Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? (ie: free ideas to hack on) - <AUTHOR> I'm not asking because I want ideas, I'm asking cause I keep having them. Seems like plenty of folks want weekend projects and I keep stubbing my toes on something I'd love to see show up as a Show HN post in the near future. I figured maybe other folks could toss some of their lingering projects-I-won't-get-to in the pile as well. I'll leave projects in the comments and let things get voted around on their own merit. <comment><USER2> 3\. Online sellers can include QR code in each physical items they sell, say Books, T-Shirts, Coffe Cup, to its URL on the site. That way, if your friend wants the exact same thing, he just scan the qr code, go the link and buy. It may be even awesome if, each qr code is custom qr code, which has user data in it, that way, if a friend buys a book through the qr code from my book, I get the referal bucks, but, It will be touch to implement a custom qr code in each product.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TV has changed. Tell me when/where new episodes are available.

I watch TV on cable, hulu, netflix, individual network's websites, or increasingly on internet tv stations like vbs.tv, etc. I'd love a service that tells me when new episodes are available of things I want to see across all of this cruft. The individual source generally do an awful job, and it's become a job for an aggregator.

<comment><USER3> Try Clicker.com, they do this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So many HN'ers side projects die because they have no customers, and developers are rubbish at getting the first ten customers, so...

...a site where people who are wanting some particular SAAS app but can't find the right one- (or can't afford one the right one) can conglomerate and become the first customers for startups.

<comment><USER5> I like this idea. Basically, a site connecting startups and early adopters. Ineedanapp.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I want to see a better cable/TV company. Where instead of paying for 500+ channels. You get 10 personalized channels. Where each particular channel learns what you like and suggests content that you might like. So I can program a channel for my kids and using some web based ui preload the channel with content I approve.Think pandora + TV content.

I'd imagine on the business side of things you can collect some of these preferences and then in turn serve ads based on my preferences rather than blindly trying to get someone to look at your ad.

Remove the slow step top boxes the complicated remotes the tv guide channel. Simplify everything to the basics. I think hulu is a nice start but this is what I think are looking for.

<comment><USER7> Cable/IPTV companies are some of the last surviving tech dinosaurs. When will they wake up and tell the content providers that they will not carry their content bundled? A la carte channel selection is the only way I would ever have traditional TV in my home. Charge me $X.XX per channel and let me choose just the ones I want. I thought that IPTV would provide this, but the content producers are the kings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fix the computer projector stupidity: Almost _every_ conference, meeting I attend has at least one case of a person connecting their laptop and the display not working because of some incompatibility between the projector and laptop.

<comment><USER9> I was just at a conference where our "leader" spent 20 minutes trying to get the sound to work on his presentation while we all sat there fighting to stay awake. When the sound emerged we were forced to watch a video clip from the movie, "Any Given Sunday". -In this case, I wish the incompatibility had existed permanently.

On a serious note though, this IS a problem that arises often.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A better 'Buy me a beer' site. It should be more frictionless, and you can take advantage of the low spending to prevent fraud. I want to a one or two click 'Buy me a beer' link to send someone 5$ for answering a forum question, or an awesome pull request or whatever. Maybe if I use it more than twice in a day it re-challenges me for a password, or something. Send me confirmation emails, or a text every day I use it, or for each event. I dunno. Something about the paypal workflow causes me too much hesitation and friction.

</comment><comment><USER10> A graphical repl. Would be great for kids learning to program.

e.g.

        Prelude> 3 + 4
        7
        Prelude> \x -> x * x

        <interactive>:1:0:
            No instance for (Show (a -> a))
              arising from a use of `print' at <interactive>:1:0-10
            Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Show (a -> a))
            In a stmt of a 'do' expression: print it

Would be great if it could display a scrollable graph of _y_ = _x_ ² instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see the bastard child of an iPad and a Wacom pad. My computer us stronger than your tablet; give me a light-weight touchscreen wireless monitor I can carry around my house.

Make the charging dock a stand do it functions as a normal monitor as well. Bonus points if you include: mic, cameras (the more the merrier, even two in and two out,) and IR (so I can use it on my tv.)

Of course, I'm sure the bandwidth required to get the video to/from such a device would be insane.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A tool that evaluates which flights are most likely to be on time. I've noticed from travelling for business that there are clearly routes that you can have more confidence in than others. Add in weather, current events, etc.. It seems like it ought to be possible to give these trips a confidence indicator. Similar work could be used to indicate flights likely to be overbooked. I'd liket that too, because I like to get bumped for free tickets.

<comment><USER11> <http://www.flightcaster.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I have tons of ideas, that I'm probably never going to work on. I was planning on writing some idea giveaway series in my blog, and post the links here. Anyway I'll just list my ideas.

1\. A Backup Service for all Cloud Data. Eg: Imagine if you google account stops working, then all your gmail, gdocs, blog posts all gone, But, services like google give access to your data, but its not easy to figure out for users, so, a service with monthly or yearly subscription, that backups all users data from multiple sites, automatically and periodically.

2\. A Market Place for T-Shirts, I love the customink, Just stumbled upon it today. But, I was looking for a market place to sell T-Shirts, Like, I create a T-shirt with some wording, which is inexpensive. Then, the site prints and sells/ships it to costumers, who want one. Money is shared in profit shared basis.

I'll post more ideas, soon.

<comment><USER11> At #1: I really like that idea, but then how would you restore it?

<comment><USER2> While I was thinking about it, I also thought how to market the idea#1, basically you have google account login page in the website, when users enter their email and password (for whatever password it, may be), It'll just say, you account is disabled. Then a modal box appears, Say the catch line, "What if this is real? Better safe than sorry!! Signup Here". Easy sell ;)

Technically this may be considered phishing, but I can't come to a conclusion, that its evil or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> crowdsourced data driven smart phone app that lets you know when your program comes back from commercial. just tap the screen reapetdley once the program is back on. when signing on the user selects what they are watching, which network, locality, etc.. If you are the first person to sign on for that program, you would have to type in the details so others could follow it. use some sort of averging equation to cancel out the early tappers and the late tappers. no need to mess with synching scheduling data, the users do all the work. offer some incentive for those that inform the rest of the users that the commercial break is over. it's a dopey idea.

<comment><USER13> I've thought about this before. In reality, this doesn't require a crowd sourced solution if users are willing to pay in some way for the data. One person could keep track of a few channels at a time, and the most popular channels would be the first ones to track.

What would be really interesting is a device that can understand the difference between commercials and programming and make the alert automatically.

<comment><USER12> I can't imagine anyone willing to pay for the service, beyond paying to download the app. cable television has cue marks inserted to indicate where to place the commercials. dvrs know where the commercials are, maybe there's a way to siphon off that info and redirect it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> 4\. Forum Application for Facebook, I used Orkut in the days, It has the best online communities and discussion, ever. There is something to users with similar interest interacting with each other, with real names/identity instead of pseudonyms.

</comment><comment><USER14> iOS app to count points on dominoes using the camera. Relatives like to play, especially over the holidays, but they use those double-twelve sets and keeping score can be a significant bit of work.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was thinking it might be cool for a job recruiting software program.

The software would pull data from Facebook and find people that are graduating the upcoming academic year, find the correct major for the job, and then send the applicant a job proposal.

It reverses the job search, helps students leaving college have options immediately after school, and makes companies bid on the best and brightest - i.e: Stanford grads would perhaps have many offers and would require bids from companies.

Just thought of it - probably not THAT viable of a program.

</comment><comment><USER16> The equivalent of MouseFree for complex programs. MouseFree is an Eclipse plugin that displays the keyboard shortcut for any action you initiate with the mouse. It's meant to train you to learn the hotkeys for things you do frequently so you can be more efficient. It requires less effort than reading a manual and I think it gets better results because it offers immediate feedback.

I'd like to see this concept extended further to more software.

<comment><USER11> Do you mean MouseFeed?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I do. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We kind of covered this the other day: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3153290>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh sweet, thanks! Missed that. [Edit: Doesn't look like that thread got past 'build a better toaster' and 'build a better toilet']

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh, something I would've like when working in an office? A tie-in to our phone system that let me type in someone's name to get their number/info, and click on a button (well, tab then tap enter) to make my phone ring, and them call that person.

Sure, I could use Google Voice or whatnot, but a single database for everyone would've been handy.

</comment><comment><USER18> A shared calendaring app, where multiple people can have rights to edit their own events but not other peoples events.

See discussion at:

[http://www.quora.com/Calendar-Software-Online- Calendars/What...](http://www.quora.com/Calendar-Software-Online- Calendars/Whats-the-best-shared-editing-calendar-app)

</comment><comment><USER7> Location-based anonymous tasking with anonymous payment. Like a crowd sourced Wikileaks for professional information gatherers (journalists, videographers, photographers, audio recorders etc.). A global network to facilitate the buying and selling of all kinds of information.

<comment><USER19> Reminds me of the CIC in Stephenson's Snow Crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> 5\. Computer screens, starts to dim after a certain time, which can be brought back up by blinking our eyes, by, this feature, we can get users into habit of blinking every now and then, while working. Good for Eyes.</comment>


Tech nightmares that keep Turing Award winners up at night - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2976873/software/tech-nightmares-that-keep-turing-award-winners-up-at-night.html

<comment><USER2> The existence of emulators is a big mitigator in software disappearing. As long as each generation of computers can emulate the architecture of the previous generation, there's a chain that can read any file format. Heck, my web browser can emulate Kid Pix and read its file format: [https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/). And speed isn't an issue since parallelizing file conversion on billions of files is trivial in the cloud.

