Ask HN: How did Snapchat gain initial traction? - <AUTHOR>

How did an app like Snapchat gain initial traction? I understand the viral loops, great UI/UX, and overall appeal to the app. However, they must have done something to generate that initial buzz of kids using it.<p>Did they hit up every high school and get some kids using it? Did they pay for mobile ads? <comment><USER2> This Inc. article (and the quoted NYT article) describes the initial scene very well. It started as a friends and family word-of-mouth viral loop that got into one particular SoCal high school of a founder's cousin and then quickly propagated to other SoCal high schools big time (3,000 to 30,000 DAU in a month) as a way for passing notes. They hired a community manager after they hit a critical mass. [http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/real-origins- of-snapcha...](http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/real-origins-of-snapchat- growth.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow I didn't read this article. Awesome. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ten Rookie Startup Mistakes You Won't Make - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/10-mistakes/

<comment><USER2> I think I've made about 7 of them.</comment>


Researchers achieve 178,000Gbps Internet speed - <AUTHOR> https://androidrookies.com/researchers-achieve-a-whopping-178000gbps-internet-speed/ <comment><USER2> More details [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/ucl-engineers-set-new- wo...](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/ucl-engineers-set-new-world-record- internet-speed)

<comment><USER3> Now if there was more details. Anyone have a account to the IEEE site to see how many fibers, length and wavelengths used?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not enough.</comment>


Ask HN: Salary and equity expectations for 4th employee - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I've recently graduated from university and have been offered a developer (web dev - rails) role at a startup. The company has a founder and 3 employees and I would be the 4th (2nd developer). I like the company a lot; I feel that they have a lot of potential. However I feel that as the 4th employee, the compensation is a little lacking.
Background: This is a Toronto start up (lower salary average) and they're about to enter their round A's My offer: 40k + 0.5% equity (over 4 years + 6 month cliff)
I'm okay with the low salary as my living expenses are not that high, but I'm not so certain about the equity. However, I've been told that there are opportunities later on for me to get more? What do you guys think? <comment><USER2> Leaving $10-$15K on the table is significant. Start-up equity are lottery tickets, with more losers than winners.

Areas to explore: What's your time worth? What if you traded equity for 8 weeks paid vacation instead? Is there any specific/unique work experience (apprenticeship education) you could get at this firm?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that seems like a good way to think about it. I'm a new grad, so I'm definitely going to get a lot of experience with this company. But I just feel that if I pour 60hr/week into it, I don't wanna exit the company 4 yrs later with nothing.

<comment><USER2> It's impossible to predict your exit. Too many variables at play beyond your control. The most reasonable expectation is to be fairly compensated for your time. It's the experience you gain, and relationships you make-- that will pay dividends for the rest of your career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You just got out of college and you got some equity and you don't think its enough? Wow... If were the founder I'd wonder what a recent grad had to offer to get any equity at all... Even if you got 1% or 2% the company would have to be worth hundreds of millions for you to see big money... and if its going that good then option and stock grants will be available to good employees. Don't try to hit a home run on your first time at bat. If you don't strike out... you're doing better than most.

However, I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Most startups fail.. you should be angling for more base and not worry about the equity at this point... get the experience and add it to your portfolio and look to your next job when this company tanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, this was really helpful. More base sounds like the right approach here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since you just graduated, remember to factor in the learning experience, I'm not familiar with the rails ecosystem but if you are working with some really good developers, you are gonna learn so much which is IMO worth way more than equity. Especially since equity is kinda random ( remember 9 out of 10 startups fails ).

As said in another comment, ask them how they value the equity by bargain, can you raise your wage and take no equity or have more holidays.

A last thing : Try an do some maths, like if you could get +1k/year how high must the exit be for the 0.5% equity to be worth more than the wage raise.

</comment><comment><USER5> 40k is low for rural usa, I couldn't imagine taking that in Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER6> It depends on you and the company. AngelList might be helpful. You can see what other companies offer for salary and equity.

[https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22locations%22%3A%5B%22Toro...](https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22locations%22%3A%5B%22Toronto%22%5D%2C%22types%22%3A%5B%22full- time%22%5D%2C%22roles%22%3A%5B%22Software%20Engineer%22%5D%7D)

</comment><comment><USER7> 0.5% equity seems really small to me. This isn't based on a comparison to other offers, or what is typical for the market, but rather on an intuitive sense of fairness.

less-than-1% equity seems more like a symbolic percentage, and I might be concerned about why the founder is so hesitant to share the pie with the initial team.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1% or more

<comment><AUTHOR> I've talked with a few people, and I'm on the same page as you. What do you think is a fair package?

<comment><USER5> 40k with 3-5% equity. 1-2% with 60k.

<comment><USER3> there's 20 guys fresh off the boat that will take the job for zero equity and probably have more experience...

<comment><USER5> That's any job. You have to take risks and ask for what you want to get it in life. If this guy is being offered equity it's a fair bet the company is very interested in him, more-so then a regular hire. To quote Zombieland: 'Time to nut up, or shut up.'</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android app killed by its author due to incompatible phones - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iwonderphone.com/2010/03/07/killer-was-killed/ Leech Killer is a SMS/call block app for Android phones http://iwonderphone.com/leechkiller/ <comment><USER2> This particular app appears to need some seriously low level access to the phone. I can completely understand his frustration.

However, with most general apps, you can debug all your problems with a number of emulators (which all suck because they move twice as slow as the actual phones).

Screen resolution differences are definitely a big challenge, then after that, the application's state. Someone can exit your app from the back button or the Home button, and then getting back in to a complicated app without a "Force Close" error can be a nightmare.

Then you have to account for the fact that the phone is doing a number of other things at the same time as your app and it could get slowed down even more. When there is NO multitasking, you don't know how good you have it until you have it ;)

Some days I dream of what it would be like to be an iPhone developer. No multitasking, one screen resolution. Ahh the life.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Leech Killer (<http://iwonderphone.com/leechkiller/>) is a SMS/call block app for Android phones. The author decided to kill it due to maintainability difficulty caused by so many incompatible Android phones.

