situation is lacking, though I couldn't tell you what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here is my take on the social dynamics: a subset of group A discriminates against all of group B. In defense, a subset of group B accuses all of group A. In return-defense, a greater subset of group A accuses all of group B of unfair accusations... and so on.

</comment><comment><USER39> One of the interesting things about the 500 vote threshold for downvoting is that it kind of incentivizes incendiary comments. If you make a comment that picks a side on a hot-button topic and delight 50% of users and annoy the other 50%, you will on net get upvotes, because the half who like the comment have more sway on the voting than the half who don't. I like that we limit downvoting, but it has side-effects.

</comment><comment><USER24> Needs a (2018) tag

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm sorry that this is off-topic, but we can we please ban Medium links? I cannot read the article because of the paywall and I have no interest in spending my time hacking around it.

<comment><USER21> Use incognito

<comment><USER41> It would be trivial to, but it's more a matter of principle. You write content for a blog so Medium can monetize it and track your readers? that's good, but I would prefer not to have it on HN.

<comment><USER2> Every major newspaper does this too.

<comment><USER41> Agreed. And I'd happily do without.

I'm not a luddite; I have been a subscriber of The Economist for like 20 years and I appreciate what they do. Still, I think that it is not appropriate for HN posts to point to paywalled content.

<comment><USER2> I'd rather know that the community thinks it's worth reading and make my own decision to circumvent the paywall, because it keeps us in the good graces of those organizations and they produce interesting articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Please. I've read plenty of biologically motivated drawbacks of the male sex, both here and other more "enlightened" corners of the interwebs Supposedly, they are bunch of pre-verbal, emotionally out-of-touch nitwits so focused on competition they can't figure out how to cooperate.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hacker News, you can't hide from this important topic about a lack of diversity. We need to discuss this and fix it as a community.

[https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293](https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293)

<comment><USER43> The flagging comes not from moderators, but from users.</comment></comment>


Scientists model mass gatherings, identify the risks of large crowds - <AUTHOR> http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/11/22/Scientists-model-mass-gatherings-identify-the-risks-of-large-crowds/6731479828499/ <comment><USER2> The source paper (accepted but not published):

Emergent structural mechanisms for high-density collective motion inspired by human crowds Phys. Rev. Lett. Arianna Bottinelli, David T. J. Sumpter, and Jesse L. Silverberg

Abstract: Collective motion of large human crowds often depends on their density. In extreme cases like heavy metal concerts and Black Friday sales events, motion is dominated by physical interactions instead of conventional social norms. Here, we study an active matter model inspired by situations when large groups of people gather at a point of common interest. Our analysis takes an approach developed for jammed granular media and identifies Goldstone modes, soft spots, and stochastic resonance as structurally-driven mechanisms for potentially dangerous emergent collective motion.</comment>


Argument between Torvalds and Drepper (RedHat) on memcpy() behaviour - <AUTHOR> http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12518

<comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR version: some software vendors used memcpy instead of memmove when copying memory contents in overlapping blocks and that used to work until recent change in glibc. Torvalds insists that glibc should try to maintain compatibility. Drepper says that programs should be fixed. I tend to side with Drepper on this one, but what is HN's take?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you like/use Reddit's redesign? - <AUTHOR> It is touted to be better, but  I don't see the appeal and it's slower. I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design. <comment><USER2> Not at ALL.

I've never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend _heavily_ on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the "normal" web pages of the old design. The new "design" breaks _everything_ that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost _impressively_ bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.

And all of this, I must say, is before I even _mention_ the ridiculous spam- like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like "USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?". Who is that for? Does _anyone_ like this kind of crap? It virtually _guarantees_ that I will _never_ download the app.

Reddit's days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I'm actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign "sins", and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What's the alternative?

<comment><USER3> If there was a cookie cutter reddit alternative and there was no content, would you use it? The network effects of reddit are a reasonably strong barrier of entry.

<comment><USER4> For a viable competitor to Reddit, you only need enough other users to fill a few pages worth of content, so the barrier of entry is much lower than if you wanted to outcompete something like Whatsapp. I mean, Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.

<comment><USER5> >Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.

Exactly. I went on reddit for years until the redesign. Now I can't stand that site. The reddit redesign is so astoundingly bad and nonfunctional it shocks me to this day.

<comment><USER6> There's a simple browser extension to redirect to old.reddit.com. But I agree that if they ever remove that, I'll leave the site. The redesign is comically worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate it, it's infinitely worse. Here are a few issues:

\- It's much slower/bulkier. I don't want a modern machine just render webpages.

\- Infinite scrolling designs are good for addiction, but not actually good for reading. If I have to reload the page, my spot is gone.

\- Much less content actually fits on a page, and I suspect this is done to encourage scrolling, similar to facebook's strategy. Increase addiction, tracking, and ad impressions through engagement.

\- There seem to be a lot more emojis and post flair.

\- There seem to be A lot more promoted posts

There's probably other stuff I haven't noticed. Between the redesign, the enhanced user tracking, their desire to go public, and tencent's investment, it's pretty clear that it's getting to be time to abandon reddit completely.

<comment><USER8> You're first point is my biggest pet peeve. I get the "Something went wrong. Press here to return home" error all the time when my connection is mediocre or like if my phone is about to drop wifi for data. For a site comprised of basically just text and images, they figured out very well how to complicate serving the data to the point of unusability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Absolute worst unnecessary redesign! Reddit's charm was its simplicity and information density on a single screen. The new redesign has completely gutted it and made everything worse.

I ONLY use [https://old.reddit.com/](https://old.reddit.com/) to access the site now.

<comment><USER10> Reddit has gone through many changes both in the product and the organization.. I feel like its initial purpose/mission has been lost in the way that it was intended as an open space to share things. I do absolutely hate the redesign and hate having to type the URL out.. the redesign is more tedious and eats up data like mad

<comment><USER11> You can set a preference in your user settings to prefer the old design and automatically get that on any reddit link you click.

<comment><USER12> it still randomly switch to new design once in a while. a refresh fixes it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No.

