Solving My Email Problem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-problem/ <comment><USER2> My inbox is at 0 and other than gmail's auto-filtering tabs I don't have too much extra filtering going on (most of it is related to Google Alerts).

For the last 20 years my rule has been "If I check my email and inbox > 1 then deal with the email right now". I usually check my email every few hours.

I'm not Mr. popular, but I'm also not anonymous. I do personal support for 30,000+ people who have taken one of my online courses so I get a fair amount of email and other things. I tend to write massive responses from scratch for a lot of them as well.

The key is not to let it build up. Then you'll have 99 problems but email won't be one of them.

Also I'm not sure if this is related but I'm one of those people who think it's unthinkably rude to ignore someone. I would never in a million years read an email and not respond to it (unless it clearly wasn't meant to be responded to). Likewise, if I see a > 1 inbox I feel compelled to handle it ASAP because I don't want to keep that person waiting.

(Of course there's exceptions, like I'm not responding to pure spam, but I do get about 50 emails a week where people ask to post a guest post on my blog and I always manually respond nicely to them with a "no thanks but good luck" type of message along with some context around their niche).

<comment><USER3> This is a wonderful, but unfortunately very naive, approach to email.

That you firmly believe this approach just means you haven't worked in a govt. dept. or any kind of position where your response represents the response of the organization (or a sub-set thereof). In such circumstances, emails that are open-ended (responses risk being misunderstood), ambiguously phrased (responses will be twisted to server the author's needs) or controversial (any response paints the organization in a negative light) are often best ignored. If your question is ambiguous, a busy boss or colleague does not owe you an answer or vice versa.

Sometimes people respond out of anger or frustration. You could respond in kind, and escalate the battle, or simply wait and let the individual calm down. Not responding is a very useful technique when conflicts arise between team members or in the management chain.

I would rather ignore an angry abusive email from an upset colleague who is having a rough time in life, than respond in kind and escalate it into an HR battle. Of course if the behaviour continues, there would be no choice, but most people are rather contrite and apologetic after a brief outburst and it's much better for everyone to just pretend that it never happened. People make mistakes after all.

<comment><USER4> Sweeping stuff under the rug helps in the short term but not the long term in my opinion. Compassionately responding to an abusive Email (even just saying, "I can understand why you were so angry...") might be the very response that person needs to dissipate their anger or re-evaluate how they communicate with people and that helps everyone they interact with after you. Sure, things can get messy too and some discussions are easier offline, but I think there's merit to completing conversations even if they're difficult.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I so weird that I don't have problem with my e-mail box? I don't receive spam (gmail, but recently all mail providers got really great at it and even if I do receive some spam is quite sporadic). I don't receive newsletters because (shock!) I don't sign-up for them (and even if I do once every blue moon I immediately click 'unsubscribe').

Yes, there is some small problem of having older messages "waiting for the right time" but this is not the problem of the e-mail itself but rather mental block to dedicate 1-3h to write response (you would spend same amount of time writing regular mail).

<comment><USER7> You're not the only one! I unsubscribed from mostly everything and now my inbox gets anywhere from 1 to 2 new spam messages per week. Still annoying when it does happen, but a big improvement from before when I was getting 40+ emails per day, in which most were newsletters I never opened or just spam

<comment><AUTHOR> >I unsubscribed from mostly everything and now my inbox gets anywhere from 1 to 2 new spam messages per week.

That would only work for a while for me. 6 months later new stuff has crept in and I would have to go through another round of unsubscribing.

<comment><USER6> > That would only work for a while for me. 6 months later new stuff has crept > in and I would have to go through another round of unsubscribing.

OK, but why wait for 6 months? Be proactive - you see something you don't want the either use unsubscribe or filter them out (if it comes from the same sender, but most of the time they give you unsubscribe link which just works…). One annoying thing with unsubscribing is that often they require you to go throu a couple of steps (including providing the e-mail itself) and confirming it so sometimes only clicking on unsubscribe doesn't work with one click.

And to make e-mail a nice tool tune what you receive - if you get gazzilion of notifications that you don't read then just unsubscribe…

<comment><AUTHOR> >Be proactive - you see something you don't want the either use unsubscribe or filter them out (if it comes from the same sender, but most of the time they give you unsubscribe link which just works…).

I addressed this in another comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102870)

Consider the two methods:

1\. Just have a whitelist that I've described

2\. Be proactive in unsubscribing. If you buy something from someone online, be proactive at the time you buy in finding the box which says you will not receive pointless emails from them (not all vendors will have that option). Ditto if you or an app you want to run requires your email address.

My question to you: If I go the proactive route, what do I _gain_ compared to the whitelist approach? Yes, I could be proactive and actively unsubscribe. That is time lost - even if it's not too much time for some people - what is gained by doing it?

>And to make e-mail a nice tool tune what you receive - if you get gazzilion of notifications that you don't read then just unsubscribe…

I think the difference between me and many of the commenters is this: I want my inbox (and my email usage in general) to be for personal correspondence. A few exceptions are OK, but I want the _majority_ of the emails in my inbox to be personal emails. So it's not about a gazillion notifications. I probably get less than one personal email per day. If I get more than one non-personal email/notification/confirmation receipt etc, then my inbox is more noise than value.

<comment><USER6> So - instead of doing a little work on your part you are forcing others (in most cases people that you DO WANT to communicate with) to jump through the hoops so they can communicate with your? In most likely event they will give up on the attempt and marketoids will simply find a way to circumvent the protection.

Again - you make it seem like it's gigantic work to keep your inbox tidy. Last time I had to click unsubscribe was months ago and it happens like 1-2 times a year - is that too much work?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've addressed your points in more detail in other comments. A summary:

1\. If someone can't be bothered to spend a minute in their whole life to be able to communicate with me, it's a pretty strong signal. I've had plenty of people who imply they want to communicate with me, but then are very poor responders to my emails. A hoop filters those people out.

2\. No one has complained. If anyone is annoyed, they just ignore it and I'll whitelist them anyway when I see their email.

3\. Marketers will not invent a way to circumvent it, because it's too much trouble for them to. I'm not _that_ important.

4\. Keep in mind the system has been working for over a year. This isn't a proof of concept or something in my imagination. Furthermore, if you read the other comments, _people are paying money to have this feature_.

5\. Just because you don't get annoying emails doesn't mean others don't. Roughly half of them are unsolicited (I did not request to be on those lists). I think more likely is that the automated emails you do receive are ones you _want_. Whereas I don't want _any_ in my Inbox.

My final point: Given where I am now, what possible reason would I have for switching to your workflow? Your stance comes from one who has a "default" position: the status quo. Look at it from my side - my system is working, and is very low maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My solution is to have my own domain, and a little tool to create and delete email aliases. When a company asks for my email, I just give them a new unique alias. I receive spam on this alias, 1) I know who leaked, 2) I delete the alias, stopping the spam. It is transparent to my correspondents (I can reply from the alias), cuts the spam pretty much to zero, and is low maintenance. It also has a small security benefit: even if I were to share a password between websites (which I rarely do), the login (email, or login part of the email) would be different/non guessable.

<comment><USER9> Gmail has this capability built in because you can just add +whatever to the end of the name and it's an alias to your email account, and you can block the email@example.com it as needed. Only problem is many sites mistakenly think + is an invalid char.

No overhead of creating addresses, you have an infinite address space for your account to play with freely.

More mail providers should offer such a workflow.

<comment><USER10> If you send me a email@example.com then I automatically know what your real address is and can strip the +whatever and now you're stuck.

With aliases, I can drop the alias and you can not easily guess my real email address.

Just depends on what you want, or what you use it for.

<comment><USER11> Not to mention that FM also allows plus addressing as well as a different style firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER12> how would that work ? don't you need to set up the MX records for that particular subdomain?

<comment><USER13> you could set up a wildcard CNAME

<comment><USER14> Please don't. Per RFC, an MX RR cannot point to a CNAME.

<comment><USER13> That's not what I'm suggesting though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I did this with procmail 20 years ago: [http://angel.net/~nic/spam-x/procmailrc.txt](http://angel.net/~nic/spam-x/procmailrc.txt) – and then stopped because lots of spam comes with random people's real e-mail addresses as the From, and my challenge autoreplies were quite rightly being reported as spam by their innocent recipients. Now I just use FastMail and let their excellent Bayesian filtering do its job. (Oh, and I filter all mail with "unsubscribe" in the body into a "Bulk Mail" folder".)

<comment><USER16> SMTP-time rejection, with a mechanism for specifying workaround ... doesn't exist, but if it did could address this failure mode of challenge-response.

<comment><USER17> It kinda does, it's called greylisting and already works today: the recipient basically says "can't right now, please come back later". A spammer will not bother even reading this and will hit other targets. A proper smtp sender that dutifully respects the specs (the legit ones do) will try again up until a few days later, where the recipient can whitelist the sender.

It's all automatic so it kind of doesn't solve OP's issue, but I feel like there should be a proper way to handle the challenge-response part.

