Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/skype-serious-privacy-breach/ <comment><USER2> I never quite understood why Microsoft is so hell-bent on adding stupid features, removing useful ones and creating unwanted re-designs for Skype instead improving core features.

The new design is awful, they removed contact groups, something I used daily. Didn't they also experiment with stupid stories at one point? And now this. I'm surprised people were not mad about it a lot earlier, since it's been a while since they did this.

All in all, it seems very tone deaf, at least to me.

<comment><USER3> > _I never quite understood why Microsoft is so hell-bent on adding stupid > features, removing useful ones and creating unwanted re-designs for Skype > instead improving core features._

I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé on what really happened inside the Skype team to destroy such a beloved product. It was indeed loved in its pre-Microsoft heyday around 2008-2010: I remember an international student telling me that Skype changed her life because she could stay in audio & video contact with her family overseas.

Since the Microsoft acquisition, every single aspect of Skype has gotten worse. It's remarkable that if Microsoft had done _nothing_ with Skype other than simply keeping it up-to-date with new releases of Windows, OS X, Linux, etc., it would be a far superior product.

As far as I can tell, only two things keep it alive: the tremendous installed base from when it was a much esteemed program and the fact that it runs on everything -- making it the common denominator when the grumpy Windows desktop guy needs to video chat with the hipster on the newest iPad Pro. :-).

<comment><USER4> > I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé

I interviewed there, soon after the acquisition, maybe nine months. Probably one of the most shocking experiences in many aspects: they flew me from Europe, no one was ready to talk to me, or knew I was coming at all. I waited more than an hour, thought about leaving, hoping they wouldn't mind paying for my hotel room and flight either way. Then someone who I recognised from their LinkedIn photo passed me, I said hi—they were surprised and thought the interview wasn't happening.

I had three interviews from people at most three months out of university (nothing but the same two brain-teasers); overall, the place seemed like completely lacking self-awareness. I had lunch with the only person with any experience, the UX researcher/ethnographer (six months out of post-doc) who was… way over everything. Chosen quotes: "Children running a daycare", "the entitlement is staggering", she was happy because that paid way better than academia and she could learn about private research, save money, go to meet- ups and interview.

I liked the lunch because I had tried to make my joke during the interview, one about how Skype allows me to get three alerts about the birthday of a recruiter with whom I had an awkward 20-min chat six years ago (wink, wink: I care about users' experience too). Blank stare from Chad. The UX researcher got it. It wasn't funny, but at least I felt like I had pushed my bug report at the edge of my ability zone.

I didn't get a call-back. I was stranded for six months on an email chain with the recruitment coordinator who was only able to reimburse me with a _paper check_ in _dollars_ (I had bank accounts in four different currencies at that point but not dollars). I honestly think that I got so tired of it all that I just forgot… Or maybe I ended up cashing it at pennies on the dollar because my bank had pity on me.

Anyway, a couple of years later, a new colleague at Facebook joins from there. The guy spent his first three months listing all the terrible, terrible things he saw there. Just new ways of being broken, every day over lunch, for a hundred days. I was impressed. That guy isn't shy. Not sure he's a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there.

<comment><USER5> Just a heads up that your interview quotes probably come with enough info to uniquely identify the person who was that open with you. Might want to return the favor with some anonymity...

<comment><USER4> Good shout. I'm actually modified one irrelevant detail in my portrait to prevent that (I always do: it helps identify leaks-- a paranoid habit that I got from working with unreliable people).

But then again, I'd be shocked if those had any consequences: she was probably gone under a month, both quotes were based on staggering observations as we were sitting there. The place acted like recess at a middle-school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to agree on this one. I am my mother's only Skype contact. When she started receiving friend suggestions she quickly worked out that those people were my friends. Luckily it's my mother we're talking about and I don't mind her seeing those contacts, but what if it was someone else? For example I have seen the practice of creating an ad-hoc Skype account for an interview. Now that employer can see my contacts.

<comment><USER7> Haha yeah I can see all my financial partner's clients now, I was just looking at that yesterday

<comment><USER8> Oh man, sales teams must be a mess right now. I can't imagine the poaching that's going on!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used skype extensively in its pre-Microsoft era as pretty much all the academics i know. It was synonymous of exciting discussions with collaborators. It had something special which set it apart from usual calls. A kind of special space for discussions.

Last time i used it it took me a day to figure out what my username was. Had to search forums, ask on the internet, and finally navigate the awful microsoft website back and forth to finally find a childish live:xxxxq122 username (MS blocked my 10+ years account because it didnt like the date of birth i provided in a hurry. I was "too young" to use the service). I have no idea now what happened to basic things like a contact list. The new interface should be studied in design schools on all the things that shouldn't be done.

I find myself using whatsapp or gtalk for meetings now. Having to call collaborators using the same device/service i use with my family. Thanks Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is going to be "fun" for all the psychologists and other doctors meeting people over Skype. MS really failed here.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty egregious. Is this possibly illegal? I certainly did not consent.

<comment><USER12> You probably did consent, it would be somewhere in the terms and conditions you accepted without reading them.

This may be against GDPR in Europe, but may not, because everyone they are suggesting has agreed to Skype's term at some point.

<comment><USER13> My understanding was that you can't sign away your GDPR rights just by accepting a ToS.

<comment><USER14> Correct - there has to be a clear indication that you are consenting. It can't just be hidden away in a 60 page document in a statement that says "I consent to being tracked, etc".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I stopped using Skype when they built a backdoor for the Chinese government.

That and a few other very poor experiences with the service, including some very questionable security issues.

Frankly, I hope it does off.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a big stain in the 'new MS' (really it's just the old MS) and we should hold Satya to account on this one.

It's mind boggling how so much money and so many 'smart' Engineers could just run a product into the ground.

Skype needs to be analyzed for why it's such a product failure.

My guess: it's mostly driven by strategic objectives (i.e. downloads, revenues) and the Engineers may care, but that 'user experience' is not a primary concern.

It blows my mind how Google, MS and others don't yet grasp this, and how even 'changing interfaces' has a considerable usability cost.

We use ZOOM now for most things, it's very reliable, but the interface is kind of weird.

<comment><USER17> > My guess: it's mostly driven by strategic objectives (i.e. downloads, > revenues) and the Engineers may care, but that 'user experience' is not a > primary concern.

Bingo. Everyone is focused on one part of that platform and nobody owns the experience as a whole. So the overall experience suffers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never assume a deep level of security for any Microsoft product. Fortunately, who my Skype contacts are isn't particularly sensitive. (I wouldn't choose Skype as a platform for anything sensitive.)

<comment><USER19> _security_ is ok, this is privacy.

<comment><USER20> Privacy is part of security. I think what you mean is the integrity is OK.

<comment><USER21> tomato - tomato. They are all the same thing to me. We still don't want others to see our sensitive or whatever info we own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The story states there is no way to opt out but in preferences / contacts / privacy there is the option "Appear in suggestions" which I assume solves this but should have been opt-in.

My grief with Skype goes deep, not to mention Skype for Business and the idiotic impossibility of adding contacts between S4B and Skype.

<comment><USER23> That Skype for Business and Skype are two totally un-interoperable things is inexcusable.

<comment><USER24> They have been interoperable for quite a while now: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/set-up- sky...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/set-up-skype-for- business-online/let-skype-for-business-users-add-skype-contacts)

<comment><USER25> you can do one-on-ones but you cannot add skype free users to a skype for business conference call. We're using Skype for Business and this limitation is very frustrating.

On the bottom of your link:

      Not available with Skype contacts
      </comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
      Multi-party IM conversations
      Audio and video conversations with three or more people
      Desktop and program sharing

<comment><USER26> So, what can we do (in general) to stop this sort of "making stuff shittier" effect that seems inherent in Western Capitalism. Very rich, very successful companies buy products and make them worse -- what's the patch for that? Is there anything beyond government regulation, or "consumer buying power"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can we get a list of Skype alternatives going? I feel like it's time to dump the corporate behemoth mess.

<comment><USER28> The article mentions 2 alternatives:

> I recommend [http://zoom.us](http://zoom.us) or > [http://appear.in](http://appear.in) as alternatives that don't "help" you > by exposing your contacts to the world.

<comment><USER29> I don't think we can call landlines via these.

<comment><USER30> I'm from Europe and I'm baffled that this would be a requirement for anyone these days. Are landlines still that common in the US?

<comment><USER31> I'm from Europe and I've occasionally used this feature when e.g. I'd lost my phone, but needed to make a call to a customer service department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It feels almost inevitable that all the major platforms will get compromised in some way, especially as they grow in features and thus attack surface. I can only imagine the magnitude and persistence of attacks on these kinds of platforms. Even if it's possible for them to be technically sound, all it takes is a bad human to spoil all the hard engineering work.

I wouldn't trust sensitive data on any of them, and with the way advertising tech and governments treat privacy, I'm not sure technology has a bright future in that regard. I would sooner write down a secret on a piece of paper and lock it in a drawer than keep them on a computer.

It's much more practical to have retractable, replaceable secrets, so that you have agency over an inevitable leak of that secret. The way credit card companies handle breaches is a great example, they are very sympathetic to the fact that cards get stolen.

