Ask HN: What PR book should I read? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on a startup and realized the importance of PR - and that I have no clue about it. Can you suggest me a book? (Or point me in any direction?)
I am very much interested in -what makes people tick -what to do - with reasoning -what not to do - with reasoning
Thank you in advance! <comment><USER2> I'll save you the time:

With media:

1\. Learn what journalists would be interested in your company (and why).

2\. Send them regular updates about what your company is doing (in press release form or, better, as a personal email).

3\. Be honest with them. Talk from the heart. Avoid exaggeration and "marketing language".

With customers:

1\. Always say you're sorry when you screw up or when they're unhappy (for any reason).

2\. Communicate as often as you can via all relevant channels...

3\. ... while avoiding spam and "marketing language".

If you ever get big enough that journalists are coming to you, hire a specialist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Matthew, appreciate your comment. However, I'd really liked to dive deeper into the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a PR and communications major I can help you with that. I can recommend these two books: [http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion- Busine...](http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business- Essentials/dp/006124189X) And [http://about.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=94...](http://about.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=949705369)

Do keep in mind that PR is something different than marketing or advertisement. Those people running around, dropping names and 'generating spin'? That's just a very tiny part of PR. PR is about shaping the public opinion, not just one person's mind.

On a side note, I wrote my thesis on wartime propaganda. I found out that the strongest motivator for people to take action is fear. The fear of losing something, missing out, or a common enemy (think Apple-Android!) is very powerful.

On a second side note, I read another comment about lying. Lying isn't right of course, but there are several degrees of lying. And imagine if know how to sell a lie, how easy it would be to sell righteous truth...

Drop me a line if you need some help or advice. I'm by no means an expert on PR in Silicon Valley, but I know a thing or two about PR.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Dirk.

I was looking in the PR book you suggested and also in many others I have found. Let me be straight, I find all of them dry, boring and useless. I had little idea about PR, and I still have little, but I start to realize it is a different animal from what a startup would need. It feels like something mysterious and don't believe in mystery.

You did actually help me to the conclusion, that I will just skip learning PR now and focus on marketing, like rmATinnovafy said. I did need your input, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This one is required reading for almost every 101-level PR course.

[http://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Sludge-Good-For- You/dp/156751060...](http://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Sludge-Good-For- You/dp/1567510604)

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't this just a book about lies?

I'd like to read things that our startup could benefit from. We definitely don't want to lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read some Seth Godin books.... purple cow, free prize inside etc... and you will learn how to market/pr. One of my college degrees is in PR but I learned more via Seth Godin's books

</comment><comment><USER6> Forget PR, and focus on marketing.

Learn to market well, and the PR will write itself.

Any book by Dan Kennedy is good.

<comment><USER7> If you're looking for a marketing book, check out:

"Covert Persuasion: Psychological Tactics and Tricks to Win the Game" by Kevin Hogan [http://www.amazon.com/Covert-Persuasion-Psychological- Tactic...](http://www.amazon.com/Covert-Persuasion-Psychological-Tactics- Tricks/dp/0470051418)

Great book about all-around persuasion techniques , marketing, and also copywriting.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks interesting as well. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the Prince by Machiavelli

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> # just testing HN posting mechanism</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Twitter/tumblr/etc "in a box" platform? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN- I am looking at building a service semi similar to a twitter/instagram/tumblr which basically involves people following other people to see their content and vice versa. For the sake of argument, imagine I wanted to build a twitter clone that was purely for cat pictures.
Is there a open source system out there which has most of the scaling/distribution issues solved for that type of setup? Im loathe to write my own follower/following system out of fear of the scaling issue.
Language agnostic but would prefer PHP or Node <comment><AUTHOR> The only thing I have found so far is pump.io but unsure of activity or how scalable it will be</comment>


To Moxie: "you really are the worst anarchist I've ever encountered in my life" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217857428 <comment><USER2> > You have claimed to multiple open source projects that they are not allowed > to publish applications on App Stores that use the Signal Protocol's four- > way signed-plus-one-time-prekey handshake in combination with the Axolotl > ratchet, even if they write their own implementation from scratch, because > since the only existing original specification of such a protocol is your > libsignal, all other implementations are, in your words, "necessarily > derived work."

This is an interesting question. My primitive understanding is that as long as there are no patents on the algorithm no one can prevent a clean room design. Is that right?

</comment><comment><USER3> Upvoted for interest to the community, but hesitantly, considering the inflammatory linkbait title. Can we get please get something more descriptive and less contentious.</comment>


Possibility of running single-system-image clusters for web farms - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that there are plenty of ways to setup single-system-image clusters for high performance computing, and I'm wondering if it's practical for web farms. It seems to be rarely used in the latter context, though I can see several advantages off the top of my head:

\- You can write your web app as if it only runs on one machine, so you don't have to worry about distributed session storage. For some continuation-based web frameworks, serializing continuations seems pretty messy.

\- You can use your RDBMS's own cache buffer instead of memcached, since it can be transparently distributed by the OS. So your app can simply talk to the database directly.

\- From the propagandas, most SSI systems promise to automatically detect new nodes and add it to its pool of resources. So this saves you some time deploying your software as you scale up.

I was wondering if anyone here has any theoretical knowledge or experience in running SSI clusters, and how it compares to the classic load-balancer/web- servers/memcached/database-server configuration in serving multiuser web apps.

Thanks!</comment>


Building Lanyrd - <AUTHOR> http://lanyrd.com/2011/brightonpy-building-lanyrd/sgptt/

<comment><USER2> There's a comment on slide 43 about finding a way to replay access logs. Siege is a great tool for this, as it takes a URLs file as an argument.

You can get a list of URLs from your apache access log with

        cut -d ' ' -f7 /var/log/apache2/access.log > urls.txt

And then hammer your test server with

        siege -c<concurreny rate> -f urls.txt

<comment><USER3> Siege is great. httperf is also worth trying. There's a good guide at [http://www.comlore.com/redist_files/httperf-quickstart- guide...](http://www.comlore.com/redist_files/httperf-quickstart-guide.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just went through the slides... watching now. Very interesting. One thing that is a bit surprising is the diversity of key-value/caching technologies. I felt like there was a lot of overlap in capability between Varnish, redis, memcached, mongodb, etc...

<comment><USER5> I'm a big fan of polyglot persistence - we're using MySQL, memcached, redis, Solr, Varnish and MongoDB now.

MySQL is where all of our key data lives up. I trust it, it's backed up, and the entire site can be recreated just from the MySQL dump.

Redis and Solr are both used for denormalisation. Solr provides search and our core calendar view, and is updated every 60-90 seconds by a cron job. It's replicated, which means that our calendar view (the most expensive page on the site) scales horizontally with the number of replicas.

Redis powers a few features, most notably pages that show which of your Twitter contacts are attending an event (a simple Redis set intersection, which Redis will happily perform 100,000 times a second). It's also used for our message queue, which means I don't have to run RabbitMQ as well.

memcached is used for caching. I could use Redis for this, but the nice thing about memcached is that it has a hard memory limit and will throw away keys without any fuss when it hits that limit. It's also a good idea to keep resources set aside for caching separate from resources being used for other purposes, in my opinion.

Varnish is currently just used as a layer in front of our JavaScript badges ( <http://lanyrd.com/services/badges/> ), purely to protect us against a super high traffic site deploying our badges (all badge requests are cached for 10 minutes, and Varnish handles dogpiling for us). I'd like to use Varnish in front of the main site as well just for logged out users, but I haven't had time to deploy that yet. Our badges are also designed to not block the loading of your site if we're down for some reason - varnish helps a bit there as well. See our badge performance notes here: <http://lanyrd.com/services/badges/docs/#performance>

We recently started storing application logs in MongoDB, mainly as an experiment. MongoDB is very fast at writes, and lets us easily run structured queries across our logs. I don't care too much about persistence here, since the data isn't as valuable as e.g. our core database of conferences.

<comment><USER6> So it this a question of:

Learning new tools and understanding their idiosyncrasies vs. building new functionality on top of existing tools?

Where learning new tools is more interesting, so it wins? :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like this approach to static assets, where each file's name is changed to include the hash of the file's contents on deployment. But I've never implemented it myself, because I can't figure out a good way to refer to those static assets in my templates.

simonw, if you're listening, how do you solve this problem?

How do you go from, e.g.,

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">

to

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.{current-hash}.css">

?

<comment><USER5> I'm using a Django template tag, {% static "css/example.css" %}

In development, the above tag would output "/static/css/example.css?0.234234" - the random number at the end cache busts so e.g. IE will always load the latest version of the file.

In production, the tag looks up the transformed filename in a dictionary, which looks something like this:

        STATIC_ASSETS = {
            "css/core.css": "css/core.b1b09227.min.css"
        }

The deployment script includes a bit of code that goes through every file in the static directory, figures out the hash, renames it and then writes out that dictionary in a generated static_assets.py file ready to be deployed to the servers. There's a separate management script that pushes the renamed files to S3 - I run that before doing a deploy.

