Netbooks -- Who buys them? - <AUTHOR>

I got into a discussion with a coworker last night about netbooks.  He made a few assertions that I had a tough time disagreeing with.  First, he asked coworkers (4 or 5 of them) if they knew anyone with a netbook.  Most people didn't even know what a netbook was, and offered up a friend or relative who owned a Kindle instead (This may well warrant a separate discussion of its own).  Of the rest of us, we came up with two netbook owners.  Two.  Of the people surveyed, there was very little to desire to own a netbook.  I would rate these coworkers as fairly tech-savvy.  I don't mean to pass this off as any sort of factual representation of the market, but I think it begs the question:
Who are the big buyers for netbooks in your opinion?
Do you think the current economic client plays to the advantage of the netbook market, or is there a significant disadvantage insofar as netbooks are perceived as luxury items-- a little brother to your existing laptop?
Do you own one?  Do you want one?  Why or why not? <comment><USER2> The big buyers for netbooks are people in Asia.

I had a 1st generation Asus EEE, it was fun. However it had some limitations and when I got a new Macbook Pro I stopped using it and sold it on ebay.

However, I'm now on vacation and really wish I had a netbook instead of my MBP. If you travel light the size makes a difference and the netbooks really are much smaller.

Now that they are sold at stores like Best Buy (when I got mine, only one specialty store in the Bay Area carried them) I would guess that almost anyone would buy one.

<comment><USER3> I carried the EEE 701 over about 8 months of travel and it was great. Bump the RAM to 2GB and install your OS of choice and it's really a pretty capable machine. The screen is a bit small but the new round (EEE 90x and stuff from Dell and whatnot) look like they solve that problem. Two tricks I learned:

\- The 701 fits inside a one gallon zip lock, letting you transport it in the rain and on boats without too much worry.

\- There's a extension for FF 3+ called "Default FullZoom Level" which lets you change the default page zoom level. On a small screen that makes a big difference (think about all those 850+ pixel grid layouts on a 800px wide screen).

\- Compiz works great on the GMA950 and the Expose-style window switcher works really well for small screens. On GMA950 Compiz breaks GLUT but other than that I didn't run in to any problems (or: make sure your code builds _and_ runs before you leave town).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just bought one to try use as a little brother to my existing laptop. I spends several hours during the day away from the office but with the ability to do work (coffee shops, etc). I thought that instead of lugging my primary workstation around, I could use the netbook. Jury's still out since it's only been a few days, but the smaller keyboard does affect my productivity/typing speed.

<comment><USER5> This pretty much mirrors my reasons.

I move around a lot, meetings at remote sites, day trips, work for a few hours from some random coffee shop.

Also, I have my sideline job where I host a growing cache of customer servers in a datacenter I have some space carved out of.

Lastly, I spend most of my weekends at a second home and in the summer spend a sub-part of those weekends on my boat.

In all these cases a small, portable, light-weight machine is often all I need or want for the basic tasks I'll be doing. A netbook (Asus EEE 4G) with my Verizon USB EVDO dongle gives me portable computing, with or without Wifi available. The fact that it's pretty much impossible to store anything personal/private on it (especially if you don't store passwords in FF) and the low cost make it basically disposable if it gets lost/damaged/stolen/dropped in the lake.

If 99% of my job was spent in a cubicle I would probably have less use for it.

Sometimes it'll sit for a month, sometimes it will get used almost everyday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I own one, MSI u100 series.

I had been looking at laptops for awhile, and after a lot of discussions my older brother and I decided that the netbook was the way to go. It's cheap, portable, and can handle whatever I throw at it. Sure, I can't play game after game on it, but I can play the basics.

I also use it as my work computer. (Mainly school). Mostly reports and stuff, but I like to fool around with photoshop and stuff.

All in all, the netbook is a solid choice for the middle to lower class. Not all of us can afford an apple device, as they can be pretty pricey. More and more netbooks are coming out that are just as good as the lower end Dell laptops that your grandparents/parents buy in the attempt to show that they are "hip".

</comment><comment><USER7> There are people who buy a netbook as a _complement_ to a full size laptop or desktop. And there are people who buy one _instead_ of a full size computer. I have friends in both categories.

I own one, which I bought as a replacement for my MacBook when that died. I love being able to use it on the bus. I was pleasantly surprised at the screen not seeming tiny. I slightly regret not buying a Dell netbook, because that doesn't have function keys I can accidentally press all the time.

I may yet buy a full sized laptop, but I am managing without one for now.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been testing them for use in my company and now that there are ones with virtually full size keyboards we'll probably start deploying them in some places.

I mean, obviously not to the finance department but to those people who only do mild word processing. The benefit is (a) they're cheaper, (b) users like them because of the portability and (c) the limited options makes it harder for users to screw them up by installing stuff they shouldn't (though they still can).

</comment><comment><USER9> My roommate bought an eeepc after his old laptop died suddenly. He only really used it for the internet anyway, so a cheap netbook is a quick fix until he has the time and money to pick out a bigger/better machine.

As for myself, I think the netbook+desktop combo could be pretty cool. I've been using my MacBook as my primary device for a year, and I have found that it isn't really comfortable for serious use and is too bulky for computing on the go.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have the Asus eeepc 4g. I use it daily. When I bought it, my only computer was a Macbook, and I wanted to start using a desktop again as my primary machine so I bought the eee for times when a mobile computer would be useful.

It's been a great little machine, I like the fact that its small and can handle bumps and drops which would kill hard drives in a normal laptop.

</comment><comment><USER11> My 12 year old niece has one. She uses it for school and absolutely loves it. A normal laptop would have been too heavy for her to carry around all day, and the netbook's keyboard is a better size for her.

I would love to have one myself for travelling. I don't code much when I'm travelling, and it's plenty big for general web surfing.

</comment><comment><USER12> The netbook is almost smaller than the size of a hardback book. You can literally grab it and your keys and head off to the coffee shop. The performance is that of a 5-yr old notebook (900mhz Celeron) but it's mostly about looks than crunching graphics/video editing. I have the Asus EEE 8G.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a low end 9" eee from best buy. I use it as my test server, comes with its own console! I'm switching to linux containers for test servers, but having totally separate iron makes resource measurement easier (possible).

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone who uses public transport for commuting. Newspapers keeps being interesting for so long.

</comment><comment><USER15> my brother who is studying for his masters (not in a tech field) has one.. light + portable + cheap is a big win for students.

My wife wants one on the light + cute angle.. (A MacBook Air would be great - but it's pretty pricey to browse facebook)

</comment><comment><USER16> The big buyers will people who don't want to spend $1.5K on a macbook. Particularly once you start seeing these w/ built-in EVDO / whatever cards, I think they'll be everywhere. Consider most people on the internet -- do they use it for more than google, gmail, fb, twitter? Do they need a $1500 device or a $300 device?</comment>


Ask HN: Have you had a crush on someone you worked with? How did you handle it? - <AUTHOR> I am curious as so to how my fellow HN readers handle(d) something like this, seeing as I have found myself in a similar situation. <comment><USER2> The ol' addage "don't shit where you eat."

Chances are that it is not worth pursuing. Let's say that you are not instantly shut down and a sexual harassment charge is not levied against you, or you otherwise inappropriately express your feelings and are terminated. The chances are that the relationship fails and you or them have bitter feeling that interferes with work moving forward.

Could it be "the one?" Sure. I've know folks who got married who met at work, one was even the owner and an employee. I've seen amicable hook ups and flings. Is it worth the risk? Probably not.

Also, just as an FYI, expressing interest is not sexual harassment. Repeatedly doing so is, or doing so in an inappropriate way is. But, again, probably not worth it.

Edit: oh, HR might also have policies against it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is tough.

A lot of great love stories happens at work. Recently, my wife and I were listening to Obama's Audacity of Hope and Phil Knight's Shoe Dog. Obama pestered Michelle until she agreed to go out with him. Phil Knight hired Penny when she was a student in his class cause she was cute. Then went out with her while he was her boss. They both are married to same person still. My wife thought it was so cute.

But there is so much risk involved. Personally, I never did pursue anyone at work. It is probably because I care about my career.

Also initially you think that crush is the one and you will never find anyone else as perfect as them. But then after a few months when crush is gone, and you can see all the flaws in that person and you are glad you didn't risk your job and career for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I met my wife at work. Best thing that has ever happened to me. We met for drinks and now we've been married for 12 years and have 4 children.

But we were 20 and single at the time, so it depends on your circumstances, not much background from OP. Having a fling with a married co-worker probably ain't going to end well.