Now, _data_ integrity being dependent on the continued existence of a single corporate entity is another issue altogether. But as long as your bytes are backed up personally on the latest generation of physical media, the bytes of the software you use to access them are backed up personally, you have a specification of the hardware architecture needed to run that software, and you have a chain of emulators that reach back to that architecture, then you're fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to point out that most image formats are actually rather simple. I very much doubt a competent engineer could not reverse engineer the formats in a week.</comment>


When Heart Transplant Patients Were Celebrities - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/early-heart-transplants <comment><USER2> I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day and he disclosed to me that his twin sons were conceived by IVF.

The first successful birth from IVF, or "Test Tube baby" as it was called back then, was only _39 years ago_. Baby Louise Brown was a worldwide celebrity.

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

Now they're my neighbors. And nobody bats an eye.</comment>


Speaking with a crew member from a NASA simulation of a long space mission - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-astronaut-who-never-left-earth/ <comment><USER2> The sleep deprivation thing is really surprising to me. Does anyone know why? I would be able to sleep for probably 10-12 hours a day.

I wonder if they have research that shows that less sleep makes for healthier crew?

<comment><USER3> There's a more interesting report from NASA on this mission here [1]. They were specifically experimenting to see what would happen to this crew with sleep deprivation. They were only sleep deprived during the week, though it's unstated how much sleep they were allowed on the weekends.

On a long term mission there will be an immense number of things that need to be done each and every day, and with the utmost precision. It's certainly important to see if sleep can be sacrificed when necessary and, if so, for how long before it starts to negatively effect their performance.

[1] - [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-final-hera- campaign-4-cr...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-final-hera- campaign-4-crew-lands-safely-back-on-earth-well-sort-of)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another, far more grounded and cynical take on this experiment, from 2 weeks ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381025)

<comment><USER5> That's about a totally different simulation, isn't it?

<comment><USER6> Yes, though HERA is mentioned briefly in that article (regarding the evacuation during Hurricane Harvey) and HI-SEAS is mentioned briefly in this one (as a similar program).

The main difference, from what I can tell, is that HI-SEAS simulates a Mars surface habitat (with a 20-minute one-way radio delay) while HERA simulates a crew inhabiting a spacecraft (with steadily increasing radio delays until the 'asteroid' 5 light-minutes away is reached, then decreasing as the 'spacecraft' heads home).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love reading about experiments like this. As a general simulation buff, I want to try making an abstract version of this mission to try out with my astronaut candidate-kids this summer. Without the jars of pee of course...

<comment><USER7> I couldn't wait and just tried a simple version of this activity with my daughter, using 440MHz mini-radios and an activity list. She decided she wanted to be in an underwater simulator, something like Aquarius Reef Base[0]. Her bedroom served as the base in this simulation.

She made it halfway through the list of activities (lego building, drawing, yoga, etc.) and we determined that the environment will require lots of patience for a five-year-old. :) We simulated an emergency egress and she swam back, hoping it was OK to continue playing with the radios.

My sons decided to take their simulation outdoors and are currently exploring Mars with a stopwatch that times their radiation exposure. We'll see how they do. Lots of interest so far. (Edit: They did "a lot of things" on the planet and said they enjoyed the exploration)

0\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3qqO8yQswg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3qqO8yQswg)</comment></comment>


Apple's Jony Ive said to be bringing flat design to iOS 7 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/29/apples-jony-ive-said-to-be-bringing-the-flat-design-fad-to-ios-7-with-visual-overhaul/ <comment><USER2> Oh thank god... when that leather crap started to creep into OSX I took it as a sign that Apple had peaked and was on its way down.

Things should look like what they are. A computer display is not leather, so it should not look like leather. Making it look like leather is low-brow kitsch, like a fake electric fireplace or fake electric arc candles.

<comment><USER3> I too thought the end was near for the billion dollar tech behemoth when I saw that design of that one app they released for one of their products.

<comment><USER4> You must have loved the podcast app, then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Edit: No I'm not an Apple fan, I genuinely have a newfound love of flat ui (not block ui)._

I've been very hard on Flat UI in the past (and still dislike the overdone blocky look) but I've decided to embrace it after realizing it's true purpose.

It's NOT to destroy skeuomorphism. It's to destroy "forced focus design" in favor of "distraction free design". In the past we used gradients to aim the eyes towards a direction, shadows to make elements pop out of the page at a viewer, overly rounded corners to seem friendlier to the viewer, etc... We styled elements like this so we could draw attention to certain things and away from others. The same way people wear certain clothing to stand out or fade in with the crowd.

However, in this era of instant gratification online property owners not only realized that content is king but that there's too much shit to do and not enough time to do it. They need to give the viewer what they want and give it to as quickly as possible. Confusion breads negative feelings and pissed off viewers leave and don't return. So pages became lighter, more minimal, and lost unnecessary elements, and so designers adjusted to this.

By getting rid of the un-needed information on a page we no longer have to draw attention to one thing and away from the other because everything on the page is important. If it wasn't, it shouldn't be there in there in the first place. The buttons don't all need to have massive rounded corners and huge shadows because they're no longer lost in a sea of text and ads. They're easy to spot.

This is why you'll notice a lot of Flat UI sites are a lot more minimal than usual.

The Flat UI that I HATE is the blocky kind. Minecraft / 8-bit / designer out of college / what the hell's an a/b test inspired extreme flat ui. The kind where you don't know if that's a header with a colored background or a clickable button. The flat ui where everything on the site is so white white white you'd think the owners were clansman. That crap I hate. And it's only a few dozen A/B tests away from disappearing off of prominent sites.

I don't think this is "just a fad" anymore. There's a reason big companies are switching to it. Microsoft, Apple, Google. They're not stupid. They run A/B tests. They're not going to sacrifice market share, page views, usability, ease-of-use, and their bottom line just to blindly follow a design fad. That's just an insult to them. To say all Flat UI is backwards while the internet's biggest companies convert to it just goes to show how delusional and unknowledgeable we (especially I) can be. I apologize for my past remarks.

<comment><USER3> I personally think it's just the in-style at the moment. It's different than what we're used to, barebones, and uses vibrant colors -- the antithesis of recent popular styles. Some seasons blacks and grays and navies are in, other seasons women like wearing greens and oranges and yellows. UX-wise, though, flat has more problems, but people might not care because it looks so fresh.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, it'll probably settle down in a few seasons to something moderate (i.e., neither the garishness of apple's calendar, nor the usability nightmare of the WP8 app on windows.) I just wish we won't forget the lessons of these experiments, but most likely we'll just be reinventing the whole thing again and again. (Recent example: the horrible 90's emoticons craze is back in messaging apps these days, except they're now higher resolution and are called 'stickers'.)

<comment><USER7> Do you mean Emoji? I've never heard it called stickers.

<comment><USER8> Stickers is the name Facebook are giving to their version...

[http://newsroom.fb.com/News/604/Messaging-updates-for- iPhone...](http://newsroom.fb.com/News/604/Messaging-updates-for-iPhone-and-a- new-look-for-iPad)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand the visceral reaction to the fake leather and hatred of metaphors taken too far, but I wouldn't go expecting iOS 7 to look like Metro.

I'd rather expect a toning down, a reduction – not banishment of gradients and all texture and personality. Look at the iOS 6 App Store redesign and iTunes 11 for visual hints.

Just as OS X toned toned the gloss and lost the pinstripes, iOS too will have its refinement.

<comment><USER10> For a similar flattening done in a good way, look at the window chrome in the Windows 8 desktop compared with Windows 7.

Not Metro or Modern, the desktop.

Window titlebars have lost the peekaboo effect and use a solid color instead. The min/max/close buttons do a simple color change with a quick fade confined to their own little rectangle, instead of glowing around the edges. It's a subtle but pleasant improvement.

I don't like the Start screen, but not because of its flatness. It's the tiny text that doesn't obey my screen DPI setting and the gratuitous animation that really bothers my eyes. But that's OK, I use Start8 which brings back a non- animated start menu with the correct font size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This kind of thing puts a smile on my face, because it breaks the omnipotence of one company in the industry. Making the market reflect its true colors, which is competition. In this case, it was Microsoft who got there first, and not Apple.

I hope this kind of innovation is maintained, because we the users benefit from this. In so many ways.

I wonder if Microsoft hadn't invested everything into flat design, would Apple had moved away from skeuomorphism so fast ? I think not. I hope to see Apple fighting for the design lead again.

<comment><USER12> I doubt Ive is going to take it as flat as Metro. It seems more likely that it will take cues from recent changes like iOS 6's App Store and Passbook, which dropped the shiny glass appearance but still have some amount of lighting on them.

My personal hope is that they push it a bit flatter than that to something like what Google did in their new iOS Maps app. We'll see.