The only really fiddly bit is that the script needs to rewrite all of the CSS files to include the updated filename of any referenced images. I'm using a dumb regex to do this:

        css_url_re = re.compile(r'url\((["\']?)([^)]+?)\1\)')

Since we control the coding standards for our own CSS, there's no need to do anything more robust than that.

<comment><USER8> On universalsubtitles.org, we're doing something pretty similar to that.

1) Move all static media to a unique hash (we get that from git's commit id, making it trivial to correlate code & static) to /[static-media]/[static- cache]/[git commit uid]/...path to file

2) Set the MEDIA url accordingly

The nice thing about this is that the generated file names are very readable and you always know what changeset generated it just by looking. It's open source if someone finds it useful [https://github.com/8planes/mirosubs/tree/master/apps/unisubs...](https://github.com/8planes/mirosubs/tree/master/apps/unisubs_compressor)

<comment><USER7> That's a pretty good approach. I guess the main drawback is that the git commit hash will change far more often than the contents of most of the static files, though, right?

<comment><USER8> Of course, but when in development, we use the a template tag that inserts the original url (no commit hash mangling on MEDIA URL), which means that yes, for each deployment we nuke statics, but on our dev cycle that would happen any way (it's very rare to have a release that does not touch static files), so it's not an issue in practice

<comment><USER5> We've written our CSS and JavaScript to have a bunch of reusable components, so often we can deploy new features without changing our static assets at all (we reuse classes for components that are already in use elsewhere on the site). I can see how for heavier JS sites this wouldn't be worthwhile though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've noticed some multi-variant testing on some of the design elements, and have rolled things out to beta testers first in the past, is there anything juicy behind the scenes powering these features?

<comment><USER5> Nothing fancy at the moment - just some if blocks in our templates. We'll probably start using redis set membership for feature flags in the future though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could you elaborate on your read-only mode?

Is it only hiding functionality that would cause writes or is there more to it? Is it built into the application logic?

<comment><USER5> Yup, it's hiding functionality that causes writes. Lots of messy template logic and a few bits of app logic as well. It isn't very neatly abstracted at the moment.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Covid virulence in Islamic states where women are veiled - <AUTHOR> If masks are supposed to be retarding spread of covid, has anyone collected data on covid virulence wrt gender in countries where the genders are segregated and the women are veiled? <comment><USER2> [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/fa...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/face- veils-and-the-saudi-arabian-plague/277112/)

<comment><USER3> That's dated 2013 and is talking about Coronavirus.

Is that correct? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> MERS also is a coronavirus, and before getting that label was also just called a "novel coronavirus".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome- related_coronavirus)

> _Initially called 2012 novel coronavirus (2012-nCoV) or simply novel > coronavirus (nCoV), it was first reported in 2012 after genome sequencing of > a virus isolated from sputum samples from a person who fell ill in a 2012 > outbreak of a new flu._

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. So cultural social distancing while not a way to combat virulence did its job.

It makes me think of the indian caste system. The diet was also proscribed according to caste. And this lead to more co mingling of members of the same community genetically etc.

Disclosure: I am Indian and when I was a child, I was not allowed to touch even members of my own family esp the women(grandmother, mom, aunts as they were in charge of the kitchen) if I came home from outside. We were kids and teens and we would enter through the rear veranda and shower before entering the kitchen or mingle with the rest of the family.

It was the same with utensils and bed linens. We never shared any of this. We had a separate set of utensils for guests and for the help. In the villages, during illnesses, the house will be marked and sometimes even the entire village will be quarantined with no one entering and exiting. This was especially true for chicken pox and fevers and malaria...I suppose it was too for small pox before it was eradicated.

When a house is marked a sick house, milk, vegetables and food will be delivered by the vendors at door step and until the house is deemed healthy again, no one will be in contact with them.

In a way, we are dealing with covid 19 the same way..but with technology. I find myself meandering in my mind and wool gathering with this..might come back with more thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And where women are already prohibited from leaving their homes unescorted?</comment>


Scanadu to shut down support for its Scout device and customers are mad - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/fda-orders-scanadu-to-shut-down-support-for-its-scout-device-and-customers-are-mad/ <comment><USER3> Property rights are pretty ambiguous when a device purchased by a consumer requires a backend service and/or is managed by an outside company. Yhe consumer has no control and while they might own the hardware they have no guarantee of it's continued utility. Companies claiming DCMA violations against those who choose to alter their devices also limits their effective ownership. I personally avoid buying devices like this in the first place.

I do however think this company should be put out of business as they clearly misled their backers. Is there any information on how many of these wer sold? The device certainly doesn't look like it cost anywhere near $199 to manufacture. And if there enough people interested in hacking the device to do a clean-room reverse-engineering project it looks like it would be a fun little project.

Is anyone who owns one of these willing to loan it out for a while? They might also become cheap on eBay next May.

EDIT: As I've thought about this a bit more, why not push a firmware update for your users that allows the device to collect the information as a fitness device? Surely if a machine in the local mall can take my blood pressure without a technician monitoring it, you can own a scout that provides reasonably accurate measurements?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I have the same rule of thumb right now - if it's cloud-dependent, steer clear. Especially if the device _should_ presumably be partially or fully functional off-line, but isn't, because "cloud powah!" (in reality, because of the shitty business model that's basically "Hardware as a Service" \+ possibly data selling).

> _The device certainly doesn 't look like it cost anywhere near $199 to > manufacture._

I can imagine it costing that much in very small batches, if it uses somewhat decent sensors. I can imagine $199 would be the cost of making a somewhat decent DIY version. I couldn't find any teardown though, and I'm pretty interested what sensors are they using, and if they're any better than the usual crap installed in fitness devices.

<comment><USER3> I spent the first 20 years of my career as an embedded systems engineer and the most expensive parts were generally the case and power supply. For devices with specialized sensors, they generally dominated the costs. I think you're right - it's the sensors that matter. I don't think $199 will buy you a laboratory grade sensor though.

If we're going to make OSS firmware for this (and what's "firmware" now that everything is FLASH?), creating a tear-down will be the first step. Anyone willing to loan one of these to TeMPOraL or me? If you're capable of doing it yourself, could you create a tear-down?

<comment><USER5> Info about the hardware is somewhat difficult to track down..

 _" The device runs the 32-bit version of Micrium RTOS (real time operating system). Under the hood, CNX Software says the layout seems somewhat similar to the Laird Technology BL600 and RFDigital RFD51822 modules, both based on Nordic nRF51822, an SoC with Cortex M0 CPU, 256kB flash, 16kB RAM, and a 2.4GHz Bluetooth low energy transceiver."_[1]

[1] [http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/72028-video- scanadu...](http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/72028-video-scanadu- scout-is-a-medical-tricorder-for-android-and-ios)

<comment><USER4> So a standard BLE platform. But the most interesting information - <USER2> used - is unfortunately missing.

<comment><USER5> Not what you were looking for, but indicative that sensors were a key issue.

[https://www.scanadu.com/blog/making-headway-with-the- scanadu...](https://www.scanadu.com/blog/making-headway-with-the-scanadu- scout)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To people who funded this, why ? There are some established products already on that market, why buy into a crowdfunding campaign when you can buy the same thing from established vendors ? why take the risk ? reminds me all these drone campaigns (like Zano and co), you can go on the internet, buy a drone, and even send it back if it doesn't work properly, if you buy it from Amazon or Ebay. With crowd funding you'll pay then wait years to get your products if it ever comes and by the time it is there you can get the exact same product, even cheaper from honest vendors. I don't understand why people choose to bear all the risk without some form of compensation. But I'd like to understand. I'm not talking about indie video games or an music album that needs funding, but crowd funding tech products in general.

<comment> semi-extrinsic The best is when Chinese copies of your crowdfunded product are available for 1/5th the price _before shipping date of crowdfunded product_. It's happened numerous times, e.g. with [http://get.pressybutton.com](http://get.pressybutton.com) IIRC.

<comment><USER7> So if I want to have a device without doing all the work of getting it built, I can just put together a Kickstarter and then refund everyone once the knockoff is on the market?

<comment><USER8> Or buy the clones from the copier at the lower price, pass them on to your backers and profit!

What could possibly go wrong!?!

Or - product-ception - create a product, have it ready to sell, Kickstarter it at a higher price; be both sides of the market.

<comment><USER9> _create a product, have it ready to sell, Kickstarter it at a higher price; be both sides of the market._

This is what successful research groups do: get an industrial customer, invent some tech in the process (but you won't have neither time nor desire to do the boring work of academic writing), and when the project is complete, get some funding for the results you already have. Everybody's happy, just don't forget to negotiate rights to retain the basic (not application-specific) technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is the FDA's problem with it? I feel like with this sort of thing and the 23andme.com issue that the FDA is being too restrictive about things that really shouldn't even be under their jurisdiction in the first place. For drugs, stringent testing and regulations is great, but how is someone going to harm themselves by knowing things about their own genome or recording things like their own body temperature and heart rate?