</comment><comment><USER5> You spend more time at work than nearly anywhere else in your life. You spend more time with your coworkers than nearly any other group of people.

Why wouldn't you pursue someone if they show mutual interest? You just have to be more careful, more respectful, and use more tact than if you had met someone in a bar (though personally I'd adhere to these regardless of circumstance). If you're not sure how to approach it with these general principles, then it's probably best to stay out of it until you're confident enough in yourself.

You also have to realize that if it doesn't work out, it'll be harder to break things off cleanly.

But to rule it out altogether? That's a bit extreme.

</comment><comment><USER6> Things can get very messy. If the relationship goes bad, one or other of you will have to leave.

Been there, done that. It's not good, especially in a workplace that has less than half a dozen people, and it's impossible to avoid seeing the other one all day long.

Having said that, there is the situation where the workplace is pretty large and the two of you are in (or can move to) different departments. That can work quite well because you don't meet or see each other every five minutes.

Been there, done that too. We're still together after 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> Go in the opposite direction and quickly. Never look back. These events in one's life can destroy you. But they are a source for some of literature's great stories too ;-)

</comment><comment><USER8> I would find job elsewhere then leave the current position.

Then I'd tell the girl.

If she's that important, finding job elsewhere shouldn't be a lot of work.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think in the current climate, you are better off keeping things professional. Look elsewhere for love.</comment>


How a Dentist Popularized Cotton Candy - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/how-a-dentist-popularized-cotton-candy/ <comment><USER2> As an etymology geek, I'm fascinated by how the original name (Fairy Floss) came to be prevalent in my home country of Australia, while Cotton Candy predominates worldwide.

<comment><USER3> Great question. I didn't come across any explanation for this, but I did dig up some other names for cotton candy around the world:

France: Barbe a papa ("Papa's beard")

Greece: μαλλιά γριά του ("old lady's hair")

Great Britain: Candy floss

<comment><USER4> I can't say with absolute certainty that it's called this across the entire country, but in my part of Sweden it's called "spunnet socker", which translates to "spun sugar". Certainly seems more appetizing than beard or hair at least. :)

<comment><USER5> In Dutch, we switch those words, and call it "suikerspin", which could be translated as "Sugar Spider" or "Spun Sugar", I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw irony in the title at first, and conspiracy on second thought.</comment>


Microsoft ends support for custom domains in free email service - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-ends-support-for-custom-domains-in-free-email-service-7000028306/?s_cid=e589&ttag=e589&ftag=TREc64629f <comment><USER2> I currently use outlook's services on my own personal domain, a simple firstname.lastname@example.com

I have no business aspirations here with my one account. Google apps would have been my first choice, but now that it is not free and I'm a mere college student, I looked elsewhere.

Does anybody have solutions for those like me that only desire 1 or two emails for an entire personal domain?

<comment><USER3> It seems that this is great opportunity for email hosting startup right here. A lot of people in your situation now.

<comment><USER2> I'd be willing to pay a dollar a month for a daily email flow of like 1-10 Max a day in, 2 out.

Well, Max being "regular maximum I've goo ten so far" hot a hard limit.

But also why I choose Microsoft or Google would be because of decent spam detection and overall filtering,

<comment><USER4> pobox.com is $20 per year, which is $1.67 per month

<comment><USER2> It seems appealing except the lack of IMAP and/or POP access.

How am I to see email notifications on my phone or through a simple email client on my desktop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Outlook.com UI is great, but last time I checked, the signup and management interface for free custom domains was as clunky and unnavigable as it could possibly be.

It was still on the old Live.com UI, with no links to/from any other part of Outlook.com. The features were poorly documented, it was too easy to mess up something and lose data, and worst of all, Microsoft refused to activate my domain unless its randomly generated MX record was added to the DNS _with the lowest priority_. That left no room for a period of testing and graceful migration from the previous email host. Moreover, it would deactivate the domain as soon as it detected another MX record with a lower priority, so it was impossible to gracefully migrate away from Microsoft, either.

I hope the paid option (Office 365) has a better management interface.

<comment><USER6> For Office 365 you actually have to change your nameservers over to Microsoft and they handle your DNS. The plus side of this is that Exchange Autoconfigure works, but the downside is that you have to use their UI for custom DNS records.

<comment><USER7> > _For Office 365 you actually have to change your nameservers over to > Microsoft and they handle your DNS._

No, you don't. That is just an option. The other option is to use a third- party nameserver.

See: [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/office-365-domain...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/office-365-domains.aspx)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the correction! Unfortunately I cannot edit my incorrect statement now. Upvoting so people can see the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love (and would pay for) a hosted email service that charged in some fashion other than per user or per domain. I've got various low volume addresses on various domains that I'd love to consolidate under one roof, and MS's custom domains was the closest thing to that. What keeps me from migrating to so many of these other services is the flat $x/address structure. That gets pricey fast if you have two or three per domain, and three, four, or more domains.

Other tacts might be charging by space consumed, messages sent, or a flat fee for a bucket with resource limits. Anyone know any providers offering models like that?

<comment><USER9> You can host up to 50 domains (with up to 500 addresses) for $40/year with a FastMail Enhanced account (all delivered to the same mailbox).

<comment><USER5> +1 for FastMail.

People should seriously realize that Google, Yahoo, and MS are not the only webmail services left in the world. There are lots of small to medium-sized, independent businesses that offer excellent email service with lots of cool features. The only reason they're not world-famous is because they don't hand out free accounts like candy, but that's also exactly why they can afford to treat you as a real customer (not a product).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just created 4 account on Tuesday and as i was creating them, i was thinking to myself "I bet MS will soon start charging for this..." How did i know...? Because their support system sucks, if you go on their support forum you will easily see 6 months old tickets without a single response. I still have one untouched for about 5 weeks. Now that you will have to pay, hopefully they will start giving a shti about support

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't mind paying for the service. I just hope they handle migration to Office 365 well. I currently sign in to my Windows Phone with an account made through this, and it automatically sets up contacts/calendar/email sync. What I don't want to happen when I move to Office 365 (which seems to use a different "Organizational" account system) is to have two email accounts for the same email address, when only the Office 365 (Exchange) one works.

Edit: same goes for Windows 8(.1) as to automatic accounts. Deleting and recreating would be an option (I don't keep emails around for long), except this Microsoft account also has all my Xbox games and a few licenses of Windows attached to it.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is relatively upsetting... I really liked the service, and had been planning on moving a couple domains of mine to them so I could shut down my mail server.

Really not worth over $5/month per account to maintain a half dozen custom email addresses. And a few for friends/family.

Also, not fond of running my own mail server any longer. Any suggestions for a hosting service that supports accounts with multiple domains that doesn't cost an arm and a leg... if I could get ~5 domains and ~15 email addresses in them for < $20/month I'd be up for it... similar features to outlook.com/ymail/gmail, spam filters etc would be top priority.

<comment><USER13> _Really not worth over $5 /month per account to maintain a half dozen custom email addresses. And a few for friends/family._

Moreover, it misses a few features that outlook.com has, like subadressing.

Better use Fastmail, which has a ton of features. Is actually fast (I tried Exchange Online, it was _slow_ ). And if you take a family account, you can make accounts for family relatively cheaply.

Of course, if you use calendars and ActiveSync, Exchange is currently the better option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Glad I got in when I had the chance! I use to use googles service, but tend to like outlook just a bit more. Not that I favor microsoft, just like the interface and features more.

</comment><comment><USER15> I left Google apps when they started to charge and started the free custom live outlook , Now that Microsoft was unable to find a way to be innovative and different from Google, and find a way to profit off of their free email service, I will be going back to Google Apps and signing up for their paid product.

</comment><comment><USER16> Turns out Yahoo offers a business mail plan to Indian users which provides 1000 email accounts (!) for ~ $5 / month

Link: [https://in.business.yahoo.com/business- email/features/](https://in.business.yahoo.com/business-email/features/)

</comment><comment><USER17> From admin.live.com, here is the kicker:

"We will continue to support the ability to log in to Outlook.com with your existing custom domain email address, but you will no longer be able to add or remove accounts in your domain."

No changes at all. That is not fun.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have been using Zoho.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is unexpected. Microsoft is trying to redesign itself and now it is doing this? Google have much more public approval and trust than Microsoft. Why anyone would prefer to pay Microsoft to be its main email hosting rather than pay the same money for amazing Gmail features? I am using Live.com at the moment for my own domain, but the news will probably make me to move to Gmail. Live is really nice service but if priced the same as Google - Gmail is in the lead. To be honest I would prefer to see untargeted ad in main inbox field (thus no tracking) rather than pay... What happened to basic FREE features on the web? If free business email was possible in 2000s, why now in era of cheap hosting is becoming extinct?