<comment><USER11> I agree. Apple will try to do it is own thing with Falt UIs. And that is also great. The fact that things are progressing and Apple is again willing to experiment on that front is all that matters. Google will have its own take on Flat UIs as well, and that is cool too.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand, 9to5mac says:

 _The new interface is said to be "very, very flat," according to one source. Another person said that the interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeuomorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS. Another source framed the new OS as having a level of "flatness" approaching recent releases of Microsoft's Windows Phone "Metro" UI._

So maybe I'm wrong. At the very least I expect it to keep the rounded corners instead of taking things to uniformly shaded boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm no expert in design, but when trends change so consistently, I have to wonder whether this is like automobile design or fashion where UI design kind of just "rotates" and churns indefinitely rather than head towards "the true answer"

I have no idea and no opinion on which is better etc, just genuinely curious.

<comment><USER14> Fashion and automobile design are quite mature fields, though, compared to human machine interfaces. This is reflected in the fact that most changes in digital interfaces include shifts in terms of functionality. These kinds of changes are very rare in fashion: pants (either BE or AE) all work mostly the same -- and so do cars. The choices made seem to affect mostly aesthetics as opposed to functions.

I guess it's possible that at some point the major interface methods will be standardized to such a degree that future changes will be aesthetic, to avoid putting off people, if nothing else. For instance, there was considerable resistance to MS changing the functional interface of Office not too long ago. But even mature consumer interfaces such as windowing systems continue to introduce additional functionality, although I guess some might characterize those changes as mere window dressing (heh), as well.

Some computer interfaces do head towards what some conceive to be the true answer, with a slow stream of incremental improvements, e.g. the Unix shell. But that's a professional interface subject to other kinds of pressures than consumer technology.

IANAD.

<comment><USER15> Automotive design has changed radically around function - safety and aerodynamics being the most obvious visible changes which could be trivialized as styling.

<comment><USER14> Ok, obviously you're right about that, but I was thinking just in terms of the human-machine interface. Even then, automotive engineering is much less "stale" than fashion, and any new technology may push towards more radical change.

<comment><USER15> Touch screen navigation, voice control, DVD players, third row seating, dynamic stability control, launch mode, dial-in suspension...etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While it's possible, it's highly doubtful Apple will radically shift away from their current look. Microsoft are currently associated with the whole flat- design UI trend and I can only speculate that changing to a completely flat look would only fuel the speculation that Apple are out of ideas and lack vision to keep innovating thus driving their share price down further and undoing all of their hard work over the years. You're only as good as your last hit as they say in the music industry.

I am envisioning if Apple does change to a flat UI look, it'll have their own little twist on it. I think it's a given they'll drop the skeuomorphism from iOS, because lets face it, skeuomorphic elements like leather books and note paper backgrounds look dated when used anywhere (not just mobile applications). I would expect things will get flatter, but evident by their latest Mac OS and iTunes redesigns which I think give us a sneak peek of the direction: not completely flat, still dabs of light & aluminium as well as rounded corners on things. Whatever the end result is, I think we can all agree Apple needs to evolve. The iOS interface has remained basically untouched since 2007, it's time for a change because the aging operating system is starting to show its age.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't see Apple being able to do this even if they tried. So many apps in iOS rely on the standard elements, mix them with others, make overlays using them and so forth. For them to "remake" the OS now would break tens of thousands of apps, and to offer a new UI as an upgrade would stunt adoption.

No matter what happens in this scenario, Apple is left with two half interfaces. Not clean at all.

<comment><USER18> They could make redesigned standard elements opt-in, so old apps would still use the old styles and continue to work.

(I've certainly seen apps change behavior simply by being recompiled by a newer SDK, so there must be something in the binary loader that sets a bunch of compability flags or something)

<comment><USER19> Right. This is how Aqua migrated to Brushed Metal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Even if they don't go as far as I wish they would (complete UI redesign) I'll be fairly happy with modest updates to the overall UI. I'm not a big fan of Win8, but I've quite liked the MetroUI look on their phones. A nice middle ground between the two would be a great update.

</comment><comment><USER21> Personally I would have liked if iOS kept the skeumorphism look and feel. I prefer that to Flat Design. Now I guess all the platforms would look and feel similar :( (Android, Windows and iOS) I hope iOS 7 look and feel much different.

<comment><USER22> I agree, that design style strongly distinguished Apple from Android and MS.

<comment><USER23> On the other hand, it will make it much easier for developers to create cross- platform apps that don't look like complete aliens in one OS or the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really hate the flat design. I prefer to see some depth as a indicator that something is clickable & active.

<comment><USER25> Android 4.x/Holo doesn't get enough credit for absolutely nailing the right balance. It's "flat", but has depth.

Going purely by the strength of their design team, I'd expect iOS 7 to be closer to Android-flat rather than Metro-flat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "The changes would likely be welcomed by most, though they could result in a negative reaction from users who've grown used to the current Apple way of doing things."

What extraordinary insight…

</comment><comment><USER27> If so, will Microsoft sue Apple for stealing their look and feel? #irony

<comment><USER28> If I was somewhere high up in Microsoft I'd serious think about it. Nothing too serious, just dragging them into court would be enough.

What goes around comes around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm sure Dieter Rams used some nice textures here and there. Ive can steal that too.

<comment><USER30> Unsure why you were downvoted - Apple has borrowed _heavily_ from Dieter Rams in the past decade or so. Heck, the current iPad Music app is a straight lift from the famous Braun SK radio/record players.

That being said, there's no real reason why Apple has to use textures anywhere. Dieter Rams designed physical products which by their nature _must_ have some texture or another. Having texture is purely optional in a digital product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems like blog spam based on blog spam based on "sources". I'd take it with a grain of salt.

I'd also be very skeptical that Ive would create a sweeping change to a formula that works so well currently (Regardless of what the technorati think, joe consumer loves the iPhone UI. Small gizmos and refreshes are all that's needed to keep the standard consumer sufficiently happy), especially with Cook in charge.

A better article could probably be condensed into: "According to sources it looks like Apple will follow the latest design trends and begin incorporating flat design into their products." Which is a no-brainer and hardly sells adspace.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish on ios I could pick a theme and stay with it. I dislike how every page is white and every other black with no rhyme or reason. At night the white screens are especially blinding even at lowest brightness. Sometimes negative works, but not when screens are half-white, half-black as is the trend lately.

Sigh... I miss the days of Windows 95? when I chose a theme and all apps had to follow it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Given the discussions they've reportedly been having with Yahoo [http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4206794/apple-and- yahoo-...](http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4206794/apple-and-yahoo-in- talks-to-build-a-deeper-ios-partnership)

I wonder if Yahoo's new, aesthetically pleasing IMO, weather app is an indication of things to come to iOS.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just when my poor parents were starting to get the hang of using their new iPhones... On a more serious note, I know it's never going to happen, but it would be nice if Apple would just create a Theme system and allow the user to choose how they want their default apps and controls displayed.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think flat UI is horrible. Outlook 2013 looks like piles of words. I can't tell where one email stops and the next starts. I would take leather trim over that any day.

</comment><comment><USER36> One of my favorite mods for OSX is to revert the dock back to "2D" mode. The mirrored table effect is not to my taste.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think its about time.

That said, a complete UI overhaul is.. I just see it as unlikely all at once, more of a gradual thing.</comment>


Ask HN: Best host for static HTML microsites? - <AUTHOR>

So I know my way around web development, and I have a meticulously crafted lighttpd.conf running on a few tiny VPSes.
Problem:  stuff goes down occasionally, severs require a reboot, and while it's great for hardcore wordpress optimization (which I do on my main blog), I've increasingly found myself modifying my powerful lighttpd.conf script to add yet another 3-page static html microsite.
Can anyone recommend a cheap, painless way to host a bunch of low-traffic static HTML across a dozen or so domains?
* Zero-configuration deployment of new sites.  It would be great if I could just put some files in a folder called "example.com" and do a git push.
* Configurable subdomain support.  S3 won't cut it.
* Reliable / no waking up to do a reboot at 3am
* Cheap: same cost or less as what I'm paying now for the VPS. <comment><USER2> I don't know about your usage profile but.. <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/> is a well known "pay as you go" host for stuff like this. They've been around ages.

They have an API that can make it as easy as a couple of calls to set up a new site and do the DNS. For example: <https://members.nearlyfreespeech.net/wiki/API/PHPExample>

</comment><comment><USER3> I do microsites on my VPS with a templated config script and a script which copies and then does a search/replace for the domain name followed by an apache restart.

</comment><comment><USER4> Heroku?

Set up a simple Sinatra app and git push to deploy. Heck, Sinatra is probably overkill. Just make it a rack app. 1 config file and a directory of HTML.</comment>


Dropbox Boosts Free Storage Limit to 5GB to Match Google Drive | PCWorld - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/254586/dropbox_boosts_free_storage_limit_to_5gb_to_match_google_drive.html <comment><USER2> Its for images, doesn't sound like this applies to the 'general purpose' storage limit. Title could be a bit more clear.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious. For those of us who participated in the recent "photo upload" beta, will this further increase the free portion of our allocation, or will it overlap the beta's additional free allocation?

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth... but just wondering.

P.S. As I seem to recall, the beta provided an increase to "general purpose" storage (not just the photo folder). So, this would be a separate increase? (Guess I should check the DB forums -- lazy.)</comment>


Dogewallet hacked - 21 Million Dogecoins stolen - <AUTHOR> http://doges.org/index.php/topic,5283.0.html

<comment><USER2>
        so hacked            such sneak
                    bai coins
        gone, wow.                many tears
                     no doge

<comment><USER3> If only HN allowed Comic Sans

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dogewallet had been engaged in several sketchy security practices, such as not using https. It's unsurprising that funds were stolen.