<comment><USER3> Given part of the app's functionality is SMS related I wonder if the author only used official APIs? I know there's a bunch of Android SMS functionality that is only available via "undocumented" APIs which could cause problems across multiple phones.

<comment><USER4> Phones, or API levels?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like he was mad that it got bad reviews.

Personally, I will never put any of my Android apps in the market for this reason. I don't really care about your opinion of my app. If it doesn't work, send me a patch.

The author of this app should do the same thing; get a thick skin, and accept patches on Github. That way it is the user's fault for the app not working, not his.

<comment><USER6> Wow, you actually want your users to submit you a patch? How about ask the users to make the app for you!

<comment><USER5> They're getting the app for free, so the onus is on them to add any features they want.

If you are writing a paid app, then maybe you should be nicer. But I wouldn't want to listen to your whining for 99 cents either.

<comment><USER6> some people will always whine whether it's free or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> iPhone vs Android reminds me a bit of Amiga vs PC.

Having one platform (or a few variants) with well-known hardware/software allowed to focus on the 'real' work on the Amiga, and we saw amazing things despite the lower raw power compared to PC.

In the end thought, PC took over Amiga.

I'm be curious to know how the future will go for both iPhone and Android...

</comment><comment><USER8> I was thinking of getting into android development. Is this a real concern? Should I quit before I start?

<comment><USER9> This was exacerbated by the fact he was using very low level interfaces which were likely not consistent among models.

Android is a tough platform to target, as its basically 8 platforms or so currently with differing OS versions and screen sizes.

<comment><USER10> You may have been alluding to this but all phones should/could be 2.1 OS in the future:

[http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/all-u-s-android- phones-...](http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/all-u-s-android-phones-to- receive-android-2-1-but-some-will-require-a-wipe/)

<comment><USER9> Striped and Buttered Pancakes! That will help the platform SO MUCH in many efforts if they force this update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If palm ever got their heads out if their.... and released an unlocked gsm developers phone I'd be all over it.

The irony is they are more open than android at this point. Hell it's been rooted forever, they've acknowledged it, and still don't care.

<comment><USER12> Aren't all palm phones potential dev phones? I recall you just have to do a konami style code to flip it into dev mode (it's described in the palm sdk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think google just needs to expand the sdk- and of course- update everyone's OS.</comment>


The internet doesn't need parrots - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682 <comment><USER2> I think you want people to raise the standard of their thinking and become more conscious of what really is. Yes, there's a good idea. However until people want thr truth they'll continue in their dreams and on the same day that people come to their senses the world will give up trying to gain happiness at the expense of others and we'll all be bodhisattva.</comment>


Email Isn't the Thing We're Bad At - <AUTHOR> https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/04/email-isnt-the-problem.html <comment><USER3> The reason nothing has replaced email yet, even tough it's an old and clonky protocol is because it's an open standard and people don't make standards any more. Today you make services (most often based on HTTP because it's a protocol any 20yr old junior programmer can handle) that are locked in, harvesting has much data about it's users as possible desperately hoping that it could monetize on this data one day.

<comment><USER4> I believe the biggest reason for HTTP is that firewalls let it through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually wish e-mail were used more.

I want my relatives, my spouse, my friends to use e-mail.

I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though. It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever's in fashion at the moment.

Any tips? Do I just have to sign up to all of the different chat apps and write bots to forward them to me or something?

<comment><USER6> Delete your Facebook. There are a more benefits than being able to email; you'll stop pretending to be friends with those kids from high school, don't see your ex's new life, and you can get drunk with your friends without your aunt knowing.

<comment><USER7> I would do this but sadly I was dumb enough to use it with OAuth in numerous places

<comment><USER8> Why is this a problem?

<comment><USER9> It means deleting your Facebook account will also prevent you logging into those other services. I had to delete a Spotify account and start over after I initially signed up via a Facebook login.

(I should note that the Spotify staff were amazingly helpful and actually migrated me over to an email-login account when asked.)

<comment><USER10> That's because you used FB to register instead of creating your own account. I suggest doing that in future, and use a password manager.

<comment><USER11> At one point Spotify were _requiring_ users to link their accounts to Facebook. [http://www.whathifi.com/news/spotify-no-longer-requires- face...](http://www.whathifi.com/news/spotify-no-longer-requires-facebook- account)

<comment><USER10> Ouch. Big reason not to register.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I never mark email as read, nor do I move it out of my inbox. I have something like 800k unread emails in my inbox.

However, I don't need to 'declare email bankruptcy' nor do I need to clear out my inbox.. I just don't pay any attention to the read or unread status. My inbox IS my archive.

My system is this:

When I check my email, I make sure I mark the most recent email as read. Then, I look back until I find the next email marked as read. The emails between those two are the ones that are unseen.

I do a quick glance at the emails in between. If they look important, I read them. If they are important but I don't want to deal with it now, I 'star' it in gmail. If it isn't important, I just don't do anything.

I don't quite get the need to have an empty inbox or to read every email.

<comment><USER13> So the Inbox Zero (and Getting Things Done, which is basically the overlying philosophy) is basically for people for which the status quo doesn't work. If you're able to manage your data without an empty inbox, that's great!

But if you're "suffering" from your e-mail, Inbox Zero is great for a couple reasons:

\- The rules are simple. Read it, then archive, reply immediately, or archive it but put "reply to this email" in your todo list.

\- The success state is simple. Is your inbox non-empty? Empty it. Is it empty? Go away.

\- It's about aggressive honesty. You won't reply to your aunt's email from 2 weeks ago. Replying with a one-sentence thing in 30 seconds is OK.

\- It fits with "email bankruptcy". Honesty and feeling of dread means you should really just empty your inbox.

the core thing is that it removes decision-making from the process of checking your email. For people who struggle with organisation, this is a bit of a godsend. Sure, you still have to reply, but for a lot of people following the Inbox Zero rules you'll end up feeling a lot less _totally useless_ stress from staring at your inbox (even if it's just somewhere else).