<comment><USER19> I don't know if you've tried using outlook.com lately, but it is refreshingly simple compared to how complicated the Gmail interface has become.

<comment><USER20> I just tried Outlook for the first time in a while, and I am pretty surprised. It's quite good.</comment></comment></comment>


I Come Not to Bury Cloudera but to Praise It - <AUTHOR> http://www.jesse-anderson.com/2019/06/i-come-not-to-bury-cloudera-but-to-praise-it/ <comment><USER2> Just bury it.

Who needs a "Hadoop Distribution" when you can just install Hadoop?

These came along with web-based management tools right around the time the industry was getting into devops and automation.

So instead of "run this script in one easy step" you have to give people a checklist that is a few pages long with screenshots and all.

Also this article misses the big picture which is roughly that HDFS is here to stay, attempts to replace it based on erasure codes are doomed, but MapReduce should be dead but lumbers on because nobody can choose between Spark and Tez and Apache Flavor Of The Hour. (Apache puts the bizzare in the Bazzar) Cloudera and Hortonworks were always a scam but the c levels won't listen no matter how many times you tell them.</comment>


Show HN: Is JavaScript Enabled? - <AUTHOR> https://isjsenabled.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I made an extension and needed to be able to quickly validate whether js was enabled. Surprisingly, there weren't any stupid simple websites to do that so I set out to make one. A few hours later [https://isjsenabled.com/](https://isjsenabled.com/) was online.

I had a lot of fun carefully picking the colors, coding the site from scratch and stopping all work to solve a very tiny problem. It reminded me, there's nothing better than the feeling of having made something, no matter how small it is.

Thought it would be fun to share.

</comment><comment><USER2> Minor, but instead of:

        status.setAttribute('style', 'display:none');

I would suggest just writing:

        status.style.display = "none";

(and similarly for the other DOM modifications; see [0] for a discussion of setAttribute vs property syntax)

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3919291/when-to-use- seta...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3919291/when-to-use-setattribute- vs-attribute-in-javascript)

<comment><USER3> I would recommend against using CSS to hide this information at all since a user might have both CSS _and_ JavaScript disabled. In fact I would have used JS to manipulate all elements conveying the relevant information.

<comment><USER4> If a user turns off CSS then virtually no websites will render correctly for them. Adding a specific detection for that fail state is really just unnecessary bloat.

<comment><USER5> You're kidding, right? Turning off CSS is used together with turning of CSS and images to _improve_ the legibility of some websites.

For example, using Medium with everything on is a pain. But if you switch off JS, CSS and images, very often the whole text of an article fills in one screen, is quite clean and really fast. Using Medium in this way actually becomes a pleasure (unless the images are a apart of the article) - you can navigate the website rarely using the mouse. In any case, I'm not alone in using the web in this way - turning everything on is just a waste of time and resources. You can check it easily yourself with an extension like disable- HTML that allows turning off these thing instantly.

<comment><USER4> Here is how Medium looks without CSS:

[https://i.imgur.com/MAalREE.png](https://i.imgur.com/MAalREE.png)

If you find that more legible then all power to you, but nobody browses like that.

<comment><USER6> That appears to be the index page rather than the article and is not too bad. But that's just the default browser layout, sites usually look a lot better in reader mode.

Also, with js disabled your link is just an empty page, imgur is too incompetent to be able to show images without JS.

<comment><USER4> Reader modes are usually clever enough to grab content from <article> tags, so it doesn't actually have to render the whole page. Plus they insert their own CSS, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is what I get when viewed in Lynx which certainly has JS disabled.

            Picture of a browser window.

        Javascript is disabled in your browser.

        Javascript is enabled in your browser.

           This text is in a <noscript> tag and should display if JS is disabled.

[https://imgur.com/a/RihgnoD](https://imgur.com/a/RihgnoD)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch,

Initially this wasn't a problem because the script changed the text from 'disabled' to 'enabled'. Now the script sets 'display:none' and 'display:block' to control which element is visible. You bring up a good case to go back to the previous way.

Edit: Fixed it, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> But... Why don't you just use the <noscript> tag?

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/no...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/noscript)

<comment><USER8> That's what the site uses:

        <noscript>This text is in a <noscript> tag and should display if JS is disabled.</noscript>

<comment><USER9> The site uses 2 methods: <noscript>, and javascript to hide an element and display a different one. This way you can tell if the methods disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I browse JS disabled. And if some page doesn't render and really want to read it, toggle it on with a single click using a browser plugin for that site only.

</comment><comment><USER11> I always get downvoted for saying I run NoScript with a whitelist but 90% of my browsing time is on sites I've been to before and I don't think any other single security measure reduces your attack surface as much as turning JS off does.

<comment><USER4> That's totally fine, and part of what makes the web great is that you're able to tweak things on the client like that.

Really it only becomes a problem if you become one of those people that harasses web devs for not supporting noscript users. At the end of the day Javascript is a web standard, and it's developer's jobs to target those standards.

<comment><USER8> No, it should be the developer's job to make content accessible in the most efficient way and to the widest audience. JS can be, but often it really _shouldn 't_ be used and there is a simpler solution. Some sites really do need to be JS webapps, but most of them don't. Your users may not care whether you use JS or not, but they do care when your site is slow because you chose to "appify" it unnecessarily and make it require downloading and running JS to show the same content that could've been directly served as a static HTML page.

<comment><USER12> I would argue that the developer's job should be to determine whether or not supporting users without JavaScript would generate more money than it costs to maintain. It's going to depend on the target audience and what you are developing. For example: Google Docs with JavaScript turned off makes no sense to me. Hacker News on the other hand could make sense. Much higher percentage of security concerned users and the amount of work to support it is likely not monumental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A suggestion:

Given the recent news that Chrome will soon prevent ad blocking and given ads can run untrusted JavaScript, the only sane choice is to disable JavaScript in the browser.

I suggest that you change the "enabled" colour to red, to highlight the user's risky behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I've been debating this. In my earliest version I had the colors as you suggested but later decided that most users would expect it the other way. I'm open to changing it, but I'll need to think about it.

<comment><USER14> You made the right choice.

"Is javascript enabled?" is a true/false question. Just like with a traffic light which answers the question "may I proceed?", green commonly stands for true and red for false.

If you make isjavascriptdisabled.com than colors should be switched.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Bid for Yahoo Drops To $29.50 a Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/02/microsoft-bid-for-yahoo-drops-to-2950-a-share.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting how Yahoo might be saved by MS shareholders.</comment>


GM to Revive Hummer Name on New Electric Pickup Model - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-to-revive-hummer-name-on-new-electric-pickup-model-11578686692 <comment><USER2> This is a giant mistake on GM's part because the brand is fatally damaged.

Or to put it another way GM would stand a better chance if they announced an electric Corvair.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywall article: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/gm-buys-super-bowl-air- time-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/gm-buys-super-bowl-air-time-to- resurrect-an-all-electric-version-of-the-hummer-sources-say.html)</comment>


Apple's App Store Gets a Smarter Search Engine - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/13/app-store-search-just-got-smarter/ <comment><USER2> Using the exact search this article describes, "Get Followers on Twitter" is the second result on iPad.

If this is the app that Apple considers the second most relevant result, I'm gonna say the jury is still out on App Store search.

[http://i.imgur.com/5Lca7cw.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/5Lca7cw.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Searching for tweetbot here (UK) brings up a calculator app second and only 3 results. I expect it's a phased rollout.

<comment><USER4> You are supposed to search for Twitter as a test. Tweetbot doesn't make much sense as a search term, at least for finding other Twitter clients. I think the search results are actually quite great, considering. (The calculator is an app by the makers of Tweetbot. I actually had that same use case before: I knew that some developer of some app made some other great app, but I didn't know its name – so I would search for the app I knew, go to it and then the dev's page and then to the app I actually want. So showing other apps of that same dev in a targeted search for the most popular by far app from that dev makes total sense to me.)

<comment><USER5> I would argue the calculator is still a fail. If I searched or Tweetbot, the top hit should obviously be Tweetbot, but I would argue that the other results should be other Twitter clients. A calculator simply isn't. Even worse, the 3rd result is for a different tapped named "Tweetbot" When you scan through the results, Calcbot is really the odd one out. Now, if I had searched for Tapbot (the maker of Tweetbot), then sure, Calcbot makes sense.