<comment><USER6> The FDA thing is an excuse. The FDA didn't shut down their product, they are lying.

<comment><USER11> The GP's question is valid, though. Why does the FDA insist on shutting down or restricting services like 23AndMe when the worst case scenario for a service failure is that you get a false positive on a disease risk indicator (for which you're going to have to go to a real doctor to confirm anyway) or you think you're 1/8th Irish when you're actually 1/8th Welsh?

<comment><USER12> The FDA's claim to jurisdiction (which I feel is BS) ... is that 23&me were providing "medical advice" or "diagnoses" by saying that you share genomes linked to x percent chance of Y ...

<comment><USER13> Am I missing something? 23&me were forced to validate their service with the FDA. They did and got passed. So they proved that their medical diagnosis are accurate.

I don't understand the hating on the FDA. It's better than having full-time quackery going on.

Edit: Here's an example. 23&Me tells you you're going to develop Alzheimer's. There's no test for that (before it develops), so you can't go to a doctor to validate it. Beyond the mental pain of living with this for years it's reasonable to assume some people would end their lives rather than be a burden to loved ones. But if they fucked up with their analysis and no one forced them to prove it?

Edit2: Also, exempt 23&me from FDA regulation? Why should your lab be regulated either? This isn't just a slippery-slope argument. I don't understand the argument to exempt 23&me.

<comment><USER12> Because 23&me are not providing a medical diagnoses. They never were. They are giving you what they calculate as your chances to to carry or possibly have or develop health issues based on their database of other people's dna ... they are showing statistical similarities and never claim to make diagnosis.. What does the FDA have to do with statistical analysis?

<comment><USER14> To most people, there is no difference between "your chances to to carry or possibly have or develop health issues" and a diagnosis. Sure, I suppose I can see some small technicality that makes them different, but really, the way you react to either is about the same, which makes them about the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is exactly why firms that build medical devices need to be fully transparent about what they're actually building in the eyes of the law, and what regulatory hurdles it must overcome before being being able to do the things people are likely to assume it can.

<comment><USER16> I think people would be fine with shutting down the study - but why remote shut down the devices? That's going too far.

The are passive devices, not active. They don't need much regulatory oversight if you don't use the data for anything medical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I diligently read all the comments and besides all the good and superbly clear points made I have to say that the strongest is that Scanadu has, for a certain extend, mislead its backers to pay $199 to provide them with big health data, something that they would have paid for using the Mechanical Turk platform. In the end, they clearly scammed myself and other people out of their money and data.

</comment><comment><USER18> My rule: no cloud service dependent devices >$50.

Exceptions are companies like Apple and maybe Microsoft that are capable of supporting the device for a lifecycle. Obviously Google is out.

<comment><USER19> Why is Google out? Have any of their cloud service devices been put to pasture?

<comment><USER20> You could consider that Alphabet buying Nest and them shutting down all service was in a way Google stopping operations on that.

But I believe that is mostly related to the unending list of services they have stopped. Code, Reader, or even APIs and libraries they stop without a single warning ( _cough cough_ angular v1.x).

Seriously, the list is big. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got the email from them. It said "cease to function." And so, I wrote them to ask what that means. They hit me with a generic:

Dear,

Thank you for supporting our crowdfunding campaign for the Scanadu Scout® investigational device on Indiegogo.

When we started developing the Scanadu Scout®, we knew there was a great deal of work ahead of us. The Scanadu Scout® was a first of its kind, and we remain committed to bringing innovative technologies to consumers.

Through this journey, we have collected an enormous amount of data over the past two years, which will inform the development of future products. We are now turning our attention towards future products. We look forward to sharing more on the new opportunities we've decided to pursue in the upcoming months.

Regards,

Scanadu Team

www.scanadu.com

Scanadu Inc, 1196 Borregas Avenue, Ste 200, Sunnyvale, CA 94089

And this, of course, is why you have to be very careful before investing in Indigogo/Kickstarter projects. Also, why I won't use a fitbit. Anyone know how to intercept fitbit data?

</comment><comment><USER22> Couldn't tell they end the trial and release open-source sorftware for the device that people can use at their own risk?

<comment><USER23> > From the beginning of the campaign, this was an investigational device that > was part of a study which has now reached its endpoint with data collection > for the study ending in November 2016," a Scanadu spokesperson told > TechCrunch. "FDA regulations require that all investigational studies be > brought to closure and their respective devices be deactivated. As a result, > we will deactivate the Scanadu Scout® devices by May 15, 2017.

I'd guess it's considered a safety measure - even if it's something innocuous- seeming, any 'medical device' could end up with peoples' lives depending on it. It's better for it to stop working entirely than to appear to keep working if it's not reliable.

<comment><USER24> Well should it not have been clear in their campaign and communication from day ONE ? Why charge the user that much then? Can i get a refund now ? why con backers to pay for selling their data and $199 on top of that for just 18month "study"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> @temporal @smoyer I'll happily lend mine. PM me to coordinate or my username at Gmail. I did just google image search the scout and the version I have must be one of the earliest batches

</comment><comment><USER26> This is why the right to be forgotten is important. It was a mistake to grant these people your personal data, but at the very least you can make them delete your personal data.</comment>


I wanna work at Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://iwannaworkatinstagram.com/ <comment><USER4> Anything that makes you stand above the crowd of job seekers and get noticed is (almost) always a smart move. Do you think Instagram is thinking "no, this girl is clearly an idiot?"

No, they're clearly going to notice her and give her consideration that she wouldn't otherwise get. They're probably thinking "nice initiative" even if they've seen this type of application before.

I think a few of you are being too cynical about this being overdone. Getting a new career is a highly competitive race and doing anything that gets you noticed (and on the top of Hacker News) is always going to be a win for your career.

<comment><USER5> And my question would be, why did it get to the top of Hacker News? I tried making a website like this and failed to get much notice.

<comment><USER6> Because as many here would probably not like to accept, HNers are just as prone to social engineering as the guy on Facebook who signs up for the app that can supposedly revert his Facebook page back to the old design.

HN can be gamed quite easily, for this and other reasons.

Since you're near the top of this thread, which itself is sitting at the top of the HN front page, why not link to your site here? I wouldn't mind.

<comment><USER5> Eh ... that would be spammy. And I gave up trying to work in quant finance. Instead I'm returning to what I know: entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER7> I've been interviewing technology interns at a finance company and every single one has said "I'm very quantitative and want to learn more about high frequency trading." I haven't been able to figure out what they mean by that. I think they just heard that's where the money is.

<comment><USER5> Seems to characterize that labour market. Lots of math, stats & CS people have heard that they can turn brains into $ through the magical zero-sum game of the markets. Thank ederman.

<comment><USER5> Then again, how do most people choose their careers.

\- I like video games, so I'll be a programmer.

\- I want to be a ballerina / baseball player / rock star / etc.

\- Read a sci fi book and now want to do genetic engineering.

\- Read My Life As A Quant and want to be a quant.

A friend of mine is a life sciences lawyer at a firm that bills upwards of $800/hr ... his reason for choosing that path was watching the movie Gattaca. Not joking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To write an effective resume you need to keep the audience in mind. The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built?

Answers to questions such as "What are your skills?", "What is your philosophy?", and "What is your passion?" mostly just get in the way and waste the reader's time.

A flashy appeal for a job like this one might get the attention of Instagram, but they will not base their hiring decision on that. If the portfolio, which in this case includes the resume itself, isn't impressive work, they will pass.

Showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light and employers will take notice even if you don't buy a domain name for every company to which you're applying.

<comment><USER9> _The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built?_

I think this is approximately as true as "Customers make purchasing decisions approximately 95% based on product quality and 5% on those trivial details like marketing."

By all means, build stuff. But after having achieved some level of building stuff, the returns are far greater in attractively marketing the stuff you have build versus continuing to build more stuff, on a ROI per-hour-invested basis.

I mean, clearly she can build stuff, right? There's a portfolio. It has stuff in it. Achievement Unlocked: Stuff Got Built. That portfolio could have one extra 100x100 thumbnail that no decisionmaker is going to click on anyway, or, this site could exist. Do you think the thumbnail will matter more than this site existing? That strongly does not match my experience with how people approach decisions in the real world.

P.S. Takeaway for all engineers in the room: if you have three projects on Github and don't have one of these sites built yet, you will have _far_ better returns on time building a site like this than you will doing another OSS project, and you will have _still better_ returns doing actual networking rather than hoping someone on the Internet will stumble across your hidden potential and give you a shot.

<comment><USER8> You might want to re-read my comment. Nowhere did I say that marketing doesn't matter. Nowhere did I say that you should just build more stuff and not write a resume to market yourself.

On the contrary, my comment began "To write an effective resume..." Translation: the rest of the comment is going to be advice to my fellow HNers about _how to market themselves_. I'm not sure how you interpreted "showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light" as "just create another project on github".