I don't lead a particularly interesting life, so it's not really going to stop me from using computers, but on principal it's not very good that we can't trust the devices in our pockets.

</comment><comment><USER33> This started with the preview version like 1 month ago. I immediately removed the new setting as I noticed the suggestions popping up.

These changes should be opt-in.

<comment><USER34> no, it's much older, the osx skype redesign included this and that was more than a year ago (i don't know about windows). when i installed it, it suggested as a contact the mother of one of my colleagues. there's nothing in common between us, she even lives on a different country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I opened the iPhone app, went to setting, turned it off. Then back out and in ... and it's on again.

Tried several more times - it shows "off" when clicked, but back on when I re- enter. I will try again from a desktop when I am next to one.

I assume it's incompetence rather than malice, but.... understandably, incompetence never works for the users, only against them.

</comment><comment><USER36> When Microsoft switched Skype to Microsoft accounts I've lost 2/3 of my contacts list. I had valuable contacts in it that were just gone.

Afterwards I contacted their support twice and both times I ended up talking with somebody that tried to convince me that it was my fault (" _you must have created a second account_ "). I understand that this actually happens in the real world but after talking with support the second time with no result, I just gave up.

And then I stopped using Skype, convinced my colleagues too, we switched to Slack, Hangouts, Zoom, whatever.

Interestingly Microsoft has good support for other products. E.g. I contacted them twice about bugs in OneDrive and in both cases I received a prompt acknowledgement that the issue exists and then afterwards acknowledgement that it was fixed.

But the experience with Skype was just terrible. When people accuse them of running Skype into the ground, I tend to agree.

</comment><comment><USER37> While I agree this is terrible, what is different about Facebook harvesting information to send "People You May Know" invite emails? Wasn't that far worse since it didn't even require that a person signup for Facebook? Couldn't the same correlations be driven as the author of this post discussed?

<comment><USER19> Why would it be ok, because someone did it before?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> After 15 years as a customer, yesterday was the last day of my last Skype subscription.

So long to the random designs, dropping calling features, horrible connections and barely-human customer support. You won't get another penny from me unless/until you do a 180.

<comment><USER9> What's the alternative service you're going to use now?

<comment><USER38> Surprisingly: Viber. Viber Out works great for calling out to 50 countries, and most text communication is on eMail/Slack/iMessage/etc

It's been a few days of Viber and already I see several pluses:

* Putting a call on speaker takes one tap and doesn't hang my phone, unlike Skype which pops up the native iOS sound output device chooser for some reason.

* Easy to see call history & times under a given contact (Skype did a weird center-aligned thing that made the information super-difficult for human eyes to parse)

* Easy to edit contact name info (Skype made this like 5 menus deep)

* Easy to set/remove contacts as favorites (Skype hid this somewhere new every few weeks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A few months ago (shortly before GDPR) there were reports of company accounts being locked out of Skype because of age restrictions. Some people had normal, personal accounts which they used for business purposes with the birthdate set to the company's founding date. Then GDPR came in and you had to be over 16 or 18 to use Skype or your account required parental verification. To do this, you had to link the supposed child's account with the parent's. Of course, the paren't account had to have a credit card linked or undergo some Microsoft verification by sending an ID scan. Most people decided to go with the second option, as they didn't have or want to link a credit card with Microsoft. Of course, that verification took days, especially when so many users requested it, and for all that time they didn't have access to Skype, Office 365, Mail etc. I can provide a source (in polish) if anyone is interested. Of course, those restrictions didn't really work out for most (real) children as most people are already used to automatically provide a birthdate that's over 18.

</comment><comment><USER40> Skype was on of those things your average salesperson could use, without any IT interaction.

Microsoft ruined it when they introduced Skype for business, which isn't even the same thing? How confusing.

Andreesen Horowitz must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

</comment><comment><USER41> If it wasn't for the fact that Skype is one of the products that tends to work in China without interruptions (as opposed to Hangouts), I'd have deleted my account there long back.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can anyone provide a screenshot on how the suggest feature looks? I'm trying to find it on Skype for Mac but no luck. Just for Windows still?

</comment><comment><USER43> At this point, it might just be easier to report on sites that -haven't- been exposed. (If there are any.)

</comment><comment><USER44> No timestamp, when was this article posted?

<comment><USER45> Dec 2017: [https://web.archive.org/web/20171223024842/http://www.stever...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171223024842/http://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/skype- serious-privacy-breach/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Judging by the Microsoft link in TFA, this should be (2017).

Also, I can't help wondering what changes they will be making to this "feature" to accommodate California's new CCPA...

<comment><USER47> It indeed seems to be from 2017 (if <meta> tags on this page are accurate).

<comment><USER48> Thanks! We've updated the headline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sounds like you're using a consumer version of a product and wondering why it has consumer features.

It would however be interesting to see how Skype for Pro's (read: Business) handles this suggestion feature.

<comment><USER50> Skype for Business does not have a contact suggestion feature.

It's also a completely separate product. Skype is to Skype for Business as Visual Studio is to Visual Studio Code.

<comment><USER34> they're pushing something else now: microsoft teams. looks like a combination of google wave and hipchat.

<comment><USER51> My company suddenly jumped to Office 365 recently. We now have to use the "Mobile" versions of all Office apps (they don't even appear in the Windows Store search for me). It feels like a preschool version of an actual Office Suite.

We've been testing Teams for a week and nobody has used it ever since. It doesn't delivers a message and then it disappear; the calls often work only one-way. To use it on Linux, you have to fake your user-agent. It's laughably bad.

<comment><USER50> You can use it on linux with Chrome, not Chromium, and Firefox, but only from the website and not from your distribution. This may relieve the hassle of faking your user-agent.

<comment><USER51> I exclusively use Chromium or privacy-oriented forks on my devices, so I'll be sticking to the user-agent faking for now. Thanks for the clarification though!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with the isolation of telecommuting? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm looking into starting at a job that is 100% remote with a completely distributed team.  I've always done my best work alone, but I'm still anxious to be home in the house 24 x 7.  Also, I'm married, so any insight how this affects the work/life balance would be great.<p>Any tips? <comment><USER2> I've telecommuted on and off for years and I'm doing that right now. Here is what I learned:

1\. Always "get ready" for work. Do the same routine as you would if you were going to an office: shower, dressed, etc. It puts you in the mindset that its time for work.

2\. Make it a point to work in a coffee shop or something similar at least once per week. You need to be around people as a human being and it breaks up your week nicely.

3\. Make lunch or meeting arrangements with people in your field on a regular basis. Its similar to point #2 but takes it a step further in forcing you to communicate and interact with another person and its work-related.

4\. Set very clear expectations with your family. Have a space that is designated only for work. Let them know that you're "at work" or they will bother you and you'll start resenting them.

5\. Set a timeframe when you'll be off work. Let them know that they can expect say, between 5 and 6 pm and at that time you're off work. Period.

6\. Never, ever do household chores during work hours unless you set a specific time during the day. For me, I don't allow any chores but there are times when I will set aside an hour and complete a task. The joy of working from home is flexibility so use it but wisely. The same goes for work. Don't allow 'creep' to set in because it can be a slippery slope. When you're off work - be off work. When you're at work - work.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've done it for over three years now. At first, it was really tough, now I actually enjoy it vs. the alternative. Some things that have worked for me:

\- Invest in a good workspace, desk, chair, monitor, etc. Good ergonomics help immensely.

\- Exercise regularly each and every day.

\- Practice good hygiene as if you were working at an office. Shower and dress everyday!

\- Get out of the house regularly to meet with peers if you can. I do lunch at least once a week with friends/colleagues to break things up a bit.

\- I've used coworking spaces periodically which can be good if you find interesting people there.

\- Start and stop at regular hours each day. I also try not to work anywhere and everywhere in the house. Stick to your office if you can.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> I worked completely remote for 2 years and anywhere from 1-4 days a week for the past year or two.

\- Get out of the house. I'd set the goal of getting out twice a week. Worst case, go eat and work somewhere with wifi. If you can meet with friends it's much better. Look for techie meetups and other events (or start one) if you need to make more local techie friends.

\- Remember that you can work from other places. I love getting to the library, bookstore, cafe, bar, etc. once in a while for a couple of hours of work.

\- Set "office hours". This has been my biggest problem. It's very easy to roll out of bed, start working and not stop until well into the evening.

\- Use video chat when you can. Some of my team hated it, but it's much more effective to see a face.

\- I like to keep an open group chat room (we used Skype most) with the whole team. If you can do that without letting it interrupt your workflow, it's much better than people having 1-on-1 chats and the rest of the team never knowing about issues. A group chat room is more like being physically together without big long email chains.

\- Don't be afraid to walk away from the computer to get things done. It feels hard to be disconnected while working remote, but I had to do it at times.

\- I know others don't like it, but I'm fine with doing chores and running errands while working remote. Short breaks are good and occasional long breaks are ok too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quality over quantity. In some of my past work, my team was rather "remote"; various members located elsewhere and/or working significant portions of their schedule from home.