It will be interesting to see if security flaws like this cause as big a splash in the Dogecoin community, since it's sort of a big joke anyways.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's the explanation from Dogewallet [http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1toz92/dogewallet_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1toz92/dogewallet_explanation/)

"the attack originated from the hacker gaining access to our filesystem and modifying the send/receive page to send to a static address."

</comment><comment><USER6> Learning that it was hacked is far less shocking than learning that someone actually gave a shit.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised to see that some people were actually using this...

Dogecoin... Very irreversible. So sorry.

<comment><USER8> It even has a black market in the works "Doge Road":

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=383053.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=383053.0)

<comment><USER9> Lol I love the "such jail many prison" comment. That is a horrible idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bitcoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, Ripple, Namecoin pretty soon we'll have more digital currencies than standard ones.

<comment><USER11> I'm kinda waiting for redditcoin to show up to the party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The thing about using a coin that was made for a joke, is the risk of non- serious developers and weak security.

</comment><comment><USER13> My confidence in dogecoin as a viable alternative currency has been shattered.

</comment><comment><USER14> Kind of what you get for attempting to speculate on a meme currency...

</comment><comment><USER15> Why anyone would use an online wallet is beyond me. Yeah your personal computer could be hacked, but a website with thousands of wallets and millions of coins is a much larger target.

<comment><USER16> If you're day-trading, it's faster to stay on an online wallet. If your coins are offline, you may have to wait anywhere from an hour to more than a day for confirmations before you can use them online. When Litecoin prices started climbing today, I had to quickly get my Litecoin client up... resynced and send some coins to btc-e.com and wait for __six__ confirmations on the blockchain before I could sell/trade them. I'm just lucky I didn't miss the spike.

That said, I'd rather risk missing out on peaks & valleys than suddenly losing thousands due to these kinda shenanigans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The DOGE market on Cryptsy has held its value. The 21M stolen coins pale in comparison to even a single day of trading - last 24 hour volume report say 973M coins traded.

</comment><comment><USER18> The number of people in this discussion not understanding a difference between a web wallet and a coin is too damn high...

</comment><comment><USER19> 21 million? Interesting number

<comment><USER5> To put things into perspective it's ~USD 13000 (1dc= 0.00062$), combined. Not saying that it's not a serious matter. OP on the forum lost $600 which is sizable. But Dogewallet have stated on reddit that they will return all the investment and close down the site, which might arguably be better customer service then we have seen by Coinbase lately with much more money from individual investors at stake.

Any ways, if cryptocurrencies are to be taken seriously and formally, these entities have to up their customer services, at least to a BOfA level, which isn't much to expect ;)

<comment><USER20> I suspect the "joke" is that the maximum possible number of bitcoins is ~21m.

<comment><USER5> Ah! Now I feel stupid. Haha

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this crypto-currency have a chance of taking off?

<comment><USER22> Yes, because it has a good story behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if blockchain.info was hacked, how many bitcoins would be stolen, and if that would be enough to undermine the currency, or if bitcoin would move forward with the ownership even more centralized among early adopters, thieves, and speculators.

(Yes, I know it's a javascript wallet - that doesn't mean it can't be hacked.)

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting how this post fell to 20th place in its first hour, whilst receiving over 50 up votes... Something tells me the way this is getting voted could be sketchy. Unless, of course, people aren't clicking the link through and just commenting/voting.

<comment><USER25> People flagging might also account for it

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isn't it possible to trace the stolen coins? Wouldn't it be a risk for the thief to spend or exchange any of it?

</comment><comment><USER27> And the world spins on. I thought insecurity was an intended feature of dogecoin anyway.

<comment><USER28> It's pretty funny that enough people believe DOGE has value that the market cap is 11,768.50 BTC (8.3 million USD).

[http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/coins/show/doge](http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/coins/show/doge)

Then again, the number of people that bought Icanhaz merchandise eg crap was nontrivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Didn't this service just launch too?

</comment><comment><USER30> What happened to bearer certificates?

</comment><comment><USER31> wow

</comment><comment><USER32> hahaha

</comment><comment><USER33> Ya dawgs go lawnch another virtuale coin'n get h4ck3d dat easy and komplain.

</comment><comment><USER34> I thought that this was a joke digital currency. Literally the only other place I've ever seen it mentioned was on 4chan.org, where the threads about it made very clear that the point of dogecoin was to try to get speculators to drive up the price so that the coins could be dumped for a profit. This story is hardly newsworthy.</comment>


Auditorium: Gaming via the process of discovery and play - <AUTHOR> http://playauditorium.com/ Really cool concept. I donated. <comment><USER2> Here's the backstory of Auditorium's development:

<http://blog.cipherprime.com/?p=6>

</comment><comment><USER3> Very original, it managed to just burn an hour of my life that I'll never get back! Has anyone got past 2:5 yet? I for one couldn't...

<comment><USER4> (solution. figure it out yourself, or you'll be sorry!)

Perngr n ybbc. Hfr nyy cvrprf rkprcg gur Hc cvrpr ng zrqvhz/znkvzhz cbjre. Hfr gur Hc cvrpr gb ahqtr gur juvgr cnegvpyrf gb gur yrsg. Fraq gur juvgr cnegvpyrf qbja ng gur hccre-yrsg. Fraq gurz evtug guebhtu gur oyhr. Fraq oyhr cnegvpyrf hc guebhtu gur checyr pvepyr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incredible.

I think it would be great if you introduced bad guys as a light-stream thing that made really ugly dissonant sounds, so you would have to block those.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not my game, but once their site comes back up I'll send over your idea to them. Good idea. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case anyone is wondering, you can quit the game and continue from where you left.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've never seen a game as beautiful before.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gaming via the process play you say!? Wow.

<comment><USER8> True of all games, I suppose, but did you play it? It's pretty fun.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it will be successful?

<comment><USER9> I really enjoyed it. I also think this would be a lot of fun if offered through the arcade section of the 360 or the like. Would sound great trough the surround sound.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it has the potential to gain enough traction to make it to the XBox and PS3 network stores. A few of my friends already want to buy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Truly beautiful game - definitely sucked me in for 30 minutes</comment>


Google BigQuery – now only $10,000 per month for a Petabyte Data Warehouse - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/03/google-bigquery-cuts-historical-data-storage-cost-in-half-and-accelerates-many-queries-by-10x <comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the folks working on BigQuery. Among other improvements, on Wednesday BigQuery dropped price of long term storage by 50%, to just $0.01 per GB per month.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you like working with tech recruiters? - <AUTHOR> Why or why not? <comment><USER2> No. Specifically referring to independent recruiters / recruiter firms that are not employed by the firm they are hiring for. My reasons are chalked up to a number of poor experiences over almost 10 years. Save for one, every interaction I've had with recruiters (in Toronto) is the same.

\- The few vague details they have almost always prove incorrect in the end.

\- Every job is cutting edge and exciting when it's usually not

\- When you don't get the position, they often don't get back to you and ignore your attempts at communication.

\- The don't have enough background in the area they are hiring for and will confuse details. e.g. Java is not JavaScript

</comment><comment><USER3> In what capacity?</comment>


WikiLeaks 9/11 Files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tbragg0/wikileaks-9-11-files <comment><USER2> Sample:

        2001-09-11 03:03:00 Metrocall [0476499] A  ALPHA  THIS IS A TEST PERIODIC PAGE SEQUENTIAL NUMBER  1890
        2001-09-11 03:03:00 Metrocall [1064376] C  ALPHA  GOVPX TREASURY 30__99.03 /05+5.437 10_101.09 /10 4.835 5Y_101.08+..................................................................
        2001-09-11 03:03:00 Metrocall [1064377] C  ALPHA  ...........................................................................
        2001-09-11 03:03:00 Metrocall [0000329] C  ALPHA  ..................
        2001-09-11 03:03:02 Metrocall [0000329] C  ALPHA  RIODIC PAGE SEQUENTIAL NUMBER  1890
        2001-09-11 03:03:03 Skytel [0001048] C  ALPHA  PERFORMANCE FEED TRANSMITTED 0301 HR.  MORGAN ADVISED.  H.M.-COMMAND CENTER
        2001-09-11 03:03:05 Arch [0895403] C  ALPHA  THIS IS A TEST PERIODIC PAGE SEQUENTIAL NUMBER  6712
        2001-09-11 03:03:05 Arch [1425048] C  ALPHA  300~MPfetchData:openConnectionToManager:ERROR CONNECTING:192.168.35.97 : www36 connectToServerPort:socket/socket timed out at /home/crdtdrv/cred>
        2001-09-11 03:03:05 Skytel {1079475} 3 1200 50413
        2001-09-11 03:03:09 Metrocall [002286026] C  ALPHA  5060>>>>>
        2001-09-11 03:03:09 Metrocall [1545041] A  ALPHA  Frm: firstname.lastname@example.com Txt: smtp.cfgg.org is UP

It looks like IRC log from Irssi.

<comment><USER3> This is the log of pager (beeper) traffic on 9/11\. Because pagers are unencrypted broadcast traffic, it is routinely collected by people for fun. Someone turned the logs from NY over to Wikileaks and they created a public archive.