My point is that this particular resume answers all the wrong questions. All the questions I don't really care about when I'm making a hiring decision. Only at the end does she say "So... What're ya waiting for!?" and link to her portfolio. And her portfolio isn't nearly as well done as all the fluff sections ("I'm vehement about creating kick-ass interactions" and "I never wear high heels"). This is a mistake. The most prominent and polished part of her resume should showcase her _actual work_. She should answer the question "What have you built?" right away and in impressive fashion. Note that the question isn't "Have you built stuff?"; it's "What have you built?" So, the fact that Stuff Got Built, as you say, isn't very important. I don't care that "clearly, she can build stuff." I care to see _what_ she's built. So, show it to me. In other words "showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kudos to her for putting herself out there, but she's misunderstood what the point of this kind of application is.

When you make a grab for a job like this, you underscore the fact that employers don't always know that there is something that can be improved - <USER2> that someone should be hired to do it.

I vaguely recall someone writing an application for 37signals, where he made some redesigns for the site that he thought were needed. (He _made_ them - actions speak louder than words; deeds are better than words; show, don't tell.) In other words: "You need to improve these things - guess what, I can fix those problems for you." It must be what every start-up dreams of at night.

This is what these applications are intended to be about. Again, kudos for putting herself out there (I shudder at the thought of putting myself in the spotlight of the internet with my identity displayed and available for public mockery). But the application itself is very vague and will do little to convince the guys at Instagram to hire her.

I mean, who the hell wouldn't have an interest in working at Instagram? You are not a unique snowflake to have that desire - and it makes the attempt to convey passion less persuasive.

But hey: the site currently has 70 points on the front page of Hacker news, and a lot of new people now know her name. It's inconceivable that there is any "bad publicity" to come of this, so she can't really fail, regardless of what happens from now on.

<comment><USER11> Her article/resume is her "show" not "tell". The medium _is_ the message... that's UX.

<comment><USER10> But what can she contribute to the Instagram team? Is their UX in dire need of a UX designer?

It's fine as a resumé and general job application for everyone who reads the story, but she directs her application to Instagram - but it might as well not have been.

It's not a lack of display of talent that I think is what she misses (although she tells a lot of things about herself that she doesn't show); it's that she doesn't show how she can help Instagram, and why Instagram would need her.

Maybe they have an available UX job position that I am unaware of, but she'd improve her chances if she directed her application to Instagram specifically.

Here is an exercise (for everyone): replace all instances of "Instagram" in the application with any arbitrary start-up name. There is little to underscore her passion and usefulness for Instagram ( _specifically_ ) - <USER3> might as well have made the same website with five other domains with "Twitter", "Tumblr", etc. instead of "Instagram" in the URL and design. (She has that "No high heels" part, but that could be a variable to be replaced in every instance.)

This doesn't mean that I believe that she's done this(!), but a specifically directed application should be much harder to arbitrarily change to work for another start-up.

(I don't write all this to hate on her, as I've said in other comments in this thread, but there are some great, important lessons to be learnt. This is, after all, a great way to land yourself a job - if you pull it off.

Again, this will only help her career. It's just that it could be improved.)

<comment><USER5> _Is their UX in dire need of a UX designer?_

<http://instagr.am/about/jobs/> | Design Candidates | We believe that design isn't just about pretty pixels – it's a full understanding of how the products we build interact with the people that use them. An ideal design candidate will have a deep portfolio of top-notch design projects. Design at Instagram is a combination of the following:

<comment><USER10> Thanks for that. This puts her application in a more sensible light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At this point, there's nothing innovative or quirky about "active applications." Especially if they're rather mediocre.

EDIT: After looking through the whole thing, I have to revise my opinion. It doesn't even qualify as mediocre -- copy and design are surprisingly awful. Large quantities of pseudo-charming nonsense ("I'm vehement about creating kick-ass interactions", "i can write a mean agile spec, and i'm comfortable working in a highly iterative environment", the complete section outlining why she's supposedly great for the gig) and completely interchangeable self- promotion. Active applications can be interesting if they're actually tailored to the company in question; this particular instance can't be bothered to make any meaningful connection to Instagram. Well, except for the domain name.

<comment><USER13> The design is surprisingly awful? What? I can only assume you're talking about the graphics and layout (unless we talk about 'attitude design' now or something). I thought that part of the site was excellent (original and pretty), although I didn't care for the content admittedly (except the word 'vehement' cracked me up, and 'LOL - I'm Funny').

<comment><USER14> I think it shows off her design skills and her lack of ability to write good copy, but I would've put the portfolio bit far higher up. - "here's my 1-paragraph spiel about me, here's what I've _done_ , and at the end, put all the cutesy bits"

<comment><USER15> A link to her portfolio is always stuck at the top right corner of page, even as you scroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't want to sound rude, but the lens ("I made this") has pretty bad type work. Kerning is off, the curve is not right (<http://i.imgur.com/tpDqv.png>). The drop shadow is also strange. Overall, there's not enough attention to detail.

<comment><USER17> I would never want to work with someone as negative as you.

<comment><USER12> Some people don't enjoy working in pseudo-positive and falsely encouraging environments that give second-rate work an undeserved pass. There's something motivating about _standards_ and _demands_.

<comment><USER18> The problem is too many people, much like about half the people commenting here, confuse that with being an insufferable prick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So HN: Why does this get voted up because of the hustle and for her actually "doing something", and yet there are Rate My Startup posts of _actual_ somethings that go unnoticed on a daily basis?

Check out the "new" and "ask" pages to help some of those people who've put a lot of effort into their executions by giving them more exposure.

<comment><USER19> Not to move this more towards Reddit, but it would be nice if there were a separate tab for rating startups. That seems like such an important aspect of HN, I'd like it to be called out more. And upvotes on that get double karma or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _I never wear high heels. So I can crawl into cracks and crevices to snap awesome pics..._

AFAIC, automatic interview line. It says so much:

\- She understands the ugly stuff needed to get to the pretty stuff.

\- She's willing to do the ugly stuff.

\- Her work is more important than her ego (I think).

\- She "gets it". (Somehow I don't imagine a poser would have ever thought of putting it quite this way.)

<comment> brown9-2 Don't you think it's also possible for someone to know exactly what an employer would like to hear, and then say exactly that?

<comment><USER10> If she can win over edw519, I'm sure it doesn't hurt to put it in your application. Regardless of what can be construed from it. :)

Telling an employer what they want to hear without the employer noticing is still a skill, no less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I want to work at Instagram myself because I love increasing entropy in the universe.

And yes, I'd say that to their faces: it can be very irritating to see pictures that already are not stellar, being from mobile phone cameras, further trod on by software.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is a prime example of "too much telling not enough showing." While I dig Netta's moxie and possibly would even hire her as a community manager, there isn't much here that wows me. Less than 200 Instagram photos and a lackluster design portfolio don't back up the passion and talent that she claims.

<comment><USER10> On one hand, I think you are dead on. On the other, I think she's inadvertently showing - unfortunately not for the better. :)

The old analogy is never to write in an application that you are funny. If you have a sense of humour, it will show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great initiative. All employers should want to have such enthusiastic applicants.

I'm not sure whether her design is "good" or whether her other attributes line up with what they're looking for, but A+ for effort, nonetheless.

<comment><USER24> I agree. I think any employer would be flattered with such a targeted application.

But I think it could be better if she listed benefits she could bring Instagram, rather than her personality traits. She does link to a very nice resume that has more content.

<comment><USER12> It's targeted in one way, and in one way only: via mention. Sure, the domain name includes the word "Instagram." Similarly, it's in the page's title.

However, the connection is surprisingly superficial. As you point out, she offers a comically generic application and then emphasizes that, you know, working at Instagram would be, like, cool. I find that a little cynical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Minor nit: "my differences only make me that much more unique."

Unique is an absolute state. One is unique or not; there is no more/less about it. Per the dictionary usage guidelines, think about using something like: "rare, distinctive, unusual, remarkable, or other nonabsolute adjectives".

Sorry. This is my wife's pet peeve, and it has been drilled into my brain.

<comment><USER26> She sounds like a lady who's at least 78% unique.

<comment><USER27> You mean probability of her being unique is atleast 0.78, dont you?

As being unique would be rather a binary state, either one is unique of not.

<comment><USER5> Not in fuzzy logic. One can have 78% membership in the set of unique things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The resumé is very difficult to read and took a bit of a nosedive into the generic in its attempt to look unique with the crescent shaping.

Also, as a UX designer the design/layout/grammar(?) of the resumé is a head scratcher - lack of capitalization is no longer a style choice and just made everything harder to read, the most important bits of information: name and contact information are ... sideways.

</comment><comment><USER29> love the initiative & hustle. dropping her a note now about our designer position

<comment><USER30> You don't mind hiring someone who clearly has her sights set on a different company? To the extent that she even registered a domain name professing her personal interest in said company?