I really liked many of them, and catching up for a few minutes on the phone far surpassed most of the semi-random office socializing that took place on- site. And at times, we'd work for a while together wearing headsets and sharing network resources. I found that every bit as good as physically sitting next to them. Actually, it was less distracting, not having someone physically a foot away from you, staring at your screen.

Make sure your voice communication is uncapped, and feel free to use it. (I'm not one for web cams; most of the time, there's no real point to having an image of the other duffer sitting at their keyboard.) And focus on those people you enjoy talking with. Take time to get to know their personality; you'll end up sharing the same humor and small asides that you would in- person.

(One fellow I got along well with and worked with frequently, I never -- over the course of a few years -- ended up meeting in person. Nonetheless, I feel that I got to know him fairly well, in the friendly co-worker sense.)

I'll add: Establish trust. Do what you say you will, and expect the same from the other person. Don't let physical separation be an excuse for not following through. This is more important than physical presence. And, if you are using physical presence to, um, "influence" (coerce?) people into getting things done, you already have a problem that is not really a matter of physical presence (or lack thereof).

The real world isn't perfect in this regard, but over time, you can emphasize the people you can trust and de-emphasize those you can't. It's a useful aspect in making career decisions.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think mzbridget and krsgoss make sensible suggestions elsehwere in the comments. On the topic of work/life balance, I'd add: try your hardest to "close the door" on your workspace when you've finished for the day. If you have a home office and can do this literally, then even better.

On the topic of having the same routine as if you worked in an office, I heard somebody once say that they left the house before work and walked round the block, rain or shine, to simulate a morning commute. They said it helped create the mindset mzbridget mentions (point 1).

</comment><comment><USER7> Get a 2nd job. For two years while I had a 100% telecommute job I worked as a white water raft guide and a ski instructor. They started as just on the weekend but before long I was working my 2nd job 4 days a week.

Incidentally, I did my best work when I was working the most rafting/skiing because life was great and on the 3 days I did my real job, I was completely focused because I had no time to mess around.

</comment><comment><USER8> I know some people at my coworking space are working remote from the rest of their company/team. It seems like a pretty good solution to not be socially isolated despite being physically isolated from your company.</comment>


Antisocial networking - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dwallach/antisocial-networking

<comment><USER2> And here I was expecting a link to <http://isolatr.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/Crowd-Sourcing%20Translations <comment><USER2> Hey andrew,

I've been working on launching a site like this for the last 5 months. Feel free to check it out: <http://www.caterpi.com/>

Also some competitors in the same space: <http://onehourtranslation.com> and <http://mygengo.com>

<comment><USER3> Cool site, dead simple. You might want to make the services page more friendly, though. I know 3 languages, so you're expecting me to enter 6 combinations by hand, one by one? Why not just let me state which languages I know, and generate all combinations? Then allow editing of rates for all of them on one page.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback algorias. I'll definitely give it some thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Transifex is probably a competitor in this space (<http://www.transifex.net/>).

One of the problems that I've had with lowest bidder translations is that the cost of a poor translation can be quite high. Working on a large real estate management application a few years ago, we hired a firm based on cost alone for a bunch of translations; and they did some weird things like using the word for "zipper" when we wanted "zip code". The translations were generally correct, but little things like that really made us look pretty bad in the eyes of our international customers.

So, my point is that I would go out and look for a company that had a good translation track record before trusting the public face of my company to someone on the basis of cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hoping that some crowd-sourcing features will handle quality better. For example:

1) Similar to 99Designs, etc, everyone could vote on quality, so that could give you some confidence in the text.

2) Translator users could accumulate karma and reviews.

3) Translators' previous work would be public for inspection, and you could see comments and votes on previous work.

4) The requester could seek higher quality by offering a higher price.

<comment><USER5> I think double-checking results would bring the most benefit, especially if done by a native speaker of the target language. They don't have to understand the source language, just point out that a sentence makes no sense or uses awkward grammar.

<comment><USER6> _They don't have to understand the source language_

Find the mistake in the following sentence which cost my company $X (can't tell you, but it is eyepopping):

"The subject registration screen should list the lecture subject name, drawn from the database table for the lectures subject name."

<comment><AUTHOR> I can find at least one grammar mistake.

There should be an apostrophe in lecture's.

Did that cost you money?

<comment><USER6> Your correction was precisely what cost $X.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain why this cost money without revealing too much?

<comment><USER6> There is a long standing tradition at a major customer of my company, unrelated to this system, that any worker anywhere on the line can hit a Big Red Button which will stop the line if they detect a quality issue. Hitting the Big Red Button has immediate costs: it delays production ($$$), it incurs overtime expenses to get the lost production back ($$$), it throws your supply lines into chaos ($$), it causes you to miss targets with your customers and pay out contractual damages ($$$$$$), etc, etc.

Hitting the Big Red Button on a software project is cheaper, but not free. (For example, the Big Red Button plan for customer acceptance testing might sound like "Nobody goes home if there is an unknown risk to delivery", and a translation error anywhere means there is an unknown risk to delivery until you have verified that whatever process introduced the error was not similarly out of control elsewhere.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually submitted this exact idea to YC last year. Here are some competitors: <http://translationcreation.com/> (site down at time of writing) <http://www.proz.com/>

The YC-segment could probably be convinced to use something like this (I'd use it if the editing/checking worked well). I know of several tech-startups that use mturk in a way similar to what you describe.

A big hurdle for wider uptake would be confidentiality of texts to be translated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to share your application, or even just the relevant business-plan type parts?

<comment><USER7> done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is a very interesting read. Also, I'm jealous of your adventures to Mt. Everest, the Great Barrier Reef, and MIT :)

I made it up Kili once, but Everest is a different beast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would use it to localize my iPhone apps. I currently use OneHourTranslation and they are pricey at $0.07/word. Make it half that and I will switch.

Extra points:

      * have the translators know about iPhone and the app,
        so that they have context
      * support for incremental translation (so that terms
        stay consistent as you add features)
      * automatically validate .strings file format on submission.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the incremental translation idea. I worry about all my translations breaking when we do a big update and change stuff.

If you could get set up with translators you liked, and the site facilitated long term relationships, that would be really powerful. The site would need some sort of specialized, versioned CMS.

<comment><USER9> The site supports long term relation with specific translators I liked. You simply ask them and they arrange it.

They dont do version control yet, that would be nice and as for price it is the lowest price I found for professional translation. They charge the same price for all languages and they dont charge extra for fast delivery.

Google is free but I would use it only for reading never for writing.

<comment><USER8> Which site are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When you talk about "competing sites" that seems a bit off, since your site doesn't exist yet. It took me a while to figure this out.

One way to find rough use data would be to find the existing sites, then plug them into <http://quantcast.com> and look at the traffic numbers.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's just a feeling, so please take it with a grain of salt, but I think people see mechanical turk a bit like a game on which they can win small amounts of money. Turning it into work and making people translate for cash (as opposed to entertainment) is likely to lead to higher rates.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your feeling is way off. The people I have dealt with on MTurk view it as work, and to most of them, five American dollars is a great deal of money.

I have met people who call themselves freelance translators, and after they finish my translation, they are eager for more at the same rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While not for iPhone Apps, Facebook's translations for Connect sites works similarly: [http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Internationali...](http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Internationalization)

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting. What were your challenges with respect to the machine translations specifically? Also, can you post or share the MTurk ads you use/d?

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally just posted the text and asked for a translation. But, even though I said "no machine translations" I still would get tons.

This ad has been the most effective for me:

Translate a bit of English text into another language.

Please email me at email@example.com to tell me what language you want to translate to, and I will email you the text to translate. The potential languages are Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. No other languages are needed.

Do not use an automatic translator. I have checked all of them. You shouldn't email me unless you are a native speaker. If you do not have Chinese relatives or a degree in Chinese from a university, then you cannot do the Chinese translation. The same goes for all the other languages.

I have gotten hundreds of responses, mostly from Indians who claim to do the translation, but they use an online translator. If you are one of these, don't bother - you are just wasting your time. If you are a special guy in India who knows Russian or some other language, then send me a really convincing email, or I'm just going to delete it with all the spam.

<comment><USER14> Nice technique. Another idea might be to select some standard text (eg: some news article) that you predetermine, and run it through several online translators, and compare what you get back from the humans to those. You might also include a 'turing test' sentence in there like: "obama talked to the bushes about their time in office".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> yes we would use this. we used mturk for translations and had it setup for multiple entries. This would help us significantly and we would pay. hth

<comment><USER14> interesting! What type of data are you translating (iphone app text, webapp text, etc)? Can you elaborate on your experience with mechanical turk? What did you notice to be the major problems/inconveniences?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yup, we were talking about localizing a bunch of strings for our app just yesterday. Specifically need Malay, Spanish and French.

<comment><USER14> Do you mind sharing what kind of app you're trying to localize (iphone, web, etc)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another strong competitor - <http://www.tomedes.com>

</comment><comment><USER9> whats the idea with getting into a segment that is crowded already? do you have something better?</comment>


F# 5 and F# tools update - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/f-5-update-for-net-5-preview-4/ <comment><USER2> Still waiting on an F# book or tutorial which doesn't assume I already know C# backwards and forwards...that is all.