It was released in 2009. [https://911.wikileaks.org/](https://911.wikileaks.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing immediately jumps out at me as being terribly important, but it's interesting to see how it was initially reported as a "small plane" then became a "commuter type plane" and "twin eng plane", alongside various vague references to an "explosion", or a "fire", and a few speculations that it was a bomb. I've never really thought about how confusing those first few minutes must have been (I was 11 at the time, and didn't see it until after the second plane had crashed, so it was fairly obvious what had happened).

The Guardian has an article here <[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/nov/25/wikileaks- publ...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/nov/25/wikileaks-publishes- messages-9-11>) summarising it (dated 25 Nov 2009), though I might include:

> 2001-09-11 08:47:46 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA Someone just told me there was an > explosion at

> [...]

> 2001-09-11 08:47:48 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA wtc....BR

in their list of defining moments, as it seems to be the first reference to the events.

</comment><comment><USER5> I miss Wikileaks. I'm looking forward to whatever replaces it coming online. It seems that Assange is headed for the grave - I wonder if the leaks will continue, anyway?

<comment><USER6> Not naturally.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384573)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273961)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273988)

<comment><USER5> I concur, Assange is being slowly tortured to death while awaiting this sham trial.

But I do think the leaks will continue. Those of us paying attention to the Assange saga have seen a new wave of evidence of crimes against humanity being prepared for release. This problem is _NOT_ going away for the American people. The magnitude of the crime is just too large.

<comment><USER7> >sham trial.

How is it a sham trial?

<comment><USER5> Because Assange has not been allowed to defend himself, by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.

<comment><USER7> When you are accused of a crime where do you typically go to defend yourself?

<comment><USER6> Yea, that's how it works.

Self defense is level 0 of a functioning judicial system.

Perhaps you get a lawyer to do it for you, but if you cant defend yourself, you are not operating in the most basic system of law.

It's similar to a place where silent protest is outlawed, and therefore you are mandated to vote.

He has not been convicted, and yet he is dying in there. Just a concidence right?

Other thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513669)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are these different from the ones published over 10 years ago?

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/nov/25/wikileaks- publ...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/nov/25/wikileaks-publishes- messages-9-11)

<comment><USER9> no

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While this is nothing "secret" or new (originally released on 2010) it is interesting to see how some people reacted at first. Some of the messages right after the first attack talk about a plane crash or fire at the Pentagon rather than a terror attack. Although I did get excited, I was hoping for more information about flight 93.

<comment><USER11> >Some of the messages right after the first attack talk about a plane crash or fire at the Pentagon rather than a terror attack.

Why do you find this interesting? I'm genuinely curious. As a civilian, until the second plane crashed an accident seemed like the most likely explanation. And it wasn't clear what happened at the Pentagon for a while.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how old you are but when it happened I was more interested in watching the cool explosions on TV. In fact, there are some people here who probably weren't even alive when it happened. I'm not saying that it is surprising how people reacted, but rather it gives me a glimpse into how people felt.

Similarly I would be interested in how the public opinion of Hitler changed. There are quotes from some German Jewish leaders in the 30s saying that Hitler should get more power. I too would be interested in understanding how the opinions changed.

<comment><USER11> I sort of assumed you weren't alive. I was in high school and remember watching the news reporting a plane had crashed into the tower with an unknown cause then later that there was an explosion then fire at the Pentagon. Finding that surprising is foreign to me, and I wondered if younger people had the impression that it was immediately clear that it was a terrorist attack.

The historiography of WWII has significantly downplayed Hitler's popularity before the war, however many Jewish leaders remaining in Germany were not speaking for the Jewish population.

<comment><USER12> I can sort of see how post-9/11 'kids' who grew up in a society that sees terrorism everywhere might think that it's odd to assume it was just a plane crash.

As a teen, I also thought it was just a crash. I was at school and someone mentioned it and we went to look for a tv. It's difficult to forget how the mood went from 'shit, that sucks but cool explosion and most people below the crash site will probably get out' to 'shit, another plane, and now the towers are collapsing'.

<comment><USER11> I also expect there's some rote memorization happening. After hearing "the terrorist attacks of 9/11" a billion times it kinda sticks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a old leak.

More interesting is I've yet to read a write up of where the leak came from, the question asked when it came out -

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_te...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_text.html)

Is it reasonable (not is it possible) a private citizen was at the time recording all pager traffic?

Can you read them passively and is it location based and does this data fit with that?

If it's not totally passive, would the network notice you vacuuming them all up?

<comment><USER14> Yes, It's totally reasonable that someone could have been routinely capturing all the pager data. Normally over a very large service area (possibly nationally) Yes, the data can be captured passively. It's just data (sounds a bit like old fashioned modems ) being broadcast over radio frequency. You just hook up a radio scanner to a pc, and run software to decode the tone, creating a huge text log, that contains all the messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What exactly is this? Looks like some sort of messages that were captured on a cellular network or something? There are messages about rebooting servers (something like alerts) and just general marketing spam.

<comment><USER6> It's an oldschool txt pager caputre. They are unencrypted over the air.

This data is not new[1], and it does originally source from wikileaks. It starts before the first aircraft impact[2].

There is a link in my profile that covers the same timeframe.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20100911151142/http://911dataset...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100911151142/http://911datasets.org/index.php/9/11_Pager_Intercepts)

[2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160405052531/http://911encyclo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160405052531/http://911encyclopedia.com/wiki/index.php/World_Trade_Center_Jet_Impact_Seismic_Signals)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel a bit lost as to what we're looking at here.

<comment><USER17> A quick google search seems to indicate this is Pager data for a 48 hour window around 9/11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does someone know the source for this? Is there a Wikileaks page available authenticating this? I can't find one.

<comment><USER19> It claims to originate at [https://file.wikileaks.org/file/](https://file.wikileaks.org/file/). It's probably 9-11_all_messages.7z or 9-11_messages.7z.

<comment><AUTHOR> The file structure comes from 9-11_messages.7z

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems to be the same as:

[https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html](https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> These are pager dumps re-released by Wikileaks cause I guess they don't have anything else going on for them.

Fun stuff though, the standard is called POCSAG and you can still decode over the air pager signals. Not that you should do that.</comment>


Nokia losing the battle for apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-13/nokia-loses-battle-for-apps-as-iphone-android-snare-developers.html

<comment><USER2> They need to adopt Android. There aren't enough developers to support more than 2 or 3 platforms really well. Microsoft might be the 3rd.</comment>


Please take this test HN members - <AUTHOR>

conducting a usability test. Please take the test at www.clueapp.com/25893. Thanks <comment><USER2> Took the test. But only because I'm bored. I have no clue (no pun intended) why you are doing this, who you are, what's going on etc etc.

If you want people to help you, at least have the courtesy to ask properly. Give more details.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just found the site for usability testing and decided to give it a go by trying it on my site. Adclays is a direct advertising tool for bloggers.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Online Coaching Made Simple - <AUTHOR> https://vrtlly.me/ <comment><USER2> The layout of the homepage is nice, but it doesn't really show what I would be in for as far as this product.

1\. What does the interface looks like while you're coaching?

2\. Are there any public coaching sessions/demos that you could show as well?

3\. How does one earn $100/hr with this product?

4\. Most importantly, how does one find their desired coaching?

5\. @anthony-thomas doesn't exist

I'm guessing these are just ideas you would like to explore.

That's a really big ask to expect someone to sign up just to "Get Started". All I know is that you could very well be collecting emails just to collect them. Also, the need to add your social network items seems like much right out of the gate. Unless this product scrapes those networks to help find leads, I would reserve that to the user's settings.

Also, I don't think you would need to send HD webcams to projected teachers. I'm willing to bet that most people looking to do this would already have a camera (either on laptop or phone) that they could use.

</comment><comment><USER3> change the name. Sometime there are words where you can drop vowels and it still works. But if someone said this name to me at a party I would not know how to put in, or even come close to guessing.</comment>


Youtube Instant creator gets instant job offer - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/10/youtube-instant-job/ <comment><USER2> Congrats!

Worst part of the article:

"Aboukhadijeh announced the launch of YouTube Instant on Y Combinator's Hacker News feed, a news aggregation site similar to Digg and Reddit."

<comment><USER3> Which means that the YouTube CEO is scouring Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> Just like being a rock star, successful CEOs continue to be normal people, which is for some reason surprising to the public, and their former peers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know Feross Aboukhadijeh personally. He graduated from my high school a year before me. For those who are talking about the "lengthy hiring processes", he just completed an internship at Google this summer. He also founded <http://www.freetheflash.com/> and <http://www.studynotes.com/>.

Check out his impressive resume at <http://www.feross.org/Resume_Feross_Aboukhadijeh.pdf>

He's definitely more than capable of producing at his new YouTube gig (assuming he will take it).

<comment><USER6> He also, most importantly, runs the ACM LAN parties at Stanford. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure this guy has no problem finding a job at any company he wants probably doing anything he wants. I don't understand why this is such a big deal.

<comment><USER8> Most sensible comment here. Working at a big name as some low level software developer is not a big deal. By virtue of being at Stanford alone he had a good chance at the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "want a job?" means "want to interview for a job?"

<comment><USER10> Yes, when a recruiter is saying that. It's different when it is the CEO saying it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats to the creator of Youtube Instant.

"Everytime Google or Facebook hires someone another startup dies" - may have not quoted right, but you get the idea.