<comment><USER16> Greylisting (e.g., greymilter) has long existed, but lacks a strong and reliable notification / remedy mechanism. It seems reasonably effective and non-noxious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In France we have a software vendor called MailInBlack.

Their solution is exactly the one proposed in this article, where the sender has to solve a "challenge" to get in your mailbox.

If I think this approach is really effective, it also creates a huge pain for a lot of tools relying on emails such as WebEx invites or when you want to contact someone for sales.

As a result I think that this approach might be better if it was for instance triggered only on emails with an "Unsubscribe" link, or on emails with specific keywords.

<comment><USER19> This is super-annoying for legitimate, infrequent correspondents. Somebody asks me to email them something, and I need to take the time to notice and read the automated response, click to access an unknown website, and then try to solve the captcha, which sometimes requires multiple attempts. You asked for my recipe, don't hassle me when I'm trying to help you.

<comment><USER20> Are you speaking from experience or theorizing?

My thought is that if i asked you for an email, and I was running a system like this, i wouldn't be a dick and make you jump through that hoop. I'd proactively add your email to the whitelist before you even sent me something.

<comment><USER21> Who is to say that you have their email address? Even if you do, who is to say that the mail you're asking is going to come from _that_ email address?

<comment><USER19> Exactly! I meet someone and they ask for info. I offer to email them with the info. I get their card and they don't ask for my email address. I'm speaking from experience.

Even if they have my address, how soon is it whitelisted? Like, they run home and update their whitelist?

In at least one case, I suspect this set up is narcissistic. 'People have to kow-tow to communicate with me.'

<comment><USER3> Next time, write your email address on their card and give it back to them. If they really care about the information, they will follow up.

You shouldn't bother writing unsolicited emails with your advice to people who may not care. It's a waste of your valuable time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The whole thing probably took a few hours to write.

Did you know about TMDA before you wrote it?

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

<comment><AUTHOR> I think someone (you?) told me about this, but I couldn't remember the name and it's hard to construct a search query to find it.

Also, almost all their links (Documentation, etc) are not working - I think they're having server issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mailinblack does this for more than ten years now, mostly in France. This technique is called a "challenge-response" filtering. It does work pretty well with other antispam techniques. Their solution send a daily digest to the user (x per day) of quarantined emails, allowing them to liberate legitimate emails of lazy senders who do not respond to the challenge-response email. They also use outgoing emails from users to populate their personal whitelist.

Their site is not shinny but the product does the job. [https://www.mailinblack.com/en/](https://www.mailinblack.com/en/)

<comment><USER18> From my experience, it seems that the daily digest is not enough :). And they still seem to blacklist WebEx invitations, which is really weird as it is definitely a "standard" in web-conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is know as Challenge-Response and ... it doesn't work. What happens when an automated system sends you a message? How do you handle the backscatter problem (ie when spammers spoof the sender address causing your helpful challenge messages to be sent to someone random who then complains..).

Laudable effort, but it's not a solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard to say something is not a solution when it's been working for over a year.

>What happens when an automated system sends you a message?

I'm not sure I see the problem. I don't want automated emails in my Inbox. Period.

For the few ones that you'd think I want (e.g. overdue notices), they are in my "other" list - those that don't go into either my inbox or my quarantine - so they don't get an autoresponse email. But frankly, there are very few automated emails that I want.

As an example, I've set up Zillow alerts that tell me if a house in my neighborhood is on sale, or has been sold. In one sense, I do _want_ these emails, but I simply don't want them in my inbox. They remain quarantined, and I'll see them whenever I check my quarantine pile. Most of the sites I intentionally signed up for because they occasionally will send me something useful - they all still go to my quarantine pile. I don't need them in my inbox intermingling with more important emails.

>How do you handle the backscatter problem (ie when spammers spoof the sender address causing your helpful challenge messages to be sent to someone random who then complains..).

If the spoofed email is in my whitelist, they don't get an email. If not, what exactly is the problem? That some random stranger got an email from me? That's just spam for them - I doubt they'll even notice. At best, they may realize someone is using their email address as a From in a spam email.

At least in the 1+ year of running this, none of these has been problems.

<comment><USER17> Funnily you've kinda inverted the mailboxes purpose: your real inbox is called "quarantine", and your actual emails are in your "inbox". Sounds like you could use inbox as inbox and then "archive" when it passes validation.

Anyway if it works for you _and_ is simple to put in place and use (as you've shown), then kudos to you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is interesting. I was initially tempted to replicate something similar to try it, but then took a moment to think about what my real gripes with email actually are. Then I went to work on solving them, one by one.

First, I have a tendency to keep emails in my inbox as well, thinking I will do something with them at some point. I can't say I've ever waited a year to respond; however, I have probably waited several months before deleting (archiving, since I use Gmail) an email. This often comes after realizing that I am not, despite my earlier assessment, going to do anything about this particular email. Second, the endless notifications are abhorrent.

Today, I finally got around to adding some little used account information into my KeePass database and archived two emails. Then I realized I wasn't going to do anything with the other 20 emails in my inbox, so I archived them, too. Then I turned off notifications on my phone. I turned off Outlook's toaster at work years ago after I was frustrated with the amount of useless junk my colleagues or other work groups keep sending me. Unable to remove myself, I just decided to deal with the junk and all the other emails I get on my time, not anyone else's. I took that practice to my personal accounts, after deciding that if I won't waste my time even when I'm getting paid, I should definitely not waste my time when I'm not.

Now if I could only talk my employer into letting me disable my email account when I go on vacation, a la Daimler: [http://time.com/3116424/daimler- vacation-email-out-of-office...](http://time.com/3116424/daimler-vacation- email-out-of-office/).

</comment><comment><USER26> I use my own simple email scripts with simple rules and it also works! Over the time, my system has become even simpler. I used to have Procmail as mda, now simply a 5 line Perl script. I used to have spamassissin as pre-filter, now I skipped it altogether. I used to have a database for whitelists, blacklists, and filter lists. Now I simply have hand-coded rules (several) and hand edited whitelist/inbox lists. There are three areas for my emails: inbox (as well as a dozen categorized ones, important boxes also sends notification to my phone), unsorted (handful every day), and spam box (hundreds every day). I do check my unsorted box about daily; I only grep my spam box if I am expecting something and something didn't come.

Every time I got a spam leaked (into unsorted) and I am annoyed or I want certain mail go to certain inbox, I simply edit my scripts (which I know exactly where and how). It is easier than -- e.g. -- reading procmail's man page.

Specific, simple, personalized approach is surprisingly effective than any generalized approach. The latter is a hard problem, but the former often isn't. The former I can choose my own compromises.

</comment><comment><USER20> E-mail is currently useless for me. people have been talking about going through and unsubscribing from things.

NOT counting the spam folder i have 52,541 unread emails.

I am not going through all of that to click a bajillion unsubscribes considering i never actually chose to receive email from 99% of the people / companies sending me email.

I'd forgotten about the whitelist strategy. I'd written it off as obnoxious to the sender, but as i am reminded of this years later i'm thinking it's more obnoxious for me to never respond to people, partially because i miss their emails, and partially i don't bother looking most of the time because there's too damn much to deal with.

<comment><USER27> Mark all old mail read and start over today? Just unsubscribe going forward.

<comment><USER20> the strategy of continuing to unsubscribe from things is based on the flawed idea that i want to opt-in to an ongoing maintenance task for the rest of my life. I do not. We shouldn't just _accept_ the idea that other people / companies can assign us ongoing unpaid work for the rest of our lives.

<comment><AUTHOR> >We shouldn't just _accept_ the idea that other people / companies can assign us ongoing unpaid work for the rest of our lives.

This is exactly my perspective as well - I even said in another comment "I don't want to do this for the rest of my life". Reading the comments, it is clear not everyone has assigned the same roles to email as I have (which is understandable). For some people, opt in as a default seems to be acceptable.

I don't know - perhaps because I had email for some years without getting all these emails, I may simply have a different reference point than many who grew up at a time when communicating individually over email was the rare use case (as opposed to being notified of sales, meetings, etc).

(Note: Definitely not complaining or being sarcastic here - to each their own).

<comment><USER28> I have a different solution, while I unsubscribe from mailers that I know I signed up for, when I have messages that I don't trust to verify my email address with a response (potentially getting more spam) OR I'm feeling lazy (even with services I've signed up for), I just hit the spam button in Gmail. That's a cheap and easy unsubscribe.

I very rarely check my spam box, only when I'm job hunting as that's very critical I don't miss anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My personal mail solution is composed of:

\- a good taxonomy on a maildir in my home and on my IMAP (thanks mbsync+cron+a small script to watch inbox with IMAP Idle)

\- a good automatic filtering/refiling (imapfilter, for now)

\- a good spam blocker (spamassassin)

\- a good MUA which support both physical taxonomy and a search-based one

The workflow it's roughly simple: I have some saved search in notmuch-emacs mostly 'unread', 'important', 'inbox', 'live', 'todo'. When I have little or no time I look only at unread+important, when I have time I go through the rest of unread. Live stuff are thing in progress that I have to watch but no action or todo, todo are...todo's...