Aesthetically speaking, I find F# to be absolutely gorgeous. I'm not sure why, but it just seems really clean to me. Performance is great, and I like how .NET has objects for everything that can be called out to. I gave OCaml a try, but found F# to have a much richer standard library due to .NET.

It is really an uphill battle though as I'm mostly a beginner with functional programming and a .NET beginner with little C# experience. So I don't know either lingo. One day I hope to have enough time to get past the hump.

I own 3 F# books. They all assume at least intermediate C# experience.

<comment><USER3> A good (best?) way to learn F# might be to learn some Haskell and C# first.

Haskell makes sure you properly understand functional programming fundamentals. (And the syntax is very similar to F#.)

You'd want to learn enough C# anyway since .NET comprises largely C# code.

<comment><USER2> That cost is simply too high from a time perspective for me. So much so that I find it unlikely it ever gets the traction it needs to reach true critical mass.</comment></comment></comment>


ReasonML and TypeScript: Comparing Their Type Systems - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@siffogh3/reasonml-typescript-comparing-their-type-systems-620e4343221c <comment><USER2> This is not a comparison of theory or attributes, just a comparison of syntax, so don't go looking for any type theory</comment>


Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.curiousgnu.com/day-trading <comment><USER2> Three trades in 12 months means you probably have a lot of people who, put a few dollars in, played around, lost money, and soon quit. I would be interested to see how the graph changes as the minimum number of trades rise.

<comment><USER3> People who initially win in gambling will kick around money for longer than those who lose on their first play.. So excluding immediate dropouts can make a gamble look like an investment.

<comment><USER4> Survivorship Bias?

<comment><USER3> I think survivorship bias indicates a segment that survives at a higher rate due to an actual trait and then its trait is presumed to have been a norm at the start. Survivorship Bias would imply there is an actual factor beyond gambling and we are just too optimistic about its frequency.

More simply, once you exclude people who only bet once you are excluding a disproportionate number of negative bets simply because betting a second time is based on the first outcome. If you want to do exclusions you have to exclude the outcome of the 1st n bets even from players who keep playing.

But then you get something that is also misleading as players can get more and more conservative on the way out the door. I.e. taking guaranteed pennies in splits and buyouts as they realize their big payouts from roller-coasters were not as certain as they thought. There should be a strategy that does similar to the return from a safe investment, so that also isn't interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So 1 out of 5 break even or make money?

Not as bad as I thought.

I think it can be an interesting hobby, if you only trade with 'losable' income. Gambling is always in favor of the house, and aside from Poker and Blackjack, there is no skill involved in general.

At least if you are into day trading, you are most likely engaged in the world news, information technology and math. You could do worse.</comment>


Free Idea: Code equivalent to Morning Pages/750 Words - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/2011/05/22/free-idea-code-equivalent-to-morning-pages750-words/ <comment><USER2> It wouldn't work because the _processes_ of coding and writing are different. In writing, yes, "keeping the hand moving" is important. If you're stuck, a good way to get unstuck is to just keep writing, and wait for your subconscious to hit upon something that your conscious mind can use as a seed to craft a story around.

Programming is not at all like that. In programming, getting "stuck" is a signal to _stop_ writing code. Its a signal to stop and rethink your approach, or at least step back and think about the problem before jumping back into coding. You can't write yourself out of a programming problem, but you certainly can write yourself into one.

<comment><USER3> I often have trouble getting my motor started on my current major project, but banging on a different idea for half an hour puts me in a good coding groove which I can then carry over into momentum on my major project.

750 code words would be more about _starting_ than about _being stuck_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly right; this isn't about being stuck. Or trying to unstick you. I don't write 750 words/day to "unstick" myself from writing a blog post. I do it to bang my head on something else a little bit to keep the juices flowing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would you need an online service to do that, if the point is just to write code for you that you're not going to share with anyone? Or did I miss something?

(I don't understand the point of 750words.com either, for that matter, except if you're not satisfied with a text file and quick scripts for reminders and word counts: but if you want to do a diary like 750words.com about coding and getting your hands dirty, why wouldn't people just code the thing they want?)

<comment><USER5> Or one could simply use a ready made blog-platform like Wordpress which supports a majority of the features listed and maybe modify it a little

> Allow signup/signin

Check.

> Allow public sharing of journals/non public

Private and public posts.

> Allow submitted "ideas"

Use comments for getting those.

>Make it look decent

Thousands of free and premium themes available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or they could use posterous, livejournal, blogger - or an internal text file. There's a million things that could do it, the idea is to make one tailored _for_ it and tailored to the _idea_. Sometimes a custom built system can beat a generalized system made to "sorta do it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My most common scenario for kick-starting my creative coding is to bust open the REPL and brain dump the more difficult concepts just to see if they're feasible. I use the REPL so I can quickly debug code and see immediate results.

There's no way I could just jot down 750 words of code without having executed it _at least_ once. Normally, I'd probably have executed my code every 10 new words of code - so like, 75 times by the time I write 750 words. I just don't see a non-REPL editor helping me in this way.

I know there are in-browser REPLs for languages like Ruby and Python, etc. Perhaps if it had one of those in it, or something, then it'd make more sense for me to try it.

</comment><comment><USER7> IIRC, The Pragmatic Programmer suggests writing morning pages. It's been a while since I read it, though so I could be wrong.</comment>


Rethinking Payment Request for iOS Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/rethinking-payment-request-for-ios.html <comment><USER2> Classic google move. Remove the ability to pay with a normal card, in favour of their own payment platform.

Antitrust can't come soon enough.</comment>


I created a Font Memory Game, how fast can you complete it? - <AUTHOR> https://betterwebtype.com/font-memory-game.html <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. I have to say though, it would be far more useful to me if you were helping me reinforce my knowledge of which fonts these are (which is what I initially assumed the game would be doing).

<comment><USER3> I agree, presenting the name of the font after connecting the two would be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Windows desktop Chrome Version 67.0.3396.99 I just get "NOT SUPPORTED Sorry, this game can't be played on mobile devices."

Worked fine in Firefox however.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is just an ad for a book...</comment>


Retirement video for the Philco 212 Mainframe Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwOkVgGw1z8 <comment><USER2> "After Philco was purchased by Ford Motor Company, the Model 212 was introduced in 1962[19] and released in 1963. It had 65,535 words of 48-bit memory. Initially made with 6-microsecond core memory, it had better performance than the IBM 7094 transistor computer. It was later upgraded in 1964 to 2-microsecond core memory, which gave the machine floating-point performance greater than the IBM 7030 Stretch computer. A Model 213 was announced in 1964 but never built. By that time competition from IBM had made the Philco computer operations no longer profitable for Ford, and the division was closed down.[20][21]

The Model 212 could carry out a floating-point multiplication in 22 microseconds. Each word contained two 24-bit instructions with 16 bits of address information and eight bits for the opcode. There were 225 different valid opcodes in the Model 212; invalid opcodes were detected and halted the machine. The CPU had an accumulator register of 48 bits, three general-purpose registers of 24 bits, and 32 index registers of 15 bits. Main memory size ranged from 4K words to 64K words. Only the first model had a magnetic drum memory; later editions used tape drives.

The Model 212 weighed about 6,500 pounds (3.3 short tons; 2.9 t)."

\--Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philco_computers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philco_computers))

So, for multiplication at least, the 212 was capable of 0.045 MFLOPS and 15.4 FLOPS/kg.. FLOPS/kg seems like a fun stat that we should probably calculate more often. The Earth's global computing capacity at the end of 2015 was estimated to be up 1.5e21 FLOPS[1], so the entire planet, elephants, mountains and all, produces just 0.00025 FLOPS/kg.. It seems like it might be a little while before the Earth has a higher computing power to weight ratio than this mainframe did, but probably not too much longer. It is just a piddly 16 doublings after all.

[1][https://aiimpacts.org/global-computing- capacity/](https://aiimpacts.org/global-computing-capacity/)

<comment><USER3> > FLOPS/kg seems like a fun stat that we should probably calculate more often.

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

<comment><USER4> Trying to do a back-of-a-napkin calculation on a Haswell core (~ 500 GFLOPS), but what is the weight of a 1000-pin BGA? Maybe 20 grams? That would put it at 2.5e+13 FLOPS/Kg

<comment><USER3> The vast bulk of that 20 grams is packaging, the die is probably less than 1 gram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what old techies think/thought about being forced to wear suits/ties.

<comment><USER6> I'll take a suit and tie that I can remove as soon as I get behind the closed door of my private office over a kegerator, shorts, and an open office hellscape. A piece of cloth around your neck wasn't the only thing the old days had to offer.

<comment><USER7> I used to keep a suit and a spare shirt and tie in the office when I worked for a bit Uk company not that long ago.

<comment><USER8> I worked for a company that had a pile of laundered white shirts and blouses lying around solely for picture day.

<comment><USER6> Precisely. I used to work at a "have to wear a tie" place. Guess how often that tie came out of my messenger bag. "Hey, that big client is coming today..."