It's sensible advice for people who don't have a working system. If you have a working system, you should totally use that though, it probably works better for you. Though maybe your system isn't working as well as you might hope, so it's always good to experiment.

<comment><USER14> I feel like Inbox Zero is mostly for people that receive massive quantities of email that they also have to _act_ on.

For people like me who mostly receive updates and notifications via email and only occasionally receive actionable content through email it doesn't make sense to have some sort of superset of methods on top of what my email software already provides.

I read the stuff that's interesting to me, I pin things I need to take care of later or remember (I use Inbox), I reply to things that need replying to which typically only happens a handful of times per week, and that's that.

If I ever get to the point where I am pinning several emails per week and find that I have to act or reply on more than the handful of emails per week that I already do I will consider a method for staying on top of my inbox but until then the built-in tools already do it well enough for me.

Also I would start by looking into the tools themselves to see how they could help me, rather than inventing a set of rules for how to use my inbox. Filtering, bundles in Inbox, etc.

But hey, to each their own. I would get stressed out with an Inbox Zero mindset.

<comment><USER13> That's a good point. If E-mail is your RSS, then this might not work for you.

Part of it is definitely feeding into an urge to be an e-mail completionist (for me this has ended up with me unsubscribing from a _lot_ of email notifications), so there is an argument that IZ feeding into the obsessive parts of ourselves.

The whole "Getting Things Done" mindset is that you have to make a call on everything, so you have to act on it. Like if you get a promo coupon, you need to set some time to go browse the website if you're thinking of using it. Nothing takes 0 seconds, right?

It's the sort of stuff to apply if you feel like your time is being sapped away an you're not sure why. As one of those people, it's helped me a lot, so I recommend it because I know others out there are like that... but no point putting a Band-Aid where there's no problem right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm one of those "zero inbox" people. To me, an E-mail sitting in my inbox is a distraction-- a task I potentially have to do today. My system is pretty simple: I skim through each one. If it looks like something I have to do or respond to today, I give it a red flag. If it looks like something I have to do or respond to tomorrow, I give it an orange flag. If it's a multi-person thread wherein I'm waiting for more info from someone else, I flag it yellow. Anything else gets no flag. For all of them, I archive them away after I've read them to prevent them from becoming inbox-distractions.

Then at the end of the day, I'll review my red flags and do them, review my orange flags and do the ones I can, and review my yellow flags and ping them all to remind them to respond. Seems to work decently, but I often find I end up with a lot of yellow-flagged items because other people don't have as good E-mail habits.

<comment><USER16> A suggestion from someone who uses a similar system: get rid of yellow flags, and simply move those emails to whatever archive folder the "completed" emails would go to. A task where you're waiting for input from someone else is a task for that someone else, not for you. As such, it has no place in your inbox.

All in all, using inbox as a TODO list has been a great arrangement for me - both at work and privately.

<comment><USER17> This only seems to work when you interact exclusively with very reliable people. What if they never get back to you with their input?

<comment><USER16> In that case, if it's something they need, you can forget about it. If, on the other hand, it's something you need, then you need to treat the e-mail as a reminder that you need to follow up - essentially, another item in your TODO - so it needs to stay in your inbox.

Well, I wrote "you need to", but I'm describing what works for me. :) YMMV, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been using Inbox for Gmail ( [https://inbox.google.com](https://inbox.google.com) ) since launch and it handles most of the things the author talks about. Emails are treated as tasks, and it's a single mouse click or keyboard shortcut to do any of the following: create a reminder based on a given email, pin it for easier later retrieval, or archive it. That's basically how I manage my mail, along with a simple trick from "Getting Things Done" (which I haven't read), which is that if a task is only going to take a short time, do it immediately rather than putting it off.

<comment><USER16> Careful about those "quick tasks", you might die a death from thousand cuts. If you're doing something that takes time and concentration, it takes effort to context-switch your brain away from it, do the "quick task", and then context-switch back. If you keep getting distracted from the "big task", chances are that you will start making mistakes, or just do it badly. It's better to defer these "quick tasks", and then do them all at once - <USER2> minimizing the context-switching from and to your "big task".

Just tell people that you'll get on their task "[in an hour/later today/today until lunch/...]", AND THEN REALLY DO IT, like an adult, responsible person. No touchy-feely patronizing nonsense about forgetting the tasks you defer, we're not schoolchildren.

<comment><USER18> Oh, I'm not processing email constantly, and definitely not while I'm in the flow. When I am processing email I've already set aside some time for it, and finish off the simple tasks immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm one of those people with a bajillion unread emails -- 15,615 at the moment, but I feel like this is manufacturing a problem I don't have. Inbox zero or whatever does nothing for me. Here's like a sample of things I haven't bothered to click: "YMCA membership survey", "Recommended coursera courses", "grubhub order", "Mailing list update for a blog I read sometimes". These aren't really things I feel any sort of pressure to read, but I haven't put in a filter on them either because sometimes I want to see them. They're not really blocking me from seeing my important emails.

This notion that I'm "bad" at email or that I need to "do" something about this; why would I want to fix something that's working pretty much exactly how I want?

I could go mark them read even though I haven't read them and don't momentarily care to, but that only holds value to me if you assume that I view my unread email counter like some sort of unfinished task list -- which I don't. It's literally just a measure of things I haven't read. It means nothing to me.

<comment><USER20> Hmm. The problem with that approach is that among many things that mean nothing in your inbox, there are some that are quite meaningful. And these have the potential to get lost among the noise.

<comment><USER19> They don't get lost -- I'm quite literally saying this is not a problem for me. I have no intention of prescribing how other people should organize their email, because I can't imagine any universe where I would actually care about that, but this extremely long winded essay about how the way I'm doing it is _wrong_ strikes me as absurd. I also think it's pretty weird someone would take the time to diagnose my apparent character flaws based on my email habits, and then propose solutions. Uh, thanks? Of all the world's problems focusing on why some people leave email unread seems borderline OCD.