Neither do I like being harassed by various banners to switch to redesign (recently sliding banners for "amazing" dark mode and infinite scrolling) or even finding it was loaded by force randomly during browsing random content and that seems to be happening way too often to count it as "accident".

I get the idea behind this: they set themselves a goal of luring in new people by making UI more attractive to the audience who's familiar with _social network_ interfaces and such way of providing content (the default card is just same as twitter, facebook and instagram feed view). Still, they should still respect users who want to stay on faster-loading old interface and provide it as an option in preferences (old domain is just half-assed way to do it), not assuming that everyone will be enjoying this new UI.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reddit keeps on putting a banner at the bottom of its pages saying "Try the redesign! It has INFINITE SCROLLING!" and I am like, guys, that's the last thing I want, I _like_ having those little moments where I have to explicitly _decide_ if I want more of what you have or not, that makes it easier to _stop_ and go do something _useful_.

<comment><USER15> Infinite scrolling is a pet peeve of mine. When it's on a PC (and not mobile), it's a little disconcerting to not have breaks in the content, and it completely breaks scroll bar behavior if I'm dragging down the scroll bar when the next chunk loads.

<comment><USER16> I've also found that it leads to the browser using more and more memory to the point that my computer starts swapping unless I close the tab every so often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> david-s No. Largely the dark pattern mobile "get the app" hassling. But also the sheer load time on desktop. And to a lesser extent the breaking of the "a bunch of mostly-static links with associated commentary" model. Using the site is quite unpleasant now.

And it's enough unpleasantness to keep me from going back to checking it regularly. I hope they keep it.

<comment><USER17> I think you can disable the "get the app" in your Reddit settings panel. How persistent that is, not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design.

This was happening to me too. I've switched to a add on to FF that forces everything reddit to old.reddit.com

I feel like the redesign wasn't for "Us". It was for those people used to a Facebook like feed. People that enjoy or easily digest pictures and videos more than they do words.

I have a friend that uses RES to view all images on the page. And basically scrolls past any threads that would have a text title. Doesn't even read the title unless an image catches his eye. And never EVER reads the comments. I feel like the redesign was for people like that.

<comment><USER19> Which unfortunately, is the sort of person who's going to accidentally click on an ad, which is probably an intentional move on their end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's dog slow. It uses small popup instead of leading to a new page. And it has less density of information compared to the old design, even in compact mode. It's like new Gmail versus old Gmail, everything got bigger anv you got less information per page as a result.

</comment><comment><USER21> I dislike it and I don't use it. I also use Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] to improve my experience.

I don't see why Reddit shouldn't just publish its retention/cohort metrics. Of general interest to the community and certainly not a trade secret.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit- enhancement...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement- suite/kbmfpngjjgdllneeigpgjifpgocmfgmb?hl=en-US)

</comment><comment><USER22> On every redesign on every website ever there will be a huge outcry of people who hate the new design.

The Reddit one is barely usable for me though, I'm not sure if it's the JS heavy front end buts it's really laggy and hard to use on a 2015 MBP with Safari so I just switched to Apollo app as the only way to use it. The desktop site got unusable for me.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's terrible. I say that as someone who usually likes exploring redesigns and new software products.

It's clear what it's optimized for and the user or the user expereince is not it.

What's especially annoying is that the mobile website is unreadable since they use growth tactics at every step to try to funnel you into their native mobile app.

I pretty much still browse on old.reddit.com.

</comment><comment><USER24> I saw Anand Mariappan (snr. dir. eng. at Reddit) speak at the Landing Festival Berlin last week. I was amused to note that both he and the organisers of the conference touted his management of the redesign as a highlight of his career. I do not use Reddit often, but I detest the new design.

</comment><comment><USER25> Kind of, but not for the reasons they want me to like it. The redesign itself is terrible in almost every way, but in being so terrible it really drives a point home I've been thinking about for a while: the "best practices" of modern SPA design and implementation can really lead to drastically reduced functionality.

It might look slightly easier on the eyes (debatable) but other than that, actually using the redesign is worse in almost every way. It's slower than the previous version and there's way less information on a page, yet this is the app you'd get if you followed all the "common wisdom" about building a web front end in 2019.

Compare this to something like craigslist, or pinboard, or HN, which are all theoretically "ugly" but all very fast and very easy to use. Content notwithstanding the user experience on craigslist is infinitely better than the one on new Reddit.

So yes, I like the redesign, but only in the sense that is has highlighted all of the bad parts of modern web design to me in a very concrete way.

</comment><comment><USER26> I dislike the redesign very much.

I've made a very simple open source extension to automatically redirect all reddit.com and www.reddit.com links to old.reddit.com.

\- [https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit- fixer](https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit-fixer)

\- [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit- fixer/boahh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit- fixer/boahhdcjflkiibelindjjjfpnffcjdag)

\- [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit- redire...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-redirector/)

<comment><USER19> Thanks fam. This is even lighter than what I was using previously.

<comment><USER26> Thanks <3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't, mainly because of the slower load times, the fact that they mix in sponsored links in the current version (but not the old version), and that it's unusable in my smart phone's browser.

I've gotten into the habit of using old.reddit.com whenever I view it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I hate the new design. Not because it's new, but because it took everything I liked about Reddit (i.e. easy to read, no flashy design, FAST) and threw it out the window for a slow error-prone POS SPA app. I also hate the fact that when I follow links to Reddit from anywhere, e.g. Twitter, Slack, I see the new design and have to manually change the domain to old.reddit.com, even though my account settings are set to always use the old design.

I also finally caved and downloaded their mobile app because I got tired of all of the nagging. I feel like they intentionally broke their mobile experience to push users to the app so they could increase ad revenue. I'm sad I caved, but I just couldn't take the BS experience any longer.

Makes me sick.

<comment><USER28> The third party reddit apps are a lot better. I prefer Reddit Is Fun on Android but I know there are several good options besides that on both mobile platforms.

<comment><USER29> Apollo on iOS is fast and easy. Would recommend to anyone.

<comment><USER30> Apollo, FTW. It has my vote. Grabbing content to quote is still a problem (it sits beneath the bottom bar, probably a negative padding issue), but otherwise I have no complaints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nope, it's awful. I will likely stop using the site if they ever do away with the old design option. I just can't stand how slow the new one is in comparison. If they fixed the performance, I guess it would be tolerable to use. Not sure what they are doing that makes it feel so laggy to use.