Looking at old pictures is not a reliable way to suss the day-to-day of "the old days", any more than looking at your Facebook pictures indicates how much you drink/eat/rock climb.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Hassle of Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/the-hassle-of-haskell-a74862541dfb

<comment><USER2> Author seems unaware that ..- might be parsed as a single operator, seems "not mathematical" to her. A good illustration how beginners in any language get hung up on small things that are different than other languages they know.

<comment><USER3> It seems like a flaw in Haskell's parser to me.

It looks like it is doing basic greedy tokenizing before passing it on to the parser, and, as this shows, that is not the best fit in this case.

Syntactically significant whitespace is seldom a good thing. (With the potential exception of indentation.)

<comment><USER4> Practically every other language does the same thing. For instance in C would you expect `int x;` to be the same as `intx;`?

<comment><USER3> No. But I expect this to not be parsed as a single comment:

         /* <stuff> */ <stuff> /* <stuff> */

<comment><USER5> I think it's just normal tokenizing. `..-` is a legal name for an operator. An error is given since no operator of that name is in scope.

The alternative of this getting parsed as a range operator and a negative number now and changing to an application of `..-` if that is ever defined or imported doesn't sound very good...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haskell's flexibility in naming operators is unusual. Haskell allows programmers to make up their own operators. Want a spaceship operator? You can define it to be represented as <=>. Want division defined over quaternions? You can make up an operator for that too, maybe /: would be good. Working with algebraic rings? >< can be defined as the multiplicative operator over the elements of the ring.

The syntax rules for Haskell allow sequences like +++ or +.+ or <..> or <\---> to all be interpreted as operators. This led to the problem for the author who may have missed the fact that Haskell was behaving in a completely consistent manner when it objected to the symbol ..- in her program. She really intended two different symbols, the .. followed by the -, but she ran them together. The error wasn't the fact that the range's end point was negative. From my perspective, the author's statement "In conclusion, I'm going to stick to Node and Rust until Haskell is further developed and at least out of beta." is over the top. I'm not claiming that I too haven't been frustrated with various programming languages and compilers and been ready (many times) to throw in the towel, who hasn't. However, I don't want readers to get the wrong idea about Haskell because of this single, and perhaps surprising, syntax error. Haskell is not in beta and is a _very_ consistent language. I hope that the author gives Haskell another chance.

Every successful programming language has it's own characteristics and peculiarities, even at the syntactic level. PL/1 doesn't have reserved words so IF and THEN could be variables. APL has left to right operator precedence so (5 + 5 * 2) was 20 not 15. Algol-68 allows operator precedence for built in operators to be changed by the programmer! Lua arrays are indexed from 1 while C arrays are indexed from 0. Python uses whitespace to indicate code blocks. Lisp relies on parentheses. COBOL spelled out arithmetic in english words. In Forth one computes 5+(5 * 2) by writing 5 5 2 * +. So it is not at all unusual for Haskell to have it's own distinct syntax.

One of my professors told a story that I've always remembered: His very young son was walking next to him and suddenly stopped in front of a house and exclaimed "This house is broken!" His father asked "Why do you say that about this nice looking house?" His son then replied "Look at the sidewalk; there is a little crack here."</comment>


Epic Biking App Marries Game Mechanics with Excercise - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic-biking/id391318109?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe not nearly as cool as this: [http://gizmodo.com/5646063/how-to-use-your- iphone-as-a-bike-...](http://gizmodo.com/5646063/how-to-use-your-iphone-as-a- bike-computer)

But Epic Biking brings game mechanics into cycling by adding OpenFeint integration. It is pretty cool to see how well... Ok, really how poorly I do in relationship with other cyclists around the world.

This app was written with Corona from AnscaMobile.com. If anyone cares to hear about the experience, I'd love to share. Let me know what you'd like to know about.

Here are a few promo codes for those that are interested:

JYT77EJEAFTP HAJR9JNN9XFT YL7RN6K3FHWJ 3XR3J64WRTJP 39WTMNE4RNNK

Please rate the app. Thanks!</comment>


How Windows Everywhere finally happened - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/ <comment><USER2> I don't like the Universal apps or whatever they're calling them this month. They are limited, slow, crashy and buggy. They regularly just disappear after a sleep and wake. I have been left questioning my sanity wondering if I closed Messenger.

Also, they are clunky and slow. For example, switch to a desktop with a universal app open and for the duration of the desktop slide animation, the app window will be completely blank. And then suddenly all the content will flash into sight after the slide ends.

The start menu itself is slow and will miss your first few keystrokes if you try to start a search too quickly. The notification bar is sometimes laggy to open, and so are the universal style notifications.

Sharing across universal apps sometimes works, other times it just opens the target app and sits there. I dunno if this is an app problem or universal platform problem.

I wonder if improving Windows Forms would have been a better strategy. Instead now Forms is seen by many as a dead platform, and UWP is so limited/slow that nobody is developing for it. When soundcloud is smoother/less buggy running on Chrome than as a standalone UWP app, what is even the point of having a software ecosystem, apart from a web browser?

<comment><USER3> As a side note, I fixed the Start menu searching issue by disabling the slide animation for the menu: [http://lifehacker.com/disable-this-animation-to-make- windows...](http://lifehacker.com/disable-this-animation-to-make- windows-10s-start-menu-o-1734223008)

<comment><USER4> That dialog appears to have remained with little change since XP. I always use "adjust for best performance" (which clears all the boxes), then select only "show windows contents while dragging". Everything instantly becomes so much faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Operation successful, patient dead...

It's kind of tragic that much of this effort may never pay off: in the process of merging platforms and restructuring API's (that started with Vista and is still going) Microsoft lost the connection to many of its developers, who went to build Web, iOS and Android apps. WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, XAML, UWP: there were too many changes, rewrites and deprecations. Windows Phone, brilliant as it is, did never reach mass adoption and all the effort that went into unifying it with Windows has probably been wasted.

I think developers prefer a crappy but stable technologies with a proven market over uncertain and fast-moving technologies. It takes many years for a new platform to mature and settle down.

Microsoft really needs to stop introducing "upgrades" that require application rewrites in Windows for the next 3-5 years, and focus on getting the Windows Store going.

<comment><USER4> As a long-time Win32 programmer (over a decade), I can safely say that the vast majority of existing applications still remain (for the time being) forward-compatible.

Here's some examples:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOj- bAZBhnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOj-bAZBhnE)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfn4M5DXTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfn4M5DXTE)

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

The reasons people hold off on "upgrading" Windows versions is not mainly because of compatibility, but other factors like unwanted UI changes and removed features, and particularly with Windows 10, the increased data- collection intrusiveness and "we own your machine" attitude:

[http://www.howtogeek.com/243581/windows-10-may-delete- your-p...](http://www.howtogeek.com/243581/windows-10-may-delete-your- programs-without-asking/)

<comment><USER6> That's great! I didn't know about it. Would anyone happen to know how does it compare with the applications on Linux? Are they similarly forward compatible?

<comment><USER7> Oh, in no way, shape, or form, unless the application was statically linked, which is uncommon.

<comment><USER8> Closed source programs usually are, exactly for that reason. (Or at least ship all libraries they link to, up to and including the libc.)

Go also makes it relatively easy to statically compile everything, one of the reasons why it's gaining popularity.

Apart from those two it's highly uncommon: You're supposed to ship sources and compile them on the target system.

To get a sort of forward compatibility you'd need to find compatible sources for all involved userland, or ship them with your sources. The latter is sometimes used in larger projects, to work around distributions having wildly incompatible versions of whatever library you need (Samba, Firefox, LibreOffice e.g.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Windows FOR everywhere. No matter that Microsoft says, windows is still a choice. We have all seen shops where windows is just taken for granted, but every senior guy I know has some horror story about MS that makes them dream of a world without.

A typical story:[http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-no-longer-allows- admi...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-no-longer-allows- administrators-to-block-windows-store-access-in-windows-10-pro/)

</comment><comment><USER10> > Microsoft promised developers that Windows would run anywhere. This summer, > it finally will.

Bullshit. _Versions_ of Windows that are all labeled Windows 10 are running in a lot of devices, and you can write applications that in theory can run on all of them (though practically writing one application that runs well on all of them may be somewhat harder if you want your application to be useful in any way.)

But that is NOT the same as "Windwos runs everywhere." in a number of ways.

The first and most obvious way is that you can't just take your existing Windows application and put it everywhere, which is what that phrase seems to imply. Nor can you buy one of these devices and immediately have access to all the library of millions of Windows applications that exist. No, if you're a developer you have to write a new universal app and embrace the Windows 10 App Store whether you want to or not.

And if you're buying a device, you better check twice that the software you want is available for the platform you're buying lest you find out too late your device has special requirements.

Secondly, we've had _a version_ of Windows running on lots of devices for a long time. The only thing that's different now is the branding. They're finally all branded "Windows 10" even though in many cases (like Phone and X-Box One) the user and developer experiences are totally different. Is that helpful? I don't really think so.

This article might as well have been written by Microsoft's PR department. Totally not grounded in reality at all.