</comment><comment><USER30> What I'd love to see is an email-like system where each message is accompanied by a small sum of money (1¢ or so). If the message is not useful to the recipient, they are free to take the 1¢, otherwise, if the message is useful, they wouldn't (and it will return to the sender either when the email is replied to, or, say, in a week). This would very quickly kill all spam-type business models, and would be unlikely to cost anything for legitimate users.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've made something like that 15 years ago.

It didn't worked. People receiving the quarantine mails often misunderstood it or dismissed it without reading it.

We tried with CAPTCHA, without, nothing worked.

Our users had to spend a lot of time checking for false positives.

In the end we gave up.

Oh, and if you want to do something like that, add a reasonable delay for your response as some Spam list check for automatic responses and consider them as SPAM and will ironically block you for that ! Been there...

</comment><comment><USER32> > _2\. Spamassassin. This worked for many years, but then a few years ago, the > accuracy went down like crazy._

I switched to Rspamd and haven't looked back. It's much better.

<comment><USER33> Bogofilter also works quite well if you have enough training material.

<comment><USER32> Sure, but bogofilter has no pre-made rules, so it makes a bad first impression, and it's tricky (as in, I wouldn't know offhand how to do it) to implement site-wide. Rspamd wins on both these points (in fact, its pre-made rules are subjectively _better_ than those of SpamAssassin), _and_ it still has bayesian learning.

<comment><USER33> True. I use bogofilter locally just for myself, and I had a set of ~100k ham and spam e-mails for initial training.

For single user mail folder/server and local use, it's very simple to set up, compared to anything server side. You basically use 3 commands after initial training and don't need to worry about anything else.

I don't want to keep an e-mail archive server side (I use pop3), and that would include a spam filter's database, there are not many other filtering options with that requirements.

Anyway, I agree it would not make a good first impression without training data, at all. Though if you train it with what you actually receive, it's quite awesome. I get > 99% accuracy for both false positives/negatives.

It's good to keep spam for training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I just want to be able to classify email by "sent by a human" and "not sent by a human." My inbox isn't a (bad) todo list, it's a (bad) notification center.

<comment><USER35> I filter anything with the word "unsubscribe" into a separate folder, then add a few filters to handle the exceptions.

What is generally left in my inbox is stuff directly mailed to me that deserves attention. 90% of the stuff in the unsubscribe folder get deleted without looking beyond the subject line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ah, like many people, I'm also one of those who let thousands of messages build up and respond them maybe a year after they were sent.

But my reason for such slow response, I believe, is a little bit different than most. I have social anxiety, and reading email is extremely painful to me. Not replying, but _reading_. I almost never open my inbox. The last email I sent was six months ago.

Sigh. Anyone with similar issues?

<comment><USER37> Ahhh, don't I ever. Too scared to have an engage with most online communities, let alone e-mails directed at me. I probably won't read any replies but I wanted to enjoy this brief connection with someone with a similar experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So your system automatically sends back messages to the non-whitelisted addresses. Those messages will eventually be classified as spam by big operators such as gmail. How do you prevent that from reducing your "email reputation" and ending up on spam email blacklists?

<comment><AUTHOR> To be frank, this is a concern to me, and I think I'm already on some spam lists. Recently two folks using Gmail told me my (regular, written by me) email showed up in their Junk folder. I checked others who use Gmail and it showed up fine for them.

I may end up using a separate domain for those emails. I'm pretty sure that's a weak solution.

<comment><USER38> Hmmmmm, the spam list downside is a non starter for me.

It sounds like you've invented a captcha for email. If that ever took off and became widely used, it would be rather easy for the spammers to write a script to comply with the scheme. Followed of course by the usual escalation to adding an image-based captcha, and then efforts to beat the captcha, and so on.

As an aside, you could do it entirely in email as well by sending a response that requires a specific reply to join the whitelist. That is you could eliminate the webserver and the mildly-questionable-looking URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> On my own domain where I've set up a mail server, I've never received that much spam. I have the impression that people are more civilized now than in the late 2000s with respect to emails. In my case at least, unsubscribe links work reasonably well.

<comment><USER8> The risk is some dodgy website (small shop, forum, etc) that has been pwned and which leaks your detail to spammers, not so much the company you give the email to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not sure how spam is the problem. Mostly solved by good filters. The problem is the amount of legitimate personal emails that one gets, creating the TODO list problem Paul Graham was talking about in his quote at the top of the blog post here.

<comment><USER41> This is exactly the problem: Some emails you can't respond because they require taking actions, so they stay in the inbox to remind you. And then it's the broken window principle... one cool thing I recently found is that on Trello you can have board specific addresses that create a new card when an email is sent to them. This allows me to move the TODO problem outside the inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Unfortunately, in the Enterprise space, this setup is likely to be a zero sum game, as the challenge email would get dinged 90% of the time for spammy wording like "quarantine" and links to unknown domains (and/or blocked entirely, because inbound filtering != outbound filtering).

Large-scale email in its current form _sucks_ , even with the Office 365 ATP tools or similar equivalents.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have used Hotmail for many years and I really don't get much spam. Most of the junk that I do get ends up in the junk folder, essentially anything that doesn't come from someone in my address book as far as I can see. I check my junk folder whenever I expect someone new to send an email to me or about once a week.

<comment><USER10> I have had a hotmail account since almost the beginning. Spam hasn't been a serious problem for me in a long time, though occasionally I get a large amount.

I've always gotten more spam in Hotmail than in Gmail (not a lot more). But I've had more false positives in Gmail than in Hotmail. Always seems like there's a tradeoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A Challenging Response to Challenge-Response MAY 19, 2003 BY ED FELTEN

[https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2003/05/19/challenging- respons...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2003/05/19/challenging-response- challenge-response/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Given that it was written in 2003, and here we are 15 years later with CR working, I don't see much value to the post. The author there is hypothesizing, whereas in reality we have functioning CR systems.

Now I'll grant there is a critical mass beyond which CR won't work. Looking at the comments here, the likelihood of hitting that critical mass is almost zero. Most people don't like the idea. So CR will continue to work.

<comment><USER16> C-R has been very thinly used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > No - I check the quarantine folder regularly - usually daily.

So what's the point? The whole exercise is intended to cut down on looking through non-personal./junk email, but you have to look through non- personal/junk email daily anyway.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Google Inbox was a nice way of setting up emails as tasks, but unfortunately Google is killing it, and Gmail doesn't come close to it.

I use Google Tasks as a workaround (link a task to an email conversation) but it's still clunkier than Inbox.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thankfully I don't use e-mail much anymore. Slowly but surely all of my communication have shifted to better, but unfortunately proprietary, systems. As authentication gets more universal this will continue to happen.

<comment><USER46> Same here.

I don't have an email problem anymore. I have a WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and Skype problem now.

<comment><USER9> I just wish we'd have OS level contact management and app integration for this, like a shell for messaging.

"Jeff is contacting you" over what? I don't care, I have a message from Jeff, and I can respond to Jeff over any protocol I choose, and the shell will show me a unified history of my IMs, chats, phonecalls, SMSes, Deathmatches, emails, chess moves, teledildonics sessions, whatever with Jeff.

<comment><USER45> Nokia N9 sort of had that.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBWRdtC9Cn8&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBWRdtC9Cn8&feature=youtu.be&t=7)

<comment><USER47> That was my favorite feature about the n900 (predecessor to n9) - sms, skype, hangouts, whatever? They were all accessible in one place in a merged thread. Really enjoyed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The thing is, I use my inbox for receipts of purchases, confirmations of online accounts and all sorts of other stuff where I am interacting with, or storing information from an automated agent.

<comment><AUTHOR> >The thing is, I use my inbox for receipts of purchases,

Stuff like Amazon.com emails are whitelisted. They go into the "low priority" folder, not my inbox. For one-off vendors, I simply "save" their emails without adding them to the whitelist. It's easier to understand if you've used notmuch. I simply remove the quarantine tag from them and they're stored in the email database. One keystroke.

I'm not any different from you. If I purchase anything on the Internet and get a confirmation email, I aim to keep it.

I still check the quarantine folder from time to time.

>confirmations of online accounts

I'm not sure I see the problem. I still can see the quarantined emails. If I'm _expecting_ such an email, I check it within a few minutes. I click on the link to confirm my email address - I merely do not add the sender to the whitelist.

>all sorts of other stuff where I am interacting with, or storing information from an automated agent.

An example would help. Some use cases from me:

\- Calendar reminder emails - Whitelisted: They go to the low priority folder (as counterintuitive as the phrase sounds). They do not go into my inbox.

\- Library overdue emails - same as above

\- Emails from my medical provider (e.g. "new test results") - same as above

If you get automated emails for which you have _automated_ actions, those can go right into the Python script and handled before they are quarantined.