Not to mention that a lot of the author's inferences are pretty insulting. "This means that when someone asks you to do a thing, you probably aren't going to do it. You're going to pretend to commit to it, and then you're going to flake out when push comes to shove. You're going to keep context-switching until all the deadlines have passed." Wow, really, you got all of that because I didn't bother to hit "Mark Read" on my grubhub order confirmation?

<comment><USER21> Many people have a legitimate problem handling their email and drop things on the floor they wish they didn't. It doesn't sound like you're one of those people, so the article wasn't for you, and that's fine.

For me _personally_, I archive the unimportant emails (like a grubhub order) so I don't waste time scanning over it next time i check my email. If I never archive it, I might end up scanning over it several times for no reason, and with keyboard shortcuts I can hit "x y j" once and not have deal with it again.

Your way is fine too. I just think some people really do need help being more organized and I thought the article did a pretty good job of talking about the non-technical problems many of them (but not you) have.

<comment><USER19> I would have zero issues if he was just proposing a solution to a problem that some people have, but he hasn't done that. He's suggested that using email in certain ways is _incorrect_ and that it implies _bad things about you_.

"In other words: The thing you are bad at is saying 'no' to people. "

For fucks sake.

I'd also have no issues if this was on like the third page, but the fact it has this many upvotes suggests people agree with this, which makes me wonder: 1) WHY do you all care about other people's inbox habits? How does this impact you? Why do you even think it's your business in the least bit? 2) WHY do you presume you can actually infer anything important about a person based on that, to the point of saying some very insulting things about their character?

The author seems to believe we all inhabit the same bizarre world he does, where apparently most email is worthless, and yet your response to this apparently worthless stream of information implies many things about your character with a great deal of certainty. Like, what the fuck? Maybe there's a common sense middle ground where I get email notifications about things that don't require much action but are somewhat valuable to have, and I can read fast enough to parse the important things in a few seconds without having to spend significant time thinking about my email process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't understand people complaining with lots of unread emails.. If you didn't read an email from X days ago or older, you won't ever do it. Just mark as read all [unread] mail from X days ago till the beginning of Time, and you are set to go.

</comment><comment><USER23> What I despise most the is the desk drop in, especially for things that could be easily emailed. Sometimes even interrupting me to alert me in person that you've sent me an email.

However I've been told by a manager to use the desk drop in more, to get more visibility and make it look like I'm engaging with the team to outside observers

<comment><USER24> I recently had a manager say the same thing to me about Slack.

The founders were apparently trolling the tech channels and my name didn't come up enough. Mostly because I was busy working and not incessantly spamming giphy nonsense.

Needless to say I quit.

<comment><USER25> Some workplaces have the "fish-bowl" feeling, and Slack can really amplify that. Imagine having alerts come into a channel where your boss's boss is watching you acknowledge them, DM'ing him critiques of your work in realtime.

<comment><USER24> That is exactly what happened. The company is now imploding because the entirety of senior engineering staff has resigned over the last two weeks.

One of our founders left herself logged in on a QA device, needless to say the entire team got to read her emails for two weeks without her knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What do people think about using email as an alternative to social networks - i.e. creating lists of email addresses (groups), and sending out photos, jokes, opinions, etc. to those groups (e.g. an "All" group to send life updates, a "Cool" group that can take any joke, etc.)?

<comment><USER27> I can't tell if this is clever baiting or not. This _was_ email with friends before MySpace.

<comment><USER28> Curious how old the OP is because I got a good chuckle out of his comment.

<comment><USER26> 31 :-)

I miss the pen-pal days of emails between friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems to have been hn'd

Here's a google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/04/email- isnt-the-problem.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Completely agree.

We use Skype chat at my company for internal communications and it is far more distracting than email.

Some people seem to 'over-communicate' when using real-time chat, meaning that my Skype is flashing non-stop. Yes, I can turn off the notifications but then, what's the point of using real-time chat versus email?

<comment><USER31> I have noticed this too. I find it distracting and often low signal to noise discussion.

I keep Slack on Do Not Disturb mode anytime I'm writing code. If someone really _needs_ to reach me in realtime, they can @ me to trigger the icon badge. Our Slack team has hundreds of messages a day, but of those maybe 2-3 require my immediate attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Email wasn't designed to be used the way we use it now.

It's not a to-do list protocol. In fact, as Paul Graham has put it, it's a disastrously bad todo list (Source: [http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html))

It's not a messaging protocol - email was never built for conversations, which is why conversations over email often get clunky, confusing and finding some piece of information later is near-impossible.

No wonder people just plain don't like email as a communication method. It was invented in the 70s and it was intended for much lower volumes (Source: [http://www.techworld.com/startups/skype-cofounder-jaan- talli...](http://www.techworld.com/startups/skype-cofounder-jaan-tallinn- hails-his-new-startup-fleep-as-skype-im-on-steroids-3609697/))

The thing is, most 'email killers' like Slack are closed systems and thus have no shot at replacing email - the reason why email has persevered is its openness, how it is the lowest common denominator in online communications (ahem, 2,5bn users worldwide).

Instead of a new open protocol, Fleep ([https://fleep.io](https://fleep.io)) has built a messenger that relies on the email protocol by integrating with email seamlessly. With Fleep, you can send messages to anyone who has an email address - if they're not a Fleep user yet, they will receive the messages as normal emails. As a Fleep user, however, you already get the improved conversational experience of emails.

(Full disclosure: I do work at Fleep and I absolutely love the product, the ambition and the ingenious approach our founding team has taken to merging IM & email.)

<comment><USER33> Email _was_ built for conversations. Reverse in everything read to people forcing by that ruined Office Microsoft unfortunately.

<comment> T-hawk Microsoft didn't force that, they reflected it. Microsoft just made their software facilitate what users actually wanted to do. They don't care about all that tedious effort to scroll and selectively trim and indent and format quotes for a neatly curated conversation. They just want to start typing. They just want all that junk out of their way. Microsoft merely reduced resistance to what users were already finding natural to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good read. I like his point that you should read your inbox oldest first, or else you reward the most annoying correspondents. This also encourages the "handle it once" ethos, because you need to traverse older items to get to new ones.

Sadly there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Gmail to sort by ascending date - please enlighten me if there is.

