Ask HN: Website with graph based knowledge management - <AUTHOR> A while ago I saw an online learning resource. Topic, IIRC, something around maths/computer science, maybe machine learning.
The cool thing about it was, that it was organized through a graph: Basically, a visual, more abstract version of wikipedia-like linking. You could see where you are and decide where to go next, along links, to related topics.
Anybody knows such a website? I could not find it anymore. <comment><USER2> I'm guessing you're talking about [https://metacademy.org](https://metacademy.org)

It is awesome indeed: [https://metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/determinant_and_volum...](https://metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/determinant_and_volume#focus=hqigazm2&mode=explore) and the graph browing even works on mobile!

<comment><AUTHOR> yes! great, thanks a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> would you be interested in commenting on a visual knowledgebase like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> sure, if it's about a topic that I have knowledge in. Do you have other examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never seen this before, but sounds really interesting.</comment>


Filing Your Taxes Is an Expensive Time Sink. That's Not an Accident - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/american-tax-returns-dont-need-be-painful/586369/ <comment><USER2> Andrew Yang, who was the 1st declared Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, has a whole policy around the strange aspects of US taxation, including automatic filing and getting a breakdown of where your money went.

>> Instruct the IRS to implement a system whereby any American can opt into a program to have their taxes filed automatically.

>> Instruct the IRS to coordinate with the Treasury to prepare a report on federal spending, and send each taxpayer a rundown of the actual amount of their taxes that went to each major spending area (e.g., domestic programs, foreign aid, military, etc).

>> Increase the budget of the IRS by 50% to $16.2 billion and modernize it with the latest technology. Money spent on the IRS will almost certainly pay for itself many times over via better tax compliance and less wasted time of citizens. Running the country like a business means both taking care of constituents and collecting revenue as seamlessly and efficiently as possible.

[https://www.yang2020.com/policies/filing-income- taxes/](https://www.yang2020.com/policies/filing-income-taxes/)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure many people even think about how possible this is. What are the drawbacks? Aside from funding, what's stopping this from happening?

I can already automatically import most forms from banks/financials/payroll companies into TurboTax. Why not skip the middle man?

<comment><USER4> Many Republicans don't want filing taxes to be easy so that they can continue to use it as an attack on taxes in general.

<comment><USER5> This might sound like one of those "the people I disagree with are evil" kind of exaggerations, but it is not. This is a real position that is fairly common among Republican thought leaders. For example, Ronald Reagan literally said "Taxes should hurt."

The basic logic is that if filing taxes is too easy, people will not have a good grasp on how much the government is asking of them and will accept tax rates that would irritate them in a system with more direct participation. (On the flip side, this seems to assume that the taxes are being used to create a good enough quality of life that people are generally satisfied and not poor, so if that's happening, it might actually be a more realistic perspective than if people focused on the tax rate more.)

<comment><USER6> > The basic logic is that if filing taxes is too easy, people will not have a > good grasp on how much the government is asking of them

This basic idea seem patently ridiculous to me.

I've more-or-less made a career of doing math and managing complicated procedures, yet still, I find the current tax prep process to be such a mind- numbing grind that, by the time we get to the point where I've calculated how much tax I actually owe, I've long since quit caring to calculate what percentage of my income that is. By that point, the only number I care to see is how much I owe or will be refunded, so that I can just be _done_ with the whole mess.

It's hard to imagine that someone who's got a more typical level of comfort with math is going to be any more prepared to do that one extra calculation.

If the GOP really wanted me to be aware of how much tax I'm paying, they'd reduce the whole process to a simple report they send me, with everything already calculated, that has "your calculated income tax in dollars" and "your calculated income tax as a % of net income" listed in big bold print at the very top.

It seems much more parsimonious to me to suppose that the logic is, "If we make income tax a hateful process, people will come to hate income tax."

(Which, incidentally, is a line of reasoning that would play very well to the position of those who want to get rid of progressive taxation. Most other forms of tax we have in the USA are either flat or regressive.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you live in the US and you think your taxes are bad, you haven't seen anything yet. The IRS starts to really make your life miserable once you move out of the country and live as an expat. The reporting requirements (FBAR and FATCA) border on ridiculous. As an example you need to report all your financial accounts, interest on them with no minimums, you have to know the maximum amount in each account over the course of a year, and BTW, if you are a shareholder in a non-public company, that company's statement goes into your tax filing, too. Preparing your tax return becomes a major project that you do once a year, and you really have to pay a specialized company to do it for you, because there are so many pitfalls.

The part that I found most surprising is that in the US there is basically no way for an individual to read the law and follow it. The law is way too complex and murky. As a contrast to that, in most countries that adopted German law principles, it is perfectly normal for a person to go read the law if in doubt.

<comment><USER8> This.

I've spent at least $2000 this year to figure out how to make this work—and I'm going to spend more to actually fill and send the forms off. . .

The additional requirements of the recent tax legislation which make it effectively impossible to own a foreign corporation (as an American living in said foreign country) and retain earnings according to the corporation's "home" country's tax laws is even more ridiculous. The IRS demands 10-20% by fiat disregarding all international tax law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The worst part about taxes is that I never know if I did them correctly since the feedback loop is up to 3 years. Just shoot them off into the ether and cross your fingers you don't get a giant bill next year.

The first time I filed, I had not updated my W4 soon enough after moving and owed NYC like $4k in taxes which came up around 18 months after I filed. The following year the software I was using said I owed around $10k in taxes, which I was pretty sure was wrong, so I went to an accountant and they did it for me and said I owed nothing. Even after all that, there is no way to know who is right until 3 years from now (IRS theoretically doesn't look back more than 3 years for individual returns).

<comment><USER10> Idle NY tax thought -- it's wild that you have to file a NY return just because the company you work for is based there -- seems weird that other states put up with that (not that it takes revenues away, but seems like it forces an additional paperwork/accounting burden on them)

<comment><USER11> you don't have to file a NY return if you didn't live in NY during the tax year.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's true. I've never lived in NY but commuted in from NJ for multiple years and always had to file both states.

<comment><USER13> I don't know if it's true for NY, but many people live in western Wisconsin and commute to St. Paul / Minneapolis in Minnesota, and none of those people are required to file income tax returns in Minnesota. They file only Wisconsin returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's crazy we still don't get a pre-filled out form that you can simply verify and sign. Done. Amend if needed.

Bonus: An option to indicate where ~5% of your taxes goes to.

<comment><USER15> 1\. That's how it's done in France AFAICT. In April/May we get the pre-filled form on our tax site [0,1] and make sure it's ok, then tick a box.

2\. We also have a website for that (though it's probably just a glorified multiplication and graph) [2]

[0] [https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier](https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier)

[1] it looks like [https://www3.impots.gouv.fr/simulateur/calcul_impot/2019/sim...](https://www3.impots.gouv.fr/simulateur/calcul_impot/2019/simplifie/index.htm)

[2] [https://aquoiserventmesimpots.gouv.fr/](https://aquoiserventmesimpots.gouv.fr/)

<comment><USER16> In UK there is not even a box to tick. Vast majority of people don't ever file a tax return themselves, I've recently had a discussion with someone who has worked in the UK for 15 years and he was surprised to hear that tax returns are even a thing - it's so automatic that he has never even thought about it.

<comment><USER15> There are still some things I had to fix, for instance: support payments from my parents, which are tax-deductible for them, and that I have to declare; the fact I got in a PACS [0].

If I moved abroad, I'd be worried some things like that get missed for whatever reason ;)

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

<comment><USER16> Yes, of course there's loads of circumstances that require you to fill a tax return manually. But even then the sections about your employment are filled automatically based on the returns submitted by your employer.

The thing is that if you are a British resident who only works one job and doesn't receive money from any other source, then such person would literally never have to think about their tax return - it will be done fully automatically without any input from them whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Planet Money podcast just had an episode on this topic ("Joe Bankman, professor at Stanford, figured out a way to make filing your taxes easy and painless. Then the tax lobby found out about it.")

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax- hero)

<comment><USER18> A professor figured it out? It's obvious, and what dozens of civilized countries do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The screwed up taxes is a symptom of a dysfunctional government.

The fix is to address the root cause--reducing excessive lobbying that seems to control the government and implementing a direct democracy that puts the government better under the people's control (it's time to replace the electoral college).

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure it as simple as blaming lobbyism or the electoral college. In France and Germany filing taxes is also an insanely painful procedure.

There are massive bureaucratic institutions and processes that need to be changed, huge IT systems to be created and maintained (doesn't the IRS use magnetic tape??) and laws to be adjusted.