<comment><USER11> Reddit is mostly 0 or 1 pictures followed by chunks of text with minimal controls/links.

Isn't it amazing that its possible to make this slow on a fast computer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't normally comment, but as a (formerly) heavy Reddit user I feel compelled to chime in: I absolutely _loathe_ the new redesign. Infinite scrolling: ye Gods, why? It makes my fairly beefy laptop grind to a halt. Plenty of very eloquent posters before me have stated in great detail just why they hate it, so I won't bore everybody by repeating everything.

I used to love the very simplicity of old Reddit; by making it more Facebook- like, they infantilised a great site, and the moment they take away the ability to visit "old Reddit" my usage will drop right down. But I suppose this infantilisation is just right for the social media generation. Sigh.

Some commenters have mentioned the great Digg redesign fiasco; here's a link from August 2010 that talks about it. The internet was a very different place in 2010.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg- redesign-revolt)

<comment><USER19> When, not if, they take away the old site, I'm done with reddit for good. I have plenty of alternatives at this point and I imagine that I'm not the only one who's jumping ship at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love the old Reddit design. It's a sea of mostly text with a few flair images but it really works. For me it's always been really readable and a joy to use. If they take it away I'll probably just stop using the site.

</comment><comment><USER34> Their metics on the redesign isn't "like it vs. dislike it" it's "actively hates it vs. hates it but not enough to care"

But at least they didn't digg it and kill the site outright, and instead just started to see how much nagging and annoyance they can pull their faithful user base through before they break.

<comment><USER13> They're obviously heading toward the moment when redesign will be the default interface without way to opt-out (which is already happening to some of the people who managed to trap themselves by this "dark mode" banner acc. to r/redesign comments) and I assume neither _old_ domain will be working at some point and removal will be explained by some ridiculous statement that it's inefficient to keep 2 interfaces, users are happily adapted to use new style (having no other choice) or something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> No. It's buggy, slow and looks terrible on a desktop/laptop. Not only does it look awful via mobile, it is practically unusable on a phone.

If they cared about usability or user experience, they wouldn't have 3 different reminders to use the Reddit app or redesign each time you visit the site, each interrupting flow or completely blocking the visible page itself. Certainly the web app wouldn't "forget" that you opted out of the redesign or log you out if they cared about user experience.

It's very clear that the redesign was an effort to more efficiently push ads to users and drive their valuation up.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sidebars are totally gone. There are subs I _only visit_ for the information in their sidebar and wiki, both of which are gone, as far as I can tell, in the redesign.

Also, I use reddit the most in bed, on my phone. It is a great aggregation service for news and interesting articles, but they have intentionally slowed down their website and regularly make it worse and more annoying in an effort to force users to use their app. I am sure that the app is fine, but I like the browser because I want to be able to open links in new tabs and then have those tabs available on my desktop the next day for further reading.

<comment><USER37> Both the sidebar an wiki are available in the redesign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It looks like a fake/scam site, somehow. You know one of those who scrape other sites, steal the content and put their own ads on top.

<comment><USER19> I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think you've really hit the nail on the head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> No, and I always go to old.reddit.com to avoid it. It's set as my default style when logged in, and I'm happy to use an extension to redirect to the old site on Firefox too.

As for why? Well the new one is slower, fits less information on the page, keeps trying to force me to use their mobile app, etc. It just keeps getting in the way with no real benefits provided in return.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting, I just closed Reddit while complaining in my head about how poor the experience is:

\- You can't seem to persist the "old reddit" design any more. It keeps switching you back to the new design

\- It's just much slower to load content. The old site was fairly snappy

\- Comment are CONSTANTLY failing to load in most of the threads I open

\- The autoscroll is also regularly failing to load new items

\- Using the mobile site, I'm nagged by numerous attempts to get me to install the native app

<comment><USER41> Just so you know, there's this[1] firefox addon that always force the redirection to old.reddit.com. I imagine there's a similar thing for chrome.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit- re...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/)

<comment><USER42> You don't even have to do that.

On reddit, go to your preferences. Down under beta test you'll find "Use the redesign as my default experience"

Disable it.

<comment><USER43> The problem is that reddit randomly ignores this and switches back to the redesign on a whim.

<comment><USER42> Interesting. It has never failed for me since turning it on soon after the redesign landed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I do prefer it. It looks much nicer, the old design was very dated, let's be honest. Don't need to use a third-party extension (Reddit Enhancement Suite) to make it usable anymore.

It does seem quite buggy in places though. Especially in regards to login flow & 2 factor authentication. Seems to get stuck and gets in limbo where it acts like it's logged in but it isn't.

However, I do hate the mobile 'experience', it's borderline unusable with all the banners and attempts to get you to install their app. If the links would take me to my third-party reader like BaconReader (iOS) then it'd be more tolerable but it only works with the official Reddit app.

<comment><USER45> Exactly. New design makes it much easier to be used by non-advanced users like your mom or nephew. They are often ignored in the context of HN discussions and seldom voice for themselves, but they did consist a large portion of user base.

<comment><USER11> Please explain why the new design is easier.

<comment><USER45> There are much fewer visual elements after the redesign. Take the post view as an example. The new design removes my subreddits, sub description & recent viewed posts and tries to hide all other elements like share links / absolute last replied date from the page. Same as the reason for the success of iPad, People like my mom feel petrified for a UI with many choices. In the new design if you look at the screen from meters away, you can easily identify the reply box & reply button as the only prominent visual element.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> No. Reminds me of Netflix. Both have gotten substantially worse. To the point of me not even visiting or cancelling my subscription in the case of Netflix.

Is anyone or any company actually improving their website?

What is the cause of this? Any one have insight? I have a theory or thought, but I'm interested if anyone has some real insight or reason?

Edit: The constant use our app banner and nag is the worse.

</comment><comment><USER47> No. Scrolling down the page should not make my 2018 i7 MacBook Pro spin up its fans.

</comment><comment><USER48> Can't stand the redesign.