<comment><USER48> > I'm not sure I see the problem. I still can see the quarantined emails.

I completely misunderstood that the quarantine is just a folder next to the inbox. It's the obvious solution, from both a technical and usability point of view, and takes care of all my points.

Thanks for clearing it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think I'm going to add this approach to [https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net) when I implement the DNSBL.

</comment><comment><USER50> Congratulations. He just re-invented SpamArrest.

<comment><USER51> Yep – this is exactly how SpamArrest works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Only problem this wont work for any automated e-mail. But you could white-list countries where sending spam is illegal.

</comment><comment><USER53> > "In a spammer's economic model, spending even five or 10 seconds per message > could be prohibitively expensive"

So, how about a proof of work system like blockchains? Like, if you've never sent me email before, my server returns some work to complete. If I've ever sent you an email, or not marked you mail as spam etc, your MTA won't be challenged etc.

<comment><USER22> 21 years ago... [http://www.hashcash.org/](http://www.hashcash.org/)

<comment><USER53> Ahh thank you. I'm not a bitcoin fanatic but it does strike me as a workable idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This also only works until it's a popular method and spammers automate a solution.

</comment><comment><USER55> Any mutt users tried notmuch? Is it any good? Only for emacs users? :)

</comment><comment><USER56> What tool do you use for this?</comment>


JSON5: JSON for humans - <AUTHOR> https://json5.org/ <comment><USER2> If we're going to extend JSON I don't see the point unless we decide on a standard date interchange format that can be validated.

Not a strong with some format in it but an actual date format.

I know this is probably a problem because there are no date literals in JS, but it's my #1 complaint about JSON.

I don't care about trailing commas. Identifiers for names instead of quoted strings would be nice.

But I want a date format.

<comment><USER3> Literally the only things actually "wrong" with JSON (as opposed to complaints about developer ergonomics) are the lack of proper support for floating point special values (e.g., +inf, -inf, nan) and not having a date literal (RFC3339 would be ideal).

Maaaaaaybe removing tolerance of duplicate keys.

Possibly, a binary literal (hex64 bytestring, maybe like << base64 encoded>>) syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this isn't technically the same project as JSON, it isn't a great name (just sounds like a later version). Shouldn't it be "json-es5" or something?

Anyway, the changes are all sensible, definitely covering the few things I routinely want to do with JSON files.</comment>


Ask HN: What entrepreneurs are you following? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Steve Jobs (post humously)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to get help from a Google employee?(for G+) - <AUTHOR> I am 100% unable to recover an old google account (after the past 6 months of trying over and over and over and over) and as a result my old google profiles page (before G+) is still up and I do not want my information public any longer.
I have already created 2 different Gmail support forum threads with exactly zero help from anybody. Even after spamming over 30+ google employees a link to it on twitter (which I really did not want to do, but I was still ignored anyways)
STEP 1.
A. Find old Gmail account used to create my old google profile page
B. Try to login into the Gmail account
C. Fail at logging in
D. Attempt a recovery of the gmail account
E. Do not have access to old phone number (over 6 years old)
F. Do not have access to the email recovery
G. According to the automated recovery form I do not have enough information to get access to the Gmail account (YES I HAVE TRIED THIS OVER 50+ TIMES STOP ASKING)
STEP 2.
A. Attempt to login to the recovery email (its a Hotmail account)
B. Fail at logging in
C. Attempt to recover the recovery email
D. Do not have access to an old phone number (10+ years old)
E. Recovery email uses an 11 year old Gmail address for recovery that I do not even remember creating and since Hotmail never actually needed verification back then I assume its made up because I didn't use Gmail until I signed up for google wave beta in high school which is the account I am on right now
F. According to the automated recovery form I do not have enough information to get access to the Hotmail address (again I have tried this well over 50+ times)
G. Talked to 4 different Microsoft customer support techs and it took over 3 months to get the login issue elevated to a support engineer
H. The Microsoft support engineer specifically told me I have no other option to recover the Hotmail address other than the automated recovery form <comment><USER2> Is this a Gmail account or a custom domain? One idea, although it may be a long shot. If it is a custom domain on Google, you may be able to convert the account to a business account. If it is a regular gmail account, you may be able to signup for a google business account with a custom domain (you can do a 30-day free trial, although you may have to pay $5, or at least put a credit card on file, to gain access to the free support).

Either way, with a business account you will then have access to live Google phone support for free (which is actually pretty good from my experience). Call them and tell them you want to move your mail from your old gmail account to your new business account, and use their support to see if they can help you gain access. Again, not sure if it will work or not, but at least it would give you a direct line to their support teams at little to no cost. Then once you have shut everything down, or have completed everything you what you want to do, just close the business account.

<comment><AUTHOR> I successfully signed up for google apps and talked with support where pretty much they have zero access to general google accounts and are only there for supporting google apps.

It was very much worth a shot though thanks for the idea again

<comment><USER2> Damn, well sorry. That was the best I could come up with on that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It may be more expensive but involving lawyers sending letter to Google legal by stating that "person is under threat due to google exposing misleading information about the person".

At least this may pierce through the thick google walls to the right person to do at least minimally required work to help you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already tried reporting the page for sexual content over 3 months ago so I assumed that didn't work.

I had just submitted a DMCA complaint with their automated form a few days ago and with google being so big I can't imagine that getting anywhere.

I asked reddit.com/r/legaladvice if I had any ground to stand on by getting a lawyer involved and they pretty much just told me oh well there is nothing I can technically do. But I am not done looking into it

<comment><USER3> I'm sure presence of false and misleading information hosted by google and advertised to the whole world is something that lawyers would be happy to tackle.

I think going with well-known firm (lawyers do know the difference between joe-blow-the-consultant and well known firms) albeit hiring them just to write a scary letter will invite a response from otherwise unavailable person at GOOG who will be more than happy to make this matter to go away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://plus.google.com/+TariqGhrayyib/posts/NpvCexzHEGw](https://plus.google.com/+TariqGhrayyib/posts/NpvCexzHEGw)</comment>


Report: Google will add an ad blocker to all versions of Chrome web browser - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/report-google-will-add-an-ad-blocker-to-all-versions-of-chrome-web-browser/ <comment><USER2> This feels like the Microsoft internet explorer case all over again. Me thinks Google will have to back off this one, especially if it blocks competing ads by default.</comment>


I was a drug rep and know how pharma companies pushed opioids - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-was-a-drug-rep-i-know-how-pharma-companies-pushed-opioids/2019/11/25/82b1da88-beb9-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html <comment><USER3> I find it pretty terrifying how many people there are in here jumping to defend opioids. Seems kinda off-topic for an article about how predatory practices in marketing potentially harmful substances can be problematic.

I mean, nobody is suggesting that opiods shouldn't be used to treat pain, are they? They are just saying that that misinformation campaigns run for the purpose of increasing profit at the expense of human lives isn't a great thing.

<comment><USER4> > nobody is suggesting that opiods shouldn't be used to treat pain, are they?

If there's enough overreaction to opioid dependency, it _does_ impede the use of opioids to treat pain. Making it harder to get opioids also, typically, makes it harder to get opioids to treat pain. Bureaucratic systems, put simply, suck.

Whenever you talk about the "opioid epidemic", a large part of what you're talking about is people buying heroin and fentanyl from drug dealers. Making it harder to get oxycodone does zero to stop people from buying heroin and fentanyl on the street. It does a hell of a lot to stop the use of oxycodone to treat pain.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly what's happened in Australia. Over-the-counter opioids (codeine, primarily) were banned last year. People were destroying their livers and stomachs due to overdosing on the adulterants (paracetomol/acetaminophen and ibuprofen) that were specifically put in to stop people taking them in bulk.

Now ordinary people with ordinary aches and pains can't get effective painkillers without visiting a doctor (or a quick trip to NZ where they're still available).

<comment><USER6> Ibuprofen always worked for my ordinary aches. I find it justified to require a visit to a doctor if the pain doesn't react to Ibuprofen.

<comment><USER5> Ibuprofen fucks my stomach. Paracetamol does nothing for me for pain (as predicted by the literature). Mild opiates like codeine kill it dead. And taking it once isn't an addiction problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may be completely unpopular opinion, but as a temporary user of pain killers I am thankful I was prescribed them. I was experiencing chronic and hard to diagnose pain. I was in a very dark and scary place and was constantly wondering how people without access to these medicines continue their will to live. I was having difficulty making it through a work day and as a desk worker I was able to tolerate them during the day.

I am thankful my doctor was so willing to prescribe them for me. Looking back on the experience in hindsight I would have preferred to stay on them longer instead of transitioning to other medicines during physical therapy. There was a lot of suffering during that time.

<comment><USER8> First of all, I am not an expert on opioids nor am I a trained doctor. For what it's worth, I have lived with chronic pain, so I do know what it is like to suffer.