Making complex things simple is one of the hardest jobs out there.

<comment><USER21> The above comment by moviuro, who seems to be from France, directly contradicts your claim.

"1\. That's how it's done in France AFAICT. In April/May we get the pre-filled form on our tax site [0,1] and make sure it's ok, then tick a box.

2\. We also have a website for that (though it's probably just a glorified multiplication and graph) [2]

[0] [https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier](https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier)

[1] it looks like [https://www3.impots.gouv.fr/simulateur/calcul_impot/2019/sim...](https://www3.impots.gouv.fr/simulateur/calcul_impot/2019/sim..).

[2] [https://aquoiserventmesimpots.gouv.fr/"](https://aquoiserventmesimpots.gouv.fr/")

<comment><USER20> I'm a German citizen working and living in France, I think I have a pretty good perspective on how hard it is to file taxes in both countries. There is the theory of how to go through the process and then there are the countless small obstacles that make it hard in practice. You don't get a thriving personal tax industry and millions of people complaining (it really is cliché at this point in France) because a trivial web-form takes care of everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This was my first year doing my own Swiss taxes (US citizen in CH). Even though I only know German to an A2 level, the free software provided by the Canton and the instructions on how to fill out the return completely guided me with no problems, even through the additional forms. In addition, as a side effect I have accurate numbers for my income, my interest payments, my wealth, and my debts.

The US side of things has been... not the same experience.

<comment><USER8> I'm in the exact same position as you (first year filing taxes in CH as a US citizen). I filed for an extension because I'm waiting for AHV to be resolved due to some ambiguities in my tax status (employed vs self employed), but I've read the paper form and it's so straightforward. My friends here are so confused when I talk about US taxes and ask questions from that perspective—my questions make no sense because it's just obvious how to do here vs the US where you have to hunt for every tiny little detail.

If you ever want to meet up and compare notes as a US expat in CH, let me know! Email in profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "...and Republicans' long anti-tax crusade."

That seems like an uncharitable characterization of a group that has argued for a simpler tax code with generally fewer loop holes (as opposed to an elaborate tax code that no one can understand, with a pre-filled form that in theory one could double check but in practice few would check).

<comment><USER24> Poor taxpayers spend 200+ dollars to file their taxes. Every single one of my employees goes to H&R block or some tax guy to pay taxes. Almost all of them have 1 job. Most of them 1 or 2 W2s and most don't houses.

A pre-filled form will help every single one them to save money.

And you can still have your pre-filled form verify by an accountant or H&R Block. No one is stopping you from that.

You should listen to the latest Planet Money Podcast - Tax hero. Republican don't support this because having complicated form will make people oppose taxes in general. That is the republican motto.

<comment><USER25> _Poor taxpayers spend 200+ dollars to file their taxes. Every single one of my employees goes to H &R block or some tax guy to pay taxes. Almost all of them have 1 job. Most of them 1 or 2 W2s and most don't houses._

We own a house, two high-tech incomes, and loads of 1099Bs to deal with. IOW, I can't imagine the tax situation of your employees is any more complicated than mine. In previous years, I could whip it out on a Saturday morning. This year, it was an hour of importing forms electronically, if that (umm, thanks, higher standard deduction?).

I'm not trying to take away from your point, I'm still chafed each year that I have to give money to TaxAct (at least they don't lobby for complicated taxes, AFAICT). But taxes aren't _that_ complicated for simple situations. Maybe have an hour brownbag or something on "here's how to enter the control # off a W2 and import it. Import from Fidelity. Sorted."?

<comment><USER26> In my experience, it's less the effort required to do it, and more about the risk of getting it wrong.

There's a lot of domain-specific knowledge that goes into filing your taxes, and it's easy to be afraid that you're gonna mess it up and be on the hook for thousands of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was particularly entertained by the tax forms this year. The 1040 is now only half a page, but there are several other required forms that didn't exist last year.

</comment><comment><USER28> I hate filing taxes so much. I wish we would switch to purely sales tax and corporate tax. I know the arguments against them, but I just don't want to do paper work.

<comment><USER29> It would put a crushing burden on those people who could least withstand it, but as long as you can avoid paperwork....

<comment><USER28> Right, it was a flippant remark meant to express exasperation in one particular thing. Not a well thought out policy proposal.

Although, when you say "a crushing burden on those people who could least withstand it" are you assuming I am suggesting a flat sales tax?

It is possible to have a federal sales tax that has categories, with different percentage scales. So maybe a bag of rice has 0%, pork fried rice from the local Chinese food place has a %5 sales tax, and Lobster risotto from a fancy restaurant has a %50 sales tax.

All I am suggesting is the burden of filing taxes should be pushed to businesses who already have to deal with accountants and lawyers and whatnot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This story is disingenuous. For people with "simple" tax situations (no itemized deductions, etc) the forms are already very simple.

The scenario they paint with chasing down form after form simply does not happen for most people. For most people it's one page.

But the idea that your taxes can be pre-computed by the IRS is fantasy beyond that, unless the tax code is significantly changed.

Sure they know your W2 income and some other standard stuff. How do they know your self-employment or business income? How much you gave to charity? How do they know what unreimbursed expenses you had? How do they know how many kids you have? How do they know your marital status?

I guess most of that could be addressed by just eliminating all deductions and allowances but even at that there are a lot of things they simply cannot possibly know until you, the taxpayer, tell them.

<comment><USER31> > How do they know your self-employment or business income?

If it's 1099 income, they know it for the reason that the 1099 gets filed with the IRS, as well as a copy going to you.

> How do they know how many kids you have?

That doesn't change very often, and there is interaction with the federal government which easily could be, if it isn't already, shared with IRS for the most common reason for changes in the positive direction.

> How do they know your marital status?

Again, that doesn't change frequently, so mostly they have a good basis for it by assuming whatever it was he previous year.(For this and the preceding, and a lot of similar status issues, it would be easy enough to move the data collection to a pre-filed form—for regular workers you could collect it, or changes to it, as part of the W-4—instead of the equivalent of the current retrospective tax return, expanding the accuracy of precomputed taxes and reducing the need for supplemental retrospective filing.

But, yeah, you'll probably always need an option for at least supplemental filing for information that differs from information the IRS has from other sources or is outside of it.

<comment><USER32> > If it's 1099 income, they know it for the reason that the 1099 gets filed > with the IRS, as well as a copy going to you.

1099s have the wrong cost basis information for ESPP and vested RSU shares, so the IRS does not know what the correct tax is when those are involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Taxes are extracted during payroll and that's a very easy process for individuals. The tax return is just an adjustment. It's an annoying process to get a direct deposit for at least as many people as it is an annoying process to send a check.

If I were a strategist in charge in making taxes hurt, I would try to help people understand how much bigger their paychecks could be. Please read this comment as politically neutral.

<comment><USER34> I look at it, and my monthly income tax is as much as my rent. It hurts :(

<comment><USER35> You probably know this, but it is possible to set things up so that zero taxes are taken out of your paycheck. Now, come April 15th, you will owe those taxes, but if you have an idea or know what that amount will be (in theory, you should be able to know it exactly), then...

...you can elect to not take those taxes out, and instead via your bank or employer have that percentage of your check put into a savings account of some sort. Then you can let that money sit and accrue interest (and laugh at the small return), or use it to invest (which has a greater risk, because if you invest wrong, now you've lost that money and you still need to pay it back at the end of the tax year).

If this sounds interesting to you, then (unless you already have the experience) I would look into some form of small time investing, or other financial instruments for wealth accumulation from which you can still withdraw an amount at the time you need to pay your taxes.

Assuming you can find something with a decent return over a year's period. Which is probably the most difficult part of it all.

<comment><USER36> This is bad advice. The IRS will fine you if you adjust your withholding to be significantly less than the tax owed. You can't just hold onto the money until April 15.

The best strategy for withholding that conforms to the law is to use the IRS online withholding calculator to set your exemptions and aim for a payment/refund of around $0

<comment><USER37> Yeah, you have to pay at least quarterly. Annually won't cut it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Filing taxes is a complicated process. Not showing where the tax money is spent is a simple process -- they just don't tell you.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's painful here in Canada, too. I read passages like this about civilized countries, also heavily socialized like my country, and am envious:

> "Netherlands, the procedure is simple ... Dutch citizens can file their > taxes in minutes ... in Sweden, 72 percent of taxpayers say filing taxes is > easy"

I enjoy what I receive from paying my taxes. Please make it easier.

<comment><USER40> If you use software such as ufile, it is pretty easy in Canada.