It feels like a group of fresh ux grads built it. Trendy and cool, with the latest js crap but with Zero functionality or friendliness.

</comment><comment><USER49> I hate it. So many reasons why. Redirect to mobile app along with nerfed mobile website is God awful. Broken browser behavior when clicking links is obnoxious. I'd go on but this thread covered everything else.

</comment><comment><USER50> Apparently my "That's enough Reddit, time to go do something productive" check only happens when I reach the bottom of the page and have to click for another page.

Endless Scroll basically destroyed my productivity for a week until I figured that out. I switched to Old Reddit and my life is back in balance.

Just one of those subtle little things nobody would've anticipated, I guess.

<comment><USER51> On the contrary: this was very likely a key point in the decision process for the new design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hey, I'm a long time Reddit user. I really enjoy the new interface. Loving the app as well, which got much better over the past year or so.

(quickly hides before old Reddit fans come at me swinging)

</comment><comment><USER53> I can tell you already that 99.99% of Hacker News commenters are going to say they hate the new design. And it does suck! But we're not the population that Reddit redesigned for.

<comment><AUTHOR> i do think that we re not far from the average redditor.

<comment><USER54> Given how much content gets pasted here from /r/programming and other tech subreddits, and how much _passion_ there is behind HN's distaste for the redesign, I would bet that many, if not most, HN users _are_ redditors.

<comment><USER53> Those are a weird minority of subreddits. Look at the front page for a taste of how Reddit is experienced on average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It is great for looking at gifs and funny pictures. Not so good for intelligent discussions, but I feel like those disappeared a long time ago.

<comment><USER33> If you only ever look at the home page as a non-logged-in user, or if you don't subscribe to subreddits I can see why you'd think that. There are awesome groups on a whole range of topics. Subscribe to some of those and suddenly Reddit is an aggregator of the best of the web. It rewarda careful choices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I Reddit a lot, with the old design + RES, and the Reddit is Fun app. I have not liked the new design because it's harder to scroll past stories I don't care about, and I can't view full text posts without going to the comments page.

</comment><comment><USER57> the new design reminds me of digg's old design.

it would have been a good April Fools prank to launch a "HN redesign" in the same style

</comment><comment><USER17> No, not in the slightest. Seems solely designed to push more banner advertisements instead of providing content. Even on Desktop you're unable to see 1 or more posts at a time if there's an image post open.

</comment><comment><USER58> I do not use the redesign. I especially despise this behavior of "forgetting" the login and redirecting users to the redesign, and I use a simple userscript to keep everything on old.reddit.

It's much heavier on my machine, for one thing, and I _hate_ the new user pages - not the bio/avatar, or the fact that you can post there, but just how the messages are displayed. It's noisy. The context provided is not worth the space it takes on the screen, and AFAICT comments from deleted thread only appear on the old overview.

</comment><comment><USER59> I quit Reddit for a lot of reasons, but the redesign was the final nail in the coffin for me. Feels like No Country for Old Men over there.

I felt like all I was doing was watching loading spinners for the content to come in. Lots of last-minute DOM element readjustments that felt super broken and I never quite knew how to use anything. Add to that, links were replaced with icons in a lot of places so I never could find what I was looking for.

Blessing in disguise, really. I started using HackerNews and I love the community here.

</comment><comment><USER60> On my screen the redesign goes from 17 links to 3.

</comment><comment><USER61> Do not like it. old.reddit.com

</comment><comment><USER62> For most people who don't like the new design, there is still [https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com)

<comment><USER63> This is how I can tell the design's actually bad -- that when I get on the new design by mistake, I'm not like "meh, links are still here", I'm like "whoops, have to go to the old one!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I imagine it's a huge success metrics-wise. The infinite scroll and bright pictures, even the sizing of the preview boxes as 2/3s screen height, it's perfectly tuned to maximize user engagement time. And since they put extra effort into maintaining the old design, they seem to have lost few users if any. Few companies have pulled off a successful transition like this.

</comment><comment><USER65> No+no. Https://old.reddit.com

</comment><comment><USER66> I understand that reddit wants to be the place where bored teens scroll through memes, gifs, news and screenshots from twitter, facebook and 4chan.

But I want nothing to do with any of that. I go for the interesting conversations in 3 tiny subreddits filled with thoughts I don't get to read anywhere else.

Of course I hate the redesign. When I want to browse twitter, I'll just open twitter.

</comment><comment><USER67> Shameless plug, since I didn't get much feedback when shared previously [0]...if anyone wants to check out another alternative to browsing reddit:

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

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910818)

</comment><comment><USER68> Hate it.

I avoid it constantly.

The old design isn't very sexy, but it's super efficient easy to read information dense. They haven't improved on that.

</comment><comment><USER69> The new design shows images from links on the page. It's faster for redditors to upvote an image on the page they find vaguely aggreeable than to click a link, wait for it load, decides if they like it, go back and upvote it. This eventually leads to all the top voted threads to be vaguely agreeable images, crowding out everything else.

</comment><comment><USER70> When I finally get tired of being nagged to install the app and concede, I find the app is exactly like the mobile website, except all my normal browser functions like select/copy, copy image link, find are all non-intuitive or don't exist. Its just so pointless and stupid. Are these guys doing any UX testing?

<comment><USER19> Sure, they're testing the new UX's ability to increase their ad impressions. I'm sure that's going swimmingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Hate it. I use the old. The new one is very slow here and pops up errors that it cannot load posts and then it they appear anyway etc. It's dynamic loading taken way too far. Just give me static pages preloaded please and, if you must, update things dynamically, but that's not really a must anyway.

</comment><comment><USER72> No, its buggy and the moderation tools are in-superior especially when you factor in the incomplete RES support.

</comment><comment><USER73> It's amazingly bad. It's bad for text, media, commenting, following users, etc.

Other than sort of looking like GMail, I cannot imagine what drove the folks behind it. It's almost Reddit and Tumblr are in a race to product the worst 2000s era social website ever.

</comment><comment><USER74> No, it's unreadable and I despise it. And trying to force me to use it makes it worse.

</comment><comment><USER75> "Mike from Triplebyte here" is the new "Here in my garage with my new lamborghini".