<comment><USER11> Your comment has some merit, if we ignore the fact that now same kernel is running across devices, with same subsystems and same applications, with possibility to write one application that works on all. While it is difficult to write UI to scale across screen size and input types, it is possible to build responsive UIs and people are doing so.

<comment><USER12> >"with possibility to write one application that works on all"

I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different.

I'm not interested in a converging UI. I want a user experience tailored to the platform I'm running the app on.

I'd rather a solid desktop experience then having to put up with trade off's the developers decided to make because they wanted a "one size fits all experience".

I've seen it in the Linux world where toolkits/desktop environments tried to chase the idea of converging UI's and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - miserable to use apps on a phone/tablet and miserable Desktop Apps.

<comment><USER13> > I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my > phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps > running on each of them to be different.

But why should they be programmed different?

You can create XAML forms that are optimized for each platform. But why would you want to rewrite your code to adapt to the different GUIs?

Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase?

<comment><USER14> Your assumptions hold for OS X and iOS even though they are not the same OS and never claimed to be.

> _Won 't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform > with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the > same codebase?_

In theory yes, in practice changing the UI isn't the only problem. The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is allowed to do.

Just as a simple example, on the desktop you can have storage that's shared between apps (at least for now), hence if you want your app's settings to be synchronized with Dropbox, you only need to detect Dropbox's folder and save your stuff in it, whereas on a mobile, you need to integrate with Dropbox's API. Plus on the desktop you usually have a lot of storage space, like my 5 year old desktop has 1 TB of storage, whereas my phones only have 32 GB and 64 GB respectively and these are high-end phones. So clearly storage is a bottleneck on mobile phone, but not on desktops. Another simple example: battery life. Mobile developers have to worry about battery life, the big and forever bottleneck of mobile devices, whereas desktop developers have never been concerned about it. For example I avoided to install Skype on my Android for two years because it was sucking my battery dry in only 2-3 hours. And now mobile Skype is so aggressive in cutting down on background chat that I cannot rely on it to deliver chat messages on time. And you want to hear the worst part? Moore's law doesn't apply well to batteries, so unless major breakthroughs happen, this will only get worse ;-)

And if universal apps on the desktop are as limited as their phone counterparts, that would turn out quite ironic for Microsoft to have turned your powerful desktop into a dumb phone just to have the same experience everywhere. Of course, them and others will try and turn this around as being for the senile grandmas everywhere that are unable to use their laptops, but many of us will have known the truth about that one.

<comment><USER15> For a lot of people, "desktop" really means laptop these days.

Laptops are much closer to mobile than the traditional desktop PC you describe. Limited storage and battery life are important considerations on a MacBook just as on an iPad.

Also the Mac desktop software environment is more like iOS these days, if you want to go through the Apple-sanctioned route of using the Mac App Store. For example direct folder access is not possible, so the Mac desktop app in your example would have to use the Dropbox API too.

<comment><USER14> > _Limited storage and battery life are important considerations on a MacBook > just as on an iPad._

No, I don't believe that's true.

Laptops are bigger, so they can afford bigger batteries. My Macbook Pro's battery holds without problems for 4 to 6 hours of intense work, which is not something I can say about my phone and I'm talking about working on and compiling Scala code and few things are more intensive than that.

Also, most of the time, laptops are used while sitting on desks for actual work. Oh, I know, you might pull your laptop at your coffeeshop to write an email or write comments on HN, or you might need it for work during a flight, which is cool, but overall laptops do get used pretty near an electrical outlet.

But the biggest difference is one of expectations. Phones are still communication devices which we rely on. If my laptop's battery goes out during a flight, I don't care because I do not need my laptop to make phone calls or to orient myself using maps or to call a cab or to open my travel documents or whatever. Whereas I do really need my phone. So the Scala compiler running on my laptop doesn't need to be battery efficient. But my phone needs to last for 12 hours while traveling, otherwise I'm fucked.

> _Mac desktop software environment is more like iOS these days, if you want > to go through the Apple-sanctioned route of using the Mac App Store ... the > Mac desktop app in your example would have to use the Dropbox API too_

Oh, I don't know about that and the reason is the Mac App Store is a wasteland and I can't think of a single app I installed from it. Also, the Mac App Store isn't the " _Apple sanctioned_ " way and they know it's a wasteland too, it's not like they are blind.

No, the Apple sanctioned way is to sign your app. Signing apps needs an Apple developer account, which is fairly costly for open-source devs, but at least I can see the benefit to it. And as long as your app is signed, OS X gives you no problem in letting it be installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All platforms now have enough hardware to run a bloated OS. Even the dinky machines. Thus, we now have Windows and Linux everywhere, endlessly being patched because some feature completely irrelevant to the application has a problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> What are the substantial benefits of getting onboard the UWP rain ? Will the platform code work faster.. will the deployment be faster ? what about the knowledge devs have gathered for decades. will the new way of doing things produce a more efficient and better running application ?

<comment><USER18> For long time Windows developers like myself, the underlying model of WinRT is what the original .NET was supposed to be.

It was called Ext-OS and based on an improved COM API, called COM+ Runtime.

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c- net...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics- research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/)

So with C++/CX and .NET Native built on top of WinRT, Microsoft has gone full circle back to the original idea.

Personally I enjoy developing UWP (started right away with the old Windows 8 model), because it offers me a modern OO API to Windows, similar to the OS APIs from Xerox PARC and ETHZ OSes.

Also, sadly Microsoft torpedoed the whole WP eco-system, but the tooling is so much pleasant to use than Android's.

I also welcome the container model to put some control into the mess that is installing Windows applications.

<comment><USER19> Do you use XAML? What do you think of it? I've never really been able to get my head around it - although my professional projects are mostly ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI so I've had no real pressing need to learn it.

Am I the only one who still likes Windows Forms?

<comment><USER18> It has the developer sanity that web development lacks with its Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript to make <div/> behave like native widgets.

Have you ever tried to use any web design tool capable of matching Blend for UI design?

XAML is what web could have become if XHTML and its sublanguages had been adopted properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Microsoft has still arguably achieved something that its competitors have > not. Rumors that Google will somehow merge ChromeOS and Android have been > circulating for some time, but it hasn't happened just yet

Uhhh.. ChromeOS and Android are both Linux. This is just as merged as running a stripped down Windows kernel.

<comment><USER21> I think you might be underestimating just how aligned Windows 10 is across these devices, certainly more than Android vs ChromeOS is. (Then again, from what I hear, ChromeOS is starting to creep more toward Android... So maybe that is changing). This is more than a shared stripped-down kernel.

<comment><USER8> Google is experimenting with an Android Runtime for Chrome:

[https://developer.chrome.com/apps/getstarted_arc](https://developer.chrome.com/apps/getstarted_arc)

Assuming this does take off, ChromeOS (and any desktop OS running Chrome) will have direct app sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's a little ironic that in the summer they have achieved Windows everywhere, that it would coincide with my first summer of Windows nowhere.

<comment><USER23> I bet it has been a great summer so far too

<comment><USER24> All they needed for Windows back then reminds me of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs) I miss that guy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Apple and Google will probably do something similar with their various > operating systems, but Microsoft has managed it first.

I thought all of Apple's OS variants these days were based on the Darwin kernel and variously intersecting sets of the same unix components and APIs. Every now and then I see someone complaining that a new Apple device contains 'an entirely new OS' like Apple TV OS, but isn't that just a variant of iOS? It seems to me it's precisely because Apple have been determinedly pursuing this common core stragety ever since the first iPhone OS that they've been so successful, compared to Microsoft's strategy at the time of having completely different code bases across product categories.

<comment><USER26> I'm only speculating, but I believe that Darwin is much more bare or stripped down compared to universal Windows. I believe that the author was refering to being able to run iOS apps on OSX and vice versa.

This IMO is not very smart. Each platform, mobile or desktop, has a different purpose and requires different things. So to make a universal OSX or iOS it means that either you make a significant amount of compromises which don't benefit either platform and each suffers. Or you build everything into the core and it ends up being a complete and buggy mess with a bloated install size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article doesn't discuss it, but I thought the Kin was the forerunner to a lot UX of the Windows Phone 7. Was the Kin also a forerunner to the Windows RT platform change, or was it just a re-skinned Windows CE?

<comment> Const-me Zune HD was released before Kin, and I think that was the first WP7-like touch-oriented UX.

Kin and WP7 all run CE. The platform for WP7 was Silverlight 3, designed long before the RT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There was an excellent segment on This American Life about a man who cured his own severe allergies by giving himself hookworms: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/404/e...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/404/enemy-camp-2010?act=3)

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder why the Windows Phone team decided to remove USER and GDI. After all, they ran fine on PCs in the 90s, so surely performance wouldn't be a problem on smartphones.

<comment><USER30> Modern graphics hardware isn't optimized for drawing bitmapped lines. It's optimized for drawing textured triangles. This means that it's not actually a good fit for GDI any more. Given that Windows Phone was, as far as apps were concerned, a clean slate, there was little reason to retain USER and GDI.

win32k.sys is also rife with security flaws, so scrapping it has arguably reliability benefits too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> First immediate thought: Can you get virus/malware scanners for XBox?