<comment><USER39> Thanks. I generally use an accountant because with some investments and side businesses I am (overly?) concerned about making an error. I'm considering SimpleTax this year.[0] No affiliation but I'm a sucker for a scrappy startup.

[0] [https://simpletax.ca](https://simpletax.ca)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's cheaper to offer a 10% gift voucher than a 10% discount.

Where I live, most people approve a pre-filled statement. This boosts tax revenue, because people don't think twice about deductions that are not pre- filled.

It's more convenient not to do your own math, if you trust the actor who does the math for you.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just one more tax on the poor

edit: 'tax', I am not being literal

<comment><USER43> If the US went to a flat tax, would the "poor" still be taxed unfairly?

<comment><USER44> Yes. Fair doesn't necessarily mean equal. A 10% tax could eat up literally all the disposable income of someone who is barely scraping by, but is hardly noticed by a person who is bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

<comment><USER45> In a fair society, it would become more and more challenging to move up the economic ladder as you reach higher levels.

In our society, life gets easier as you move up. Beyond a certain threshold, you can set up a self-maintaining rent seeking empire and stop working entirely, while your wealth accumulation continues to accelerate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there any reason we don't require the government to create software that largely does the taxes for us? They have the W2s, etc. and it seems like they could fill most of the forms out. We'd just need to set the deductions.

<comment><USER47> Tax prep companies lobby strongly against it. See [https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be- fre...](https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-free-simple- hr-block-intuit-lobbying-against-it)

The argument they try to make is that the government could take advantage of its citizens. As in, it wouldn't be in their interest to reduce our taxes as much as possible.

<comment><USER37> > it wouldn't be in their interest to reduce our taxes as much as possible

The thing is,that's the exact reason most private tax preparers say not to us H&R block. They only take the most conservative deductions, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Here in NZ most people do not need to file - the tax system is deliberately simple, there are essentially no deductions/etc.

Most people who have a single regular income will find that their employer has paid the exact correct amount of PAYE on their behalf, people who have multiple employers may receive a tax refund, they can file for it by filling out a 2 page online return (I think this year the IRD will start doing this for you, you'll just get a cheque in the mail)

As an employer filing monthly PAYE is equally trivial, it can be done with 1 line in a spreadsheet - I spend 30 minutes a month paying bills/taxes/etc for my company

</comment><comment><USER49> A fair tax system would be one where you are sent a bill every month and you allocate your money as you want it to be soent. Some baseline auto-allocation should be a part of this. Perhaps you control 75% and the rest is automatic. No tax filings and the IRS is reduced rather than grown into a larger monster.

People don't revolt about taxation because they never see the money. If people had to pay the bill themselves every month there would be riots in every city within a year or less.

<comment><USER50> Monthly? Crazy talk. Once a year is plenty difficult and painful enough. (If you're like me and got involved with bitcoins and shitcoins)

<comment><USER49> I agree with you. My point is that people need to wake up and understand just how much they are giving up and what for. If they had to pay it as a monthly bill they would be compelled to question it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Well, unless you're poor, at least you likely don't have to worry about being audited. The IRS is too busy auditing the poor and minorities to worry about anyone else.

[https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/3/18292741/irs- tax...](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/3/18292741/irs-tax-audit- eitc-black-belt)

I really wish, as a country, we could stop beating up on the poor.

<comment><USER52> I'm not saying that conclusion is incorrect, but I'm not convinced by the article's preemptive rebuttal to the population heatmap counterargument. To its credit the article mentions it:

 _> The sociologist Kieran Healy has joked that most data visualization maps of the US show one of two things: population density or the percentage of the population that's black. This is decidedly one of the latter maps, with the notable additions of heavily Latino counties in southern Texas and Indian reservations in South Dakota and Montana._

However...statistics are pernicious. This is an extraordinary accusation, and before I accept it as true I'd like to see more due diligence to ensure there isn't (for example) a stray, superfluous correlation between population density and Hispanic/Black demographics at play here.

With that aside, this looks like something that should definitely be investigated more thoroughly. Even if this is ultimately a side effect of minority groups being correlated with greater population density (and I don't know if that's true, to be clear), the ultimate consequence looks pretty negative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've long wondered why the government doesn't do the calculation first, then you have the right to appeal if you want a change. If they have the data to check the calculations you make, they have the data to do the calculation.

I am deeply disappointed in the gratuitous attack on Republicans at the bottom of the article. Low for even the Atlantic, it shows this is _not_ an unbiased source but rather a politically biased one.

</comment><comment><USER54> Filing your taxes is an expensive time sink if you're wealthy with a lot of assets. I'm not, and it takes me about ten minutes to file mine on the free website. Fill in my W-2, answer about ten questions, hit the "File" button, done.

</comment><comment><USER55> the article uses the netherlands as an example of how its supposed to be done. the problem in the netherlands is that there are some things you are legally entitled to, but that aren't on your tax app. like 'averaging' in case of varying income. Dutch tax law is not so simple as implied. also i'm supposed to be paying wealth tax over the part of the property i'm not using as my own living space (i rent out part of it). right now it is impossible to do this. saves me a bit but it could land me in trouble as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> Many countries have more or less fully automated tax-systems. They are not time sinks, and that is by design.

I'm happy with the local "IRS" using the newest technology to save me time and the country money.

</comment><comment><USER57> Tax prep lobbying at work. I'd love to know how much H&R and TurboTax spend on keeping things as is.

<comment><USER58> A couple million dollars a year [1]. It's always interesting to me how relatively little money it takes to make life objectively worse for everyone else in the country while making a small number of people richer. For the cost of a nice house or a low-budget indie film you can make sure taxes are difficult to file for everyone. Of course there's more to the influence these companies have than the dollar value they spend per year but still, it ain't that much money.

[1] [https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be- fre...](https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-free-simple- hr-block-intuit-lobbying-against-it)

<comment><USER59> That makes me wonder if there could be a model of some sort of "People's Lobby" where one could set up a fund that individuals could contribute to in order to lobby for/against something.

Probably more complicated than that and corporations would respond in kind. But it does seem like giving citizens the ability to compete in the lobbying space only makes sense.

<comment><USER29> Isn't that more or less what donor-funded political organizations like the ACLU and the NRA do?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We Have Given People Amyloid Disease - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/12/17/we-have-given-people-amyloid-disease <comment><USER2> As an aside, the author, Derek Lowe, is a great writer. If you haven't done so, check out his "Things I won't work with" series on the same blog. [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things- i-wont-work-with)

It is very informative and funny.

<comment><USER3> His blog is great for general "this is what's going on in chemistry and pharmacology" news too - it's not just things he won't work with! Admittedly, I really wish he'd do more articles in that series, because they were absolutely hilarious.

<comment><USER4> It must mean that everything left is safe...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> New research shows amyloids may not be the cause of Alzheimers [1].

[1][https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/dec-8-2018-why-are-users- tak...](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/dec-8-2018-why-are-users-taking- fentanyl-making-stuff-with-moon-dust-an-app-to-detect-anemia-and- more-1.4935099/have-researchers-been-wrong-about-alzheimer-s-a-new-theory- challenges-the-old-story-1.4935121)

<comment><USER6> *ultimate cause

They definitely can cause it as shown in multiple inoculation experiments unless there is some other kind of contamination happening - which is unlikely. Their presence in high enough numbers also starts the runaway process.

But those misfolded proteins do not start making themselves on their own...

And if the cascade is indeed immune related then stopping progression should be potentially as easy as targeted immune suppression combined with amyloid treatments. (Not easy at all but easier than doing it outside the brain.)

And obviously getting the cause too if possible. So far, few successes in treating, say, later stage Lyme disease...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The comments to this article are worth a read too.

<comment><USER8> I got smarter reading those comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Nicest" Theory I've heard recently (think from a Peter Attia talk). That in almost all cases of Alzheimer's there is a broken/reduced glucose-brain- mechanism (Hypo-glucose-metabolism) in the brain, that's why there are a good amount of ppl showing improvement on Keto'based diets. Since the brain can't get enough energy from the normal glucose pathways it has less energy to help clear out plague(tau) and other debris.

</comment><comment><USER10> The link between HGH and beta-amyloid is new to me, and makes me wonder how many former NFL players now suffering CTE may be affected by that as well as brain trauma.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ugh, god damn it. This is bad news for reasons beyond medical intervention.

Consider the premise of gangrene or any scenario involving necrotized flesh in contact with living flesh. If an infectious proteinaceous agent gets beyond protective barriers, whether via artificial or natural means, with sufficient dose or load, you'll get pathology. Which is to say, whether in a clinical experimental setting or not, this can happen to organisms.</comment>


Like Instapaper, but for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://api.thequeue.org/v1/ <comment><USER2> I tested a lot of these services and libraries a while ago as part of developing a product that required extracting article text and metadata from a URL.