Running a search for "tapbots" indeed gives me Tweetbot and Calcbot in the 1 and 2 slots, but the rest of the results are shit. Some competing apps, and of course "Resturant Fan Logo Quiz" in slot 4 for some reason. (It's in slot 5 for "tweetbot".)

These results are still, not very good beyond position 1. Perhaps Apple should simply start thresholding results instead of inciting on an infinite scroll of results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The apple music search is also atrocious - that gets a relook as well hopefully.

I think in general, we (or at least I) have underestimated how good Google is at search, probably a result of how they have been monopolising talent for the last several years. This technical superiority (particularly in the machine learning space) is going to be a huge advantage going forward, as already evidenced by how much better Google now is than Siri.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now they need to work on OS X search, which is atrocious!</comment>


Introverted employees make the best leaders - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/career/introverted-employees-make-the-best-leaders/2874 <comment><USER2> This article basically links to a Forbes article with limited additional info, so here's the direct Forbes link.

[http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/30/introverts-good-leaders- lea...](http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/30/introverts-good-leaders-leadership- managing-personality.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> They can also get screwed.

[http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/when_only_the_g.html)</comment>


IAmA venture capitalist.AMA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e99b0/iama_venture_capitalist_ive_had_4_companies_file/

<comment><USER2> I am highly skeptical that this is a legit posting. Of course, the poster has not answered much of anything anyway, so it doesn't matter too much anyway.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I doubt there's a VC partner anywhere in the world who's had 7 companies IPOing in a year.

<comment><USER4> Approximately 100 companies have gone IPO this year in the US. And almost 400 in China. Don't know about the rest of the world.

Reference: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/business/18place.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am flagging because I hate AMA, if I wanted reddit, I'd read reddit.</comment>


Essential shutting down after failing to launch 'GEM' smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2020/02/12/essential-shutting-down/ <comment><USER3> Can't say that's a surprise.

I wasn't following the Gem but I sure wonder what the appeal of a skinny phone was supposed to be.

It's like trying to make a two door minivan. All phones look the same just like how all cars look the same for a reason - we have converged on the most useful design that works for everyone.

<comment><USER4> Speak for yourself. It drives me absolutely insane that I simply _cannot_ buy a recent phone today which is smaller than the largest phablets sold in 2014. This is bonkers.

<comment><USER5> My kingdom for a phone with stock Android and a 4.7" display.

<comment><USER6> Get an XZ1 Compact and put a GSI on it. I gave in and got an S10e which is only slightly larger but is all screen.

<comment><USER7> I look periodically to see if anything has changed.

[https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2018&fDisplay...](https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2018&fDisplayInchesMax=5&sOSes=2&sOSversions=2910,2900)

Nope. Literally seven phones, with the search just limited to sub 5" diagonal, Android 9 or 10, and a release in the last two years.

My phone now is an Xperia X Compact. Based on that list of seven the Xperia XZ2 Compact would be my next choice. Which actually looks like a fine phone, but not much of an upgrade versus what I already have. And it's from 2018 anyway, feels kind of silly to upgrade from a phone from 2017 to a phone from 2018 in 2020.

Librem... if you're listening... I'll pay _extra_ for a phone that's under a 5" diagonal. You can quote me on that and call it a pre-order.

I don't have market research to back it up, but I do hear more and more people basically saying they haven't bought a new phone in years because they're all too big. Do they not include people who wear women's clothing in their market testing?

<comment><USER4> Don't filter by screen size, filter by physical size instead (phones are getting ever better in screen/size ratio). I also filter by RAM>3GB: [https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2018&nHeightM...](https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2018&nHeightMax=145&nWidthMax=68&nRamMin=4000&sOSes=2)

<comment><USER8> Those interested in small phones are usually looking for one-handed operation and zero-width bezels are not the right tool for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Andy Rubin may have gotten this company off the ground but he ultimately was the cause of its demise. I wouldn't ever buy a product from this company.

[https://www.wired.com/story/andy-rubins-essential-gem- google...](https://www.wired.com/story/andy-rubins-essential-gem-google- android/)

<comment><USER10> Exactly! I bought the first Essential Phone, PH-1, because I liked the design of it and wanted to support a new product. And to be honest, it's a decent phone, but that was before his misconduct came out to the media. Once it came out, my girlfriend asked me if I still wanted to support this company and at that point I knew I would never buy another phone from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A real bummer. For me, the PH-1 was the only truly beautiful current- generation phone out there, since Windows Phone shut down. I can live with a not-so-great camera, especially if it means I don't need a camera wart. With an OLED screen, the PH-1 would have been, to my mind, perfect. And, unfortunately, no one else is making anything that looks quite like it.

I understand (phone) aesthetics are not universal, and usually (and probably rightly) considered secondary to more practical, functional considerations, but man, it was nice having a company that carried that standard. Don't think any of the other angles they were trying to pursue made much sense, but thanks for making something beautiful, even if it ended up being only briefly.

<comment><USER12> PH-1 has a hole in the display — very weird design choice, and it probably costs a fortune to custom order displays like that.

<comment><USER13> Samsung takes a normal display and knocks out the pixels over the camera with a laser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I mean, the phone looks _super_ cool if all you want to do is use it for is a phone and music player.

But the super-weird keyboard means typing (like replying to texts and e-mails) takes a ton of getting used to... and the narrowness means you can't really browse the web. Even reading a basic news article becomes frustrating with only three words to a line. (Or five lines to a screen in landscape mode.)

And given that most people spend way more time texting and reading the news on their phone than making calls... it's crazy to me they ever had user research indicating this ever had a chance of succeeding in the first place.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure what market research inspired the phone, but there's probably a segment of people where pretty severe constraints are considered a positive, primarily to reduce device usage, either as your only device or a device you just use in certain contexts.

I don't want the temptation of the web and apps when I'm getting ready to go to sleep, but I do want basic functions like phone, controlling my lights and music, etc. For this use case, the candybar form factor is excellent.

<comment><USER16> This is exactly my thought process. Well put!

<comment><USER17> In landscape mode, you could control multiple at once with a good UI. I want one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have used the Essential Phone for a few years now. The experience has been great in every dimension except for the one thing many people care the most about: the camera. The camera app the phone is shipped with is horrible. I really don't know how they expected to sell it as a high-end phone. The crazy thing is that there are some builds of the Google Camera app that you can find which make the pictures really good (it is definitely still really bad in low light conditions though).

<comment><USER19> Maybe second most after the phone part?

Although for me specifically, the order would be text, phone, email, camera.

<comment><USER20> Does anyone really care about the phone part of "phones" anymore? Even my parents text me far more often than they call these days. I'm sure I'm an outlier, but I would say browsing, email, text, nav, camera, ..., phone. Honestly with the ratio of spam phone calls I receive, I might prefer a smart "phone" that didn't even accept incoming calls.

<comment><USER21> Agreed, but I have some more reasons for why the "phone" part of the phone isn't really much of a factor when it comes to buying a phone these days.

At this point in time, texting+phone parts of the phone are pretty good and uniform across all devices, so it isn't a differentiating factor that people care about anymore imo. The only "texting" part of the modern phones that is still somewhat of a differentiator is iMessages, but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just hope Cosmo and Henry land on their feet.

[https://www.essential.com/about#team](https://www.essential.com/about#team)

<comment><USER23> Oh man, I just saw one of the product exec's LinkedIn and he spent 3 years at Juicero before spending 3 years at Essential.

That's gotta hurt.

If you're a reasonably talented product & engineering person don't work for a hardware startup. Startups are lottos already as is but hardware is so unforgiving. I think Ring's acquisition by Amazon was the last one I can think that was a true success.

<comment><USER24> I worked with him at Google. He is exceptionally smart and a great person to work with.

<comment><USER25> I don't know anyone who seriously thought that Juicero was a good business idea

<comment><USER26> I mean, I thought (and still think) that Twitch was a terrible business idea - something I'm clearly very very wrong about. Equally, there are dozens of business ideas that I thought were fantastic, but are dead in the water.

Sometimes it's good to acknowledge that your foresight can be wrong. I think engineers in particular can be overly pessimistic.

Why not occasionally take a risk on someone else's gut feeling? You won't always win, but "losing" means enjoying a cushy, well-paid office job for 2-3 years before moving on the next thing. It's hardly the end of the earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like this was pretty doomed from the get-go. Right off the bat the entire internet would be broken on these phones, as I doubt any websites are designed to handle a ~100px wide viewport. Even designing sites for 320px viewports of the iphone4 is massively challenging and not well implemented by many. Not sure how they planned on handling that.