<comment><USER12> Not sure I agree with you there, mate. Plenty of startups have been founded by people who cut their teeth at these companies. I know 19yr-old founders are all the rage, but there's a lot to be said about getting some experience before doing the whole startup thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hi everyone, I'm the creator of YouTube Instant. Thanks for all the nice comments. This discussion has been quite interesting to read. Great feedback.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is YouTube exempt from Google's lengthy indirect hiring processes?

<comment><USER15> someone from youtube recently reached out to me about some stuff and as an aside commented that i'd also probably make a good google employee. but my college GPA (2.8 or so) pretty much rules out that possibility. too bad.

<comment><USER16> Who told you that your GPA rules you out?

If you have actual experience, nobody should care about your GPA. Or even whether you have a college degree. Lots of people at Google don't. If you're still in college it might be an issue, but if you have something to point to you still have a shot at getting into the interview process.

The interview process is hard. I won't lie to you about it. Even if you belong at Google, there is a good chance of not making it through on the first try. But your odds are infinitely worse if you don't even try.

Speaking personally, I didn't apply to Google for years because the core Google languages are Python, Java and C++, while my professional experience was all in Perl. Eventually I did apply, and discovered that it never would have been a problem. And in fact I'm doing most of my work in internal languages that nobody comes here knowing.

<comment><USER17> Internal languages? Why would Google make new languages when there are already many great ones already available? It sounds counterintuitive and inefficient. Please answer if you can.

<comment><USER18> <http://golang.org/>

<comment><USER19> That one actually seems more supply-driven than demand-driven. Google hires huge piles of accomplished people, and the senior ones then continue to work on whatever it is that they do, because they're well-known and independent enough that it's hard to assign them to projects they don't want to work on. So they hire Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, and the result is a programming language inspired by C and Limbo, because that's what they do. =]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Must have been one of the most exciting days of his life. Not just the job, but the recognition for something cool he made!

<comment><USER13> I'm the author of YouTube Instant. You're right - the last two days have been the most exciting of my life! I'm still high on adrenaline from the whole ordeal. I never expected my little hack to make it this big, and for that I'm grateful.

I just finished recounting my last two days running YouTube Instant here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1683100>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Regardless of whether or not YouTube could build this with the team they have, it makes perfect sense to me that they'd want to hire a smart, self-motivated person who's passionate about their product.

</comment><comment><USER22> So, did he accept ?

</comment><comment><USER23> Very cool. Didn't think it be such as big deal, since others have already played around with the official Youtube player and API. For example: <http://www.yvoschaap.com/youtube/>, <http://www.flatvid.com>.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes, we know, we know - the existing discussion is at #5 on the front page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679845>

<comment><USER25> Actually, I didn't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> what's next? twitter instant?? suggests a tweet for you. I will actually like to see/indulge in a stab at that.

</comment><comment><USER27> Big congrats man

</comment><comment><USER28> Kudos to Feross! An inspiring story.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good for him and all, even though the search results were:

1) Painfully slow compared to Instant's realtime. 2) Only one at at time. 3) Text. (People respond to visual cues, and for a vid site, better to have thumbnails display in the results with captions.)

<comment><USER30> He made it in a day.

<comment><USER29> And I'm sure they'll give him time to work it out further, but is this the innovation YouTube is looking for? Hard to believe their UX people and dev teams haven't already toyed with something like this.

<comment><USER30> He threw something together that people could get a feel for. I'll concede that it was hardly usable given the performance. But it was only a demo, enough of one to show just how usable the real thing could be.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tim Ferris: The 4-Hour Body - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/09/29/the-4-hour-body/ <comment><USER2> I don't want to get downvoted here, I bought 4HWW and liked it, and I used to like Tim's blog posts, but perusing this blog post, this book looks to be full of snake oil or just plain tacky ("How to give a woman 15 minute orgasms", really?):

\--- From the blog post --- YOU WILL LEARN (in less than 30 minutes each):

\- How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails.

\- How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)

\- How to increase fat-loss 300% using temperature manipulation

\- How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time

\- How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested

\- How to produce 15-minute female orgasms

\- How to triple testosterone, double sperm count, and (literally) have sex like a porn star

\- How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks

\- How to reverse permanent injuries

\- How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months

\- How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit

\--- End of blog post excerpt ---

The "5K to 50K in 12 Weeks" is a complete crock (and yes, I run ultras). Not unless you've already trained up to 13.1 mile distances.

"Gain 34lbs of muscle in a month" was highly ridiculed in the fitness/muscle community and Tim's description of his techniques was considered dubious at best. I don't know any human who can survive 2 hours of sleep a night on a regular basis, etc.

If you're going to order the book, consider ordering a rather sizable grain of salt.

I've been really disappointed with Tim lately, when I found his earlier stuff very valuable (his early "pack light", "travel light", life hacks stuff was great, and real, solid advice). I wish he'd go back to that.

<comment><USER3> i preordered one because i'm at least mildly interested. i also bought 4HWW. liked some of the ideas, disliked others. at the very least, a somewhat entertaining read.

what i like about the possibility of this book is that it'll be much more objective. much easier to test an idea he presents on yourself and see what comes of it (provided you're already regularly exercising).

<comment><USER2> I'd pre-order it, but I suspect these outlandish claims were designed to cause people to proclaim "BS! I'd better buy this book to prove it's hogwash!".

<comment><USER3> i didn't read the claims, actually. i was interested from his previous mentioning of what he was up to. the outlandish stuff is marketing spin, almost definitely

<comment><USER4> Yeah why buy a book with 4-Hour claims? It seems we could sit back and let the fireworks take off and figure out his system pretty quickly. Nothing that claims to succeed in four hours won't leak pretty quickly on the internet

<comment><USER3> i'd point out that 4 hour claims are more along the lines of methodologies for using time efficiently in combination with the pareto principle (80/20 rule).

for example, his claims of gaining muscle mass involve 20 minutes at the gym doing a specific exercise routine, twice a week, and eating more protein. so its really a 6 week or so process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is the 4-hour body like the 4-hour work week, where you count things like running a marathon as fun instead of exercise? "Oh, I'm not working. I'm cold calling for the fun of it, because rejection gets me pumped."

I really like how he's offering courses for buying more copies of the book. Surely, thats not to hack the NYT best seller list. I'm going to hold out til the book as offered as part of a get rich quick scheme on late night TV with both Tim AND Tony Robbin's signatures. The only thing missing is how the book would NORMALLY retail for over $300.

<comment><USER2> Some of us do run them for "fun" ;) I hate running as an exercise (unless it's on trails, out in the woods, preferably while rainy and muddy), but I like the challenge of pushing past everything in your body and mind telling you to quit.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but I'm sure that the 4-hours of gym time, also includes a lot of exercise, which is not what the statement implies.

<comment><USER2> Many of his claims in 4HWW also required additional initially-unmentioned effort (as you so eloquently mention in your OP).

This tactic is common in tabloids with a majority female demographic ("Get your perfect beach body in 2 hours!").

I hope I'm proven wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _and (literally) have sex like a porn star_

In an alternately freezing and boiling sound stage with a dozen people watching, no real passion and stopping every 40 seconds to move the cameras or do another take?

I'll pass.

<comment><USER7> What? And give up show business?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tim's Next Book: Go to heaven in just 4 hours a day.

He'll show you how to guarantee entrance into heaven when you pass into the beyond, no matter what sins are committed in real life through a combination of Zen, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism.

</comment><comment><USER9> The techniques in 4hww pretty much tell you how to succeed mostly at the expense of others. I do agree that some ideas are worth trying though and also introduce you to some lateral thinking on the nature and practice of work.

Never forget that what Tim's books do best is promote Tim and explain what a really fantastic fellow he is.

<comment><USER10> "Never forget that what Tim's books do best is promote Tim and explain what a really fantastic fellow he is."

You hit the nail right on the head there buddy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tim certainly knows a thing or two about marketing. After reading all the claims I'm definitely intrigued. But, I'm also skeptical, since the claims seem so outlandish. So... I think I'll wait until the book comes out and flick through it in the bookstore.</comment>


Show HN: CSS to render Markdown as unrendered Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/ImJasonH/c00cdd7aece6945fb8ea

<comment><USER2> This is pretty nice for a "toggle source" feature. I added the use of CSS counters: [https://gist.github.com/jbrooksuk/2d6989c35c77bf0c62f9](https://gist.github.com/jbrooksuk/2d6989c35c77bf0c62f9)

<comment> rkuykendall-com Except it excludes the css content when you copy it, so it wouldn't really work for that feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think a more accurate description is that this renders HTML as unrendered Markdown.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Also, the word _elegantly_ should be somewhere in there.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it quite makes it to "elegantly" because it's not actually _useful_ markdown. I can't copy it and do anything with it because all the tags disappear. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also ReMarkdown: [http://fvsch.com/code/remarkdown/](http://fvsch.com/code/remarkdown/)

I'm sure there was another one too. I was going to make a WordPress theme with it at the time, but never got around to it.

You can go in the opposite direction with markdown.css too: [http://kevinburke.bitbucket.org/markdowncss/](http://kevinburke.bitbucket.org/markdowncss/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is almost perfectly useless.

I approve.

</comment><comment><USER8> Of course, it doesn't actually reverse the (lossy) Markdown transformation. For example, the source "9." turns into an ordered list that looks like "1." and CSS won't reverse that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any usecases for this?