<comment><USER31> You eventually have to eat, even if Instagram doesn't want you to work for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> While I like the initiative, I'm a little worried that someone who says she's a UX designer wouldn't have considered that most Mac users do not run their browsers full-screen, so there's a horizontal scroll bar for anything less than a 1024 width (I think it's 1024). That's not a good UX!

<comment><USER33> Is the lack of a working maximize button good UX?

<comment><USER13> I'd say the maximize button is in itself a bad design idea. Hit the green button on the browser window and it will expand to the width (or height) whereby scroll bars are no longer necessary. This 'maximizes' your screen real estate, rather than blowing it all on one window/app like a Windows maximize button. Also, while it's not a bad idea to keep page widths in the 750-1050ish range, No True Mac User would object to using their UI controls to optimize their viewing. I mean that's why they're there.

<comment><USER34> Doesn't work so well with a tabbed browser, where each tab is going to have a different optimized 'maximize' size. It's decent for folder windows and etc. though.

<comment><USER13> Hmm, that's a good point I hadn't actually considered. BUT, I don't see it as a big problem because once you resize for the largest tab, it's not like the others become unusable, they just now have some redundant space. It helps that most sites conform to a standard range of widths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hate to be the debbie downer here. I love her ambition and ability to market herself, but when you are attempting to sell yourself as a visual & UX designer shouldn't your design be original?

Both this page and her portfolio are blatant "adaptations" of inspectelement's html5 single page portfolio design <http://inspectelement.com/html5portfolio/>

The top bar, color choices, structure, font, her "logo" for her portfolio, the contact me portion... all of that comes straight from the template

 _edit: added "contact" part_

</comment><comment><USER36> +1 for the effort.. but her choice of typography is a big BIG no-no. It's very hard to read. I don't think Instagram will be too pleased.

<comment><USER10> It looks fine in Opera. (Well, I would prefer Georgia, but I'm boring like that.)

Maybe you are using a browser with a duller font-rendering?

EDIT: On Windows 7. Should have included that.

<comment><USER37> Opera 11 on Linux looks like this for me: <http://upurs.us/image/24755.jpeg> Maybe I don't have the proper font. It looks awful.

<comment><USER38> Nope, that's the correct font; but I disagree with you about it looking awful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So this is the new way to get a job huh? Replacing the old boring curriculum, I think it's great. Big and Creative

</comment><comment><USER40> Anyone else see gibberish? (Chrome 11/XP) This can't be good. <http://awesomescreenshot.com/0e59u240c>

<comment><USER41> Its a font thing. The style sheet calls for a load of YanoneKaffeesatz- Light.otf and a few others from the server. If that goes wrong for some reason, there's no alternate so you get gibberish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a question. Why isn't _every_ resume a website? This is the era of about.me, flavors.me, and filing your resume online.

The www allows for image, audio, code, and video, as well as text. Why are resumes still pretending to be paper (pdf / doc)?

</comment><comment><USER42> I think she did a great job. Her portfolio site is nice as well.

</comment><comment><USER43> She made leica d vario-elmarit 14-50? I'll hire her then! </snark>

<comment><USER44> For a long time the instagram jobs page for the designer role asked for the candidate to attach a rendering of that lens.

<comment><USER43> Thanks for clarification - as I have never used instagram nor seen their job page. It's a good rendering (sans fonts), if nothing else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm sorry, I don't hire Aries. Only Cancers and Leos for my company.

<comment><USER46> OMG, instant app idea. Are there astrology pages for hiring already? You could enter the zodiacs of all your employees to determine if a new hire would match or not...

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Awesome. Forwarded along to Mike, one of the founders. (Know him from our CHI days...ah, memories. :) ) Hope it works out for you!

</comment><comment><USER48> The copywriting is really awful - it makes her come across as a try-hard...

She should have just put up a page with her work and the line: "I want to work at Instagram. Why should you hire me? Take a look at my work", and then post a bunch of kick-ass projects.

Over-the-top copy coming from a designer always is a sign that they're trying to hide subpar quality of work.

<comment><USER49> Or that you're a designer not a copywriter. You know. One of those two things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wow. Reading the negativity in some of these comments makes me want to think twice about sharing something I've made with HN. That's a bad thing.

It's not perfect. It's not the first time anyone's ever had this idea. Maybe you wouldn't hire her. Who cares?

Not everyone's running for best-most-perfect-idea-in-the-universe-ever. She made a thing. Good on her.

<comment><USER51> Agreed. As a newbie in the HN community hoping to share some of my work soon, this is really disappointing. There's a difference between being constructively critical and judging. I would welcome more of the former.

<comment><USER52> Don't let it stop you. Understand going in that there will be noise in the feedback, and to sort through it to extract the valuable feedback. Its not personal, because the judgmental don't really know you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'd love it if we had this sort of show o'enthusiasm in our applicants. It's more than I ever did to get a job.

</comment><comment><USER54> Someone should make an app to let anyone make this kind of clean targeted resume.

<comment><USER39> How about this? <http://arcv.cwjobs.co.uk/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I just finished interviewing 12 grad students from the same school. I wish someone would have come in and given me such a clear reason to place them above the rest.

Very nice idea with great execution surely that is worth something.

</comment><comment><USER31> What's with the trend of public overdesigned resumes? If you want to work for company X, call your friend that works there and ask them for an interview. They will probably be very interested in speaking to you.

</comment><comment><USER56> Wait a minute. jQuery 1.2.3 and jQuery 1.4? Just for the image hover?

<comment><USER57> Packets for nothing and bits for free...

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I think that a _bunch_ of the people commenting on this thread should go back and read this: <http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/>

Seriously.

</comment><comment><USER59> I built a site like this once for a company I wanted to work for very badly. I didn't get the job, but I did at least get a response from them, which is very unusual.

</comment><comment><USER60> Good portfolio except it's a bit too Web centric. Apps, Mobile interaction should be a part of it if this person is serious about working at Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER61> Love the ambition, but I'm curious why her portfolio work isn't nearly as good as this site.

<comment><USER62> When you're a relatively young, novice designer, one would hope that the last thing you made is usually better than the older stuff in your portfolio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Wait, is this still considered unique and outside-the-box? I must be living on the edge.

<comment><USER64> Agreed, seen a few too many these days

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> FWIW <http://tuhinkumar.com/portfolio/instagram/> (The first (or second maybe) Instagram redesign before everyone joined the party)

</comment><comment><USER66> I always find these kinds of "résumés" rather awkward. Yes, companies usually like to hire people who are passionate about the product, but it's possible to be passionate in a creepy obsessive way too.

</comment><comment><USER67> Might be a good idea to create some filter effects on your own and apply them to your photos - giving a sample of the original and your various filters applied to it. Just a thought. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER68> Is instagrid failing under the front-page pummeling? Her page isn't showing any images: <http://instagrid.me/nettatheninja/>

</comment><comment><USER69> I like the Instagram (well, I liked it better when it wasn't so crashtastic) but I can't help feeling her talents would be wasted there since there's basically no web presence.

</comment><comment><USER70> Or if anyone wants a date, she's looking for that too....

<http://www.okcupid.com/profile/nettatheninja>

</comment><comment><USER71> I am having an issue where when I start to scroll down, part of the page tries to to scroll down as well and mucks up everything else..in Firefox 4

</comment><comment><USER72> I think the site is good but it's not really an innovation thing with many sharp strokes that make me scream: How did she dare to do like that!!!

</comment><comment><USER68> Did Netta the Ninja break Instagram?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361470>

</comment><comment><USER73> Say what you will, but I hope I can create a product or business awesome enough to inspire candidates to do something like this.

</comment><comment><USER74> Well done. And she's certainly creative, intelligent and incredibly talented at what she does. Hope she gets the job!

</comment><comment><USER75> Haters gonna hate. Give her a break. The site's not half bad and at least she tried.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why doesn't she find a technical co-founder and start her the next Instagram?

<comment><USER76> If I were her I would immediately update the website to read I Wanna to Work at Color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Nice looking site. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER78> this is clichéd, obsequious and poorly typeset.

<comment><USER79> I disagree sir. Pure ambition right there.

<comment><USER80> That doesn't dispute his points even remotely.

As for 'poorly typeset', I have no choice to agree, if only because her portfolio page implies that her name is "Netta & Design".

Her customer work looks good though, so if, as I assume, she's seeking a design-oriented role, she'd likely do well in a team (where somebody else can say 'Hey, what's up with this bolding?') The fonts in her personality chart are barely there.

Completely offtopic, I'm always wary of people who tell me how funny they are. If you're funny, I'll almost certainly figure that out organically.

<comment><USER79> I was addressing this part of said comment: "clichéd, obsequious". I do agree with your last point. Most people who tell me how funny they are turn out to be the exact opposite.

<comment><USER80> It's all open for interpretation, of course, but I think, by this point, these sorts of 'I want to work at X' websites ARE cliched, so I personally would agree there.

I don't particularly find it obsequious, though I probably wouldn't have to look too far to find another word that I could apply disparagingly to reference the points I mentioned before.