</comment><comment><USER35> One thing I would say in disagreement is that you can use filters and labels to your advantage even with this mentality. I agree that keeping things labeled and archived hasn't done me much good. Lately what I do instead is use filters to label things by category, just so I can archive them faster. As I archive, I also remove the label. For instance, "Newsletter", "Transaction", etc. When I look at a bunch of things of one type, I don't have to make as big a context switch between them, and I can quickly determine which I care about. ("Recruiter" is a fun filter that is a perpetual work in progress.)

</comment><comment><USER36> I've found the trick to email is filter/delete/archive with extreme prejudice. It's hard to fall into but-I-might-need-it-later mode if you never saw it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER37> OT, but my first reaction to this article was how much I loved that font. Looked it up, it's Monda, and available on Google Fonts [https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Monda](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Monda).

</comment><comment><USER38> tl;dr : "Turn Messages Into Tasks"

Man, I miss Agenda :( It basically did that automatically.

<comment><USER39> I've been looking for a different interface for email that focuses on actions and not emails. Other types of communication, e.g. RSS, could feed actions into the same interface. Every incoming email is an intended action: a text that you intend to read and decide to either take any number of actions on.

At different times of the day, different filters apply. During work hours, only work mails and a few personal contacts get through the filter and on my 'read mail' task. I perform the 'read mail' task a few times during work.

Outside of work, only mails with private topics will get through. Phone and text can be used for urgent work issues. For mailing lists, each updated thread is one read task.

Every read task can lead to one or more immediate or intended actions. Intended actions have categories.

Different types of actions:

\- current action: the action I'm taking right now

\- action stack: a current action can lead to a small subactions

\- intended action: action that is in the system and shows up as a possible current action. This includes sports and cooking.

\- planned action: an action with a fixed start time, usually these are synchronous with actions of other people e.g. meetings or travel.

An important feature of this interface is to group and filter actions by context. When working on project X, only show actions of project X. This reduces the huge number of context switches the many people struggle with.

Every action that is taken is linked to the action that led to it. Sending email gives the option to create an intended action for a follow-up when there is no reply from the receiver within a set time.

While an action is being performed, your computer IO is monitored. These data packets, e.g. git commits, changed files, emails sent, visited web pages, sent web forms, can be included in an action report. This way, there is a simple report after each action.

All action reports form your archive. The archive are your past actions, they are out of your way once you've dealt with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Saying "No" does help. I answer much mail with "UNSUBSCRIBE", then blacklist the sender in Thunderbird. Almost all spam gets filtered, as do messages mentioning "survey" or "webinar".

</comment><comment><USER41> If anyone wants to help build this stuff, you should build a plugin on Nylas N1. :) [https://github.com/nylas/n1](https://github.com/nylas/n1)

</comment><comment><USER42> > but the defining characteristic of email is that it is the primary mode of > communication that we use, both professionally and personally, when we are > asking someone else to perform a task.

what the fuck. This is so specious. I don't use email this way at all.

</comment><comment><USER43> The website looks down.. any mirror?</comment>


Developer Preview of Couchbase Mobile - Apache CouchDB for iOS devices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/couchbaselabs/iOS-Couchbase/blob/master/dev_preview.md <comment><USER2> This is a good time to self-link to trundle: <https://github.com/schwa/trundle>

Trundle is my Objective-C (iOS! Mac OS X!) framework to communicate with CouchDB servers. The guys at CouchBase use it in the demo for Couchbase Mobile

<comment><USER3> Nice work. For android devs there is also:

<https://github.com/couchbaselabs/libcouch-android>

and

<https://github.com/couchbaselabs/couch-android-launcher>

Both supported by couchbase officially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm an iOS developer that has no idea what CouchDB is other than another database system. I'm a little confused as to what CouchDB Mobile is. Is it at another database engine I can use to locally persist my data on the device (like an improved SQLite), or is it some kinda of API system that can be used to communicate directly with a CouchDB hosted on a server without the need for a REST API to be created to manage the interaction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apache CouchDB is an open-source database that stores JSON and runs in resource constrained environments. It's killer feature is that the data it holds can be shared across multiple users and devices in near realtime. Did I mention that CouchDB is also a web server?

Mobile Couchbase is a package of Apache CouchDB designed for iOS. It is pre- Beta right now, but we are taking the wraps off the source because we've had an application that uses it approved by Apple for sale in the App Store. We are soliciting open source contributions and feedback from users.

<comment><USER4> Okay, I checked out your site and you guys have me at "CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests."

To put it mildly, this sounds fucking awesome. I have no idea why I haven't checked this out sooner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really excited for this. It seems like having CouchDB available on iOS will make it fairly easy to build apps that require synchronization to the web backend after being offline.

<comment><USER6> The web backend needs to use CouchDB, right?

<comment><USER5> I haven't worked with CouchDB yet, but I believe the answer is yes, since the syncing is done using CouchDB's replication features

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "If you <3 CouchApps, you can deploy them as iOS apps." - Love this one!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget to come to the meetup tonight if you are in SF (see the bottom of the article for details).

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it'll be very interesting to see people distributing and replicating CouchApps. This could allow us to potentially skip completely the AppStore and have our own CouchAppStore.