The best service, and it won by some margin, was Diffbot (www.diffbot.com). I ran comparisons between approx 20 different services and libraries and it won by some margin. It uses machine learning rather than regular expressions or per-site filters, and the engine has been extensively trained (I threw a lot of edge cases at it, which improved it). There seem to be a lot of similar services that do well with common cases but completely fall apart when applied broadly.

So to the author of this service - what features or examples do you have that distinguish your implementation from others? What is the technique being used here?

<comment><AUTHOR> I set out to build my own interpretation and that's what I did. It does have an automatic extraction pattern, but also uses per side rules, if available. I'd say the main distinguishing factor is the price point: free.

<comment><USER3> Which if you want people to use it with confidence probably isn't a selling point:

<http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I cannot, in good conscience, charge for just scraped content. I mentioned it before, but once I complete testing, I'll release the full source on GitHub

<comment><USER4> I used to work for an online editorial in Spain, which did exactly that: charge for scraped content. You can't imagine how many customers there are for this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks nice, we should talk, I run a service that does the same (and more): <http://www.feedsapi.com> , where are you based in Switzerland, I was in Bienne a couple of months ago and based in Germany. I will drop you a mail shortly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Any chance you can expand this as a "real" service, i.e. one with a guaranteed service level for a monthly fee?

I would love to use this in an iPhone app I am building, but I am obviously wary as it may disappear/go offline at any point.

I would gladly pay a monthly subscription to use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using it in <http://readapp.net> & my upcoming HN News App, so it isn't schedule to disappear any time soon. Send me an email, so we can discuss this further, if you'd like to.

<comment><USER7> Interesting service. You've got several typos and some awkward phrasing in the text under <http://readapp.net/pub.html> though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will rewrite this today

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What text extractor engine are you using?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm building this on top of a PHP port of readability.

<comment><USER9> Are you using this port <http://code.fivefilters.org/p/php-readability/> ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried this on <https://www.xkcd.com/386/> , but [http://api.thequeue.org/v1/clear?url=https://www.xkcd.com/38...](http://api.thequeue.org/v1/clear?url=https://www.xkcd.com/386/) just extracted the content disclaimer and Creative Commons license notice at the bottom of the page: "Warning: this comic contains [...] This work is licensed under [...]".

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be all fixed now, please let me know if it works for you.

<comment><USER10> Somewhat better now, but it still grabs a lot of the boilerplate too.

(Also, out of curiosity, what did you change to fix it?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I added a set of rules for this page. Unfortunately the DOM isn't easily broken down, thus the extra clutter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sweet. We should talk. I run a similar project at <http://www.rtcool.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks. You should avoid underlined text for non-links, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be really great if, for shortened links, it also provided the final url

<comment><AUTHOR> Try now

<comment><USER13> Great stuff, thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is great. I made a personal periodical for myself using readability and it worked, but was a pain in the ass. This is exactly what I should've built first.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks a lot. It needs to improve a bit I guess but a great beginning, always wanted such an API.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just what ive been looking for! Will definitively use it sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER17> You might want to stop it from opening local files.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please elaborate?

<comment><USER18> Probably they're talking about the implication of errors such as in the result of [http://api.thequeue.org/v1/clear?url=http://news.ycombinator...](http://api.thequeue.org/v1/clear?url=http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646627):

        Warning: file_put_contents(db/aHR0cDovL25ld3MueWNvbWJpbmF0b3IuY29tL2l0ZW0/aWQ9MzY0NjYyNw==.clr) [function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/mackh_vps/api.thequeue.org/v1/clear.php on line 27

        Warning: file_get_contents(db/aHR0cDovL25ld3MueWNvbWJpbmF0b3IuY29tL2l0ZW0/aWQ9MzY0NjYyNw==.clr) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/mackh_vps/api.thequeue.org/v1/clear.php on line 31

        Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/mackh_vps/api.thequeue.org/v1/clear.php:27) in /home/mackh_vps/api.thequeue.org/v1/clear.php on line 55
        aHR0cDovL25ld3MueWNvbWJpbmF0b3IuY29tL2l0ZW0/aWQ9MzY0NjYyNw==Invalid URL

Also, maybe turn off display_errors and turn on log_errors in your php.ini.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the ? character was causing issues

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks man, you quite likely made my day!

</comment><comment><USER20> any chance you'll add JSON support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Try adding &format=json and let me know if you run into any bugs

<comment><USER21> How's about sum Accept headers up in there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you point me in the right direction?

<comment><USER22> Accept: application/json

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently using header('Content-type: application/json'); Source: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/267546/correct-http- heade...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/267546/correct-http-header-for- json-file)

<comment><USER23> I think they want it so that if they send an Accept header in the _request_ that asks for json, you reply with json, instead of using a query parameter to specify the format.

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTTP/Content_negotiation> has more details about the accept header and its use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> too awesome! I like it and it couldn't have come at a better time. Made my day as well :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Very cool. I could totally use it in a future iPhone app. Pinterest fever alert! :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Hey thanks for using my post as an example! ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm glad there is JSON support. Does anyone else think XML should die a painful death?

</comment><comment><USER28> Very cool, good work :D</comment>


What beautiful HTML looks like - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/examples/CleanCode/Beautiful-HTML.png <comment><USER2> Discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932976></comment>


Sydney couple launch 'Google for fashion' startup - theurge.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/sydney-couple-launch-google-for-fashion-startup-20191023-p533a6.html <comment><USER2> The Urge makes it so easy to browse all your favourite brands in 1 browser screen!!! You no longer need to have 10 tabs open to try find the best deal!

It really takes online shopping to the next level!

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not just use google?

<comment><AUTHOR> @bgdkbtv - After spending 5 years in the industry, watching how people shop, Google does not solve the painpoint when you are trying to really hunt down a specific item or style of clothing.

This becomes clear when you look at some of the ways shoppers go about finding the items they are looking for. A great example is the FindFashion or the FemaleFashionAdvice Reddits:

They have over 1m users who are actively looking, discussing or trying to hunt down a piece of clothing.

Google images is currently the next best thing, but this contains a whole load of junk too.

What we are doing at [https://theurge.com](https://theurge.com) is curating, on a very broad scale, the best brands and stores from around.

Disclaimer: I am the founder and therefore, might be biased :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great product</comment>


New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/38722872

<comment><USER2> How is this any more "Big Brother" than hiring people with clipboards to count footfall?</comment>


So what exactly is chat.meatspac.es? - <AUTHOR> http://ednapiranha.com/2013/chat-meatspaces/

<comment><USER2> It's the greatest place on ear^H^H^H the internet.</comment>


Enzyme behind cancer spread found - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7813072.stm <comment><USER2> The NHS choices site gives a good write-up of this although they skim over a couple of points.

[http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/03March/Pages/Studyfindscancersp...](http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/03March/Pages/Studyfindscancerspreadenzyme.aspx)

One concern I have is that the primary tumor is weakened by the low LOX expression and it is this, rather than its ability to prime remote sites for metastasis, which leads to reduced metastasis. Although this may be partially the case they also inject conditioned media into mice and show that media from wild type tumor cells recruits CD11b+ cells to the lungs consistent with priming sites for metastasis. Media from tumor cells in which LOX expression has been down-regulated or wild-type media with an anti-LOX antibody did not have this effect. They also found cell recruitment with purified LOX although their results suggest there is something else in conditioned media which can increase this effect.

I would like to see them repeat this with tumor cells in which the LOX gene can be turned off once the tumor is established but overall I felt this was a strong piece of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "metastasis ... is known to be responsible for 90% of cancer-related > deaths."

It's important not to misinterpret that fact and conclude that preventing metastasis will reduce cancer deaths by 90%.

</comment><comment><USER2> This story may relate to the following article: [http://www.cell.com/cancer- cell/retrieve/pii/S15356108080037...](http://www.cell.com/cancer- cell/retrieve/pii/S1535610808003784)

Sadly it isn't freely available.

<comment><USER4> Let me know if you'd like a pdf of this (see email).

<comment><USER5> If pg doesn't delete your comment, isn't he guilty of the same thing as The Pirate Bay are being charged with? (actually I guess he is protected in the US unless he gets a DMCA notice?)