(referring to the way-too-common reddit ads with the goofy looking guy, and to Tai Lopez's cringey "here in my garage" self-help-success videos)

</comment><comment><USER76> I used to absolutely hate it, to the extent where I would actually take the time and effort to switch to old.reddit.com whenever I got served the new redesign.

BUT after a few months of having the new design being pushed in my face, and forced to engage with it, I've kind of mellowed out. Infinite scroll is annoying, otherwise I find the look and feel is reasonably pleasant, and a little more "2019".

It does feel like a pretty unnecessary redesign though. Does anyone know if Reddit has published any stats showing what the redesign accomplished? I'd be curious to know.

</comment><comment><USER77> I prefer the old design, but the new one has a number of improvements and I think I could get used to it if it wasn't so unbearably laggy. I'm on a beefy MacBook pro and it's so slow it's frustrating, especially on Firefox.

Also I think it's a huge shame how much customization they've taken away from the subreddit styling. Completely custom CSS was way better, the new design seems to allow for some basic elements to be styled along with the banner. That is a major downgrade.

</comment><comment><USER78> i personally like it, it's cleaner and there's more whitespace that helps with readability.

<comment><USER79> I want to congratulate you for being the only person in this thread to like the redesign. I'd go as far to say that you're brave for outing yourself like this

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I would like it quite a lot if it worked properly, but there are some pretty brutal bugs. I have some amount of faith that they'll be fixed, though.

</comment><comment><USER81> Generally yes, although I definitely wish the initial load was speedier the better looks and "flow" are worth it imo. I usually browse Reddit using Relay and look at my saved posts on desktop, which has benefited a lot from the redesign since I can just do stuff in a single tab instead of middle-clicking a bunch of posts.

</comment><comment><USER82> NO

It's a disaster. It is slower has worse UX than the old Reddit. Whoever thought making a SPA with React was a good idea was wrong. Reddit is a terrible use case for a SPA.

Design wise it's not terrible, but the chosen fonts have less readability than the previous fonts (I believe good old Verdana).

I will keep using old Reddit with RES for as long as I can.

</comment><comment><USER83> Reddit's redesign is ok, and I can use it when I have to, but it's worse in every way than the old version.

</comment><comment><USER84> I preferred the old one though the new one is slowly growing on me. I do like the way that posts seem to be in a popup that get closed rather than having to use the back button.

Is it just me or is the quality of Reddit posts on any mainstream sub going down? If feels like its going the way of Digg.

</comment><comment><USER85> I don't mind the new look, but the build itself is terribly slow and feels bloated.

</comment><comment><USER86> I dislike it, but I reluctantly use it because its very numerous and significant drawbacks are maybe offset by the fact that it offers night mode.

If there was a night mode setting in the old version, I'd use that in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER11> Did you know user scripts can give you a night mode?

<comment><USER86> I did wonder if an add-on or something could do this, but hadn't got to looking into it. Knowing there's an easy solution means I will now. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Nope, dark mode+RES remains my one true love. If your redesign reduces info density, increases load times and breaks compatibility with the most popular user mod to your site... Perhaps you should rethink things.

</comment><comment><USER88> captcha. captcha everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER89> Kinda and I usually use reddit on mobile app because reddit website on mobile is terrible and on pc its not appealing enough. So I use mobile app. Mobile app also sucks a bit.

</comment><comment><USER90> Yes. It's nice. I love how collapsing comment threads is now done with a big solid bar on the left instead of a tiny '[-]' link that you have to scroll up to find.

</comment><comment><USER91> No, it's absolutely terrible. Overly JavaScript heavy, slow as anything, laggy UI elements, bad use of screen realestate and it seems to be generally bloated.

</comment><comment><USER92> I will be using the older version until they can it. the old Reddit is still very easy to use, very responsive and is very fast.

</comment><comment><USER93> it is absolutely worse.

</comment><comment><USER94> I don't know anyone who does.

</comment><comment><USER95> No.

The old design is ugly, but it works.

The new design is prettier in a messy way, but I much prefer the original UI.

</comment><comment><USER96> I MUCH prefer it. I've been using reddit daily for just under a decade.

</comment><comment><USER97> I wonder if Reddit will one day trigger a Digg-like death for themselves?

</comment><comment><USER98> The only thing that would make people like the new design would be coming out with a newest design. It's the perpetual law of redesigns, which makes me believe a very vocal fraction of the internet lives in constant horror of the world around them changing.

<comment><USER27> Except Reddit's new design definitively sucks and it practically forces their app down your throat on mobile to increase their ad revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> I still like to browse reddit.com/.compact on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER100> Only one thing I don't like is infinite scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER101> Hate it, old.reddit.com stays in my address bar

</comment><comment><USER102> No, I use old.reddit or nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER103> History is broken, search is broken

</comment><comment><USER104> All growth-minded websites eventually decide to go to war with their users. This usually happens right before they die.

</comment><comment><USER105> The old design was better, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER106> old.reddit.com all the time

</comment><comment><USER107> No and no.

</comment><comment><USER108> No.

</comment><comment><USER109> no

</comment><comment><USER110> Is that a trick question?

</comment><comment><USER111> Pretty much stopped using reddit and found other things to do. Still go back of course but if they're gonna make my exp shitty for more money then I'll take my attention elsewhere. Plus it's helped me realize how shitty reddit has become anyway :/</comment>


The Most Edited Wikipedia Articles from Every Year of Its Existence - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/2016/wikipedia-most-edited-articles-15th-anniversary <comment><USER2> FiveThirtyEight has a much more comprehensive take on the same subject: [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited- wikipedi...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited-wikipedia- pages-over-the-last-15-years/)

In fact, given how FiveThirtyEight describes obtaining the data[1], my guess is that Digg copied the link above.