<comment><USER28> It's not _that_ hard, as long as you don't try to do things that nobody ever wanted in the first place, like floating Google and Facebook buttons on the left hand side of the page.

<comment><USER29> I see you've never designed anything frontend, ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've had an essential phone since its release and overall I've been very happy about it. Too bad it's shutting down.

I can also say Im not surprised at a the company is shutting down - - <USER2> strategic decisions were downright idiotic after the essential phone's initial release. They should have just made a great second iteration instead of getting distracted with shiny toys.

<comment><USER31> The first phone only sold 150,000 units over its lifetime, even after a fire sale. It's reasonable to conclude that iterating on the same concept won't create enough sales.

Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/andy- rubi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/andy-rubin-s- phone-maker-essential-is-said-to-consider-sale)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> That's a real shame about Newton Mail. Anything that provides more user choice and adds innovation in a saturated market is a good thing in my book. I hope Essential open sources it, as well.

From TFA:

"As part of the company wind down, the security update for PH-1 released on February 3 is the last update from the Essential software team. Your PH-1 will continue to work but we will not be providing any additional updates or customer support. Current Newton Mail users will have access to the service through April 30, 2020. For developer fans, a prebuilt of our vendor image and everything else needed to keep hacking on PH-1 will be hosted on our github."

<comment><USER33> It is too bad they don't release all the source code.

<comment><USER34> This is a big part of why it's so important we support efforts like the pine phone and librem 5.

When these companies go belly up the perfectly functional devices we _own_ shouldn't become effectively unservicable.

<comment><USER33> They need to start by having a _working computer in a form of a phone_ that runs Android applications from Google Play, has support for 4G LTE. Until that happens, pine phone and librem are non-starters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is personally very disappointing to me. Like many others on the thread, I've been following the Project GEM fairly closely (as close as you could given the lack of information) and was planning on buying at least one this year. I loved the idea of the tall form factor. I want to do less web browsing and video watching on my phone and more listening to music and quickly managing my life. I know I have very long fingers and large hands, so the larger phones feel fine in my hand, but are a pain to carry since they are heavy and take up a lot of space in my pants pocket.

</comment><comment><USER35> As much as the essential phone lacked, the clean android, edge to edge display, and ceramic feel were really awesome.

This is really sad news for me to hear.

I currently use the ph-1 as my android developer device and am really disappointed that we are not getting a successor.

Any recommendations for a new android device that has a clean non bloated android build, as well as long term android updates?

<comment><USER36> We run repair shops, so I get to hear all sorts of feedback about Android phones from customers. The Pixel 3A is definitely the most popular and budget- friendly "clean Android" phone out there right now. Pixel 4 is out as well now, but less popular thanks to the higher price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Used my Essential today to snap gorgeous 360 pics with the snap-on camera. I think they had a good approach that could've lead to building a good ecosystem. Not sure what I'll upgrade to after carrying the Essential...

<comment><USER38> Why upgrade to anything else, until your Essential breaks?

Drive it like you stole it.. and there's always LineageOS[0], so you can keep updating it basically forever, and since it was a flagship, the specs are still pretty solid, even compared to mid-tier phones.

It's pretty hard to find a phone that has the stock Android experience, no bloatware, and beautiful, powerful hardware for this kind of price ($150 on Ebay for grade-A used), let alone one that has an awesome 360 camera and can run nightly android builds.

0\. [https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/mata](https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/mata)

<comment><USER39> The problem is that stock Android on Essential will no longer receive security updates. LineageOS will receive updates, but if you want to use things like Google Pay or Netflix, you'll have to install kernel mods to trick SafetyNet into thinking that it's not running LineageOS.

I'm almost OK with doing that, but I think it's a tall order my partner (non- technical) who has been using an Essential.

<comment><USER30> If you're on the latest update, you're several years ahead of 90+% of Android phones out there in terms of security updates

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Such a shame, I had the PH-1 and to was the best <$300 phone. I loved their commitment to updating Android. I remember getting Android 10 within the same day the pixel phone officially got it. I wish they just updated the PH-1 with a better camera (and app), processor, and maybe more storage (the default was 128GB!).

<comment><USER30> With the GCam apk the camera became entirely decent. The bad native camera was largely bad HDR postprocessing

<comment><USER41> I've downloaded the latest APK from apkmirror but the app is force closing at launch on stock. It was the same 2 years ago when I first tried, is it working for you? Do you have a suggestion?

EDIT: Ok so I've searched a bit on XDA and stumbled upon this: [https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google- camera/dev...](https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev- parrot043/)

The latest beta doesn't work but the one before it does work.

<comment><USER30> Yeah the version I'm using is ~9 months old from the XDA link.

Even GCam 5 and 6 perform better

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Had no idea they also owned Newton. Going to use this as yet another reminder not to invest in new email clients, they all seem to get shut down within a few years of launch.

<comment><USER43> I mean outside of any specialized features that the email client hosts, the majority of the functionality is local, no? So even if the email client is no longer developed, it'll keep working as long as your email service works.

<comment><USER44> Back when I used it as Cloud Magic, they did auth through Google. I'm pretty certain there's middleman processing going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was in the market for an Android phone a few months after the Essential came out, and bought it at a much-reduced price. As others have said, it was a really nice phone except for the camera.

I'm not sure exactly why it failed. I remember showing a friend a picture on my phone once. His eyes opened wide and said, "That phone is all screen!" He was amazed by it, in an era when most phones still had big bezels.

</comment><comment><USER46> I interviewed with them for an engineer position back in 2018. My overall impression was actually quite good. The interviewers I met all seem very smart and experienced (a few with 20+ YOE at bigCo). I was quite bumped that I didn't get an offer, but it turned out to be a blessing I guess.

Maybe it also shows that just having smart people isn't enough for a company/product to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER47> I had an essential phone from the first fire sale, was overall happy with it but a few months in I went hiking and my pants got a bit wet from walking though wet forest (wasn't raining) and the phone died. They were small enough that nobody knew how to work on it (tried all the usual tricks). As other people have mentioned, the phone was pretty good, except for the camera.

<comment><USER48> You can't even really work on it as opening it breaks the whole phone. ifixit gave it a 1/10 score [https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Essential+Phone+Teardown/967...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Essential+Phone+Teardown/96764)

<comment><USER49> The iFixit guide was b---s---, they froze the phone for no clear reason, and destroyed the entire phone. I almost gave up on buying because of them. Here is a tutorial by fixEZ. All you need is a heat gun (I used a hairdryer) and a playing card.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCKxAQXdTJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCKxAQXdTJ8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think the hardware phone market was just too competitive. While I was hopeful they would make some awesome stuff. It's obvious when you're playing with the giants of industries (Samsung, Apple) unless you have a super huge value proposition that no one's thought about before the odds are stacked against you.

</comment><comment><USER51> I can't say I'm a fan of this ruler aspect ratio phone. If Essential wanted to exist in a crowded market, they didn't need to invent something new. Copy a recently designed phone and just add a removable battery. No one else is doing it. Instant success.

<comment><USER52> As someone who thinks the iPhone SE is the ultimate form factor I'm sympathetic to the "build it and they'll come" argument but I don't believe it. The reason no one is making a phone with a removable battery is because there isn't a large enough market for it. These companies do a lot of market research, if there was an opening in the market _someone_ would have capitalised on it.

<comment><USER51> I'm sure they do conduct a lot of research. However, I bet that research points toward failing batteries after 1-2 years as the major driving force in phone upgrading. If an OEM makes an easily removable battery phone, they are essentially killing their chances of future sales. The Lg g5 is a good argument to this case, but I feel it was mainly DOA because LG at the time was not conducting enough testing on their phones (Bootloop problems).

<comment><USER52> You can replace a phone battery even when it's non-removable though. Apple makes a nice little bit of extra money from it in fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Cool design, but never heard of it. Maybe they failed because they didn't go worldwide quick enough to raise the interest they needed.

This could be an awesome compromise between lite phones that offer no everyday utility and large phones that entirely consume your attention.

</comment><comment><USER54> Good time for an employee to write a book about Essential?

I would love to know more about Essential + the development process around the PH1. Shipping such a product with a relatively small team must have been challenging in many interesting ways.

</comment><comment><USER55> It makes me mad that I can't buy a recent iPhone with headphone jack and USB 3. Instead I'm lured in to buying phones with a lightning port that fails after 2 years, plus dongles, or expensive ear pods that fail after 2 years (and which I will lose after 4 months). Meanwhile, the IPhone 6S is becoming so slow with recent IOS releases that it stops being an option, too.