Otherwise, it seems an immediate easy target for a new botnet.

<comment><USER21> Windows has had a sufficient built-in virus/malware scanner for a while now. But, I agree, it's now as easy of a target as other Windows 10 machines out there.

<comment><USER32> No, because desktop and server Windows 10 machines have to be compatible with arbitrary older binaries that were written against the Win32 API. The Xbox One version of Windows 10 can leave out the backwards compatible and more easily targeted parts of Windows, and only support UWP apps, which are sandboxed and thus are less exposed to various types of exploits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I must have missed something because last time I checked it was still on the desktop, a failed phone platform and a game console with an installed base of less than 30 million. Meanwhile Android is everywhere from phones, tablets, desktops, cars, TV's and numerous IoT devices.

<comment><USER34> The article is about the state of the technical implementation, not the actual market penetration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> We've been using the Windows 10 for RaspberryPi and love it. Don't think of Win32 as your API--think of .NET and it all makes sense.</comment>


Louisiana leads the way in nationwide trend of ditching plastic drivers licenses - <AUTHOR> https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_a87892ae-ef73-11e8-974c-934c2c75b0f8.html <comment><USER2> ...so, lets see you license, and do you realize that you have waived the 4th and _given_ implied consent for a search

</comment><comment><USER3> Great .. get pulled over, hand your unlocked phone to a cop just like that!</comment>


House plans first-ever hearing on surprise medical bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/25/18281148/house-hearing-surprise-medical-bills <comment><USER2> Markets such as US health care, characterized by inelastic demand and secret prices, should never, ever be tolerated.</comment>


Tobacco industry generates highest net income per employee - <AUTHOR> http://erikrood.com/Posts/NIPE.html <comment><USER2> One reason for this is because the Tobacco industry benefits enormously from manufacturing economies of scale. Take for example Reynolds American's (mentioned in the article) largest manufacturing facility in Tobaccoville, near their HQ in Winston-Salem. The Tobaccoville plant is capable of producing 110 billion cigarettes a year¹, and employs just ~1,200 people².

Let's say the average revenue per cigarette pack is $5, and there are 20 cigarettes in a pack. That works out to $0.25 revenue per cigarette. The Reynolds Tobaccoville plant is capable of producing $27.5 billion in revenue alone ($0.25 x 110 billion), for a labor cost of roughly 90 million (1,200 x $75,000).

1\. [http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/23/business/what-s-new-in- tob...](http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/23/business/what-s-new-in-tobacco-in- tiny-tobaccoville-a-giant-plant.html) 2\. [http://www.journalnow.com/business/business_news/local/updat...](http://www.journalnow.com/business/business_news/local/update- reynolds-to-create-jobs-in-tobaccoville-to-expand- vuse/article_cc60b98c-e283-11e3-ac51-001a4bcf6878.html)

<comment><USER3> Crayola also has like 1,200 employees manufacturing packs of paper wrapped tubes of product for 5 bucks a pop. What about cigarettes is more beneficial for economies of scale?

<comment><USER4> Cigarettes are literally dried up leaves. Their customers light the product on fire and then buy more the next day. Given that as a viable business model, how do you not make ridiculous quantities of money?

<comment><USER5> That is true, but I feel obliged to point out that tobacco is an incredibly difficult and labor-intensive crop.

<comment><USER6> But they don't have to grow it.

<comment><USER5> But they still have to buy it from people who do, and the difficulty is reflected in raw material prices.

From [http://www.nasda.org/File.aspx?id=48147](http://www.nasda.org/File.aspx?id=48147)

Types of Tobacco & December 2016 Avg. Price/lb. – Flue Cured $5.12 – Fire Cured $7.25 – Burley $5.09 – Maryland $4.86 – Dark Air Cured $6.54 – Pennsylvania Seedleaf $5.23

For comparison, wheat is around $6 per bushel. A bushel is 56 lbs.

<comment><USER6> You can get roughly 22 packs of cigarettes from a pound of tobacco. Lets say RJ Reynolds sells those packs for 2.50 wholesale. 22 * 2.50 = 55. 10x the cost of a lb of tobacco doesn't seem too bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a shame and a terrible irony that one of the most successful industries on our planet is also one of the leading causes of deaths on Earth.

<comment><USER8> >is also one of the leading causes of deaths on Earth.

The methods of calculating that 400,000 number are highly suspect.

 _Nearly 60 percent of the deaths occur at age 70 or above; nearly 45 percent at age 75 or above; and almost 17 percent at the grand old age of 85 or above! Nevertheless, without the slightest embarrassment, the public health community persists in characterizing those deaths as "premature."_

 _tobacco-related deaths occur at an average age of roughly 72, an age at which mortality is not unusual among smokers and non-smokers alike._

[https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/blowing- smoke-a...](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/blowing-smoke-about- tobaccorelated-deaths)

I'm not disagreeing that they are harmful, but 400,000 deaths a year is hyperbole. Governments make a lot of money on that hyperbole too.

 _In Fiscal Year 2010, the federal excise tax on cigarettes (currently $1.01 per pack) brought in $15.5 billion in revenue._

 _In 2009, states raked in more than $24 billion by taxing cigarettes and $8.8 billion in settlement payments from tobacco companies_

[http://dailycaller.com/2011/02/28/what-would-an-america- with...](http://dailycaller.com/2011/02/28/what-would-an-america-without- smokers-cost/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sure. Imagine how much income the crack industry would produce if they didn't have to waste so much labor avoiding law enforcement.

<comment><USER10> Just look at Miami in the 80s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would be interested in more summary statistics rather than just mean (NIPE), particularly median. What story is actually being told by this data, that tobacco growth and sales are highly automated and they employ relatively few people, or that execs are disproportionately compensated relative to other industries, or what?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here -- boxplot distribution is in the article.

Also, any story I could string together would definitely be speculative, so just stuck to the few facts I know for purposes of article. Will speculate here, however :) -- I'm going to guess primary driver is efficient manufacturing coupled with simple product offering. (e.g. this isn't some Tech company employing X% of it's workforce for R&D purposes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used to work for Brown & Williamson Tobacco (though I did not receive my $608k per year), and I can absolutely attest that their profits are not as the author suggests "return on talent". I worked at corporate HQ, which is probably very different from the factories where the cigarettes were actually made. The vast majority of people spent the vast majority of their time looking for work to do, because we quite literally had nothing to do. We had something like 20 corporate holidays, plus many other "bonus" holidays announced a day or two ahead of time, and many half-days. One story goes that the CEO was talking to someone about our building and someone on the street asked her "How many people work in that building", and her response was "Oh, about half".

</comment><comment><USER13> A pack of cigarettes is about 20 gram, or about 2/3 of an ounce. So tobacco used to make a pack, is not free, but pretty close to it. Factories cost money but after the initial investment, they mint cash...

I'm almost certain that Marlboro would sell you a gazillion packs for around $1 each on the black market---complete with e Vegas trip and hookers--if they could. Smuggling, to avoid taxes, was a huge business a while back when getting away with it was much easier.

Taxes and advertising cost a lot.

</comment><comment><USER14> 160kμSv? Why? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0)

Without the combustion and rads is nicotine interesting on it's own?

</comment><comment><USER15> And highest externalities too?

</comment><comment><USER16> Who would have guessed that addiction sells.

</comment><comment><USER17> Excellent news for Legal Cannabis.

</comment><comment><USER18> Tabacco - average of $609k per employee

Oil, Gas, & Consumable fuels - average of $421k per employee

I think top 5 public software companies (GOOG, MSFT, FB, AMZN, AAPL) averages more than Tabacco.

<comment><USER19> [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=microsoft+net+income+%2...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=microsoft+net+income+%2F+microsoft+employees&dataset=)

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=google+net+inc...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=google+net+income+%2F+google+employees)

Facebook, however: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=facebook+net+i...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=facebook+net+income+%2F+facebook+employees)</comment></comment>


Suriname Will Tow a Giant Bag of Water to Fight the Caribbean's Drought - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/suriname-to-ship-bags-of-blue-gold-to-drought-struck-caribbean <comment><USER2> I always wonder about ideas like this. Desalination is a known solution and big boats full of fuel that can power desalination plants are a solved problem. In terms of under utilized infrastructure you could put tanks in shipping containers and use unused container craft to move the water from port to port. Hanjin has a bunch available for cheap at the moment.

<comment><USER3> All drinking water from the tap in Curacao has been from a huge desalination plant for many years, see also [1]. There's a shortage of water alright, but not drinking water.

I don't know anything about this story, but when I just asked a friend who lives down there it was not known to him. When I showed him the article he said that it reads more like a first of April joke as anything serious.

For the record, it does not happen much, but it has been raining down there now for 2 whole days.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2015/feb/18...](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2015/feb/18/caribbean-water-crisis-forcing-long-term-reliance-on- desalination)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sound like an absurd way to get fresh water to an island.

<comment><USER5> Dunno. Maybe a few hours of a tug boat is less energy than desalinization of a similar amount of salt water? Not to mention desalinization plants likely cost more than a tug boat.