I was thinking that this could be useful for giving people markdown to copy directly, but css:before and after doesn't get copied.

I'm so gonna use this _somewhere_, just not sure where.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't have any real use cases in mind when I made it, I just wanted to see if it was possible.

In theory you could use it to demonstrate the underlying Markdown for some HTML, but unfortunately I haven't been able to figure out how to make the CSS ::before and ::after content user-selectable[0], so you wouldn't be able to copy it back out to make a simple HTML-to-Markdown converter.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19914349/how-can-i- make-g...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19914349/how-can-i-make- generated-content-selectable)

<comment><USER10> the table stuff doesnt work too well either, understandably. if you actually want to do conversion though, check out reMarked.js [1], disclaimer: mine. it's not too heavy, either.

[1] [https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js](https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not nearly as impressive, but I did this using Angular directives a while back: [http://embed.plnkr.co/zSjqqh/preview](http://embed.plnkr.co/zSjqqh/preview)

This is the jQuery README.md rendered as html, then with a series of angular directives to convert that rendered markdown back to what the source would have looked like.

</comment><comment><USER12> This would actually pretty useful if someone was implementing a Markdown editor using the `contenteditable` HTML attribute. Toggling a class on the editor wrapper element could switch between rendered and non-rendered Markdown. No JS needed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lacks handling of
 and
. For
 prepend (append?) two newlines. For
, suffix two spaces.

</comment><comment><USER14> It goes to show you how well designed markdown is. It's humane markup but machines can still do fancy stuff with this.

<comment><USER15> Hard to beat Org though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Completely useless, you can't even copy and paste

<comment><USER17> Alternatively, you could say it the browser's job to support copy/paste of content inserted with CSS.</comment></comment>


Lap dancers earn more when they are most fertile - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9942043

<comment><USER2> Could it be that the women behave differently when they are most fertile? It would make sense that they would try their hardest to get pregnant at that time of the month.

<comment><USER3> Depending on their circumstances, it could also make sense that they would try hardest not to get pregnant at that time of the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else think the Econ has gone downhill in the last couple of years? It's not just the overly-cheeky photo captions, the bad puns, the annoyingly small vocabulary of the new editor (how many times can you use the word "Schadenfreude [1]"?), the "amazing new energy technology!" ads in the back -- but the actual substance, the subjects it reports on, are devolving into factoids and titillation with a side dish of political snark.

[1] [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+Schadenf...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+Schadenfreude)

<comment><USER5> I do think it has gone downhill a bit since the new editor came on board. But I still think it's the best single news source out there. However science articles that boil humans down to testoserone and estrogen sacks have been their bread and butter for a while. Personally, I don't mind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, what has this to do with "Hacker news"? Do we imply that hackers are more effective when they are horny?

Sorry, but stories like this are better suited for reddit or digg.

<comment><USER7> Many hackers are interested in science generally.

<comment><USER8> ...and there are many places where they can get and discuss information about science. I'm sure many hackers are also interested in xbox360 and Ron Paul, but that doesn't mean they are good fodder for discussion as 'hacker news'.

I understand that you are trying to broaden the purview of YC news, but my personal preference is for a more focused site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like the infamous T-shirt experiment.

<http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/15/4/579>

</comment><comment><USER10> Reddit had the same study a while ago, reported by psychology today [http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-4...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-4435.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> and another piece of the puzzel</comment>


Ask HN: I have an idea to fix the DNS change problem - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm migrating one of my websites to a new IP address and of course I'm running into problem because the change was not planned and DNS takes a long time to update. I have suddenly got an idea how this could be easily solved, so I want to see what you think about it:
A new HTTP response code would be added to mean "Please refresh your DNS cache because this site has moved servers".
When the browser sees this response, it would ask its DNS to update the cached entry with the new address.
Are there any drawbacks to this?
Who can I contact to suggest this addition into HTTP protocol?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> 'Are there any drawbacks to this?'

Yes!

1) DNS already has a mechanism for this. As soon as you know a change might be coming, reduce the TTL for the hostname(s), so that your yet-to-be-decided change is propagated quickly when the time comes. Totally unplanned changes (e.g. I decide on a whim that I need to change the IP addresses for my web site) are rare.

2) The new feature would make DNS dependent on HTTP.

3) The web server has no way of knowing whether your DNS record(s) have changed. So, you'd need to tell it manually, or it would need to be linked to your DNS server, which is probably on a different machine. And, in any case, your web server shouldn't be dependent on your DNS server.

4) The responsibility of HTTP is to transfer pages, not to determine how DNS queries are handled. Your browser could be delegating DNS queries to some lower level system. Let's assume that (1) your web server is using HTTPS, and (2) you're connected to the web via a proxy server. Your proxy server is responsible for DNS, but your browser is meant to interpret the contents returned over HTTPS. How would your browser 'ask its DNS to update the cached entry'? You'd need to add another hack to HTTP, so that the browser could send some special message to the proxy, asking it to update its DNS cache.

5) You're trying to solve a 'problem' in one system (DNS) which covers only one of many use cases (HTTP). DNS is used to resolve hostnames for non-HTTP, and for other things like DKIM/SPF.

</comment><comment><USER3> Alright, I'm going out on a limb to suggest we need an aggressive approach to DNS resolvers. Someone should build a RESOLVBL of resolvers that don't respect RR TTL. I'm certain resolvers will rethink their approach when end users complain.

<comment><USER2> Is this a widespread problem? Is it mainly ISP's DNS servers which don't respect TTLs? Does anyone gain (e.g. by saving bandwidth) by caching DNS entries for longer?

<comment><USER3> It's only a problem when you need to switch IPs urgently. Some browsers also maintain their own cache but it's not as aggressive as resolvers.

Caching (e.g. overriding TTLs) cuts down RU on space, power, hardware, and latency (having to travel all the way down to the root NS for answers). There's definitely incentive in caching stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start here: [http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.network.dns.operations/5019](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.network.dns.operations/5019)

</comment><comment><USER5> If the old web server is going to be up anyways, why not just reverse proxy responses to the new one using nginx for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great idea. In fact, I did this for one of my websites two years ago (using HAProxy) and I completely forgot about it until now.

Thanks.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Search, Sort, Filter Prices from US Hospitals - <AUTHOR> https://www.allhospitalprices.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I work on this search engine which is made to help patients to research prices from various US hospitals. Hospitals are required to publish their price lists online starting this year but it is a real pain going from website to website.

Current version contains 5M+ prices from doznes of hospitals and will be growing.

Planning to addd these things: \- Indication of charge types (procedure, drugs, etc) \- Better filtering \- Export to downloadable CSV

Please share your thoughts and suggestions!</comment>


A better Android emulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.manymo.com <comment><USER3> Dear HN moderators: the original title (about 43 Android emulators within the browser) was far more informative than this rewritten version.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, I clicked on the title expecting some kind of great update to the normal android emulator, with the old title I would not have been mislead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want a fast way to run Android, you can also use a VirtualBox image, it is significantly faster than the emulator in the SDK:

<http://www.buildroid.org/blog/>

<comment><USER6> I've found the official Intel-based emulator images (2.3+ only) plenty fast. Details here[0] but the tl;dr is:

* Open SDK manager, install Intel image for your preferred SDK version and the "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager" from the Extras section

* Find the HAXM installer in SDK/extras and run

* Create Intel-based AVD

[0] <https://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html>

<comment><USER7> Just an FYI -- this killed my Virtual Box install the last time i tried it. Uninstalling HAXM fixed it all, but having Virtual Box was more important than the Intel images, so I left it uninstalled.

<comment><USER8> This issue specifically, and others like it (snapshot management, bugs in the interface to create emulators, such as setting the hw keyboard) really made managing local android emulators a pain for us. We thought we could make the experience better, so we made Manymo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What irks me most about the regular Android emulators and actually also testing on the devices themselves, is that alot of restrictions seems to be off in dev mode. In my instance i was using a jsonp webservice over https. Everything worked aces on the 2.1-2.3 emulators, and a device in dev mode, but when I published the app, turns out that the SSL certs, or rather the ssl trust chain, wasnt trusted in "Retail" mode on Android 2.1 and 2.2.. Why oh why did it work in the emulators and on the devices while developing..

On topic, this looks great!

</comment><comment><USER10> This could be useful for mobile web developers who don't want to install the full Android tools, but both this and the recent VirtualBox based Android system are (for native app developers who have a CPU with VT-x, EM64T, and XD -- basically all modern Intel chips) inferior to just using the Intel-x86 based emulator that has shipped since Android SDK API 10.

Both of these projects would have been extremely awesome to have a couple years ago, though.

<comment><USER11> These projects are still extremely awesome for those of us running older CPUs!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks extremely useful assuming it works. Although I never use the emulator while building Android because it basically does not work on most machines and does not give you any real indication how your code will run on an actual device.

Very curious how they pulled this off.

<comment><USER13> > Although I never use the emulator while building Android because it > basically does not work on most machines and does not give you any real > indication how your code will run on an actual device.

This has not been my experience in the least...

<comment><USER12> you find you get a consistent experience between running code on the emulator and on a device?

Have you tried running your code on any of the OEM releases like HTC sense, Samsung TouchWiz or Moto Blur?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I really need is a way to emulate specific devices.