</comment><comment><USER56> My biggest issue with the PH1 was the lack of cases. I work in an industrial environment where I _need_ an otterbox or bulky protective case. The PH1 only lasted for a month before I dropped it on a concrete floor and cracked the screen.

</comment><comment><USER57> Was this ever not a strong possibility? Entering the world of Smartphones is incredibly tough. When I first read about essential my thoughts weee this is either going to sell to someone for pennies on the dollar or just shutdown.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm not sure your "It's been an Incredible Journey" post is the appropriate place to showcase marketing videos for a product you see "no clear path to deliver it to customers".

Are they hoping for a last minute buyer?

<comment><USER59> Maybe they're just sad to be shutting down and are proud of what they built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> No one needs another Android phone. I wonder how they even thought about selling more than several thousand units to early adopters?

</comment><comment><USER61> I would have never bought an Essential phone because of the sexual harassment allegations that Google internally found credible. It's just not the character I can support.

Andy Rubin has never acknowledged his behaviour was wrong. He's never apologised, and maintains it is a "smear campaign".

<comment><USER62> I'm frustrated by this logic. On one level, you're punishing an entire company because of the actions from one guy. Wouldn't it suck if your CEO committed some offense, and you personally had to pay for it by losing your job?

Second, I simply do not feel it is my place as a consumer to punish a person for his behavior. The legal system is in place to deal with this, and that should be more than sufficient, and it's important that is the system used to deal with the issue, because everyone has rights. The legal system is designed to allow both parties to exercise their rights. Cowboy boycotts by consumers are emotionally driven mobs. That's not justice.

Finally, we as a society used to believe in second chances. Once someone commits an offense, usually they pay some price (maybe losing a job, going to jail, paying a fine etc) and then we give them a chance to participate in our society again. They don't always get all their previous privledges back. If you commit a felony, you won't be able to own a firearm for example. But you do get a another chance to be productive.

<comment><USER23> I hope you're kidding but don't think you are. This guy doesn't need a second chance - he has hundreds of million of dollars.

Anyone working at this company is smart enough to get a job anywhere else with relative ease. I'm hardly worried about highly skilled people "losing their job" \- at this point the ones that choose to stay are doing so for some reason, not because they just need any random job.

<comment><USER62> What about a secretary at the company? Is it fair if (s)he loses their job? But what is it about being highly skilled which makes it okay that they should have to uproot their lives? Just because I might not fall down does not imply that I would enjoy being kicked.

I just don't feel like you're being morally consistent here. Sure I get having empathy for the guys victim(s) (i have no idea what the details of the situation here are). But there's two sides to the coin that are worth considering.

<comment><USER63> There is something really unpleasant about seeing ordinary people held up as human shields to defend the noxious actions of the rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Not sure "An Update" quite captures "we're shutting down; there'll be no more updates; you have 68 days to retrieve your data."

<comment><USER65> There's not really any data to retrieve. Newton Mail is an email client rather than an email service. Oddly they had announced a shutdown about a year and a half ago but Essential bought them out right before the shutdown and kept it going until now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Better title: "Essential to cease operations and shutdown"

</comment><comment><USER67> We've changed the URL from [https://www.essential.com/blog/essential- update](https://www.essential.com/blog/essential-update) to an article that says more directly what's happening. The site guidelines call for original sources ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)) but corporate press releases increasingly feel like an exception to this rule. Maybe it's because they're as much a mask for information as a source of it.

If anyone can suggest a better URL, we can change it again. I just picked the first item from some search results.

<comment><USER68> I thought the first paragraph of the original article (from essential.com) explained things pretty clearly:

> Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and > shutdown Essential.

<comment><USER67> That's fair. On reflection I suppose I was reacting mostly to the title and the fact that comments like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311295) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311297) were showing up in the thread. Perhaps a title change would have sufficed in this case. When I said that the genre of official corporate announcements tends not to have a great track record, I was speaking generally.

<comment><USER69> For what it is worth I think you did the right thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> So...they weren't essential after all.

<comment><USER71> Essential in the sense of "the essence of", like how it's used in "essential oils"</comment></comment>


On YouTube's Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pedophiles.html <comment><USER2> What keeps getting lost in this discussion is the fact that young kids are uploading videos to Youtube. That should not be allowed, both de facto and de jure. It's up to both parents and technology providers to make this all but impossible.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations.

So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children's clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split."

Holy shit, just burn it down at this point. This is what happens when you just mindlessly optimize.

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of the day I disabled Youtube history, suggestions, etc: I sometimes listen in Youtube to old civil war-era songs from my country, Spain (my great uncle was a partisan who fought against the fascists). Once I left the autoplay engaged and returned to my Youtube feed filled with current neonazi/extreme-right/conspiracy recommendations.

Retracing the browser history, it went something like: historic recordings of civil war/partisan songs -> later recordings by popular musicians of the most vanilla/famous ones -> current renditions of the old songs by extremist groups -> crazy political propaganda from those extremist groups.

As you say, it was a first hand experience of what unsupervised, mindless optimization looks like. Ethics are not factored in the merit function, so they just don't exist for the machine.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you sign an anti-ad pledge? - <AUTHOR> I don't know about you, but I have personally committed to never (or so rarely as to practically be never) respond to advertisements. I'd love to be able to tell advertisers that they are wasting their money trying to buy my impressions and clicks. I'm also willing to pay for an ad-free but otherwise identical version of a product, and I think many of us here might be in the same boat.<p>If there were an easy way to do so, would you sign a pledge / publically commit to being "anti-ad"? One version of such a pledge could involve committing to buy a competitors product if you see a relevant ad.<p>(Note: Given that only a subset of online users might sign such a pledge, this might actually save the advertisers money, which you may or may not want to have a hand in.) <comment><USER2> Even if you were to sign this pledge, ads aren't as simple as "I see, I buy". Lots of branding seems to be around changing your perception of or just making you aware of a company or product so that several months later, when you're purchasing something in that category, you'll think of them. You can't possibly remember all the ads you have or haven't seen, so trying to restrain yourself from buying products which youve seen ads for seems futile.

<comment><USER3> I tried ads once for a sports blog. A lot of it was things like marketing a chocolate drink as an energy booster or breakfast meal for athletes. I thought it was quite dishonest .

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you heard of the Boulder Pledge?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert#Personal_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert#Personal_life)

> During a 1996 panel at the University of Colorado Boulder's Conference on > World Affairs, Ebert coined the Boulder Pledge, by which he vowed never to > purchase anything offered through the result of an unsolicited email > message, or to forward chain emails or mass emails to others

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not heard of the Boulder Pledge, thanks for linking to it. I imagine Roger Ebert was on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited offers, being a public figure and all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would.

Ads are a lazy way to make money. It works for FB & Google because they can focus all efforts on making the best product. But this was an era before ad blockers.

Ads pay badly and also significantly drop user experience if done to a certain extent.

When we did a recipe app, it was a conscious decision not to use ads. If we had recipes, the only fitting ads are food related, not dating related, not car related. Anything other than food would be dishonest to advertise.

So instead of advertising food, we skipped the middle man and sold ingredients directly. As we had a niche (keto recipes), the sold product was also a niche of keto alternative ingredients.

My partner later did a different startup, focusing on a football blog. They tried ads, but it was terrible; made about $300 for millions of pageviews. Sponsored articles, e.g. for football injuries recommending a product, would pay several times more. This is also advertising but more precise, and gave the sponsor a huge SEO boost for exactly the thing they were selling. The company eventually landed a deal with a sports supplier which made up a big portion of their revenue.

</comment><comment><USER5> No. Ads are not bad. Ads for products that suck are, which is to say 90% of products and something like 99.99% of ads (really great products only need ads if they are in areas that are not normally talked about, e.g tampons).

Ads for products that don't matter to me are noise and annoying.

We should actively work toward rewarding people who create stuff that solves problems, but right now nobody has a better way to get the word out there than using ads.

</comment><comment><USER6> No. Ads in general and bad/abusive tactics are not unique to the web. I'm willing to take the good with the bad and be discerning with my clicks and quick with the back button. And that includes paying for valuable apps and services.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks for answering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I'm also willing to pay for an ad-free

It has been tried multiple times, particularly in print media. Most people, regardless of what they claim, aren't willing to pay for ad free. Just the pure fact that it used to be free, often makes it even harder to convert them.