<comment><USER6> Most scientists really don't care about the copyright on their journal papers being violated. They would prefer them to be read as widely as possible. It's only the journal publishers that try and protect the content. Sometimes you can find papers under journal firewalls on the authors' academic websites.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Talpiot -- elite Israel Defense Forces school feeds startups - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpiot_program <comment><AUTHOR> BlockQuote:

JERUSALEM -- After graduating from high school in 1993, Arik Czerniak entered a secretive Israeli military program called Talpiot. The country's most selective institution, it accepts 50 students a year and trains them in physics, computers and other sciences. Its mission is to create innovative, tech-savvy leaders capable of transforming Israel's military.

Upon graduating from the nine-year program, Mr. Czerniak took a different route: He helped launch Metacafe Inc., an online company that lets users post short videos, such as a clip of an acrobatic squirrel and one of a bikini-clad woman making a snow-angel. Now 32 years old, Mr. ...

EndBlockQuote

There is a great article on Talpiot in today's WSJ. If you are a subscriber you can read further at [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118368825920758806.html?mod=...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118368825920758806.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone) If you are running a startup you really should be reading WSJ, it's a great resource. Either way, a free version of this article will probably show up at one of WSJ properties soon enough.

Note, that the college + 6 year of service is not an exception in Israel, like the article implies. You can enlist before college and serve shorter period as a private, or you can signup, go to college and then serve for 6 years as an officer.

The recipe seems to select the 50 most promicing freshmen in the country. Train them hard (in existing university), have them serve the country, let them grow and then watch the GDP grow.</comment>


NASA didn't catch an error in the ISS data until a kid pointed it out - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/940971/a-17-year-old-student-spotted-an-error-in-nasas-international-space-station-data/ <comment><USER2> While the error is fairly mundane to spot (still good on that kid for even looking at the data!), this story is a perfect example of the power of crowd- sourcing big data analysis.

Imagine for instance if all states/govs published most public data and people could just spot and report errors... Or if most companies let non-sensitive data be read by most employees. Free cognitive debugging, is what it is. This should be automated eventually but _access_ to the data is critical.</comment>


Xbox Modding Lawsuit Dismissed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/crippen-dismissed/

<comment><USER2> In part because losing the case would be worse for the future. Ars Technica had a good writeup on the judge's frustrations. [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/news/2010/12/judge-in-xbo...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/news/2010/12/judge-in-xbox-modding-trial-berates-prosecution-halts- trial.ars)

</comment><comment><USER3> Standard police / prosecutor procedure: a witness up and "remembers" a damning detail immediately before trial. This isn't disclosed to the defense. The fact that the prosecutor felt comfortable acting this way even after the previous shitshow he put on is simply amazing, and I think goes to how far they're willing to break the law.</comment>


The broken promise of static typing - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/danlebrero/the-broken-promise-of-static-typing <comment><USER2> An interesting idea, but note that the "bug density" seems to skyrocket as the projects are restricted to having more "stars", suggesting that bug density of a language (as measured by this post) is correlated to people actually caring about the project.

It's possible that the association exists here, but it would be better to see a scatterplot of various metrics (stars/watchers/forks/activity metrics) against "bug density" with languages plotted in different colors. It wouldn't surprise me if the 'no one gives a shit about your toy system' factor is higher than the 'which language you chose' factor.

<comment><USER3> Aye. Even ignoring per-project issues, there are so many compounding factors in these language shootouts as well - although I _would_ be interested in seeing one comparing, say, "comparable" JavaScript vs TypeScript projects. But it's hard to nail down all the compounding factors.

Give me a static typing system that requires no effort on my part (e.g. is entirely inferred, negligible build time penalties, etc.) and has zero false positives (e.g. every type error reported by it is an actual bug to fix) and you'll have a _very_ hard time convincing me this could be anything but a good thing, even on the most TDD driven of projects. It's basically a free lunch.

The question then, is not if static typing conceptually is a good thing, but _which_ static typing systems (if any) make satisfactory tradeoffs - and thus are more beneficial than not.

With the rise of larger codebases and hard to exhaustively test things like multithreaded, multiprocess, and multinode code, I only find myself moving more and more towards static analysis (including static typing) _on top of_ dynamic approaches (not just TDD, but various assertions, telemetry, logging, fuzzing, chaos monkeys, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure there are a few problems with this analysis that people smarter than I can point out but one thing that does come to mind is the age of a repository. I'm fairly confident that most of the highly starred Java and C++ repositories are much older than the ones for other languages. I'm not sure if the graphs took age into account but if they didn't, they should. A library that's been around for 10 years will likely have more than one that's been around for 1 years so it's not really a fair comparison.

<comment><USER5> This is a good point. Maybe measuring bugs/year instead of bug count total would work better.

Of course, what you want is all your bugs to be discovered quickly. It'd be interesting to see the bug/year count across all projects for each language, too. I suspect dynamic languages are prone to "coping" with bugs for longer, until a broken edge case is discovered.

<comment><USER6> I found myself wondering whether the paranoid mindset that finds static typing reassuring is more likely to realize when code doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a great idea for an analysis, but I can't see ANY patterns in the data.

I thought the expressiveness of the language might be a factor. A line of Haskell does more than a line of Java, so it there is more room for bugs. Clearly not.

I thought the age of the language might a factor. We would hope that language designers learn from what has gone before, and make better languages. But Erlang, one of the oldest in the sample, is also one of the least bug-prone.

The one that really shocked me is Ruby vs Python. The two are similar in so many ways, and on the points where they differ, I would have expected that Python's "one way to do it" philosophy would have made it less bug-prone. That's clearly not how it works.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a click-bait headline coupled with a terrible analysis.

I don't even know what "bug density" is because the author doesn't define it, but I assume it is some count of bugs divided by lines of code. It doesn't seem like the author tried to normalize or control for any factor, including basic ones like the age of the project.

I'm not sure what a sound approach to answering this question is—I think this is a topic worthy of academic study—but this is definitely a low-quality analysis.

<comment><USER9> The author defined it after responding to comments--he says it's bugs per repo. So, a repo with 10 lines of code and 1 bug is, according to him, less buggy than a repo with 100 lines of code and 2 bugs. Also, note that projects in dynamically-typed languages tend to be smaller since people tend to switch over to static types for larger projects. So this 'analysis' is pretty much designed to 'find' that dynamically-typed language projects are less buggy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMHO the promise of static typing is about having more structure in your code that can help you with understanding of the code and also help to figure out more patterns in your code to refactor and reduce complexity.

</comment><comment><USER11> An important feature of Erlang is single assignment. This is something that I try to enforce in all the languages that I use (VB.Net, VBA, C#, Java, Javascript) and it definitely reduces the bug count in my code. Unfortunately the two languages I use most, C# and VB.Net, do not have a way of declaring a local variable so as to enforce single assignment so I have to inspect the code. Final in Java and const in JS save me a lot of grief.</comment>


Ask HN: List of generic services required by most websites - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to compile a list of the generic services which are required by most of the websites but are not included as part of the most common frameworks. Some the examples that I came up with are -<p>- Website Analytics<p>- Logs Processing<p>- Business Intelligence<p>- Extracting data from third parties<p>- Exposing data to third parties<p>- Security alerts<p>- Website error alerts<p>- Comments system for getting user feedback<p>Please let me know what you have come across as essential services that you think is a must for website but was not readily or freely available. <comment><USER3> This is not new stuff, just your list in a more readable format:

      - website analytics
      - logs processing
      - business intelligence
      - extracting data from third parties
      - exposing data to third parties
      - security alerts
      - website error alerts
      - comments system for getting user feedback

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, thanks. I have changed the main text also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depending on your definition of "most frameworks"

      - Ad/monetization schemes
      - Performance/health monitoring
      - Deployment tools
      - Source control tools
      - Content management
      - Configuration management
      - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER5> A/B testing software.</comment>


Jeff Bezos asks Twitter for philanthropy ideas that can help 'right now' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15811594/amazon-ceo-asks-twitter-philanthropy-charity-ideas <comment><USER2> I tweeted that he should run for office: either a seat in the House of Reps or the Senate; if what Washington needed was a billionaire non-politician to fix things how about a legitimate billionaire (not a faux one with his name on buildings) who isn't insane?

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, Jeff, you could start by paying off my mortgage, my daughters' education, my wife's car loan, and buying me a 20' conex and 14 acres in Fiji.</comment>


Most Exclusive Website - <AUTHOR> http://mostexclusivewebsite.com <comment><USER2> Surprising to see such a contrived marketing gimmick working on so many people. Actually, maybe it's not that surprising...

For those who want to see what's behind the curtain, here's your spoiler: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=11&v=j0FF5geWW_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=11&v=j0FF5geWW_E)

<comment><USER3> Wanna bet the author will be calling it a "social experiment"?