I do not think the problem is that opioids are evil, but that they were clearly (to the point of obvious fraud) being sold in great quantities to people to abuse for recreational purposes. Obviously it can be frustrating because now people with legitimate medical pain have one less option for dealing with their suffering (although based on studies I have read, opioids are actually not the first choice for most users), and they are the victims of the flagrant corruption of the pharmaceutical companies in question.

I am not saying doctors need to be perfect in diagnosing problems and always knowing what to prescribe, and magically predicting when a patient will become addicted (even if it is to treat a legitimate medical condition). I am saying the corruption of overprescribing drugs for the obvious profiteering should be stopped, and those found responsible should face legal consequences (I assume something like 20 years jailtime, plus forfeiture of all assets gained illicitly after thorough audits - when going after billions of dollars it is easy to come up with the money for audits).

I am glad that opioids were able to help you and I am glad you were able to get them when you needed! I understand there is a lot of villification of opioids and in the outrage some people want them banned entirely and that would likely be a loss (similar to what happened with marijuana, ketamine, and other drugs that were always suspected to have real medical benefits and we are now getting real clinical studies to support these hypotheses). But the corruption is real, and the criminals need to be punished, and the overselling needs to be stopped.

<comment><USER9> I think "recreational" is not the correct term to use for most of the people taking opioids without a prescription.

So many addicts start out using for some pain, and become addicted. They then buy from shady doctors or people who get drugs from shady doctors. Or they might use them to feel numb because they are depressed.

I am just not sure that a majority of illegal opioid users are people who started their habit by thinking "I am looking to have a good time to night, let me take some opioids"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmmm... this article seems like a real world demonstration of the principles outlined in "Influence:The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini [0]

1\. Reciprocity - check 2\. Social Proof - check 3\. Authority induced bias - check 4\. Scarcity - check 5\. Commitment and consistency - <USER2>

Damn scary how even highly qualified professionals fall prey to the same old tactics.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practice)

</comment><comment><USER11> The fact that so much effort and so many dollars are expended to "sell" drugs to patients via the trust that doctors engender, illustrates just how broken medicine is in the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't there a professional and ethical obligation to prescribe painkillers to people who are in significant pain?

<comment><USER12> I guess it depends. In other countries, like Germany, doctors have a very different stance on people in pain.

 _"Pain is a part of life. We cannot eliminate it nor do we want to. The pain will guide you. You will know when to rest more; you will know when you are healing. If I give you Vicodin, you will no longer feel the pain, yes, but you will no longer know what your body is telling you. You might overexert yourself because you are no longer feeling the pain signals. All you need is rest. And please be careful with ibuprofen. It's not good for your kidneys. Only take it if you must. Your body will heal itself with rest."_

From: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery- ge...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery-germany- vicodin.html)

<comment><USER13> Yes. When stubbing a toe I've historically employed two strategies for dealing with it. In my youth I would shout and hop around the room, i.e. distract myself. Nowadays I pay as much attention to the pain as is possible and practical. Remarkably this approach does _seem to alleviate the pain_.

So my guess is that the function of pain is to direct attention to injury. Not just for thinking about ways to avoid repeat injuries but purely and simply to promote the healing response. Which is not to say that I wouldn't welcome a painkiller if the pain was great enough. It's just that the suffering caused does seems to increase with the efforts one makes to distract oneself from it.

<comment><USER14> There is a level of pain where it becomes totally debilitating and all consuming. I can meditate over light headaches or other pain but from time to time I get migraines where I either want to die or take anything that will make it go away.

<comment><USER13> With very severe pain I don't see why one couldn't adopt a dual strategy of alleviating it both with drugs and by focussing on it during its most intense moments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Since I left the industry in 2000...

That's a significant time to be out of the industry and still speak with credibility about today's methods and practices. Not impossible to be entirely on point, but it would be more credible from someone closer to practices in at least the last decade.

<comment><USER16> I suppose if it were "since I left Google/Microsoft .." you'd be more right, but industry-wide practice is usually something that's relatively out in the open especially for former insiders

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Back in the early 2000s I built a web app for a big pharma that was used to compile doctor's responses to questions on survey cards that were mailed out.

These could be anything from multi-choice questions about awareness of drug products, whether they prescribed particular drugs for specific treatments and I think from memory there may have been incentives like prize draws like trips to conferences for filling in the survey (return postage paid as well).

I can't imagine this having changing so much (maybe more online or in partnership with clinic software) as it served as both promoting a drug for a specific treatment and identifying individual doctors responsiveness to future marketing.

<comment><USER18> Things have tightened up a bit since then, though not completely. My dad ran hospitals for a living when I was a kid and we got tons of free tickets to sporting events from various vendors trying to sell him stuff. He would have to listen to a 10 minute pitch from some salesman (that he always made fun of later) and in return he got a free night out with the family. I remember being mad when that dried up in the mid-2000s. I later learned that CMS had implemented some regulations cracking down on the practice.

These days, thanks to the ACA, you can look up exactly how much money your doctor has received from medical device manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies ([https://www.cms.gov/openpayments/](https://www.cms.gov/openpayments/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My 5 year old had to have surgery to repair a small abdominal hernea. Not a big deal, most kids recover incredibly fast and are back to running around within 2 or 4 days. We were given a prescription for enough opioids for 3 months at the maximum daily dosage. She needed one day, half the daily max.

<comment><USER20> There's a lot of anecdotes in this thread about people being prescribed "too much".

What would your anecdote be if your child was in severe pain after the surgery, occurring in the middle of the night, and you needed to get the meds after hours?

What if you had to drive back in to get a paper script?

What if you had to wait 2 days?

I rarely (almost never as a radiologist now) write outpatient narcotic prescriptions anymore, but when I did, I often prescribed in a pattern so I could avoid people becoming uncomfortably symptomatic in an inconvenient time for them (and us). I'm not sure what the best situation here is, other than giving you the RX and telling you to not fill it?

<comment><USER19> There is a big difference between a reasonable margin of safety, say double what was expected, and the 3 months which was 30x the expected need. Three months is not an emergency contingency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> " _When my patient's loved ones ask how this could have happened, or start to blame themselves, I think with anger about how, for years, drug companies promoted the idea that addiction was not a common effect of the medication but rather a personal failing of the addict._ "

Shouldn't that be, "...I promoted the idea..."

<comment><USER22> The author says they didn't sell the opioids. Your point is valid though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be nice if actual statistics were floating around that identified causes of drug addiction. I grew up surrounded by crack and heroin addicts, anecdotally not a single one I met was pushed opiods by a doctor, they instead had a lifetime of drug seeking behavior and pooled money with other drug addicts, and whatever was cheap and available on the streets they took which often was heroin (now synthetics like fentanyl). In that same country pushing drugs by doctors was not common like it seems it is common in the US, yet we still had an enormous out of control street addict problem with no end in sight.

It would also be interesting to see Portugal research as they decriminalized all drugs, if they still have an out of control street addict problem and culture of drug taking, or Japan research why they don't have a drug taking culture.

<comment><USER24> In 2005, the large majority of heroin addicts in the US were concurrent or former pill opioid addicts, but as of 2015 or so, it's about 50%.[1]

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28582659](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28582659)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Title should be "I was a drug rep. I know how pharma companies pushed opioids.", as per the original article.

Here's a tl;dr of the article (quoted from the article itself) to save you a click:

> Medical students and doctors didn't just learn how to assess and pay > attention to patients' pain — they also internalized the idea that > prescribing opioids was a professional, even an ethical, obligation. > Exaggerating the clinical significance of pain drastically expanded the > market for opioids, bringing them to populations with a high risk for > addiction, like adolescents.

<comment><AUTHOR> The code of conduct changed around 2009 as the author points out. Prior to that time it was a torrent of all kinds of expensive gifts, which were not restricted to opioid prescriptions. The higher the number of "scripts" a physician had, the more extravagant the giveaways.

Interestingly, prior to the opioid frenzy, the culture was one of great restraint often leading to under medication of pain and unnecessary suffering for patients. This was superseded by the conviction that pain had to be eliminated if at all possible, it was a physician's moral imperative to do so. Now in hindsight, it's clear that Pharma was driving a lot of this ethos.</comment></comment>


Gita – autonomous lightweight delivery system - <AUTHOR> http://gita.piaggiofastforward.com/ <comment><USER2> Starship Technologies has a similar robot.[1] They asked the Redwood City city council for permission to operate this on Redwood City sidewalks. This was granted. Startship made a video of a delivery from La Tartine, which is a downtown bakery. But I asked the clerks at La Tartine, and they haven't seen the robot again since the video was made months ago.

Both Gita and Starship have the feel of a startup with a great video, but problems delivering the product.

These robots don't have the speed and range for a suburban environment, and they can't deal with doors, stairs, and elevators in apartment buildings. That leaves a narrow market niche.