Regardless, as I stated, it IS a nice looking website, and if they have openings, they probably would do well to hire somebody so obviously passionate and motivated to work there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> picture perfect CV replacements are already getting old

</comment><comment><USER78> I'd just like to put it out there that when I run a company we will automatically disqualify anyone who tries to get a job w/ us in this way. So remember that if you'd like to work for me sometime in the near future.

<comment><USER82> ...why on _earth_ would you do that? This person _wants_ to work at instagram, if she gets the job, she'll be absolutely floored about coming in to work every day.

This is exactly the type of employee I would think everybody would want. Why would you want something else?

<comment><USER78> because I'd quite like my designers to be capable of creativity, whereas this Instagram application is derivative in every single way.

<comment><USER82> Alright fine, but you're not allowed to say that and not include some ways that she could make it better.

So what would you do to improve this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Seriously?

</comment><comment><USER84> This is hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if Instagram hired this guy just for publicity because of the attention on here.

<comment><AUTHOR> For one, she's a she, not a 'guy'. Second, that's the whole point - to get noticed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> "My name is Netta & Design is what I do. It's what I'm good at so why not?"

Just what I'd be looking for in an employee — good, old-fashioned "meh, why not?" attitude.</comment>


Could you do this in 54 hours? (Startup Weekend SLC) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zagg.com/community/blog/swslc-presents-cinch-makes-life-a-bit-more-mobile-friendly

<comment><USER3> I'm highly skeptical that this tool will be able to deal with anything other than the most basic of pages.

What happens if your site already has a mobile version? I assume this Cinch tool would have to proxy your site to deliver their mobile rendition - <USER2> keeping the consumer from ever landing on the site and triggering whatever native behaviour the developer intended for mobile browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> My guess is that you wouldn't use the tool if you had a mobile version to your site. I wasn't on this team, but my understanding is that it's not intended for browsing per se. The idea is that a huge number of people are opening links from emails and other messages on mobile devices. Bounce rates are much higher when this link is directed to a full site rather than a "mobile- friendly" site. If you can capture their attention a bit longer with the "cinch'd" site, there is a much higher chance they will return later. I believe a feature to purchase directly from the cinch'd site is in the works.

The bottom line is that these guys built this from scratch in less than 54 hours -- pretty amazing to me.</comment></comment>


What is the best time of year to launch a site? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I heard that March is the best month to launch, and April through December are very bad. I guess you will have to wait until March. :)

Actually, everybody always says a.s.a.p. Most people think they're competing against "people who will rip me off as soon as I release my product" which leads to conclusions of "if I release on day X, I will be ripped off Y number of days later, so I should wait until Z, the perfect time, to release." In fact, there's a higher chance that there are startups and current companies doing something similar REGARDLESS of YOU.

A lot of the reason existing companies have not caught on to idea X is because the whole reason you have idea Y is because the current companies just came out with idea X and there's simply no way to do Y before X. So, they may have already had your idea Y in mind, or started working on it, but had to release X first. So, when you got your idea, so did employees of all of these other companies, as well as budding entrepreneurs. So, you should release and at least get credit for being first. The whole point of being a startup is you can create whatever there's a huge chance big companies are working on as well, but much faster because you're just implementing basic features and avoiding bureacracy, as well as have no responsibilities. So, if you're trying to do a startup PG-style, I would try to create it and release it as soon as it works, with the bare features in it, and get publicity about it.

I'm sure there are other mantras, like targeting a very small niche and improving the product, and only publicizing it when its ready (but you have tons of feedback from your small niche). Or, maybe getting a lot of venture capital straight off and partnering with big shots after you're much older and have many contacts. But I think if you're doing it PG-style (and I don't speak for him), you should release it as soon as it works. More or less.

<comment><USER3> I agree with Feb/March/April. Summer will give you a lot of users who will use your site more thoroughly. If they're still around by winter then you have a good chance of sustaining the growth. That's my guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends on the site. A site offering customized Christmas cards won't do well immediately if you launch in January; a site offering something useful for preparing for college won't do well immediately if you launch in November.

Launch the site as soon as it's ready to be launched. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to micro-optimize and asking yourself if you'll get more traffic if you launch on Tuesday or Saturday.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know I know -- as soon as it's ready to launch. But seriously, is launching a site going into the summer season a good idea? You're just not going to reach as many people as you would in the fall or right after the holidays.

<comment><USER5> Depends on what perspective you subscribe to and decide to follow. For example, launching in summer _might_ not get you all the visitors you want but it will also give you time to use summer to optimize your site in time for when summer ends and you _supposedly_ get the new visitors.

I did learn in my media planning class that TV use significantly goes down during summer. I've a feeling the same holds true for computer use.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Are you shocked by how vengeful users can be in the app store? - <AUTHOR>

If a user doesn't like an update, he/she will say so and give it a very low rating to try to kill your sales until the issue is addressed.
Something seems wrong about this.  A single user can have way too much power over sales.  And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.
Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update. <comment><USER2> Unfortunately this is just a symptom of user led opinion systems. Hotels suffer from bad reviews on aggregator sites (e.g. TripAdvisor), products can suffer bad rep through Amazon and so on.

When you give users a platform to voice their opinions they'll use it and any small niggle or frustration will exacerbate what they say in their review.

"Total lack of respect for the developer" may be a cause for concern at your end, but at the end of the day you're the one going out their to impress them and products you sell need to be of good quality to get good feedback. That's just how it works!

The real problem with all of this is when rival companies or rival products can sometimes 'flood' review sites with negative comments to drive people away from their competitors, that's the sort of thing Apple should be striving to prevent but proving such practises can be very, very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also no check by other users against users posting unreasonable reviews. Amazon at least has a way to comment on another user's review. That and it allows you to traverse across to other reviews from the author. Often a great way to tell if someone's responsible in their reviewing or just just a whinging crank hell-bent on complaining about everything. Apple, however, doesn't give a rats ass about users in their whole app store equation. So you'll never really see a genuine community form around it. Apple simply won't allow it. Users need to wake up to that nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get how "a single user can have way too much power over sales", unless the total number of ratings is very low. And, if the total number ratings is that low, then it sounds likes the sales problem predates the bad review.</comment>


Show HN: Zupadoc – markdown to PDF/slide converter - <AUTHOR> http://www.zupadoc.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My first little webapp/project. Any feedback from the HN community would be welcome.

Am I right in thinking that markdown is catching on more widely than the coding community? Writers and non-technical academics seem to be becoming aware of its merits as a cross-platform medium.

I am using this for my own simple on-the-fly slide production before lectures I give.

Who do you think might use this? What features might I consider adding? My first instinct is github/gist integration to allow versioning and collaboration between writers, as per the #scholmd / "scholarly markdown" proponents.

Is there anything like this already?

Thoughts and opinions gratefully received!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some of your favourite product demos, why? - <AUTHOR>

I've gotta give a demo in a few days and I'm looking for some inspiring product demos and introductions. [and why they're great] <comment><USER2> Some just posted this morning an "Ask HN"/review my site that someone said had a great demo. I don't have the link now but it might be worth it to look through the past 12-14 hours' worth of submissions for it. Good luck!</comment>


This Russian Is Spamming Google Analytics to Show His Support for Trump - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-pro-trump-russian-is-spamming-google-analytics <comment><USER2> This has been incredibly frustrating for me. I get this spam a lot and it isn't flagged by Google Analytics as spam since it keeps showing up when I have block spam turned on. The biggest reason why it bothers me is that I have a fairly new site and I'm trying to get people to download my trial (or even buy) but when there is all this spam it makes it seem like I'm getting a lot of traffic but no conversions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've had two clients tell me that their Google Analytics is getting this spam. Super annoying.

I guess they just send the spam by faking window.navigator.languages or something?</comment>


The Permanent ESP32 HW Exploit - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/limitedresults/status/1194671118193512449 <comment><USER2> Disappointing that this appears rather easy, but hardware access usually means game over.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think by now everyone is aware that you cannot defend hardware that you put in the hands of attackers.

If this were a remote (ie. Via WiFi) attack, then we'd be talking...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering, how many companies that use ESP32 actually use the firmware security feature?

<comment><USER3> And how many of those encrypt their firmware just because the non-techy CEO thinks the firmware is worth $billions whereas a coder could reproduce firmware for an IoT widget in a few hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not wireless, not practically interesting.</comment>


Show HN: An anonymous P2P social network for Android, written in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://nightweb.net/ <comment><USER2> Lein-droid author here. A few commenters asked about the performance and maturity of Clojure for Android, so I decided to answer in the top level.

The main problem of Clojure for Android right now is the large size of Clojure runtime. This leads to two issues: a) long loading time (can take a few seconds even for the basic app), b) applications often gets closed by the OS once switched to another, in order to free that memory.