<comment><USER9> That violates the Apple developer ToS. See what happened to Scratch on the iPad.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this would be nice, but it is also totally understandable that it is not allowed. "Just" adding reliable sync to native iOS apps and single-package CouchApps is cool enough :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been waiting for this for months. Pretty excited about this.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Rails really MVC?  - <AUTHOR>

I wonder if ror is really based on MVC though  they claim, otherwise I am probably ignoring something very obvious.
Refer to the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller
Look at the diagram there. In ror the views dont refer Models directly. Its done essentially through the controller isn't it ?
Check out his component diagram http://lh4.ggpht.com/Dikiwinky/RwGSHOH-OWI/AAAAAAAAAEI/4UH_4ohjC4U/Rails2.png
Here also there is no interaction between Model and Views.
From this RoR appears to be just a 3 tier architecture. <comment><USER2> No web framework is going to be classical MVC but, it can be inspired by it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Controllers pass models to the view.</comment>


Non-nullable pointers for C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dropbox/nn

<comment><USER2> Using types to encode additional invariants is of course very useful, though those pointers does not enforce non-nullability. For example you can transfer ownership out of them more than once:

      void f(nn_unique_ptr<std::string> a, nn_unique_ptr<std::string> b) {
        // Null pointer dereference in one of following lines:
        std::cout << *a << std::endl;
        std::cout << *b << std::endl;
      }

      int main() {
        std::bind(f, _1, _1)(nn_make_unique<std::string>("Hello!"));
      }</comment>


Windows 7 SMB Crash Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUouQy7Ohus

<comment><USER2> Well that's ugly. Embed a JS redirect via some XSS to a server running that wincrasher script and you could start bringing down a lot of boxes out there.

Hope this is fixed asap. I'm just starting to really like Win 7.

<comment><USER3> Can you even hit SMB shares over the internet? Seems to be that the malicious computer would have to be on the same network for this to work.

<comment><USER4> Indeed you can. Try \\\live.sysinternals.com in a Windows Explorer window for an example of it (presumably mounting it in linux would work as well, although I haven't tried).</comment></comment></comment>


Multi One Password – The Most Secure Password Manager for Windows OS - <AUTHOR> https://windowsportableapps.blogspot.com/2019/09/multi-one-password.html <comment><USER2> "The most secure password manager" is quite a bold claim.

The website goes on to say:

> Almost all Password Managers are unsafe […]

If you don't even acknowledge that security/safety are always relative to a threat model, why should I trust you to design a good password manager?

For example, does Multi One Password mitigate against an attacker getting hold of your master password? (Yes, other password managers do.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is garbage and should not be on HN.</comment>


Bitcoin Core Developers Join MIT's Media Lab - <AUTHOR> http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2015/04/joining-mit-media-lab-digital-currency.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields are the three principal developers of Bitcoin Core, the network's reference client. They were previously employed by the Bitcoin Foundation.

Brian Forde, the director of the Media Lab's new Digital Currency Initiative [0], wrote a blog post with a few more details about why they brought in Gavin, Wladimir, and Cory [1].

0\. [https://medium.com/@medialab/launching-a-digital-currency- in...](https://medium.com/@medialab/launching-a-digital-currency- initiative-238fc678aba2)

1\. [https://medium.com/@medialab/welcome-to-the-mit-media-lab- ga...](https://medium.com/@medialab/welcome-to-the-mit-media-lab-gavin-wlad- and-cory-977ae418c084)</comment>


Compound with potent effects on the biological clock discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101214181918.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29 <comment><USER2> FYI: Deceptive title. I thought this was going to be about reproductive stuff, not jet lag and sleep disorders.</comment>


Use a Mask Without Valves - <AUTHOR> https://vitals.lifehacker.com/if-your-mask-has-a-valve-its-half-useless-1843182019 <comment><AUTHOR> This is an important point, and for some reason I haven't seen it discussed very widely: masks with valves protect you, but they don't fully protect anyone else.

<comment><USER2> And additionally, N95 and similar masks are "wasted" in a non-professional use:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23957506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23957506)</comment></comment>


My YC submitted company - Thoughts or suggestions  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sleep.fm <comment><USER2> I disagree with the comments saying that the purpose is unclear -- I understood immediately -- but this just seems like begging for being the butt of practical jokes. I don't want to wake up to getting rickrolled, and I don't want to _not_ get woken up because somebody chose John Cage's 4:33 as my alarm message.

<comment><AUTHOR> LoL - RickRolled... yes you can have a lot of fun with it, but you can regulate your Social Alarm Clock, impeding the practical jokes.

I only allow few people to send me alarm messages, like my g/f who is away at school and some of my family members who are sure not to RickRoll me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, without signing up, I don't really get it. Maybe you'd care to explain it to us in a few lines? A few things of note though:

1) Breaks the back button on my browser. That's a no no

2) The splash image takes way too long to load.

<comment><USER4> Since you asked for thoughts + suggestions, here are mine:

I totally agree on all three points of the parent to this post (wtf is it, don't break my back button, and why is the bg so beastly).

The only keys that could give me some context don't really make any sense: "sleep and wake up social network" - huh? alarm messages - what? Vertical and horizontal scroll bars on my maxed-out browser window - why? No chair at the computer desk - oh noes! where am I gonna sit? "Sleep with us... and let your friends wake you!" - This sorta reminds me of this one time in college...

I'm curious to know what your site does, but not curious enough to sign up to find out. But if I did want to sign up, why do you need my website? Which website? My business website? Personal website? Blog? Flickr? The chamber of commerce for my city of residence? (Same goes for "name" is this my real name, first name, last name, or a user/nick name?)

Why does the input look right justified? That feels awkward.

The thick black border around the brown box changes its thickness on the bottom left side.

You've got a lot of work to do to get your front page together. I will be interested to see how you progress, and to learn what your site/company is about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I appreciate your comments and suggestions :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK, I really don't understand the point. Can you explain to me several different user cases for your site? How many people out there do you think will want to use your sleep.fm?

Why does an alarm clock have to be a social networking site? This seems to be a rather utilitarian thing that works perfectly fine via the multiple alarm clocks I already own. All of my friends would use a service like this to mess with me, if I gave them privileges to wake me up. I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to abuse it if the roles were reversed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sleep.FM is introducing a new form of communication that further enhances our always connected digital society. The always connected generation enjoys IM, Voip, Email, Social Networking, Twitter, text messaging, chat rooms, lifecasting and now they can start off their mornings providing each other with personal greetings, pertinent information or having fun with one another through alarm clock messaging.

Yes, this definitely can be used for practical jokes(which some may enjoy and others not, but either way it's something both parties will talk about). Practical jokes aside, we have used Sleep.FM' Social Alarm Clock to send...