[1] _" we asked the site's operator, the Wikimedia Foundation, for data on the most-changed entries of English-language Wikipedia in each year."_

</comment><comment><USER3> The most odd-ball of the lot seems to have been edited largely by one person [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geospatial_summar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geospatial_summary_of_the_High_Peaks/Summits_of_the_Juneau_Icefield&offset=&limit=500&action=history)

<comment><USER4> Interestingly enough I did a cursory google search of Kirk James Miller and nothing really came up that I noticed. I expected him to be an academic or researcher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it very amusing that RuneScape made the top 10 list. As a retired fiend, it reminds me just of how popular it was at that time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems silly to include lists like "Deaths in year XXXX". This is hardly rigorous anyways.</comment>


How to Price Software - Economics vs. Pyschology - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html

<comment><USER2> Great read if you are in the business of making money. Since we launched SyncPad, pricing (for enterprises) has been the most difficult thing to decide.

One thing not mentioned is that, even before pricing, is important to define what are you charging for. While in some cases it's easy (Photoshop charge per seat), in other it isn't because there are several variables in the application usage. In our case there are several thing we can charge for: users, concurrent users, concurrent rooms, and length of the meeting. Focusing your pricing on one thing instead of the other could radically change the amount of revenues as well as the perception users have about the price.

<comment><USER3> What you are selling? Indeed. If you are selling to large businesses, you are to _some_ extent selling checklist functionality (even if the UI / responsiveness / workflow is an instrument of torture to the poor dumb bastards having to use your Enterprise nightmare), AND (!!!) absolution of responsibility.

You are selling reputation, support, and a willingness to hold the customer's hand in the middle of the night, and possibly anywhere in the world. You are selling the assurance that your product is safe and reliable, and that selecting your competitor's product would be madness, folly & death, leaving your client out of a job, and his children disgraced and homeless.

This also contributes to the $75K entry level price tag for business software that Joel mentioned. It doesn't all go to "sales porn" -- some of it has to go into at least the appearance of support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While it didn't spoon feed pearls of wisdom as on pricing strategies, it was a fun read, and at the end I was saying something to the effect of... ditto! Pricing's more of an art, as are many things when it comes to running your own shop. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I'm sure for every art, someone's written a book on the scientific approach to it. Ultimately, think, decide & accept your decision. Learn from the past & be happy in knowing that at least you decided for yourself, and then look to the future with optimism!

</comment><comment><USER5> An oldie (but goodie) that has been referenced many times on HN. Probably one of Joel's best pieces.

</comment><comment><USER6> Regarding the sneaker example, this is an example of a Veblen good, which are bought specifically for the status given to the brand or product:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good>

(There's also Giffen goods, which are similar, but where the lower priced product is inferior. This means that consumers will substitute the product for another if they have the money to do so.)</comment>


Code Inflation (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/Code_Inflation.pdf <comment><USER2> Excellent analysis.

I'd like to add that "growth over time" also solves the "No Silver Bullet"[1] paradox: while Brooks's analysis[2] seems obviously correct, we also obviously have code that seems orders of magnitude larger than it has any business being[3].

As far as I can tell, Brooks doesn't consider cumulative effects of growth over time, but only a single iteration of analysis → development. So a 20% difference in efficiency is just a 20% difference in outcome. However, that same 20% inefficiency per iteration yields a 40x difference in outcome over 20 years. Compound interest.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet)

[2] "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

[3] MS Office is >400MLOC. Xerox PARX had "personal computing" in ~20KLOC. Even assuming MS Office is 100x better at "officing", that leaves 99.5% of the code unaccounted for. Similar analyses can be done for web browser (WWW.app, 5KLOC, Mozilla 15MLOC) and other operating systems etc.

<comment><USER3> Brooks argument if I remember right was about humans software always trying to push the envelope. So it is always going to be hard.

The inflationary phenomena described here is more about incremental decorative and accidental complexity. The root cause is not the human enterprising drive to go boldly where no man gone before.

Looking at the examples of adding headers and command line bells and whistles I wonder what human trait drives this? Those seem (product-)management and architecture/framework type decisions possibly driven by a need to have things uniform and under control.

Moore's law is tiring (it is more obvious on the data center side than in devices yes). Will we become more frugal again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Code inflation nicely cancels out gains from Moore's law. But there's also another interesting phenomenon seen in embedded _hardware_ \- it seems that each generation of devices has more (exponentially more?) computing power on- board, while the user-facing functionality stays the same or even slightly degrades. For example, the functionality of today's fridges, kettles and washing machines is equivalent to those made 20 years ago, but today's versions will break down faster and in ways nigh impossible to fix by yourself.

We're about to have _Android_ running on toasters. And I can't stop myself from asking the question - _why_?

<comment><USER5> > while the user-facing functionality stays the same or even slightly degrades

I would disagree with that on so many points. Today, more than ever we have massive differences. "Hey Siri/Google", the camera functionality is just incomparable, the maps, ...

In the case of consumer white goods the business case is that expensive mechanical components and security mechanisms are replaced by electronic ones that are cheaper. And indeed, counting inflation, today's whitegoods are far cheaper than they ever were. This is happening in power adapters, but also in washing machines and kettles. This means that half the components only exist in the virtual sense and you'd need half the design, a plastic molding factory, and a master's degree to have any hope in hell of fixing them. But they're 1/10th to 1/5th of your monthly pay, and last 2-10 years, so why bother ?

But the story is the same at a high level for everything from cell phone radios to motor controllers for washing machines. Virtual components, simulated in microcontrollers are far cheaper (and far less repairable) than a real component ever will be.

<comment><USER4> I bother, because I don't like to throw away a perfectly fine appliance only because some short blew out something on the motherboard. Nor do I want to pay for a new one every 2 - 5 years when the hardware could perfectly well last for 10-20 years. In a perfect world with perfect recycling, I wouldn't mind that much, but as it is today, it's only a way to make me spend more and trash the planet more.

Also, I don't feel like the price of appliances was dropping over my lifetime, so I have to ask - where do those apparent savings go? They're definitely not being passed on to consumers.

> _I would disagree with that on so many points. Today, more than ever we have > massive differences. "Hey Siri/Google", the camera functionality is just > incomparable, the maps, ..._

I'll grant you camera, because chips and algorithms do get better. Siri/Google doesn't really _feel_ like that much of an achievement over what was possible 10 years ago, except nobody tried to build that product then, and smartphones weren't exactly popular. As for maps, I'll only point to Google Maps application, which is constantly degrading in quality and functionality for the past 5+ years...