You say you're willing to pay for ad-free, but I'd ask why you aren't paying for ad free already. Many websites now offer it, and few pay it (e.g. almost all online news, Reddit, Google's ad network, YouTube, etc.

<comment><USER8> I'd pay for ad and analytic and tracking free. Not just making the ads invisible, but the other code along with it disabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point. People should be able to opt-out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is an ad exactly? Friends/non-friends telling/mailing/phoning/showing paid/free products/ideas/events irl/online? I need to know the specifics before committing.. Better yet, I'll stay away from extremes and judge case- by-case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question / good points! I don't mean to single out word of mouth recommendations. Perhaps the pledge could be individually modified so that one could specify per-platform definitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No. I would be willing to give google/amazon/facebook a list of my life problems every 3 months if it would get me ads that were actually relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, the other end of the spectrum, which I also find not unattractive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I already behave this way. I'm not sure what I would gain from the pledge you suggest. I don't think the advertisers would care.

<comment><AUTHOR> They may not! But there is information asymmetry between the advertisers and us individuals. Also, if enough people signed it, such a pledge could be used as a collective bargaining chip, one that could be used to convince C-suite executives to change how they do things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've failed already. I just clicked on an ad promoting a hopeless, self- contradictory political movement :-p

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh no! Keep fighting the good fight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would</comment>


The best book to give to each kind of person - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/all-about-books/16-books-that-make-for-perfect-gifts-68f9ddb8a5f8 <comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to promote giving books as gifts because they are affordable, lovable, and easy to gift on afterwards.

I wrote this list of books as a starting point for people who aren't sure what to get. Let me know if you think there are any others I should include!</comment>


The Disappearance of Conservative Commencement Speakers - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-disappearance-of-conservative-commencement-speakers/ <comment><USER2> Huh. Ed Helms gave the commencement speech at Cornell in 2014. This was presumably based on him having played a character who went to that particular Ivy League school.

I'll tell you what: No serious person gives a damn who their commencement speaker is. Sure, if Obama or Conan O'Brian shows up, that's worth a headline. But the only people who join the _Commencement Planning Committee_ to decide between Jerry Seinfeld and Kermit the Frog, are unserious people. College kids tend to be more liberal, sure, but you can't really put that sentence together without the word "kids" in it. College "adults", if any, wouldn't pay 25 dollars to rent a mortarboard in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe any movement in favor of a collective attempt to cling to an anachronistic past, in the face of drastic, rapid, broad, sweeping social and economic changes facilitated by modern technology will face an inevitable implosion.

There will always be clusters and enclaves of the orthodox. Amish and Quakers, if you will.

But when we're staring down the barrel of self driving cars that map our cities for us (even the crumbling cities no one wants to live in), privatized corporate rocket ships, quad-copter delivery services, instant/constant/global all-points communication in every language simultaneously, artificially intelligent voice-activated personal helthcare devices, killer robot jet aircraft miles overhead watching us all with baited breath for an air strike, cryptocurrencies few fully understand but many will hurriedly buy drugs with, high frequency autonomous trading no one understands and everyone fears, well gee... the humdrum arguments even from last year barely seem to make sense this year.

Trying to preserve any political inclinations amidst all this, let alone those biased towards standing still or moving backward, is like trying to swim against a tidal wave.

I don't think any political label will survive this kind of tide. Only attitudes and personalities persist in this kind of turbulence.

</comment><comment><USER4> Condoleezza Rice - Neo-con and socially liberal

Christine Lagarde - Neo-con internationalist banker

Robert Birgeneau - Lifer academic liberal

Conservative... I do not think this word means what you think this word means.

<comment><USER5> Agreed on Birgeneau, but I don't understand your comment regarding the first two. You realize "neo-con" is short for neo-conservative right?

<comment><USER4> Globalist neo-conservatives are conservative in name only: they are typically socially indifferent, contemptuous of decentralization and tradition, and radically progressivist in international relations.

Russell Kirk was a conservative. Condi Rice is not.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure the author of the article is referring exclusively to social conservatism. There's also fiscal conservatism, which Republicans are associated with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> News flash! Generally liberal college students prefer liberal commencement speakers. Hardly a surprise, really. How many college students do you know who are looking to hear from George W. Bush or Ted Cruz?

<comment><USER7> I would have preferred George W. Bush over my commencement speaker. Hell, who'd say no to a former president?

<comment><USER8> Apparently, plenty of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting observation, but isn't this just a reflection of the fact that the Republican party is in a deep, deep hole with the sound majority of educated Americans?

<comment><USER10> If you define "educated" as being a college graduate, more educated people voted Republican than Democrat in the last presidential election: [http://www.statista.com/statistics/245886/voter-turnout- of-t...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/245886/voter-turnout-of-the-exit- polls-of-the-2012-elections-by-education/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, at universities people are very intellectual. The right wing has had a decidedly anti-intellectual stance for quite some time now.

<comment><USER12> I would consider Milton Friedman very intellectual. I would also classify him as on the conservative side of the ledger. Some might even call him right wing. He certainly would have made a good commencement speaker.

There is a danger of groupthink that anyone who doesn't follow the du-jour trends of college life must be an anti-intellectual. Young people should be aware of this as they leave college and enter the real world. Few things are as insufferable as a young person who plasters their political views into a workplace without respect for the people they work with.

<comment><USER13> Milton Friedman would be considered a liberal by modern conservatives, really. Accepting that monetary policy can be effective is heresy to the conservatives who currently wield power.

But yes, Milton Friedman would be an excellent commencement speaker. I'm sure there are more great academic conservatives who would be equally good, but very few of them are well-known enough to be considered even if the students wanted a conservative.

<comment><USER14> He also advocated negative income tax, which is essentially communism to the right.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Noise-cancelling headphones don't cancel noise - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-bought-some-beats-noise-canceling-headphones-they-dont-cancel-noise/ <comment><USER2> The author seems like a grade A idiot. If his priority is noise cancellation, go for Bose QC series or Sony WH series which are known for great active noise cancellation.

>Yet I chose the Beats because they looked comfortable. And, you know, NBA players wear them, right?

Drop near $300 on a product because NBA players wear it, then write an article complaining it is not what he expected.</comment>


Drawille: Pixel graphics in terminal with Unicode Braille characters - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille?source=hackernews <comment><USER2> Reminds me of MapSCII [1] that was posted here a few months back, which also uses braille characters for rendering.

[1] [https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii](https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii)

</comment><comment><USER3> Drawille is amazing. I built an image viewer for the terminal with it, very rudimentary, sort of 'cat' but for images [https://www.npmjs.com/package/tty- view](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tty-view)

</comment><comment><USER4> the -B flag in p2pvc allowed something similar! [https://github.com/mofarrell/p2pvc](https://github.com/mofarrell/p2pvc)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I googled for a project that could do this and found Drawille literally last night.

I was looking for a way to quickly display graphics right in the terminal, cross platform and with default settings. I wanted to build a simple python library that would allow you to graph 2D plots without opening excel or using a graphing calculator. The best alternative I could think of was using the PIL to draw and image and quickly .show()ing it

<comment><USER6> Matplotlib is great if you dont need it to be in the terminal, or use it to generate an image and then display it with Drawille

<comment><USER7> Show HN: Plot directly in your terminal with matplotlib | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700512) (2017Feb:28comments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty cool. And if people are wondering, yes, screenreading software can output this to a braille display. However, mainstream displays only have one line of braille making 2d images somewhat more difficult to understand.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of the Sinclair ZX81 where you had 4 plots/pixels characters to draw with

</comment><comment><USER10> > ?source=hackernews

In the URL. Is this a thing? Can you analyse the source of traffic to a repo?

<comment><USER11> A usual method for forums and such is to embed an image with an src hosted on your domain, then analyzing the logs. I used to do this to mark forums as read in a browser game I played, as a player-linked ID was in the URL (sent in the referer)

Github solves this particular method by downloading the src and mapping it to camo.githubusercontent.com, so maybe OP didn't realise that, or GitHub shows the stats somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does mplayer have a backend capable of using this?

</comment><comment><USER13> pretty cool concept. I'd like to see a game made with this</comment>


Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rekognition-image-detection-and-recognition-powered-by-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> Pricing (for first million images / month)

Google Cloud Vision $1.50 per 1,000 images[1]

Amazon Rekognition $1.00 per 1,000 images[2]

Interesting that when Google Cloud Vision first came out it was $5 per 1,000 images (for label detection), but they reduced it on Nov 15, 2016. [3]

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing) [2] [https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/pricing/) [3] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/Cloud- Machine-L...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/Cloud-Machine- Learning-family-grows-with-new-API-editions-and-pricing.html)

<comment><USER3> Microsoft's offering is $1.50/1000 calls as well. [https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en- us/pricing](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/pricing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you guys want to see an example of this in action I made a stupid little demo. You can tweet @AWSCloudNinja a selfie and it will replace your face with a ninja mask.