[1] [https://www.starship.xyz/](https://www.starship.xyz/) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc)

<comment><USER3> I get the impression that Starship is doing test deployments in many different cities. The videos are probably indeed intended as press pushes, but they make a lot of them, they try a lot of different locations and conditions, and they interview generously and with a focus towards business value, which speaks to the underlying tech being sound in principle. I would be much more concerned if they were showing the same laboratory environments over and over or focused their videos on unsubstantial claims about the tech - they don't do either of those things. Here's some more recent coverage: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GpaAF3_lKA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GpaAF3_lKA)

And while there are some obvious limitations to wheeled bots as a door-to-door courier system, the market for "personal luggage that follows you", which is more like what Gita is trying, could also be a pretty good one, and less ridiculous looking than "luggage you ride," [0] our current incumbent for luggage innovation. Having a bot stay by you has the gratifying feeling of having a pet or perhaps a servant.

These small scales and low speeds are much more amenable to experimenting, making mistakes, and ceding control than a highway-speed automation, as well. At worst, they're toys, but toys are often a good starting point for serious stuff too. It makes for very efficient R&D.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npEkbCmE31Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npEkbCmE31Y)

<comment><USER4> odd sighting: your first youtube link has a brief cameo of the scream mask in the stock footage of delivery trucks: [https://youtu.be/1GpaAF3_lKA?t=31](https://youtu.be/1GpaAF3_lKA?t=31)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought this was going to be git based CI software..

<comment><USER6> A boy can dream, can't he?

<comment><USER7> I have been dreaming about this for a long time...I'm gonna make it someday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want a city or neighborhood hooked up to a pneumatic tube system, like they have in bank drive-throughs, and I want at least one node of the pneumatic router network to be in an Amazon warehouse, and at least one other to be at a decent cheeseburger shop.

Make sure it's wired for fiber internet and I will buy a condo in that development.

Imagine ordering something up to the size and weight of a 3.5" HDD (or bacon double cheeseburger) and having it magically appear in your kitchen five minutes later.

If these things became prevalent, packaging could standardize on the capsule cylinder size, like shipping containers. Units containing e.g. 500mL of milk or 5-7 eggs would be perfect.

<comment><USER9> Have you seen Sand Flea jumping onto building roofs? [http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html](http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html)

So instead of tube, how about a delivery robot that's like an alley cat? One which grew up watching Indian Jones and superhero cartoons. And loves tightropes. And wants to be flying squirrel. And is wired into Google RealTime City Map...

 _I haz the cheezeburger. My human customer hungrily awaits. So I roll down the alley, and around the trash. Pause for traffic, and scoot across the street. Time for my usual northbound path. Up onto the roof. Down a toll zipline to another roof. Leap, wings out, glide, grab a street-pole cable, wings in. Roll along the cable, dodge pole, cable, pole, cable, etc. Roll down a quiet side street. Roof, alley, jump fence. Quick charge station. I consider Uber, but no! Here comes city bus #1726! Leap, electromagnet, hitchhike. Drop, wait for light, down sidewalk. Jump to porch, landing before the hungry human. A human lucky that it is I, city cat, that haz their cheezburger. And not some blind dumb hulking oft-clogged brute of a straw. Though if the straw ever gets built, I may ride that too. I take my bow, and my leave._

What constitutes travel infrastructure depends on what you can cope with. Wrt power, mechanics, sensors, information, and computes. It may be that those advance more rapidly than our ability to build large-scale physical-plant infrastructure. Like cars were easier than moving sidewalks. Robots that can use custom infrastructure where it exists, but can cope "on the ground" in the infrastructure gaps, would have higher complexity cost than say drones. But as costs change...

And hybrids may be interesting. _The midday Amazon truck drives down the main road, shedding drones and robots, and taking on those dropped in the morning..._

<comment> crooked-v That third paragraph could make for an awfully interesting short story. It would just need a bit of plot or social commentary added beyond just playing around with the initial idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At Asteria, we were looking for a proof of concept implementation of something we're working on. One of my friends worked as an engineer/designer at Buell (motorcycles), is a mech engineer, has done loads of work on electric vehicles, and is interested in autonomous vehicle tech. He flew out here and we decided to walk the streets of San Francisco to consider dimensionality required to successfully autonomously navigate sidewalks downtown. Our test was just delivering keys from my place (Stock + Sutter) to a friend's house (Gough + Market).

The problems with traffic, pedestrians, accessibility, streetlights, construction, parked cars (illegal, lyfts, etc), pets (and their poop), business signs, trash, human activity blocking the walkways, curb hopping, lane blocking, etc.

There are a designs that could accomplish dealing with a _couple_ of these things, but nothing amazing and easy to implement that would satisfy any reasonable payload without looking/being/feeling cumbersome. Maybe with deployment, social etiquette might change, but in the long run it might be easier to have the city think about implementing lanes/infrastructure for last mile autonomous logistic vehicles to operate.

This is why you typically don't see any autonomous vehicle/agents like this navigating any sort of street with real life obstacles.

<comment><USER11> Your going to be competing with Vehicles or Pedestrians one way or the other, I highly doubt any city is going to blow tens of billions on a grade separated autonomous delivery thoroughfare. Most cities are barely willing to put paint down for bike lanes, let alone create a physical barrier so they are safe for cyclists to use daily.

Unless you are restricting deliveries to within 2 or 3 miles of where they start from (considering people walk at 3mph, and Segways were banned from sidewalks for going 10mph) you will probably be on the roadway.

<comment><USER10> Well 2-3 miles is fine, especially if you're considering graduated deployment of autonomous vehicles.

I'm a big proponent of refactoring the world to facilitate autonomous agents within our lives, so I think spending money to figure this out is part of what we should be doing.

Perhaps we need more people with similar opinions in government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like an automated suitcase trolley.

It could be handy, except ... you probably can't take it on the bus/train or put it in a car or take it on an airplane.

<comment><USER12> Also, it could be used by bad guys as a very dangerous delivery mechanism.

<comment><USER13> That horse left the barn a long time ago. You can strap some c4 to a drone very easily. You could do the same with an RC car cheaply 30 years ago.

We aren't safe because it's difficult to hurt someone. We're safe because we keep an eye on the people who would do us harm.

<comment><USER14> Alternatively: "We're safe because most people aren't jerks."

Ascribing general personal safety to surveillance doesn't ring true to me. (It's _possible_ that surveillance mitigates extremely rare but extremely serious dangers to safety, but evidence of that seems scarce...)

<comment><USER13> Not all surveillance is state surveillance. I pay attention when I walk around, and I talk to my neighbors.

If you think surveillance isn't necessary, my guess is you are actually living in a "safe" area and leaning _heavily_ on state surveillance and military/police violence to provide border control so that the general public can't enter your community.

Perhaps you don't consider the person standing at the border and looking to see who's trying to come in as "surveillance".

<comment><USER14> "If you think surveillance isn't necessary, my guess is you are actually living in a "safe" area and leaning heavily on state surveillance and military/police violence to provide border control so that the general public can't enter your community."

My initial indignant reaction to that was "No way!", but realistically, my country (Australia) treats refugees worse than (assumption ahead) yours... While my neighbourhood is "safe" and pretty much abhors police violence, you're right about my country... :-/

"Perhaps you don't consider the person standing at the border and looking to see who's trying to come in as "surveillance"."

Like I said, I'm not from the US, but even some of us on the opposite side of the planet have seen all the stats proving toddlers with guns kill more people than "the people standing at your borders". From someone with no real dog in your immigration policy fight, but perhaps with a bit of outside perspective - this seems like institutionalised every day racism, rather than any real attempt to make the public safer... (Not intending to accuse you personally of racism here, but there's a deep undercurrent of it in your country's policies, government, institutions of power, and public discourse. And my country is no better either...)

<comment><USER13> For what it's worth I'm against both borders and state surveillance. I am just questioning your suggestion that somehow surveillance itself is inherently evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool how similar it looks to the WW2 Kugelpanzer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer)

</comment><comment><USER16> What's with the name Gita? You know it is the name of the holy book of Hindus, right? Then again, there is the infamous tech book series "Bible".

<comment><USER17> it's italian for "trip" (or school trip, or field trip), the mother company here is Piaggio which is an italian manufacturer.

<comment><USER18> to complete since it's internationally know better then Piaggio's name, the Vespa scooter is produced by Piaggio

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I haven't seen such a useless 'take a look' video

edit: second video

</comment><comment><USER20> The video looked like a comedy sketch, it seriously does not look real to me with weird shaky cam shots of people's eyes and "we imagine this future" type dialogue.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love it! It reminds me of Terry Prachett's traveling trunk aka 'Luggage' from the Discworld series..that is only half suitcase and the other half's a homicidal maniac. It is made of sapient pearwood and is awfully protective of its owner..can't be stolen..will fly into a homicidal rage of owner is threatened. I would have named it after Terry Pratchett..had Gita been mine..oh well..

</comment><comment><USER22> Did anyone else that watched the video feel extremely uncomfortable with the comparison of a sherpa to a robot?

<comment><USER6> Affirmative

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What I like mostly is that more and more companies are feeling confident enough to put more-or-less autonomous robots in real-world environments.