<comment><USER6> Appliances perhaps don't feel like they're dropping in price due to inflation (i.e., the number is higher), and added features.

If you correct for those, they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some days I'm inclined to rant about software bloat. I've often quoted or paraphrased a bit of dialogue from the Scott Meyer novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ that's kind of funny but also pretty sad:

Phillip (time traveler from 1984): What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?

Martin (from 2012): Upgrade it immediately.

But on the other hand, some of what might be perceived as bloat is really useful, even _necessary_ , to someone. For example, show me a "light" desktop operating system, Unix desktop environment, or web browser, and I'll probably tell you that many of my friends couldn't use it, because they're blind. (As for me, I'm legally blind, but I have enough sight to read a screen up close, so I don't _need_ a screen reader, but I often use one.) Accessibility requires extra code. In Windows 10, UIAutomationCore.dll is about 1.3 MB, and will no doubt get bigger as Microsoft continues to improve the accessibility of Windows. But you can't write that off as bloat.

Elsewhere on this thread, there was some discussion of microcontroller software versus Android. A user interface written for a microcontroller with a screen is inaccessible to a blind person, except by memorizing a sequence of button presses, if the UI is simple enough and the device has physical buttons in the first place. But if the device is running Android, the infrastructure for accessibility is there; just add a text-to-speech engine and TalkBack (edit: and make sure the application follows accessibility guidelines). That ain't gonna fit in 1 MB or less of flash and 512K or less of SRAM. So sometimes we may be inclined to rant about bloat, but there's actual progress, too.

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree with your point, but I think you are over estimating how much code some of that takes.

The reality is that we use so much code because it is easier that way. And the added ease is very hard to remove.

Then there is data. A single picture is more storage than my first few computers had. Compression isn't magic.

<comment><USER7> True. It's particularly sad that so many desktop apps these days bundle a full browser engine (through Electron or the like) because it's so convenient. And I hadn't really thought about how much space photos take up because _gasp_ I don't have a photo library. Music, though? That eats up space too.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, a ton of data goes to music and video. On the plus side, I no longer spend a ton of physical space on these. Not sure what is more wasteful, tons of movies and music I don't get to on my computer, or bookshelves of the same.

And I still have a fair number of books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a small irony here in the author's use of histogram plotting that performs meaningless perspective rendering - one of the features that has contributed to document-creation software bloat.

<comment><USER10> Perspective is not an expensive feature and I really doubt it would contribute significally to code inflation.

Start using libraries for a tiny feature without consider the whole size impact is what is driving code inflation. Now and then I find a very tiny project which executable is big just because they are linking again Boost for just one couple of classes.

<comment><USER11> _All_ of Boost?

It's modular, so you should just have to pull in what you use.

<comment><USER10> In practice it is not very modular, parts of the library like Asio are so dependent to other parts in boost, and given that bootstrapping can be an annoyance at times, I have seen a los of project that decided to include the whole library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work on some pretty heinous legacy code and build systems. I often measure my success by the amount of code I remove rather than the amount I write.

</comment><comment><USER13> > It sometimes seems as if [software] has just gotten bigger, but not safer. > So why is that?

The premise for the article. But it provides no proof of it. And I can just as well say "for me it seems software in general have gotten much safer over the years, because I barely remember a time a program crashed."

</comment><comment><USER14> Results of code review of false.c:

* Use of undocumented magic numbers (1)

* No use of getter/setter pattern

* Inflexible design (datatype of result is fixed, no template pattern implemented)

* Manual memory management (no garbage collection used)

* No infrastructure for automated testing included

* No unit tests available

* Code has not changed for Years (code smell!); Probable stale code, to be removed in next release.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article briefly mentions _cat_ , but there's more to say there: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11341175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11341175)

</comment><comment><USER16> "the probability of non-trivial defects increases with code size."

Intuitively this feels correct, I wonder if anybody has studied it.

<comment><USER17> Why does he specifically say "non-trivial" defects? The probability of any defect surely increases with code size?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps to forestall the suggestion that the growth is in trivial bugs, such as a typo in the text printed in response to the -h option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In what circumstances is it still useful to have a true/false executable in addition to the shell builtin?

<comment><USER11> In cases where you might not be using a shell.

Like, say you have a program that uses a user-specified program + arguments, like parallel or find -- but for evaluating a boolean condition.

true/false would help.

<comment><USER19> The undeniable fact is that there will be a case for any scenario, and that fact is the essential driver for code inflation. You can't shed the code since that code is there for a potential case; and you can't help adding code as you keep discovering/imagining new cases.

This is where a bit wisdom differentiates people. There is no winning trying to match exponential generality with our finite ability. So wise people seek essence and accept the reality that there will always be cases that are uncovered and the important thing is not to lose the essence -- bury the essence amid mountain of glut is not much different from losing the essence, therefore, it is often more plausible for the minimal approach than the bloat. The essence covers 80% of the time and the rest 20% of the time we cope with it.

In the case that you might not be using a shell and when you need the true/false such as with parallel or find? Why not write your true/false program then? In fact, I write my own parallel script every single time when I really need parallel. It is not hard. Takes about the same time for me to go through the man page.

<comment><USER11> Okay.

But if anything is the bloat it's the true/false shell built-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> __TLDR __

Author rants about how the size of the executable for the Unix `true` command has increased "exponentially" from 0 to 22KB over ~30 years, for no apparent reason other than "because it can", referring to cosmology, of course.

"...true and false commands also don't need an option that can invert the result, or one that would allow it to send its result by email to a party of your choice."

The article is humorous in nature, but not without a point.