<comment><USER2> If not that, then something equally as groan-inducing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04282006](http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04282006)

</comment><comment><USER5> They should add bitcoin bidding in the queue. If it starts from zero, maybe somebody for some reason wants to skip thousands of people for 0.1mBTC (e.g. to advertise something I guess)

</comment><comment><USER6> > 'Granting permission simply confirms if you are a verified user _and how > many followers you have_.'

Does it even make sense?

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been in line for 24 hours and still have tens of thousands of people in front of me...

<comment><USER8> If a single visitor takes 1 minute, then it can serve (60 * 24) = 1440 visitors per day. 10000 visitors take a bit less than a week, enjoy!</comment></comment>


A new, more visual way to view your Promotions tab - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-new-more-visual-way-to-view-your.html

<comment><USER2> I think this hints at the future of "electronic mail".

Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all of them in a single list without distinction.

Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").

<comment><USER3> More cynically, it's also a great way to get people to tolerate high-value google ads in their inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I loved Gmail when it was a kick-ass email client in the browser. I was okay with the labels, even though their IMAP implementation was dubious. I was kind of meh about their ham filter, since I usually go for inbox zero.

Anyway, I left gmail a while ago, and really haven't looked back. It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. More like the kind of value-added services we see popping up and dying everywhere on the web, and less like the basic infrastructure kind of thing it started out as.

<comment><USER5> What did you move to?

<comment><USER4> Mostly native clients. And a provider that hosts in the same country I live in (Germany), that values my privacy, and uses green energy.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand why people don't use native clients more.

Every time I say I use Thunderbird people look to me like I eat soup with a fork or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They moved newsletters, promotions and other commercial email into Promotions and now they're reformatting the parsable ones into ads.

From an email marketing perspective, I'm torn. I can definitely put out offers like this if that's what Google makes me do it. They'll probably be pretty visible too! Maybe I'll sell more. Unfortunately, we'll have to figure out other ways to communicate with people when we're not selling them something. (which is almost all the time)

The cynic in me thinks this is just a prelude to charging me to email my gmail customers, though. In line with Facebook's paid promotion features. Hope not. That would be dirty pool for an open protocol like email...

edit: I a word.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would you please leave my email alone. there are already 1000 and 1 distractions in my life over the internet.

by the way what is the price tag of Gmail. If I ever get rich I would buy it and let it be what it is. an email service.

<comment><USER9> This is an opt-in thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature.

[1] [http://www.altomail.com](http://www.altomail.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> The promotion tab does not work for me. A lot of my emails are miscategorized into it. E.g. monitoring emails.

A flexible tab system would be really great. The Google machine learning approach does not work for me.

Am I the only that experience this issues?

<comment><USER12> You can drag messages from one tab to another. It will ask you if you want to put all messages from that sender into that category in the future.

<comment><USER11> Yes. It's a usability nightmare. I can't do it for all messages at once..., if I scroll down the tab is gone... hell I can't even move messages to the Inbox.. only labels and other tabs are possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up another 30px of vertical screen real estate.

I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads. (Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under "Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.

<comment><USER14> A lot of people don't want to spend the time to set up filters. Not everyone who uses GMail is a HN user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since their primary stream of revenue is advertising, they want to get more eyeballs on the promotional emails, most of which are ads.

<comment><USER16> My promotions tab is 3rd party emails. It will be interesting to see how this looks, will they make thumbnails of promotion emails or pick an image? How will this affect statistics for folk at Mailchimp et al? what about the little guy who sends a couple of hundred promotions out via a Mailchimp? Will their 'open' stats be skewed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> STOP MESSING WITH WEB MAIL.

I have to get OwnCloud running on the server I already rent for an inane IRC bot.

</comment><comment><USER18> My visits to the promotions tab has been reduced to 0-1 time a month since their introduction. I guess they need to try something to get those visits back?

<comment> k-mcgrady Why would Google want to get those visits back? Things in the promotions tab are essentially competing against Google's own ads in Gmail so it probably benefits Google that you don't look at them.

<comment><USER19> Weren't they inserting ads in the promotions tab that look like regular e-mails?

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses- gmails...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-gmails- promotions-inbox-to-promote-a-new-kind-of-ad)

The plan seems kind of simple here:

\- Make the promotions tab nicer.

\- More eyeballs for placed advertisements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Okay, so how do the ones that are just text appear, I wonder? (Like my newsletters, for users who've not yet moved them back to their Inbox.)</comment>


Passion has a funny way of trumping logic - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkBOI4lNfYs

<comment><AUTHOR> "Just because they are the strong, doesn't mean they can't get their a55es kicked" :)</comment>


Paid pet sitting in homes is illegal in NY. That's news to some sitters - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/nyregion/dogsitting-new-york-illegal.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=https://m.facebook.com/ <comment><USER2> The babysitter analogy is extremely powerful. I, for one, hope a middle line is found</comment>


Sucking at Retina - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/posts/retina/ <comment><USER2> "And yet, the internet is still having a hard time adopting. Startups slave for months meticulously designing their new marketing site and are completely oblivious that, to people on a Retina display, it looks like a jumbled pixelated mess."

Or maybe they don't care enough about a tiny fraction of their market to create assets at dramatically higher resolution just to prevent customers from feeling a slight amount of buyer's remorse when they look at their display with a magnifying glass?

Maybe they'd rather have pages load faster for all their customers, instead of serving up needlessly huge image assets to every user? It's not like the WHATWG and W3C have solved this problem yet, they're still bickering over whatever the latest solution is (I don't even know whose fault that is at this point, what a mess)

I still find it incredibly hilarious that owners of Retina macs bitch at content creators because their content looks 'pixelated' when Apple is still too lazy to even run a bilinear filter when upscaling the framebuffer. What is this, 1993? Windows has been able to do this since desktop composition was introduced in Vista.

<comment><USER3> This isn't just for those people running Retina MacBook Pros. iPhone 4 and up, iPad 3 and up and certain Android devices would benefit from Retina assets.

It's not a tiny fraction of the market.

<comment><USER2> Are you honestly suggesting that it's worth doubling the size of all your assets over the wire, making pages load even slower on mobile, just to make them look high-DPI for people on retina devices?

Again, if it were easy to feature-detect reliably and only serve the bigger assets up to people on retina devices, I might agree with you.

I've got a high-DPI device and I prefer fast-loading pages every day. If I want things to look incredibly crisp I'll zoom out. Text still looks great!

<comment><USER4> Loading a page with normal assets and then replacing them with double- resolution ones with JavaScript doesn't seem ridiculously bad to me.

Pages still load as they normally would, and then become progressively clearer. Set a cookie, and all subsequent loads can be sent with only retina quality images.

A little fragile, but it works.

<comment><USER2> That seems like it could work pretty well as long as you can reliably detect that a browser's display is high-DPI. Can you do that? The last time I checked, it's not possible to reliably detect a high-DPI display or force the page to render at a certain DPI level - Chrome used to have a meta viewport attribute for it, but it was removed.

I'd love to see a JavaScript library that does this; I've never run across one.

<comment><USER4> You can just read 'window.devicePixelRatio' using JavaScript. Retina devices will be more than one.

<comment><USER2> That's cool, I didn't realize you could use that in production yet but it looks like (other than some weird caveats) you can: [http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/07/more_about_d...](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/07/more_about_devi.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This author's insightful article is easily destroyed by his sheer arrogance and the tone at which he makes an inappropriate statement, attacking the majority of the users.

"The Retina MacBook Pro is still very much a luxury item, but we've had a Retina iPad for almost a year and the iPhone 4 for two and half years. And yet, the internet is still having a hard time adopting."

Because the rest of the internet aren't Apple fanboys and unfortunately, that's the massive majority.

The ideal solution - Don't give a shit about Retina displays, because these tiny fraction of Retina users are already 'used to' looking at normal websites in a pixelated fashion. They'll get used to your website too.

Until the retina resolution is adopted by the rest of the Internet, you have my zero fucks.

<comment><USER6> Heck, my $100 non-Apple phone has a ~330 ppi display, same as a "retina" iPhone. And high-res displays (especially from Korea) have plummeted in price. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4292450> High-DPI won't be a niche for long.

<comment><USER7> Those two are not the same thing at all; a 27" 2560x1440 like the one you link to is ~108dpi.