\- Happy Birthday alarm messages \- Messages detailing an important meeting has moved to an earlier time \- My colleague's cousin in Iraq being awakened by his kids alarm messages \- My friends(newlyweds) who have different sleep schedules waking each other up

The Social Alarm Clock has been wrapped around a modern concept(a social network), one that allows users to regulate who sends them alarm messages, as well as upload alarm message to their Sleep.FM friends. As a social network there more ways to monetize users, as if you look at lone applications like Skype and Twitter they are challenged in this regards!

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, and I really hope I'm not the first person to tell you this, but I just don't think this is a very good idea. I just can't see why anyone would ever want to use a Social Alarm Clock. I don't like waking up anyways, being Social isn't going to make it better. If there is one time when I am fine having absolutely no social interaction, it is in the 10 seconds a day when I wake up. I don't want to do any of the things your site allows me to do. It doesn't seem like very many other people here want to either.

I think there are some ways you could adapt this to be more viable but in its current form it just really isn't going to work. If you want to go forward with this idea, I would recommend widget'izing it, this is one function that would be more useful integrated into an existing social network.

Also, I don't think very many people have a computer sitting next to them to use as an alarm clock.

<comment><USER6> I think there's something there, but probably not in its current form, as rms says. I think it's probably misleading to call it an alarm clock, since people associate it with waking up. Yeah, unless you're hot, I don't want you waking me up. Reminders might be a better metaphor.

I have a friend who doesn't keep track of anything, and relies on his girlfriend to tell him when to do what. Whether this is a good way to go about a relationship is debatable, I can see how you'd set alarms for people to do something because it's important to you, rather than the person executing it. Say like, "pick up groceries at 5pm", but send it at 5pm so he has no excuse not to remember.

Happy birthdays wishes. "hey how did the date go?" messages right after your friend's date. "how did that pitch go?" messages after your colleague got devoured by VC's. What's in common is that you sent the message at the time you remembered, and they received it at a time when it's relevant to them, while you might be out golfing at the time. You can seem thoughtful at the moment it's relevant to the receiver of the alarm message, and when it's convenient to you.

Or you can send messages to your future self (say 5 years later), so you'd get messages from your past self saying, "this is what I want to do by the time I'm your age. Have you done them yet?" Or you send friends messages later on saying "I was really mad that you ate my ice cream last sat, but I was too shy to say anything at the time."

I think it's probably worth exploring what you can do with asynchronous messages that don't get delivered immediately, cuz that's essentially what it is. Limiting it to just messages you can send for waking is limiting, but perhaps not as easy to sell to people otherwise.

While widgetizing it is one way to go, I think this best fits on a mobile app of some sort. Mobile devices are seen as personal extensions of self. This sort of thing falls under that category.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we have a Windows Mobile prototype working and it will be finished soon. iPhone in Feb. when they release their SDK.

We definitely are aware of of other uses of The Social Alarm and will be detailing that in a presentation on Tuesday.

There are a ton of things to be done by meshing the alarm clock(or an audio alert system if you prefer to classify it as such) with the Internet. We plan on implementing a lot more to this concept!

Again, thank you everyone for your comments and honesty!

<comment><USER7> "Audio Alert System" is impressive and it can be used to represent the various ideas you want to integrate in your website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No offense, but that is the worst idea I've ever seen in my entire life. Nobody in the whole world would ever want to use that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input! Not everyone will enjoy this, but we hear both sides of the fence.

Sleep.FM was a semi-finalist for TechCrunch40 and recently chosen out of 20 companies(they pick 6) to present to a crowd of 400 where Microsoft and Facebook will be present.

<comment><USER8> That's because people in The Valley have no concept of what the other 99.9% of the population wants. They see a novel concept where most Americans will get woken up once when they didn't want to and be nothing but annoyed.

Also your video at [http://www.jumpcut.com/view?id=5DA53674478211DCAE95000423CF3...](http://www.jumpcut.com/view?id=5DA53674478211DCAE95000423CF382E) should be the moment of zen on the daily show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No offense...

The site looks horrible, graphics aren't pleasing. I don't like the background picture, nor do I like anything else design wise. I simply won't use a website that looks like that.

It requires plug-ins to be installed (and I don't trust your site enough to have it install the plug-ins).

I think that idea is pretty bad. Instead, maybe have a facebook app that sends wake-up reminders (with permission from the receiver) via SMS or something similar.

How are you going to make money off this idea, I'm pretty sure no company is going to want to buy you out.

Also, don't put a TM symbol in your logo unless you actually have a trademark on that logo (which I highly doubt that you do).

What are those scrolling images on the front page? What has that got to do with anything?

<comment><USER7> :-) I liked the background picture since it is perfect night setup and goes along with the utility - alarm clock.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great thank you so much for your feedback. It's a big help!

Here is a full summary...

Sleep.FM - The Social Alarm Clock is an alarm clock social network, where upon the alarm time passing on the site(mobile versions soon) you are awakened by your alarm messages(audio files or voice-mail) received from your friends on the network.

It is themed around the human conditions of resting and waking where user environments are bedrooms. Users interact with one another by entering each others bedrooms to leave one another gifts(with or without comments), emails and or alarm messages.

 __The back button issue.. does that happen on the splash page or when you click, "Already a member? Click here," which takes you to another page?

Thanks!

<comment><USER10> The back button problem is on the main splash page. It looks like you are doing some kind of javascript redirection. So there are actually two entries in history. When you go back one page in history, it jumps forward again.

Incidentally, there have been several related products in recent years. Someone (maybe Sharper Image?) was selling an alarm clock that supported downloadable alarm sounds. I don't remember exactly, but I think it worked like those digital picture frames. That's not to say that you couldn't do it better. But I think your biggest issue may be that most people don't sleep next to their computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, this is awesome. I am throwing away my cell phone immediately.

But, keep an eye out for your completion: <http://www.zombo.com/> .

Good luck with your Series A.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now that I think about it....this concept may be better suited as a facebook application. I think the high-schoolers may have fun waking each other up for school.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should have a tour, so people can see what you have to offer without signing up.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's like!.. a cellphone.