OP, thanks for sharing the article.</comment>


Ask HN: Seeking Freelance Mobile App Developer to Build Simple App - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I was inspired by this post on HN some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5420588
...And after reading it started the startup I'm currently committed to working on, Sub Sonic Software.
I'm looking for a freelance dev to build a simple cross platform mobile app for the 4 major smartphone OS'.
I have a page on my website about it here: http://subsonicsoftware.com/Developers.html
The actual job posting is here: https://www.odesk.com/jobs/Simple-Cross-Platform-Mobile-App-Development_~~dcb76a048ecaf226
I'd like to hear from more people who might want to take on the job, so I'm posting here, too.
Thanks,
-c <comment><USER3> Talk to a dev and let them determine how 'simple' your idea is to implement. 'It's simple, I just want a bridge for cars and trains and pedestrians, between these two points separated by a half mile of ocean. I'll pay you when the first car reaches the other side.'

</comment><comment><USER4> Surely, you must be joking. Do you really expect someone to work on this - <USER2> just one app, but four - without payment, and a hard budget of $1,200?

I'm sorry to sound condescending, but truthfully, what you're asking of any legitimate developer is condescending in and of itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Payment upon all 4 app variants' successful submission to all 4 platforms' app stores using our accounts."

So if your idea is rejected by the Apple App Store then there's no payment?

That payment clause alone will be a deal breaker for any decent developer.

If you take that restriction out you MIGHT get someone to help, even with the restrictive budget.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the app isn't accepted initially, it would just have to be refined until it _is_ finally accepted. That's just stated that way so that I don't get a dev who makes a low quality app that can't get approved to the app store & so I don't get stranded paying for an app I can't sell.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that acceptance/rejection by an app marketplace -- and this is notoriously the case with Apple's App Store -- is not something that is either consistently based on quality or based solely on criteria which are known with certainty by anyone outside of the firm operating the marketplace prior to the decision to accept or reject (and, potentially, not even _after_ that decision is made.)

You're essentially asking the developer to bear the risk of uncertainty from all of the app stores, and making the entire project payment potentially forfeit based on any _one marketplace_ 's arbitrary action. There may be developers that are willing to take that risk, but I suspect its going to narrow the pool that are willing to even consider your project at any given price point.

> That's just stated that way so that I don't get a dev who makes a low > quality app that can't get approved to the app store & so I don't get > stranded paying for an app I can't sell.

Sure, its reasonable you'd want to avoid that, but on the other side, developers are going to want to avoid writing an app that they can't get paid for due to forces beyond their control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not possible to build the app you're proposing for the iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was afraid of some kind of technical restriction that would get in the way.

What would be a simple, $300-to-code alternative way to schedule the phone's ringer, preferably based on existing calendar appointments?

Otherwise I'd have to nix that platform & lessen the price of the job by $300.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thank you everyone for your feedback. I'll be redoing the job with your input in mind.</comment>


Google's Area 120 incubator aims to improve your NYC subway commute with Pigeon - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/31/area-120-subway-pigeon/ <comment><USER2> The MTA's own SubwayTime app provides real-time train times based on the train's current locations. (This is new in the last year.) It even works when trains are running on different lines, changing which stations they stop at, etc.

I'm struggling to imagine what "live alerts from other riders" can provide on top of that?

Even for things like if a subway station is particularly crowded, or a train is particularly crowded... seems like that could be inferred from the train locations and average activity per-station for that day of the week.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the API gives actual train locations? It just gives an estimate of how long until the next train arrives. I've found that it is pretty accurate on some lines, but it feels like just a guess on others. I recently waited 45 minutes for a train which the sign and app perpetually said was 12 minutes way. I generally look at the sign or app now and think of it as a binary thing - the train is either probably coming soon, or it is going to be a while.

I heard a story from a colleague who had recently traveled to Japan. He leaned over the edge of the platform to see if a train was coming, as is common in NYC, and found that this surprised everyone around him. They trusted the signs and the schedule.

<comment><USER4> The numbered trains have more accurate data than the lettered lines. Here's some more detail from this article: [http://www.metro- magazine.com/rail/article/715387/nyc-transi...](http://www.metro- magazine.com/rail/article/715387/nyc-transit-uses-new-tech-tests-real-time- train-arrival)

"Over the past few years, however, MTA New York City Transit (NYC Transit) customers using the numbered lines (except 7) and the L have benefitted from the installation of countdown clocks that alert them to which trains are coming and how many minutes away they are. Countdown clocks were first introduced along the L in conjunction with the installation of the Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) moving block signaling system. Second-generation clocks, facilitated by Automatic Train Supervision (ATS), were installed along the 1 through 6 lines.

Countdown clocks take the guesswork out of waiting for a train, offering a reduction in stress levels for harried New Yorkers. The clocks are arguably the most welcome innovation to the New York City subway since the arrival of dependable and effective subway car air conditioning. Instead of leaning over the platform, all they have to do is look up and the arrivals of the next trains are displayed in real-time.

With stations along the numbered lines (A Division) nearly all covered, that unfortunately still left about two-thirds of the system in the dark, so to speak. Given the size of the B Division and the technical complexity of the implementation, customers using the A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J/Z, M, N, Q and R Lines were looking at 2020 before they could begin relaxing those neck muscles.

Then, prompted by New York State Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, innovation combined with the arrival of a new technology to create a solution. That solution involves the use of beacon technology. In description, the system being piloted is relatively simple: Installed on platforms are Bluetooth receivers that communicate with beacons placed on the first and last cars of a subway train. As the train enters a station, the system uses its arrival and departure times to estimate the time at which the train will reach the next stop. That information is them transmitted via Wi-Fi to the LCD screens."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it reasonable to believe Pigeon could only add value if the time delay between a new delay-causing issue and some verifiable / consensus info getting posted by users is faster than similar updates by an official source like MTA?

(I am assuming that other information from Pigeon users would matter far less than info material to delays or service disruption. Knowing if there's an annoying street performer on a platform, the example in the article, might have secondary value, but seems far less important. I could be wrong though.)

<comment><USER6> There may be issues that go unannounced. Not sure if this was a regular thing, but I got a train from Grand Central a while back and the trains & platform were so packed I could only get on the 3rd or 4th train that came.

I'm also not sure if all lines have real time info yet, my line only got it within the last 12 months, and when I played with their external API, the data was of dubious quality.

I'm not sure how much lasting value this app really has, but that's probably why it is an incubator project, rather than part of Maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The invite code apparently is pigeon :D

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh joy, I get to read all the crabby comments of New Yorkers late on their commute.</comment>