<comment><USER6> According to Apple's math for "Retina", phones are held at 10" and you need 330ppi like an iPhone. But laptop screens are used at 16" and only need 220ppi like the new Retina MacBooks. So if you use a monitor at a distance of 30" (which is more likely if you use a huge 27" monitor) then you only need about 120ppi to have the same angular resolution. I've seen one of those Korean monitors, and they're definitely dense enough that you need to increase the size of elements on the display. That means pixelization unless you use high- res assets.

<comment><USER7> Good to know. Got schooled on angular resolution today :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article (and so far the comments here on HN) are all talking about "double resolution" but in reality it's quadruple for actual retina aseets.

a 120x90 image becomes a 240x180 and that's not 2x the pixels, that's 4x the pixels (and bytes.) It's not insignificant. There's great reasons not to bother right now:

1) On phones and tablets people are either going to be zoomed out where they can't appreciate the hi res images, or zoomed in on some text and not really looking at the image most of the time.

2) While I have an rMBP, most people don't. They're starting to get around but for now it's fine. Certainly I agree with the author's advisement to figure out a solution this year, but I disagree with his admonishing of people still putting it off right now.

3) Lots of people who DO have rMBP do NOT run the machine in pure Retina 4:1 resolution. That includes me, I run it in 1920x1200 mode. Most people don't go seem to go that high but even at 1650x1290 "bad" images are much less bad.

Basically, my point is, this isn't as big of a deal as some people make it out to be. I think it's most important for large hero areas and other images that are going to be focus points of your page. But as long as you get on it some time this year you should be fine before a significant portion of your users are thinking your site looks ghetto.

<comment><USER9> > that's 4x the pixels (and bytes.)

In my experience the 4x pixels works out to something less than 4x bytes assuming jpg or 24bit PNGs because the compression gets more efficient. For instance quadrupling the number of pixels generally doesn't increase the color table by 4x.

I just calculated the difference for about 100 retina files on my sites/apps, and the average size increase is 1.8x.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Sucking at webdesign". Today we'll discuss how to turn on antialiasing, that is so glaringly missing from the authors blog:

<http://i.imgur.com/d3tby.png>

The interested reader will be glad to know that this is plain to see on a non- retina, 24" 1080p screen. The author might also want to stop messing with the font-weight, its hurting my eyes.

<comment><USER11> Looks fine (antialiased) on my browser. Firefox on Windows by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Serve retina assets to everyone indiscriminately? Sorry Zach, but if that's your professional advice then you suck at serving the 99% who do not have a fat pipe and a fat processor at their constant disposal on every device they use and in every location they frequent.

</comment><comment><USER13> I actually thought this was a joke until about half way through. It said it great in the first four words: "It's been six months." You expect the entirety of the internet to transform in a matter of months to accommodate your latest gadget?

</comment><comment><USER14> What baffles me a bit is how horrendously buggy some OS X apps are with Retina displays. I'm running an rMBP and Thunderbolt displays, and I've had no end of pain with Chrome; Flash videos fullscreen at 2x or 1/2x resolution (seems to be no logic as to which that will be), pages will randomly go white while the elements are still there with logic running, text will overrun controls (e.g. the "add comment" button on HN -- text is 2x bigger than the button), etc. It's generally not a dealbreaker, but it absolutely isn't a great user experience.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Let's hinder 98% of our visitors to please the 2% with retina screen !"

Seriously, developing for multiple density is hard in the real world. Way harder then this article says.

<comment><USER16> It is unquestionably difficult, but the idea here is to improve the experience for that smaller percentage while not hindering the majority. Depending on your site, you can do this using CSS media queries so the browser can determine what asset to load. The only disadvantage is an increase in bandwidth utilization for the retina consumers.

Clearly that's not practical for many sites at this time, but the options are there and it's relatively easy to do if your site is built via the spritesheet style.

<comment><USER12> Right but that's not what the article advises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a little retina less mixin I use (when using bootstrap mostly) that I modified from the retina.js solution. It's the same solution with additional parameters. I've found it to be useful when doing retina projects.

I put it up on github here: <https://github.com/erikflowers/retina-mixin>

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't have a retina device, so I wonder: are they not capable of rendering normal resolutions? I would have assumed that they simply render a "classic pixel" as four retina pixels? So classic web sites should still work?

<comment><USER2> Apple renders a classic pixel as four retina pixels, but they don't apply any filtering, so it makes graphics (particularly text with subpixel antialiasing enabled) look rather awful. If they did filtering it'd look much better, but you can probably imagine the economic incentives not to do that.

<comment><USER19> Not economic - runtime performance.

The rMBP actually has 5 scaled resolution modes with 2:1 being the 'ideal' 'retina' mode that the laptop defaults to. In 2:1 mode, no filtering is done. Occasionally to get a bit more desktop space I'll shift mine into one of the modes with non-integer scaling to make the desktop bigger, and in those modes filtering is applied. There are two non-integer modes where the scaling is N:1 where N>2 as well. Switch into any of these non-integer scaling modes, though, and screen rendering is slightly but noticeably affected - scrolling windows in particular is much choppier in any of the filtered modes. This is the runtime cost of touching that many pixels in such a large display buffer in order to oversample and filter.

As for why 2:1 mode looks so blurry, I'm guessing that its a combination of pixel glow in low resolution displays smoothing edges and comparison to the relative sharpness of the rest of the OSX UI.

<comment><USER2> Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter.

Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy.

One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"?

<comment><USER19> _Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter._

Are you seriously advocating that Apple use a desktop GPU in their laptops?

 _Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy._

None of this is true. First, the 15" retina mbp has a nvidia GT650M along with an intel gpu. And it's still not enough. Remember that a game running at 2880x1800 using filtering can use memory-bandwidth saving tricks like quincunx which can't be used in a desktop environment. Moreover, in the 'scaled-up' 1920x1200 mode the rMBP supports, the rMBP is essentially super-sampling a much larger pre-display buffer than 2880x1800

Have a read:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook- pro-w...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with- retina-display-review/8)

 _At the default setting, either Intel's HD 4000 or NVIDIA's GeForce GT 650M already have to render and display far more pixels than_ either GPU was ever intended to. At the 1680 and 1920 settings however the GPUs are doing more work than even their high-end desktop counterparts are used to. _In writing this article it finally dawned on me exactly what has been happening at Intel over the past few years._

...

 _To be quite honest, the hardware in the rMBP isn't enough to deliver a consistently smooth experience across all applications. At 2880 x 1800 most interactions are smooth but things like zooming windows or scrolling on certain web pages is clearly sub-30fps. At the higher scaled resolutions, since the GPU has to render as much as 9.2MP, even UI performance can be sluggish. There's simply nothing that can be done at this point - Apple is pushing the limits of the hardware we have available today, far beyond what any other OEM has done. Future iterations of the Retina Display MacBook Pro will have faster hardware with embedded DRAM that will help mitigate this problem. But there are other limitations: many elements of screen drawing are still done on the CPU, and as largely serial architectures their ability to scale performance with dramatically higher resolutions is limited._

 _One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"?_

It has a bigger battery.

<comment><USER2> I'm advocating that Apple doesn't ship displays that can't be driven by the graphics hardware in their devices. Whether they solve that by shipping better GPUs, larger batteries, or lower resolution screens, I don't particularly care, but I think the current situation is ridiculous.

I applaud their attempts to push the limits of hardware, deliver new and innovative experiences, etc etc etc but ultimately at the end of the day you shouldn't ship optional features that won't work in basic usage scenarios. I think 'being able to scroll a webpage at 60fps' is a pretty basic usage scenario.

I don't understand the claim that a GeForce GT 650m running at 1920x1200 is doing 'more work than even their high-end desktop counterparts are used to' though. That's blatantly false. Furthermore the claim that rendering is largely serial is blatantly, tremendously false - modern GPU architectures are embarassingly parallel and even the kind of rendering Apple does for their UIs can be parallelized to a large extent. Perhaps the intent here is to describe how the workloads that suffer (like scrolling webpages) can't be parallelized?

Thanks for the explanation on the 15", that makes sense - I didn't realize that you could only get a larger battery for the 15".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm, I'd probably lay the blame at Apple here more than at web developers.

If you're going to go out there and create a premium end product you might want to think about what 80% of the web is going to look like on it. Perhaps Apple assumed that web designers would be all over this and rolling it out everywhere from day 1?

I don't optimise stuff for retina, mainly because I don't have a retina device so it's partly a case of "out of sight, out of mind" and also without the device to test on it would become difficult to assume anything about how good my retina icons _really_ look.

</comment><comment><USER4> One particularly large issue that I've had with making retina compatible websites is Mobile Safari. It renders SVG a little strangely at times, and even the simplest of the can reliably crash the browser when zoomed in on.