Since ProGuard is no help in optimizing Clojure-compiled code, the issues should be addressed in some other way. One that is possible is to write source-shaking compiler that will strip the final APK of the unused functions. It's pretty hard to do with the current compiler, but if we eventually write Clojure-in-Clojure compiler (there is a proposal for this year's GSoC by the way), it may be feasible to add these optimizations to it.

And finally a shameless plug: if you are interested in trying Clojure for Android, here are the links to get you started: <https://github.com/alexander- yakushev/lein-droid> <https://github.com/alexander-yakushev/neko>

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been _waiting_ for this.

Here's my Nightweb link for anyone interested in experimenting with me: [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=5avfzwgkdzgddsv3...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=5avfzwgkdzgddsv3xtt2kq5ptfgg7fn6)

gw: It would be great to have multiple personas available to me, like an inverse of google+ circles.

<comment><USER4> [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=fcx2ahb4vuobu7ej...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=fcx2ahb4vuobu7ejz6gjzffn3mlwkrvt&time=1364739180140)

That's mine ... awww feels like the beginnings of ICQ ;)

But ... we can hack on it ... finally a good reason to learn Clojure.

<comment><USER5> Exactly, I've been both wanting to learn Clojure and develop for Android (but no Java thanks) for a while.

So here's mine [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=dtvjjjuk7eai42xx...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=dtvjjjuk7eai42xx7czwoibockvuqrsl)

<comment><USER6> Here's mine, for science:

[http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=tnaohxmxj2eg3fsf...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=tnaohxmxj2eg3fsf2agdokaxvoel5rp4)

<comment><USER7> Here is mine: [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=bicbgdgdxvv5ifxa...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=bicbgdgdxvv5ifxay5kgs) kj2voujr7vk

<comment><USER8> Me too! [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=psvmye7nw7mp53yp...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=psvmye7nw7mp53ypslxl7ifiqhbqolm2)

<comment><USER9> Jumping on the bandwagon as well! [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=wlvkr6lmjrz7stgf...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=wlvkr6lmjrz7stgfxl7kishroj5yzsec)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could you write a blog post about building the mobile app in Clojure?

</comment><comment><USER11> I would love some comments on the maturity and performance of Clojure (speed, load times, memory consumption, executable size...) for Android apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Things have improved quite a bit recently. Daniel Solano Gomez is the pioneer here, and Alex Yakushev made it a lot simpler by creating the lein-droid plugin for leiningen last summer.

It will impose a few seconds of load time no matter what, so it is best for long-running apps where loading time isn't as important. The cost in runtime speed, memory consumption, and APK size are also present, but aren't a big issue in my experience. The same Clojure optimization rules apply.

I think things will get better and better once more people use Clojure to write Android apps. It will be a signal to the core devs that it's an important platform. Currently, you must use a fork of 1.5 that includes a few necessary modifications.

<comment><USER12> I've just tried NightWeb and the startup latency is very high, even on my Nexus 4. Sadly I can't think of an app where 5-10secs of latency is acceptable :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I will definitely work on this, I apologize for that.

<comment><USER12> If you manage to get a Clojure Android app to boot up quickly, I would be very interested. For now, the only reasonable ways to not use Java for Android apps that I've found are Scala or Xamarin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here goes: [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=4zfhmwiio7kdp5oc...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=4zfhmwiio7kdp5ocvgrqpt6ktsgp3hgm)

How does the protocol differ from, say, tent.io?

Just in case anyone has the same issue: on my device (Nexus 4) it took a while for the UI to become responsive when first opening the app. Patience solved this one :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The word "decentralized" is a pretty loaded term unfortunately. I think tent.io and other similar projects are decentralized in the sense of who controls the servers, but they are still fundamentally client-server protocols. Nightweb (and I2P specifically, which it uses) is fully peer-to- peer, so there is no distinction between clients and servers. I think that's the most important difference.

Sorry about the non-responsive loading, I will work on that in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does this have a particularly adverse effect on phone battery life, when compared to a well-written app for a centralized social network (aka, not the Facebook Android app; perhaps the G+ app)? I can imagine that a lot of uploading of social network content to your peers would take place.

Also, what is the bandwidth utilization like compared to an app for a centralized network? With a lot of us on tiered data plans now, this is a crucial concern.

<comment><USER6> I ran the app for most of this morning on my Nexus 4, after adding most of the links in this HN post as favorites. Between 9 and 11 my battery lost 40% of its charge. Ordinary usage tends to yield 14 to 17 hours of battery life from a charge. This kind of impact on battery life will be a deal breaker for most people until resolved.

<comment><USER15> Fell out of my chair reading those "ordinary usage" numbers. Reading a book for a couple hours drops my N4 by 50%, easy.

<comment><USER16> I own a Nexus 4 and agree with the parent poster. 14 or more hours mostly idle is normal. I get even more if I dim the screen for normal use.

Fortunately, Android JellyBean provides all the data you need to fix your problem. If you are getting worse battery life, you need to check Settings -> Battery and determine which apps are unreasonably eating up your battery life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Nightweb starts its life by generating a DSA-SHA1 key pair"

Just a note for the authors, as of 2010 NIST recommends not using SHA-1 for new digital signature generation and "disallows after 2013". See section 9 here: [http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-131A/sp800-13...](http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-131A/sp800-131A.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I chose that because I2P uses it. The devs are already discussing upgrading, and once they do I will upgrade it in Nightweb as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Android 4? That's a pity. But why a mobil app? Why not a .war app for the i2p router? IMO Social networks are something that are mostly used on desktop computers.

Also it seems to me like you want to fork i2p. I think that's a very bad idea. First since you should be very confident in your skills if you roll your own crypto. Second because a split seems not necessary and harmful in the long run for the network. The i2p networks could be bigger aswell, and this could help.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't actually modify the core or router code at all, I only needed to modify the I2PSnark code (i.e. the BitTorrent component). I did not roll my own crypto at all, other than the digital signing of meta torrents which is an application-level concern. It is technically a fork because I have a separate copy of the I2P codebase in my repo, but I will always update it to the latest versions as they come out.

<comment><USER18> >but it will pay big dividends later if I need to rewrite parts of the I2P backend.

I'm all for clojure, open source, innovation and forking. But i urge you to stay part of i2p and not create incompatible releases. Maintaining your private branch will result in a lot of extra work, and I'm 100% sure that this will result unfixed security holes. The i2p project on the other hand would probably gladly accept your java patches.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood; I actually was moreso referring to rewriting I2PSnark, not I2P itself. The BitTorrent codebase is pretty old and I know I can improve it if I had time. I agree that touching the core/router code itself is dicey, but keep in mind the I2P developers themselves have encouraged people to make alternative implementations. I don't plan on that right now, though.

<comment><USER19> I think the I2P community would be thrilled about I2PSnark patches. I2PSnark is in active development currently, as the I2P update mechanism is being moved into I2PSnark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how they're going to get around the problem of malicious collectives and Sybil attacks, given the anonymity constraint. You should be able to set up dozens of fake accounts to vouch that you're a "good" person, or that someone else is a "bad" person, use astroturf tactics to wage malicious campaigns against other parties, and basically sow havoc.

<comment><USER4> So far it is only distributed twitter ... you don't have control about who's following you. The network does not really have a trust component yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This app is pretty well polished and from an ideological standpoint very awesome.

If you have any feedback/requests for I2P, I'm sure that zzz would be very interested since he did all of the I2P@Android work. Catch him on zzz.i2p or #i2p-dev on the I2P irc net.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep I've spoken with him a few times on his forum. I announced Nightweb there a week ago but I don't think I ever got any replies. I am definitely willing to incorporate any changes he suggests, as he knows the I2P codebase as well as anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=6pocouo5pxv6wwnt...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=6pocouo5pxv6wwntwcvl2lmpub7x2bjx) is mine, though I can't promise I'll do anything with it. ;P

</comment><comment><USER22> Here is mine URL [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=eyynvzrb4npqnrrt...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=eyynvzrb4npqnrrtqau2wwawbxai2sgc) I decided to add a photo as well

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=lzk6fkyifc4zhjls...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=lzk6fkyifc4zhjlsuzm6xf7ceepzr3rs)

Here is mine. Great to see new work and so clean out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why do you say it's a "killer app" for Android? I think it's a great idea, but it does not _use_ the fact that it lives on a mobile phone, so it's certainly not a killer app for it.

Can we haz a desktop or web version?

<comment><USER25> I only saw this on their website:

        > The goal of Nightweb is to be a "killer app"
        > for anonymous networking

<comment><USER26> >> _> for anonymous networking_

It suggests me to share my profile and posts with others(with rest of sharing apps like Twitter). How am I anonymous then?

Besides, after installing the app and creating a profile - I just had to enter a name, how do I make first contact? I searched and it didn't work.

Looks like there's sth that I am not doing right.. ?

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to find people externally, such as through the links people shared on this page. There is a bug preventing links in a browser from being openable in the app, but I just released an update that fixes this. There is no way to discovered people internally right now, though I did make it auto-add my user so you can at least see some content after it runs for a little while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I always had the idea to create a distributed social network, I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes :-) Hopefully very well, would love to delete my facebook account.