I'm waiting to post the code until the new boto models are out but it's all in python and lambda functions.

(I work for AWS)

<comment><USER5> Can it put fruit hats on kitties?

<comment><USER6> No but I code a thing that would put hats on people. [https://mrmonksy.com/p/ProjectFunnyHats#.WD9gybIrLRY](https://mrmonksy.com/p/ProjectFunnyHats#.WD9gybIrLRY) (It was a project for a class)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a lot of services like this (Google Cloud Vision, IBM Watson, CloudSight, Clarifai, Imagga) but I'm yet to see one that lets me provide my own dataset. That's what I'm most interested in.

So far the only solution I know of is to take Google's Inception net and train/host it myself somewhere.

<comment><USER8> [https://developer-preview.clarifai.com/guide/train#add- image...](https://developer-preview.clarifai.com/guide/train#add-images-with- concepts)

Try this - Clarifai is run my Matthew Zeiler, who's imagenet results really kickstarted the whole deep learning craze.

<comment><USER9> Clarifai's web interface for training with your own images is great, although a little slow — but that could be my computer.

I've used their standard/general model for classifying most of the images for the search on my site, and would love to use custom models for various side project ideas I have, but the price is way too much for me ($0.46 per concept, per month).

<comment><USER10> Hey, Jason from Clarifai here. Reach out to us. I'd be interested in hearing more about your ideas, and how we might be able to support them. Fun fact: we're willing to give volume discounts based on number of concepts, inputs (indexed image search results), or predictions (tagged images).

<comment><USER9> Thanks for getting in touch, Jason. That's good to hear! I'll be sure to contact you when I've sifted through my ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worst AWS product name after Elastic BeanStalk.

<comment><USER12> It's just named after the product they bought:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-05/amazon- sa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-05/amazon-said-to- acquire-ai-based-image-analysis-startup-orbeus)

The ReKognition API

<comment><USER11> And so? They didn't name RedShift (great name!) after the company they acquired.

<comment><USER12> I don't care either way--I was just pointing out that they didn't choose the name

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://console.aws.amazon.com/rekognition](https://console.aws.amazon.com/rekognition) gives me a "Please (re)authenticate or return to [https://console.aws.amazon.com"](https://console.aws.amazon.com") error.

Anyone else getting this or is it not open yet?

<comment><USER14> Yeah. Same. Similar thing happened to me when lambda came out. I'm guessing they are still rolling it out to everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anybody know whether it is kosher to use Rekognition (or comparable Google/Azure/Clarify solutions) as a source of "supervised" data to bootstrap your own in-house ML models? I'm pretty sure the TOS would frown upon that, but it would beat manually tagging your own datasets, plus its hard/impossible for them to enforce.

EDIT: in retrospect, the pricing means its probably not economically viable.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there other similar services out there or is this completely new?

It looks really awesome.

I know this is silly to ask of a cloud company but some kind of offline mode would be really useful for robotics and for the security example. Maybe it could be limited like you request n specific things you want to recognize and it stores the relevant data locally.

<comment><USER16> Google's Vision API: [https://cloud.google.com/vision/](https://cloud.google.com/vision/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "appears to be female - 100%" "does not have a beard - 99.2%" :D

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome, I never knew what happened to these guys!

We used to use it to count faces and get some basic demo data from the photos our animated GIF photo booth takes. One day it shut down but we didn't know why until now!

<comment><USER19> Feel free to give www.kairos.com a try. We have a world class facial detection and recognition service, as well as emotion analysis on still images and video.

(Disclosure CTO of Kairos.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Will this help me tag and classify my thousands of personal photos? Once it recognizes a face will it tag it and identify it the next time I call it with the same person on another picture?

<comment><USER9> Yes.

> You can also use Rekognition to compare faces and to see if a given image > contains any one of a number of faces that you have asked it to recognize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know (I don't see in docs, but maybe?) if this has the power to be able to make an image hash for comparison to other images? To be able to do tineye type stuff?

</comment><comment><USER22> It is based on Orbeus's technology which was acquired by Amazon. Orbeus was found by two Chinese guys in Boston University.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there an AWS product that is similar to catchoom.com or slyce.it

Something that recognizes specific items rather than generic terms?

<comment><USER24> The closest service provided by Amazon to achieve that I'm aware of is Mechanical Turk ([https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)). It's of course a completely different approach, but depending on the problem it might be a viable solution as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This comes rather fast on the heels of Yahoo releasing their NSFW source code

<comment><USER26> AWS Rekognition's core technology is coming from Rekognition.com, and the company Orbeus behind it was acquired by Amazon in 2015. [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=orbeus+venture+beat)</comment></comment>


Experimental support for PQC XMSS keys in OpenSSH - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=151940152732492&w=2 <comment><AUTHOR> Would appreciate if mods would change the title back to "Experimental support for Post Quantum Crypo in OpenSSH", the present title isn't the title of the page, nor does "PQC XMSS" mean anything to approximately anybody.

</comment><comment><USER2> XMSS is great work, but it's not clearly suitable for use in SSH: I will occasionally copy SSH private keys around, or restore them from backups. I think that's fairly common. However, with XMSS:

"the signature schemes described in this document are stateful, meaning the secret key changes over time. If a secret key state is used twice, no cryptographic security guarantees remain." [1]

Perhaps the SSH authors have a clever answer for this! But stateful signatures are not, in general, suitable as a drop-in replacement for traditional signature schemes and I do worry that people may miss this subtle, but critical, point.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-cfrg-xmss-hash- based-...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-cfrg-xmss-hash-based- signatures-12#section-1.1)

<comment><USER3> The statefulness is going to be a problem with current cryptographic APIs. There's another post quantum public key signature algorithm called SPHINCS that is supposed to be stateless and will be much more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This 'post-quantumness' of this work is based on XMSS/Merkle Signature Scheme, if you want to dig further:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_signature_scheme](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_signature_scheme)

<comment><USER5> Non-mobile link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_signature_scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_signature_scheme)</comment></comment>


Arrgh Facebook is lying about me - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/28/facebookFraud.html <comment><USER2> Maybe I am wrong, but Dave you said you deleted your account. Are you sure that is your account, if it was shouldn't it resolve to your _username_ you chose?

> But when I went to my URL, or at least what I remember my URL to be:

> <http://www.facebook.com/dave.winer>

The account Ben showed doesn't seem to be yours.

<http://graph.facebook.com/100002526165063> (no username showed here)

whereas

<http://graph.facebook.com/dave.winer> (false i.e. gone)

Unless Facebook releases usernames after deleting accounts (or you remember that this is indeed your Facebook ID) I think these are all different accounts. There is also another <http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001554391855> which as well does not show your username.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first comment on the post explains that the account in question appears to be set up by a spammer. It is an impersonation by a bad apple, not something Facebook did. Reporting it should result in its removal, hopefully.

If that doesn't happen, _then_ Facebook is responsible.

[http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/28/facebookFraud.html#c...](http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/28/facebookFraud.html#comment-374287112)</comment>


Invention by a British student could save millions of lives across the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37306334/this-invention-by-a-british-student-could-save-millions-of-lives-across-the-world <comment><AUTHOR> I apologise for the rather crap title but in keeping with HN policy I kept it as close to the article title as possible (shortened only due to 80 character HN title limit).

Personally I would have used something like - "British students' patent-free mini-fridge could save millions of lives".

</comment><comment><USER2> That's cool. I was afraid it was another method of purifying water.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr

 _The device maintains a steady two to eight degrees for 30 days. It works by heating ammonia and water to create ammonia vapours, which are then released into its main chamber when cooling is needed._</comment>


RNNoise: Noise Suppression with Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/rnnoise/ <comment><USER2> Cool!

I definitely can hear the noise gate flap on and off and also the man's voice gets distorted by the filter noticeably, less so the woman.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "distortion" you're hearing is actually just the leftover noise. When there's noise and speech at the same time and frequency, then you can year some of both and it sounds a bit harsh -- like distortion.

In general, this problem is tough because when there's a change in the signal, you have just 10 ms to decide whether it's the noise or the signal changing.</comment></comment>