<comment><USER21> This is a huge problem, which is the poor handling of SVG by even 'current' browsers. I keep hoping the 'retina revolution' will force this issue for browser makers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's really not that hard to do a decent job with Retina.

For LESS, I like "retina.less" from <http://retinajs.com/>

      #logo {
        .at2x('/images/my_image.png', 200px, 100px);
      }

Could easily be adopted for SASS I'm sure.

This avoids the typical double-image downloading (like on Apple's website).

[https://github.com/imulus/retinajs/blob/master/src/retina.le...](https://github.com/imulus/retinajs/blob/master/src/retina.less)

And if I'm rendering an image JavaScript and want to choose a resolution (like for Gravatar), can detect like this:

        app.isRetina = function(){
            var mediaQuery = "(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),\
                    (min--moz-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),\
                    (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 3/2),\
                    (min-resolution: 1.5dppx)";
            if (window.devicePixelRatio > 1)
                return true;
            if (window.matchMedia && window.matchMedia(mediaQuery).matches)
                return true;
            return false;
        }();

</comment><comment><USER23> Supporting a high density display is not just about making images 2x as big. A responsive design, use of icon fonts and careful use of images and you can do it pretty painlessly.

Clearly my personal blog is not a bastion of high design, but it looks pretty decent on every screen I've viewed it on just by following these small prescriptions and testing it during construction on both high and low density displays. It's really not that hard. <http://jeffbail.com> if you're interested.

That said, since its my personal site, I can do whatever I want and I appreciate fully that is not usually the case at some/most corporations. These folks usually need more than 6 months to make these types of changes, get approval from higher ups, etc...

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a bunch of people in this thread making the case that developers shouldn't bother supporting retina devices because they represent such a small section of the market. Ordinarily I'd agree with that sentiment. I don't spend a whole lot of time making sure my work renders well in Internet Explorer 6, because IE6 represents less than a half of one percent of the traffic I receive.

But here's the thing - IE6 market share is shrinking, and retina display market share is growing. It seems inevitable that given enough time all Apple devices (and potentially many devices from other manufacturers) will come with retina displays. Which is why it makes sense to get out ahead of this trend before retina displays become popular.

</comment><comment><USER25> The author may want to fix his menu-bar before complaining about others. It's a tiny, blurry mess on my 27" Thunderbolt-Display. On a smaller retina screen it probably looks more like a smudge than text.

</comment><comment><USER26> Pretty awesome solution to this is the browser based page compilation for GWT:

<http://retina.teknonsys.com/>

Works really well and non-retina clients don't even have to load extra css or javascript for retina images, and retina clients don't have to load the small- version images. Fairly perfect solution... provided you use GWT, I guess, which is rare...

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't own any Retina devices, and won't for the immediate future, as a not- yet-employed student.

How can I test how my webpages will look on a Retina display, without hardware? I haven't found an answer (admittedly, with only a little searching) that doesn't involve me taking the bus to the local Apple store each revision.

<comment><USER4> If you have a Mac, you can use Quartz Debug to enable HiDPI mode on a non- retina screen. I wouldn't attempt that if you have anything but an iMac or large external monitor though.

Alternately, get an iPhone 4 or one of the older retina iPod touch models. I picked one up for $80 to do some testing on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well, i don't know.. i have a very slow internet connection and a very standard 1366x768 resolution (which i guess is by far the most common nowadays on laptops!). I wouldn't want to wait like 4 times as much to view webpages! I can understand his arguments though. Everyone wants nice and crispy graphics.

And here is the real solution that fixes resolution and bandwith problems once and for all, atleast for icons and most of the stuff a webpage is made of (which he doesn't even mention once!): SVG. Can we please move on and ship vector graphics (for all non-photo content)?

P.S.: Yes, bad browser support, yada yada yada.. Still, what he proposes is by no means a solution for the real problem. What happens with the next generation displays?!

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the main obstacle is that most companies are uber focused on mobile, and adding high resolution assets is going against that initiative. I don't know of any companies that have a Retina initiative.

I understand that there's ways to serve lower res assets to mobile devices, but many of these architectures are already set and updating them to take advantage of media queries is not high on the list of to-dos.

<comment><USER30> In what way are HDPI assets going against mobile initiatives? The vast majority of Retina display are on mobile devices.

<comment><USER31> Mobile devices quite frequently find themselves on low-bandwidth networks. (Edit: and many mobile users have low transfer caps on their data plans)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> quoting anil dash (<https://twitter.com/anildash/status/221353763842174976>):

"Rather than optimizing your website for Retina displays, invest your budget on the 30x as many people who have visual/sight challenges."

In the long run, the OP is probably right and we're going to have to deal with retina.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand why exactly, but an image saved at 2x pixels isn't necessarily 2x the bytes.

Take 20 minutes and at least redo your logo and key images.

Here's my take on how (short-form of author's post): [http://telecuda.tumblr.com/post/26032269612/optimize- blurry-...](http://telecuda.tumblr.com/post/26032269612/optimize-blurry- retina-images)

<comment><USER34> At least in the case of 24bit PNGs, you (always) end up with 4x the pixels (2x width and 2x height) and (generally) end up with about 1.8x the size due to more efficient compression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Weird, the very first thing I noticed was how pixely the g+ twitter and rss icons look at the top in my non retina desktop

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow. Either a lot of web site developers posting here really don't give two hoots about the quality of their website's appearance, or a lot of the people posting here are posers that don't develop websites but feel entitled to an opinion about it. Either way, not a great indicator of the direction the HN community is headed.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems like all the current hi res solutions are somewhat hacky. I recently did a project with foresight.js (<https://github.com/adamdbradley/foresight.js>) I like how it tries to estimate the connection speed before serving up a 2x image.

</comment><comment><USER11> Facebook, Apple, and GitHub are the only sites I've seen that seem to support the retina display with their images. Even then, Facebook misses some images.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sure lets 4x the requirements for download and rendering for a fraction of a % of the user-base.

Im all for advancement but doing it blindly and you will trip and fall.

</comment><comment><USER39> Slightly off topic, but anyone know if anything is happening in terms of Linux/X11 and HiDPI? Or will we need to wait a few years?</comment>


Infographic: 1.36 years lost in planning a trip - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=385855074824007&set=a.385855051490676.89982.336934619716053&type=1&theater

<comment><USER2> What would be an half trip?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are referring about the data for the number of trips undertaken by an average user. It is just a statistic based on total number of trips/ sample size. No one is actually taking a half trip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> can you elaborate how does it work?

<comment><AUTHOR> We found that an average traveler plans about 10 trips in an year and spends almost 30 hrs in preparation ( travelers visit about 22+ website and numerous friends just to prepare a trip) We have been working for 4 months to create an automatic trip planner which can prepare a custom travel itinerary for travelers in a couple of seconds.We have now completed the planning logic and working towards a release next month. We are looking for some suggestions/feedbacks from the hacker news community so that released version comes out as a better product. <http://demo.triptern.com> shows the basic algorithm working with some key features missing. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Site : demo.triptern.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We would be taking some inputs from the user eg. city , number of days, interest ( art ,culture , night life ), budget. We then consider these inputs and use some of our such as ranking of places of interest, opening closing time, distance between two places. Keeping all these in mind we prepare the optimal itinerary for the user. We are also working on integrating the social aspect i.e. sharing trips with friends, saving you trip history etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you guys think of our political satire website? - <AUTHOR>

We recently launched a website for political satire: www.thewashingtonfancy.com
Wondering what you thought of the design. Any areas for improvement?
Also, hope you get a good laugh! <comment><USER2> Initial thoughts, it looks good. It definitely has the feel of a real newspaper site. The writing isn't quite as polished. The ideas are good, but every so often you hit a sentence that makes you go "What?" An example is in the story on Rand Paul and GPS. You quote him as saying "The American people should be free to literally chart their own course without the inferring hand of the government getting in their way." But I believe you meant "interfering" rather than "inferring". It's not a huge error, but it's enough to make you stop for a second, breaking the flow. All in all, I'd give it a 7 out of 10.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point on the Rand Paul article. We have a few editors but obviously stuff slips through. Thanks for the praise though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable link: www.thewashingtonfancy.com

<comment><USER3> Try: <http://www.thewashingtonfancy.com></comment></comment>


Windows 7 Adds TaskBar Preview Feature - <AUTHOR> http://officeliveteam.com/archives/301

<comment><USER2> "Windows 7 promises to provide many aesthetically pleasing features and a potentially smaller, less bloated, footprint than Vista."

I guess they're not quite ready to commit to a smaller, less bloated footprint.</comment>