</comment><comment><USER28> Great stuff but will it really scale? See secushare.org/2011-FSW-Scalability- Paranoia

Did anyone try to save Nightweb's data directory encrypted in Dropbox or ownCloud?

Would it be possible to add something like a reply option to a post? This would give us twitteresque chat.

Would love to be able to share posts with certain persons only.

PS: Can someone provide a download link for those avoiding Google Play? TIA

<comment><AUTHOR> You can already reply to posts. Just hit the new post button when viewing a post, and your post will link back to it.

I'm considering adding an APK download link, but my site doesn't use SSL so I didn't feel comfortable doing it there.

<comment><USER29> Also would be great to have it in F-Droid repo (<http://f-droid.org/>). They have direct APK download over https.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> One thing that wasn't clear in the protocol or explanation page was the favorite-of-a-favorite discovery.

I'm assuming this works by including your personal favorites in your meta torrent, so when people get your new content, they also get a list of who you've favorited?

Does this also mean that the meta update notification gets sent out when I favorite / de-favorite someone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, your favorites are stored in your meta torrent, so it will be updated every time you add a favorite user or post.

<comment><USER30> Thanks, figured that was the case.

Nice take on announce_meta, btw. I had mused over something similar (though not as well fleshed out) to the Nightweb concept but kept bumping my ahead against the notion of how to announce additional content when the bittorrent protocol ties info hashes (and magnet links) to a direct hash of the content - meaning you could never update something already announced for a specific key. And since the hashes are content based, it's not like you could say "my next content will be <<previous hash plus 1>>".

Extending the protocol to include a new announcement method side-steps this very nicely :) Kudos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very intriguing. I was just beginning research into a server-less shared state model and this seems to solve that quite nicely.

</comment><comment><USER32> >How does it avoid spam?

For me a good solution would be to use machine learning, the same way spam filtering works for email.

A decentralized version of Reddit could actually be pretty simple, with a flooding P2P network coupled to some machine learning on each of the nodes.

The beauty is that anyone would be free to implement the content filtering measures the way they like it.

<comment><USER33> How would you discern what is popular and what is not(that is, the "upvotes" of reddit/HN)? Or did you mean only machine learning?

<comment><USER32> People could optionally broadcast their pseudonymous votes, using cryptography to avoid impersonation.

That would actually be a lot richer than the current "one vote is one vote" systems, since you could learn which people you tend to agree with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Could this be a practical tool for groups such as Occupy Wall Street and the various groups of "Arab Spring"?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is so cool. It makes me want to switch to Android just to use it. Any thoughts on a desktop client?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am definitely considering making a desktop client. I can re-use all the backend code but will have to make a UI from scratch, so it won't necessarily be soon.

<comment><USER36> Second the motion for a desktop client

I _have_ an Android, but I dislike typing on it. For me, it's a phone, period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not yet indexed by Play Store, but can be found by going to the http url. Oops, the problem is: My 2 T-Mobile HTC 4G phones are not compatible with this app. Neither T-Mobile Samsung SGH-T679, and Vodaphone Samsung GT-I9000. Only works on Asus Nexus 7.

<comment><AUTHOR> It requires version 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above, so that may be the issue.

<comment><USER37> Guess it will not turn out as killer app then. This suggests other fixes, such as apk sizes < 50MB: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10475954/why-does- the-goo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10475954/why-does-the-google- play-store-say-my-android-app-is-incompatible-with-my-own-de)

<comment><USER5> It's not like it will suddenly see mainstream adoption in any case. The project is young and the early adopters will be the nerds and the geeks who don't mind the bumps. It's always like this. Organically it can spread and by then it could both be a robust app and have prerequisites pretty much anybody fulfills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing > on mobile devices."

This is really interesting. How is this uncensorable? From what I've read, i2p requires defined servers to resolve addresses which themselves can be taken down.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not use I2P's domain name system at all. Everything is just fully- qualified base32 hostnames underneath.

<comment><USER38> What do you mean by base32 hostnames? ips? If you mean ips, then, especially on a phone, wont the ip change often. If you mean some actual hostname (presumably not the reverse lookup) then who translates that hostname? If it is provided by nightlyweb servers, then if that server gets taken down, you have no more network, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean the hostnames used by I2P itself. They behave like normal hostnames, but they don't require any DNS-style resolution because they contain your public keys inside the hostname itself. They are equivalent to .onion addresses in Tor, except a lot longer.

<comment><USER38> I understand that, you are saying that you have an id of who you want to talk to. The problem is, where do you start looking? Even with .onion you need an entry point to the tor network. It can be a DNS server, a web server, or whatever; but it must be hard coded (unless you start broadcasting on the local network looking for an entry, which I havent seen an example of). That is the problem. The first entry point can easily be taken down.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to bootstrap onto the I2P network initially. There are several IPs hardcoded into the router by the I2P project, which are run by volunteers. If these IPs are blocked in your country, you are out of luck.

There are a few possible solutions to this. First, allow users to add new bootstrap nodes to the app. Second, provide "meshnet" functionality to the app. I am considering both. The latter is much more complex to implement, but Android provides an API called Wi-Fi Direct which I could conceivably use to connect Nightweb nodes together if they are in close proximity. I'm open to other ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've joined, here is my link for anyone interested: [http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=3c6mdngahryip52n...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=3c6mdngahryip52nwi5lgwlp5nx3ggur)

<comment><USER40> Same.

[http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=xcrwasje7ojqdf3k...](http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=xcrwasje7ojqdf3kbaectcszdjpop2wf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow, this is just awesome! The app is really polished for an early beta release, especially that hidden markdown feature.

Just three things that come to my mind:

1\. how long does it take to propagate updates?

2\. what is the traffic consumption on mobile?

3\. what about statusbar notifications?

<comment><AUTHOR> Once you've bootstrapped/integrated with the network, it takes a minute or two for a new update to reach you in my testing. The initial time to bootstrap onto the network is around five minutes.

The traffic consumption is pretty high, because it becomes a full peer on the I2P network. Over a month I would expect it to consume around 1GB or more. If this becomes an issue for people, I may add the ability to be a non- contributing peer.

<comment><USER41> You might want to add a status text to the service notification, displaying how far bootstrapping is..

Please make the non-contributing status the default then, or at least ask the user on installation... capped data plans are still the default in many places... :(

<comment><USER4> Do android applications have access to their amount of data used? Maybe it would be possible to cap the data usage or lower the bandwith when a limit is reached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Please bring this to FDroid! In the meantime an APK for download would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER43> had the same idea a while back and was pondering how I would get past NAT if you are on a mobile network. does it work there as well? I'm assuming it will continue to work as long as your carrier doesnt block the respective ports.

also, don't take this personally - but if you're looking at targeting a broader crowd, you might have to update the UI to make it look more like traditional social apps.

<comment><USER44> There are IETF standardized NAT traversal mechanisms, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN#NAT_traversal_solutions>

I don't know how widespread NAT is on mobile networks, my operator just started using it and I've been meaning to switch.. not a real internet connection anymore IMO. And lots of people are doing self-inflicted NAT on their home wifi. So it might actually be that mobile connections are less likely to be NATted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is there country restriction?

It says incompatible for my country

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mind telling me what country you live in? I selected every possible country in the dev console so I'm not sure why it would say that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> OT: One thing I don't yet understand is why security-critical software is usually written in C instead of a language like SML.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone else having trouble adding pics? They seem to attach properly but don't show up after I hit send.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll look into this.

EDIT: Ugh, yep, a bug I introduced recently. I am issuing another update, 0.0.6.

<comment><USER47> Nice! But i have another problem, I upload a picture and this turned one left.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean.

<comment><USER48> I tested this behavior a little bit, it does not apply to the profile picture but when you submit an other picture it appears to be rotated 90° left. So I manually rotated my pic 90° right to counter this, unfortunately the picture appears exactly the same way as before so I suspect it to not be just a rotation 90°left

EDIT: here's a screenshot <http://i.imgur.com/efngFHN.png> (on the picture I uploaded the sky should appear at the top)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll look into this; it hasn't happened on my phone but hopefully I'll figure it out when I get home from work tonight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> how do you solve the p2p user_id problem? everyone can be everyone when faking the id on some client.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's derived from your public key, so only those with the corresponding private key can update the meta torrent for your user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Definitely looking forward to using it and reading the code. Landing page is profesh too. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER50> Have you considered Cjdns, an alternative to I2P that does not require the internet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say it's an alternative, because CJDNS and I2P operate at different levels of the stack. In other words, you could theoretically run I2P on top of CJDNS. I like the project very much, though integration into Nightweb isn't likely because it requires the creation of a TUN device, which is a kernel- level facility and thus requires root permissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone having trouble attaching pics to posts? They just vanish after I hit send.

</comment><comment><USER51> This app looks awesome. Reminds me of mit roof net. Can't wait to try this out</comment>