That's different from the military using drones, which are highly trained operators with robots in the air, which is a lot less cluttered.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks _a lot_ like TwinswHeel, which was just presented at the CES. [http://twinswheel.fr/](http://twinswheel.fr/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it legal to use such robots in human-populated environments like office building or factory? What if it causes harm to somebody? Any thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds a lot like the robot from Starship Technologies;

[https://www.starship.xyz](https://www.starship.xyz)

</comment><comment><USER27> tl;dr It's a 2 foot cylindrical robot for carrying 40 lb of stuff alongside/behind you as you walk. Can move at walking-running speed of a person. Unveiled two days ago; no indication of when this is ready for general consumption. Gita is an italian word, appearantly. Their yt channel : [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAynoPCMT5etFQp_hJB4DGQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAynoPCMT5etFQp_hJB4DGQ/videos)

</comment><comment><USER28> Are you serious? An autonomous robot that can walk alone in the streets and carry a lot of stuff inside?

<comment><USER29> Seems like it's not really designed for walking alone in the streets. All the autonomous operations are portrayed indoors.

<comment><USER17> the text says that in environments it knows it can travel by itself, and handle obstaclers and stuff.

AIU the operational concept should be: show the thing one route once and it will be able to retrace it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does no one talk about greenhouse gas reclamation? - <AUTHOR> I understand why we always talk about reducing emissions but I never hear anyone talk about increasing reclamation of emissions. Maybe it isn't very feasible but it seems it would be possible to mass harvest a fast growing crop and then landfill it repeatedly to reduce the overall carbon in the air. For instance, wouldn't it be possible to take 1 million acres as a test project, cover it with bamboo, harvest the bamboo, cure it, and then place it all in a landfill and repeat? Wouldn't also be possible to do something similar with mass producing and harvesting sea algea?
There's also probably some process I do not know about where you could mass ingest and filter the air of all greenhouse gasses but since I haven't heard of anyone doing it, I'm guessing it's either unscalable or cost prohibitive.
I feel like there are many simple options for massively increasing the reclamation of emissions but I have never heard this addressed. I would love to know why or find any other sources discussing this topic. <comment><USER2> That is the idea behind some carbon offsetting strategies that involve reforesting efforts incentivized by lower emissions taxes. Some programs are more successful than others, but the government's are deincentivized to provide these breaks because they are often the smaller nations who actually need the revenues.

The sea algae idea strikes me as a cure that is potentially worse than the disease. I could just see use causing the 6th great extinction by (either intentionally or accidentially) introducing a genetically modified algea into the open ocean which over oxygenates the atmosphere, swinging the planet into an ice age.

Build more nuclear reactors, try the thorium reactor to reduce the waste, and invest in solar power for the long run. Hell, if the Serbian physicists who uncovered Tesla's notes on the world power distribution tower managed to get it working, we can sacrifice a desert or two to build solar farms large enough to power the world.</comment>


When the blockchain skeptic walked into the lions' den - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/when-the-blockchain-skeptic-walked-into-the-lions-den/ <comment><USER2> In that way, Song pierced a hole in the near-religious zeal of crypto enthusiasts, who tend to sort the world into two categories: HODLers (true believers) and no-coiners (haters).

Which is funny because a currency(token) needs to be transacted in order for it to be useful. The more people that hold it the more the price goes up and it becomes useless to spend/transact.</comment>


Text Editor Performance Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-perf <comment><USER2> Would be interesting to see more editors in the comparisons,

like sublime text (2,3), notepad++ & Visual Studio Code(to compare it with atom.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've added sublime text. I'm not sure what you mean by "(2,3)": I downloaded "Stable Channel build 3114".

I've also added notepad++.

And I've added Visual Studio Code.

<comment><USER3> There are two different versions of Sublime Text, 3114 is part of version 3, which is still considered beta.

The default download would be version 2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's really interesting to see how Joe outperforms (by speed, not memory) every editor consistently by such a large margin.

Are there any editors built with pure speed in mind that beat joe?</comment>


Amazon Is Waging Class War - <AUTHOR> https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/amazon-hq2-nyc-capital-strike-investment <comment><USER2> I lived in seattle during the city council's employment tax. It was wild how many canvassing yuppies amazon had on the streets trying to get folks to sign their petition.

<comment><USER3> Actually I think someone hired a company to do the petitioning.

<comment><USER2> Someone being amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I wrong in thinking that the election of progressives who were vocally against AMZ HQ2 in LIC the reason mentioned by AMZ as well as NY State gov't (Dem) officials including Cuomo[1]? And not only that but progressives claimed "Victory"[2] at the announced departure. So it's like Author is trying to blame Capital but Progressives are claiming victory themselves for the pullout --which is contra.

Obviously AMZ was shifty in its (private) dealings with State officials, but you don't cut your nose to spite your face as progressives did.

This quote is fascinating and I think is indicative of the myopia in the article: "...Capital strikes we look at cases directed against leftist governments in weak and poor countries of the "global south". Capitalists stopped investing in Venezuela the minute Hugo Chavez became president..."

I think they began pulling out because he confiscated and nationalized companies and industries.

Also, VZ was the richest country in the South American continent --not the "poor" country, at the time they claim. Chavez and his pals made it poor.

[1][https://www.syracuse.com/politics/2019/02/cuomo-blames- other...](https://www.syracuse.com/politics/2019/02/cuomo-blames-other-dems- for-amazon-exit-as-aoc-celebrates.html)

[2][https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-new-york- polit...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-new-york-politics/as- amazon-drops-new-york-city-project-progressives-claim-a-major-coup- idUSKCN1Q332P)

<comment><USER5> You're trying to make it a "progessive" or "Democratic" thing when it was really an anti-gentrification thing. After all, North Virginia is heavily Democratic and they welcomed Amazon with open arms. Amazon's existing officials are nearly _all_ in heavily Democratic cities, and Seattle, it's HQ, is one of the most progressive cities in the US.

Queens and Long Island did not need Amazon HQ2 in the neighborhood that Amazon wanted to put HQ2. It would have ruined traffic and driven up housing prices for the 99% of residents who wouldn't work at Amazon, and the tax credits would have resulted in a net tax loss because the tax credits would have far exceeded the expected tax revenue from the _net_ jobs Amazon would have created in that neighborhood (compared to the jobs that would have been created if Amazon did not move there).

 _VZ was the richest country in the South American continent --not the "poor" country, at the time they claim_

This was the result of cronyism and vote-buying political programs. Like what the Trump administration is trying to doing right now...Communism and socialism had very little to do with it; after all, most Scandinavian nations have extremely socialist policies, and China, Cuba, and Vietnam have been doing fine and even thriving despite being Communist nations.

<comment><USER4> It wasn't a Dem thing, it was a progressive thing. Cuomo, DeBlasio, et al are Dems. They clamored and campaigned for it. It was the new Progs who killed it. AMZ didn't stick it to NYC/NYS so much as the new Progs actively killed it (Read what Cuomo has said).

VZ: Author claims it was poor. It was rich prior to Chavez, regardless if he and the state were true Communists or fakers loved by Bernie.

According to this polling[1], there was strong support across the board in NYC, and Queens in particular for HQ2.

[1][https://harrisx.com/2019/02/new-poll-shows-overwhelming- supp...](https://harrisx.com/2019/02/new-poll-shows-overwhelming-support- among-new-yorkers-and-queens-residents-for-amazons-new-headquarters/)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much should I charge for the Power User Toolbox for Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

Over the past several years, I've build a number of Facebook applications that extended and enhanced my own user experience -- such as an app that bypasses the standard 400-character status update limit and an app that sends email notifications when someone "likes" your post.
I decided to bundle them together and charge for access.
I have no idea how much to charge, though.
I've thrown together a bare-bones landing page that describes all of the apps that will be included in the toolbox:
http://facebook.pressbin.com/poweruser
Would you mind taking a look at what's being offered and giving me your two cents about whether this is worth ... two cents?  two dollars?  more? <comment><AUTHOR> In case you're curious, here are links to a couple of the apps that will be included in the toolbox. (Obviously, they will be refined and combined, where appropriate, once I start charging for them.)

Right now, most of them are either free or restricted to my own personal use.

<http://facebook.pressbin.com/clicktrack>

<http://apps.facebook.com/hiddenstatusupdates>

<http://apps.facebook.com/schedulestatusupdate>

<http://apps.facebook.com/unrestrictedstatus>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Landing page, hyperlinked:

<http://facebook.pressbin.com/poweruser></comment>


Instagram rolling out algorithmic feeds to some users - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/joseph-steinberg/instagram-secretly-made-a-huge-change-and-its-not-its-logo.html <comment><USER2> The algorithmic feed is a compromise between adding value for the user and revenue for the company.

Feeds based on followers, the followed, hashtags, likes, and other data about a user's habits are not increasing value for the user in terms of discovery or catching up on what was missed.

In a chronological feed, if you missed something, you know when and seek out that section of time. The nuances of discovery are diminished when you trust Instagram to do that for you.