Doubly so if you need to ship fuel to the desalinization plant via boat.

<comment><USER6> > The trip to Barbados was expected to take five or six days.

One would think a pipeline would be cheaper. I guess they have done the maths on a $2 million investment though. But it's not intuitive.

<comment><USER7> Thats a long pipeline. Apparently, the Keystone pipeline cost 7 billion $. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline)

I'm guessing a water pipeline would be cheaper, and it would need less capacity. But it would have to be constructed for underwater conditions, and any maintenance would be cumbersome.

<comment> semi-extrinsic The Langeled underwater pipeline, carrying natural gas from Norway to the UK, is a bit longer than the Barbados-Surinam distance (at 1200 km), and cost approx. 2 billion USD adjusted for inflation. That's a really big-ass pipeline though, at 44" diameter. I guesstimate they could probably get this water pipeline done at about a hundred million USD.

Edit: Digging a bit further, subsea pipeline lay cost can be roughly approximated at 0.04 million USD per inch-kilometer (that is, multiplied by pipeline length and by diameter in inches) for 8"-24" pipe. Furthermore we can estimate that Barbados would need a flowrate of 5 000 L/s to supplement their water supply, giving an optimal pipeline diameter of 8". That means it would cost 942km * 8in * 0.04 million USD/(km*in) = 300 million USD.

<comment><USER8> What do you base that estimate on, given that planning, permits, work etc don't scale with the diameter of the pipe?

<comment> semi-extrinsic Actually, work does scale with the diameter. For lower diameter pipe, you can use a smaller, less specialized lay barge with less crew, the welding goes quicker meaning progress is faster, and you can fit more km of pipe on each supply ship.

Also, the cost of permits (called Right-Of-Way, ROW) is a very small fraction of the total cost, as is the planning cost. Materials cost for the pipe, OTOH, can be as much as 60% of total.

<comment><USER6> I guess the boat system can be moved around the world to meet demand. Unlike a pipeline that might not get used again for another 10 years.

Still I think the numbers seem off for a boat dragging water in bags for 6 days to be cost effective.

<comment> semi-extrinsic If you've never purchased pressure-rated pipe, you'd be shocked at the cost of even a 6m piece of 1" PN20 pipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If people are willing to pay as much for water as they do for oil or gas, can we use oil infrastructure (tankers, pipelines, trains, etc) to transport water?

<comment><USER10> Can we assume they'd be willing? Here in Canada I use orders of magnitude more water than oil products, and would be willing to pay commensurately less.

<comment><USER9> [http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?id=5047)

Looks like water costs $2 / cubic meter, and oil costs 100x more than that, so we have a long way to go before this makes any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Business as normal. Clever engineering is all it is.

Pretty soon we'll be towing icebergs & what an amazing day that will be.

<comment><USER12> Historically, ice was actually towed (stowed and sailed) from the Northeastern US to e.g. India, and other hot climates.

It was a huge industry in the northeast in the 17th(? I think) century. Got this info from an awesome documentary called the Science of Cold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Jesus, does this ever sound like a terrible idea to operate at scale.

I hope this is something that's only reserved for emergencies, and is otherwise unprofitable.

I get the feeling that this could become horribly destructive behavior, if it catches on as a global trend.

Meanwhile, quotes such as these are disturbing to read:

      We have a nearly unlimited
      source of fresh water in
      Suriname.

Actually, in terms of things human activity can place stress upon, and ultimately ruin, few things are "nearly unlimited."</comment>


How do you manage time to work on side projects? - <AUTHOR> How do someone manage time to work on your side projects with a full time job and family? <comment><USER2> I find I'm most productive in the morning so I try to dedicate the first hour to two hours of my day to my side project.

So I would try boxing time early in the day before your full time job, focus on your side project then. Work your full time job come home for family time, get a good nights sleep.

Occasionally I will work on it late in the evening if the family is out and I'm home, and sometimes on the weekend. I just find it easier to get things done early before everyone is up and going about their day.

Giving up TV shows and Video Games can give you extra time for your side project. Although everyone needs some down time so I wouldn't say you need to give those up completely if you enjoy them.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Working early on your side-project is kind of like the "pay yourself first" principle of saving money. It is also the same habit practiced by most writers before and after they publish their first book.

I've had the most success with this formula:

      1. Every day, wake early and work on your project 1 - 2 hours.
      2. Work your "day" job. If your job allows it, spend your breaks planning your side-project work.
      3. Spend time with family and work some after dinner. In my case, I can usually code
      and watch TV out of one eye while spending time with my wife.
      4. Rinse and repeat

I used to strongly believe that side projects could only be done in four hour blocks of time without distraction but, often, that kind of time is in rare supply. However, when I got a job that required an hour train commute, I found that I could knock out some useful code even when my time between laptop-open and laptop-closed was 30-45 minutes. The tricks to making use of short blocks of time are:

      1) Break the project into short, deliverable bits
      2) Build placeholders/stubs as you go for things to flesh out later
      3) Leave yourself lots of "do this later" comments with ample specifics.
      Don't just say "finish this." Say "Use ABC parameter to lookup XYZ value to override the default."

Structuring the work for "resume-ability" makes it possible to squeeze short bursts of productive work into your day.

<comment><USER4> "In my case, I can usually code and watch TV out of one eye while spending time with my wife."

I'm surprised your wife doesn't complain you're not giving your full attention to her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find I need 4+ hour chunks to make any progress, so I find Saturday and Sunday mornings are the best times until around noon when people start waking up.

But this requires basically going to sleep early on Weekend evenings.

Another option is save a bunch of money and take 6 months to a year off in between jobs and work on side projects.

It's really hard to work full time, have a life, and work on side projects.

If you figure it out please let us know.

</comment><comment><USER6> Understand and accept your schedule. How much time can you realistically spend on such projects?

Then, schedule and budget that time. Maybe you have an hour on Monday evening. Plan to do something that you can accomplish in an hour. Might be two thirty- minute tasks, or half of a two-hour task.

I used to have lofty ambitions for spending time on side projects, but I came to realize that I must of necessity limit my expectations. Weekdays, I might only have an hour or two. Sometimes zero. Weekends, probably more time, but maybe not.

So I work on smaller projects, or on larger projects that I can divide into smaller chunks. I am working on evaluating my mentality at the beginning of my project time; some days I am just too tired, but instead of accepting this, I sit there and pretend to work for an hour or two. That's a waste. I'd rather read, or exercise, if I'm not in a good frame of mind to actually work.

It can be tough! And the work output might not be as high as you like. But you can still do great things.

</comment><comment><USER7> One option, if you can afford it, is to try reducing the time you spend at your full time job.

Ask about reducing to four days a week instead of five. I've recently done this and I find having one dedicated day to spend on side projects is much easier than trying to find a few hours here and there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Block out time by the hour. If you only had one hour to work on a side project, what are the most important next steps you would attempt? Would it be organizing/making lists?--if so you're probably in a planning stage that could benefit from the efforts of even less than an hour. If you begin work and realize you spent 2 hours and 30 minutes... then it seems to me whatever you had scheduled for other hours was less important or you somehow "found time" amidst it. Block time out by the hour and bump what's not important when you're on a roll and maybe abandon the hour early when you're stuck to move on to (aka give time to) other things. Without blocking my time out by the hour there's no way I would ever be able to have so many hobbies.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't change my hours at work, and I'm not going to shut out my family so I can work on a side project. The only thing after that I still have control over is how much I sleep. I usually get 5 - 6 hours of sleep a night. My wife works as a teacher and has to go to bed pretty early for work. My kids are young and need a lot of sleep, so they are in bed pretty early. That usually gives me around 6 hours a night to work on something. I also work remotely, which helps a ton.

Not giving this as advice, but it is how I manage to do it.

</comment><comment><USER10> you take the time from the full time job, family comes before both in my book...

</comment><comment><USER11> I time box 1 hour before watching YouTube/playing games etc. You can do a lot over the long term just spending one hour a day.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reduce TV consumption, just not watching a series saves me hours every week to work on the things I love.

<comment><USER13> I would suggest getting rid of a TV completely (I.e selling the TV or not ever buying one), so many hours are wasted per week when you have a TV

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I outsource some of my side project work where possible</comment>


Historic Facebook campaign will boost voter registration, turnout and voices - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/17/facebook-voter-campaign-strengthen-democracy-mark-zuckerberg-column/3191152001/ <comment><USER2> In no way will Facebook play a positive role in politics. They have already shown their bias and it continues on a regular basis.</comment>


NameCheap BS and GDPR Fail - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/E9eVY6a <comment><USER2> Not sure if it's been posted here before but this contains a good collection: [https://gdprhallofshame.com/](https://gdprhallofshame.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hope image posts like these don't catch on.

</comment><comment><USER4> And your image hosting of choice also injected "15 or 23%" of ads on the page.</comment>


Dynamic Static Inventory for Ansible Tower - <AUTHOR> http://tech.taskrabbit.com/blog/2015/03/12/ansible-dynamic-static-inventory/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the first of a number of Ansible blog posts about how we adopted and use the tool at TaskRabbit.</comment>