My Android app crashes on a Droid Razr Maxx right now, when it rotates, and I don't have one to test on, so I have to get crash logs from users.

<comment><USER15> Device Anywhere might be what you want. They connect real phones to their system for you to use, and have a large variety of models (or at least had - <USER2> haven't used them in a couple of years). They're expensive, but worth it for the convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The developers of this are friends of mine so I got to play around with it a little last month.

Though I'm not an Android developer, I can see how useful it would be for testing mobile web sites. You can launch an emulator in many different resolutions and pixel densities to check out your web site/app.

You can also see a video of the product in action at the last MinneDemo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TXiDPlc3Fg>

</comment><comment><USER17> I keep getting the page with the Android-fail-whale image. No idea what is going on... didn't last long this website. Can someone explain how does this work?

<comment><USER18> We are adding servers right now. In the meantime here is a short screencast of an earlier version in use: <http://vimeo.com/48571832>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll be the token Opera guy in the thread and reiterate that they have a mobile simulator as well: Mobile Emulator.

It's annoying that it doesn't come with default iOS device settings, though, but it's a great alternative to running a server to test on.

<comment><USER20> This(manymo) doesn't seem primarily meant to be used for web development, but rather Android native application development. Opera's emulator is designed to emulate a mobile browser, nothing more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Keep getting:

Failed to connect to server (code: 1000, reason: Target closed)

<comment><USER8> yeah, we're getting a bit more traffic than expected.. bringing more servers online shortly.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that's the downside of having something awesome like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is really cool, nice work. That said, many of the problems I've experienced have more to do with weird behavior in the OEM code (i.e. TouchWiz) than core android stuff. It would be beyond awesome if there was a way to launch OEM versions by simply entering the model number of the device.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there any difference between this and having a real device with the same OS version and screen size?

<comment><USER24> In addition to hardware capabilities and responsiveness mentioned by others, the performance data (CPU usage, memory usage, battery usage, etc) of a real device will be vastly different than the emulated version. In addition, emulators typically do not run manufacturer or carrier ROMs, meaning that the behavior on the emulator often differs from the actual device.

For testing initial layouts or on-the-fly development, emulators are fine because they offer instant local access (After the setup, of course, but who cares now that x86 emulators are so fast). For complete testing real devices are a must. That's traditionally been expensive, but there are solutions to that, such as the company I founded, AppThwack, and our competitors like TestDroid. Test locally on emulators, and test periodically on real consumer devices.

There's a reason nearly every development shop has a cupboard full of devices, and it's not because they couldn't figure out how to get a few emulators running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Finally got an emulator running :-D

"Start quickly." - not today, but hopefully in the future?

"Run smoothly." - ehmmm... Nope! Smooth as barbed wire...

"Are lightweight." - perhaps, but that makes little difference if it fails the first two bullet points.

Fantastic idea - had it worked. Let's hope it will with some tweaking :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been putting off porting an iOS app to Android specifically because of my fear of testing on so many devices.

While I'm sad that there are 43 (and counting) possible variations, this looks solid and helpful — I'm much more likely to attempt my port project now.

<comment><USER27> Get a low-end (HTC Legend), a mid-end (HTC Desire / Moto Droid), and a high- end (Samsung Galaxy Nexus or S-II/III) device, and you are good to go. Also get a cheap tablet if you need to support that. Always develop on the lowest end device as a rule, and the optimizations you apply to make it usable on it will make the app super snappy on higher end devices. Choose Android 2.2 as your target platform and you include 96% of Android devices: <http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html>

Always use dp instead of px, use dynamic layouts (like HTML/CSS) instead of absolute ones (like in iOS), use 9-patch or XML drawables wherever you can, don't fight the framework. Use the compatibility library for fragment support and other cool stuff, and use them wherever you can. Be careful about bitmap memory consumption, that's a gotcha on low-memory devices.

If you don't mess around with low-level stuff like NDK or OpenGL you should be good to go on the very most devices. The well-tread Java API paths are not as scary as some blogs want to make you believe. You don't have to own all the 10k devices which exist, because most of them have stock Android installed. For special cases you will receive stacktraces from people's devices in the Play dev console - or you use one of those crashlog services.

<comment><USER4> by moto droid do you mean the original moto droid? if so, i'd think by now the 2+ year old handset would be considered low end

<comment><USER27> Yes, the original one. No, HTC Legends are still around, those are the real low ends, also in terms of display resolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Really irks me there isn't a tool I can download to setup emulators that mimick actual released devices - trying to find the settings and set it up manually is a real PITA.

</comment><comment><USER29> This looks really great. Very clever!

</comment><comment><USER30> Awesome!! Care to share any technical details on how this was done for newbies like me? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER31> Awesome! In my opinion a killer feature would be to add sharing/embedding support.

</comment><comment><USER32> Such a bummer, getting number 1 on HN and can't show your product...

<comment><USER33> I guess it is part of the problem space in this case. The reason they can compete with running the emulator locally is that is it so freaking slow. There are some cases where you can speed it up, like Intel emulator images and if you are lucky hardware OpenGL support, but these don't cover all the cases you often need to test, and many developers don't know about them or don't have systems that can use them anyway. So it being difficult to run the emulator fast is the main point of pain, which is the same thing making it tough for the company to scale in this case. Makes me wonder what they are using themselves to speed things up, if anything. Intel images, x86 branch of Android, ARM servers maybe somehow? Their solution would affect their scaling/server obtaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wish I had this when I was doing Android development last year

</comment><comment><USER35> Couldn't get it to work in Firefox 16.</comment>


Aspiring to a Higher Plane: "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/19/aspiring-to-a-higher-plane/ <comment><USER2> If you can find it, "The Dot and the Line" is another brilliant tale along these (ahem) lines [0]

I've had a look around and cannot find it online, though the excellent animated adaptation is easy to find [1] - well worth picking up the hardcopy as a beautifully designed picture book.

I'd also recommend Norton Juster's other work "The Phantom Tollboth" as being another great math & science inspired kids fairy-tale type book [2]

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Something that surprised me when reading Flatland for the first time was the seemingly high levels of both sexism and classism.

While the classism mostly consisted of the typical oft-repeated jabs that don't really mean anything, the sexism felt much stronger. So much so that I assumed that it was meant to be satire. But is it reflective of the views that were prevalent at the time it was written?

<comment><USER4> Flatland is satire: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland#As_a_social_satire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland#As_a_social_satire)

<comment><USER5> To echo this, it was written primarily as a social satire. The mathematical part was more of a sub plot (but still fun and interesting).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For people who think this universe is a simulation, maybe the simulation is possible because the next universe up has more dimensions. (Maybe the 20+ dimensions some string theorists talk about.) Despite Flatland, you can't really do much in 2D; the connectivity is too limited. 3D is a minimum for life.

Computing would work better in a higher dimensional space. Propagation delay is less of a problem because you can have more things closer to each other. Cooling would be easier with an extra dimension or two into which heat could be radiated.

But if higher dimensional beings want to run a universe simulation, 3D would be enough for entertainment purposes.

<comment><USER7> When you go one level deeper, you realize that there's no difference between a simulation of a universe and a universe.

This is only tangential, but a few months ago I vaporized 50mg of DMT after spending a day studying linear algebra and differential equations. You only ever take back flashes, but I remember seeing this higher-dimensional hypercube where every "face" of the cube was a 3 dimensional space. I came away from that trip feeling that our universe was just one of infinitely many solutions to a higher-dimensional equation. I still haven't decided if that makes any sense or not.

<comment><USER8> > but I remember seeing this higher-dimensional hypercube where every "face" > of the cube was a 3 dimensional space

Cool. Did everything else appear "flat" in comparison?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although not the same article, there was a previous discussion on HN about Flatland a few years back. There's some interesting comments and links, I'll post the link here just in case there's not much traction this time around:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2086425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2086425)

</comment><comment><USER10> Game author Marcus Rowland created a "Flatland RPG" as part of his Forgotten Futures project (a series of games about Scientific Romances: the genre that later became SciFi): [http://www.forgottenfutures.co.uk/flatland_lite.pdf](http://www.forgottenfutures.co.uk/flatland_lite.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> A related book you may find interesting is "Spaceland" by Rudy Rucker - it's set in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boon - a tech executive get's a visit from the 4th dimension. It's a hilarious and modern update to Flatland.

</comment><comment><USER12> As mentioned in the article, there were, not one, but two animated films released based on the book: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland:_The_Movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland:_The_Movie)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland_%282007_film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland_%282007_film%29)

<comment> david-given I have the second one. It's... well, I don't know whether to recommend it or not.

Part of the conceit of the film is that it's continuously interrupted by snarky title cards. The action continues, you can hear the audio, but all you _see_ is the title card. For me, this single thing completely ruined the otherwise excellent film --- they weren't required to understand the story, they didn't add anything to the theme, they just got in the way, every single time. They're painfully, painfully long, too.

If there was a version of the film which was otherwise identical but without the title cards, I'd definitely suggest checking it out. As it is, YMMV.

Hey, it's on Youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfglluny8Z0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfglluny8Z0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember reading this out of curiosity about 3rd grade, in the US about 8-9 years old. I read the sequel right after, enjoying that too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphereland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphereland) It triggered a life long interest in geometry and classical philosophical documents.

</comment><comment><USER14> now is the time to learn about or review your understanding of a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract)</comment>