If you follow a bread maker and enjoy seeing their photos on occasion and you don't tap the heart every time, or haven't tapped the heart much in the past, you may hardly ever see their posts again. You'll have to find them, and look at their feed, which takes away from the nuance of enjoyment you once had.

The curation one builds for their feed is not always a conscious decision. You have your own process for making an enjoyable feed. Then someone else's idea of this process steps in.

A foreign feed steals your once familiar orientation.

I would appreciate a toggle between their idea of my feed vs my idea of my feed.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is 100% a play for increasing the types of ads for Instagram, but I think it will hurt the platform in the long run.

When I started using snapchat, I thought one of the coolest features was that I could see everyone who viewed my story. Suddenly, I knew my audience and everyone who viewed my snaps. It made me want to post more on snapchat because I knew I had an audience.

I've heard from multiple Instagram users that their recent photos have not gotten the same amount of likes or views as they used to before the algorithm change, and I think this will cause users to be discouraged from posting to Instagram. It almost gives the platform an illusion that it is on the decline, regardless of if it is true or not.

<comment><USER4> They certainly said the same thing about Facebook once upon a time...

<comment><USER5> Well, it _did_ hurt the FB platform... It's just resilient enough to handle the loss of interactivity it's caused. At least for now. (This is discussed ad nauseum here on HN...)

Time will tell how resilient Instagram is. Userbase may revolt more than Facebook because this is the ONE component of network. So 100% of user functionality is affected... Bigger risk for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Their fears stem from a similar change that Facebook, Instagram 's parent > company, did a few years ago, which significantly reduced the organic reach > that brands and influencers get on the platform._

I'm sorry but "brands and influencers" can all go take a flying leap. They're the exact thing I'd like to filter _out_ of my online experience. For me, Instagram and other social platforms are only interesting to the extent that they provide a view into the long tail of human experience, and the massive surge of eyeball-seekers into these spaces only serves to dilute and pollute.

Instagram may get a lot of guff for being vapid and shallow, but historically they've been uniquely resolute among social platforms in their refusal to make life easy for brands and influencers. They've only partially succeeded, and I suspect this move is a compromise attempt to divert motivated attention seekers out of people's daily feeds, or at least into a revenue-generating funnel.

</comment><comment><USER7> The fact that i know what i see and what other people see is one of the major points i see to using Instagram instead of Facebook for sharing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would it be within HN rules to change the title to something less clickbaity? From "Instagram Made a Huge Change – And It's Not the Logo" to perhaps "Instagram rolling out algorithmic feeds to some users"?

<comment><USER9> I agree. The clickbaity title actually makes me want to skip that article, whereas an informative title like you proposed would make me read it.</comment></comment>


ArsDigita University: Lectures & courseware from intensive MIT CS program - <AUTHOR> http://aduni.org/courses/

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems most videos are available on Google Video if you (like me) had forgotten that RealPlayer even existed: [http://www.google.com/search?q=Arsdigita&tbo=p&tbm=v...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Arsdigita&tbo=p&tbm=vid&source=vgc)

(Allegedly VLC can play RealPlayer, but it wasn't working for me.)

</comment><comment><USER2> This was Hacker School ten years before Hacker School. Sure, the methods of instruction were a bit different, but the overall purpose was similar.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is fantastic. I'm glad that there are such detailed resources available for guys like me who want to get a thorough understanding of topics like these, but didn't go to MIT or comparable schools. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some of their videos are available on this YouTube channel: <http://www.youtube.com/coderisland>

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really interesting.

Anybody have experience with these courses?

<comment><USER6> "Theory of Computation" is quite good.

<comment><USER4> Their theory courses are one of the only good resources on the web on the topic (though I found it quicker to just read the textbook).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is where I learnt Theory of Computation from; I'll especially recommend Shai Simonson's lectures, that guy is absolutely brilliant</comment>


Everyone should be using low level caching in Rails - <AUTHOR> http://robotmay.com/post/23161612605/everyone-should-be-using-low-level-caching

<comment><USER2> Excellent. You may wish to mention that the default Rails.cache is a per- process cache and doesn't work between instances / goes away at process death.

For Memcache users, configure Rails.cache to use Rails' built in :memcache_store:

[http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache/MemCa...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache/MemCacheStore.html)

For Redis fans, try :redis_store:

<https://github.com/jodosha/redis-store>

This covers Rails 3 caching pretty well:

[http://broadcastingadam.com/2011/05/advanced_caching_in_rail...](http://broadcastingadam.com/2011/05/advanced_caching_in_rails)

Note for Rails 2: If I recall correctly, in Rails 2 fragment caching/action caching still uses the filesystem even if you have a cache_store set.

<comment><USER3> As a small addendum, I strongly recommend dalli (<https://github.com/mperham/dalli>) over the default memcached library. It is written by the former maintainer of the memcached gem, is smaller in size, up to 20% faster, and most importantly to me, is actively maintained.

Most of that info is in the readme, btw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If by everyone he means anyone who's reached a point in their application where it's worth adding code and complexity in order to improve performance, then yes this is useful (and I use it often).

<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureOptimization>

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Though I will admit to often prematurely optimising as I quite enjoy performance tweaking :)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, guilty on occasion here too, but only if I find myself with too much spare time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There used to be many model-caching plugins for Rails, but few if any made the transition to Rails 3. The record-cache gem looks interesting and flexible, though I haven't tried it:

<https://github.com/orslumen/record-cache>

<comment><USER4> IdentityMap is going to greatly reduce the need for model caching for the majority of sites. High traffic sites with a lot of data will still benefit from a distributed cache though.

[http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/IdentityMap....](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/IdentityMap.html)

<comment><USER5> That would be wonderful. Unfortunately, IdentityMap was disabled by default in 3.1 because it was incomplete, and it was pulled from 4.0 for a while due to lack of development:

<https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5261>

Though there is now a company volunteering to fund completion of the feature, starting Real Soon Now:

<https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5442>

IdentityMap would, obviously, be great. Though I didn't realize it could serve as a replacement for model caching; didn't IdentityMap, like the query cache, only last for the lifetime of a request? Or could it be persisted in the Rails.cache of your choice for an arbitrary lifespan?

<comment><USER4> IdentityMap stores the model in memory for the process. Only storing for the lifetime of a request wouldn't be terribly useful.

IdentityMap will be extremely useful for the majority of sites since they have very low traffic, processor, and memory demands, and therefore it's unlikely you'll have too many processes running using up their own memory containers. Though you could argue these sites really don't need additional caching anyways (they'd still respond slightly faster with IdentityMap).

For high traffic sites it'll still be useful to save some trips, but you'll also want to implement and manage a distributed cache (for models, actions, fragments, etc).

It's available and sort of works now. You just have to turn it on and be mindful of how associations are handled. Still a work in progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is good information, but could you explain why you think that everyone should use caching? You don't mention testing in this article so is it safe to say that you don't? Do you have performance tests that show that the caching actualy matters for you application workload?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do test for caching (though I must admit I write first, test later); I'll write that up in a later post. Similarly, I'll put up some comparisons to show the performance difference those changes have made :)

I think everyone should be caching as the speed of your page loads is fast becoming an even more important factor in people using/enjoying your site. Everyone (including myself) is getting more impatient in regards to page load speed, and every little helps. Also, you never know when you'll hit the frontpage on HN!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice fist post. For anyone interested, he's another awesome guide to Rails Caching. Worth a read too. - [http://broadcastingadam.com/2011/05/advanced_caching_in_rail...](http://broadcastingadam.com/2011/05/advanced_caching_in_rails)

</comment><comment><USER8> Good article. A few things:

Use "if" and "present?" instead of "unless" and "blank?". It's much easier to parse mentally, especially for people who didn't write the code. :)

You don't need to use "self" to access latitude, longitude, updated_at, etc. You only need to use it for assignment.

You don't need to call #to_s on the captured exception. When you interpolate an object into a string, Ruby calls #to_s on the supplied object itself, e.g., "I am an #{Object}".

I'd probably also add a "has_posts" scope to Category and use that instead of the #where call in ApplicationController.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

I'll keep that in mind for the future; it's a bad habit of mine :D

I actually didn't realise you only needed that for assignment. That's going to neaten up my code somewhat.

I normally don't put .to_s in strings like that, so I'm not entirely sure why I did in that line.

Aye, I'd normally use a scope but I figured I'd write it out more verbosely just for clarity :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting tips, I'll be sure to try them out.</comment>


Why Skype for the iPhone is no threat to AT&T - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/skype-for-iphone-no-threat-to-att-2009-3

<comment><USER2> The only crucial killer is that you cant have it running in the background (which makes it essentially useless). (the not-over-3G thing is easily overcome with a jailbreak + app)

I use Skype as my landline when at home (and dont wish to pick it up when _not_ at home) so if they could overcome that it would be a brilliant alternative to a wifi skype phone for me (plus I could easily check voicemail at hotels when I travek etc.).</comment>