<comment><USER11> but this ads social networking features and a tag cloud: THE FUTURE IS NOW!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can you give a summary of what it does? I don't understand and don't feel like signing up

Also, it hoses the back button on my browser, which is annoying

</comment><comment><USER14> It is not a bad idea, here are my suggestions:

-Put a FAQ -Get a Designer to do the graphics, more white

Good Luck

</comment><comment><USER15> I had to scroll horizontally, and the text input boxes are not exactly in the surrounding block.

I am using Safari 3.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi

thanks... it is not compatible for MAC yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Breaks back button, very frustrating. I don't get it, needs at least a short explanation on the front page.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We are in private beta now; been for a month or so...

Thanks for all feedback!

</comment><comment><USER17> How does it deal with different time zones?

<comment><AUTHOR> The alarm clock time is set by the time on your computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your site is slow.</comment>


Tell HN: 24 Hours to Try Eye Tracking for Gaming - <AUTHOR> I saw 40+ fantastic comments in this HN thread about gaming with eye tracking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524371
It was written by a games journalist and the comments in the thread were fantastic - honest and useful. (all gold to us, I work at Tobii Eye Tracking)
We decided to let the HN community try it out for themselves - by tweeting "let me try @tobiieyex via #hackernews!"
That's really it. We will DM you for shipping details. More than 10+ amazing eye trackers are up for grabs!
Let me know if this hits the spot or misses it by a mile. <comment><AUTHOR> The free trial test has ended.

 __Note:we will not be sending them out to dormant /fake/unused twitter accounts _</comment>


4 Advantages of Self-Employment - <AUTHOR> http://blog.taskwise.com/2011/08/4-advantages-of-self-employment/ f you work a regular 9 to 5 job for a corporation, you may have thought more than once about starting your own business. Maybe you feel like you could perform the same tasks efficiently without office politics or gossip standing in your way.... <comment><USER2> A weak and superficial article written in a hurry to get pageviews... I mean, another article on this site is "Why your business needs a blog"

The article entirely misses the issue of temperament. Some people really crave the "security" of a 9-5, they need somebody to tell them what to do.

There's also the question of where your career was going. I worked for a summer at a job shop -- one of my co-workers who'd been a web freelancer for a few years felt that getting a job at this place, with a good team and good salespeople, was a big step up. For me, it was a dead end job, and I turned down the offer of a permanent job with them and got one with another firm.

In the last few years I became an expert in an obscure but growing specialty, and that led me back into contracting, which got my career out of the doldrums. We've all got our own path.

Now, the article entirely misses the elephant in the room with self employment, which is health insurance. This can be a non-issue if you're 23 or if you're married to somebody who has a real job, but for many people, health insurance cannot be purchased on the individual market at any price.

<comment><USER3> I agree with everything you've said. But I live in the EU, so the health care issue is covered by the taxes I pay; regardless of where I pay them.

I hail from the UK, but I've lived and worked across the EU. In fact, even if I weren't paying taxes, my health care, and that of my dependants and anyone else, would be covered.

So, on this side of the pond, this elephant is absent.

That said, USians' resistance to universal health care mystifies me only a little less than their returning Bush Jnr for a second term.

How can any civilized nation justify the rejection of universal health care?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 5\. Diversity. As a freelancer, I have worked on several large projects and a couple of smaller ones in the past few years. I saw many different processes and learned the advantages and disadvantages of them. I had to learn and use new technologies in every project. I worked with a lot of people, some of them really talented, some not so much, but I learned something from all of them.

All of this was interesting and exciting. Working 9-5 for a company would have exposed me to exactly one development process and one set of technologies. Not much to learn here, and less fun too.

<comment><USER5> Consultants may experience the same diversity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> None of the four would be in my top four. They aren't even advantages. Certainly not competitive advantages anyways.

Going along with the theme of employment vs self employed, I would like to add one I think is highly important.

5\. The pivot: In the startup world, this is basically switching focus based on the realities of your startup when you get it out into the world. You start with x idea but you find your customers are using it for something completely different. Based on that you change the service. Or something to that effect. Most people here know what I'm talking about.

Entrepreneurs are able to see changes in their industry and are able to pivot based on those changes. They independently learn new things. Try out new technologies. Take different approaches to the problems they are trying to solve. Explore different models for income. There are many other examples.

A real life example might be a web developer moving from hourly client work to building a product (perhaps on the side while still doing hourly work.) That developer might also move from web development to building Iphone apps. There are limitless ways to change in this industry.

Unfortunately, many of the jobless are in their situation because they haven't been able to do their own pivots. Perhaps it's because they have put their heads in the sand and ignored industry changes. Perhaps their routine of punching the clock has put them in a bubble where they weren't even aware that the industry has been changing.

<comment><USER5> Pivoting seems orthogonal to self-employed. I'm gainfully employed and 'pivot' on the side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want evidence of the complete worthlessness of this article, here it is: they list the self-employed tax deduction as a "tax advantage." This despite the fact that it only partially offsets the self-employment _tax._ You pay more taxes on self-employment income, not less.

(Technically, of course, the self-employment tax is the equivalent of the portion of your payroll taxes that your employer pays on your behalf, which don't appear on your paystub. In practice, of course, your employer factors these taxes into your total compensation, and they affect what kind of salary they offer you, so it's silly to argue that you're not the one paying them in the long run. But the reality is that you pay more taxes on $50,000 of freelance income than you pay on $50,000 of salary.)</comment>


iPhone's New Parental Controls Block Searches for Sex Ed, Allow Violence/Racism - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xj3bx/new-iphone-parental-controls-block-searches-for-sex-education <comment><USER2> This is easily the stupidest thing I've read in a long time, and I'd like to be reimbursed by Vice for the time it took to read it.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. Do you have a reason, or do you assume there's no other way anyone could feel about the article?

<comment><USER2> I assume the reasons should be clear to most readers on HN.

What do "Sex" and "Sex Education" have in common?

There's the word "Sex" in them.

What did Vice do? Ignore the fact it's clearly just filtering the word sex blindly because no content filter is all knowing and never is is expected to replace a supervising adult.

Then double down on it by randomly constructing sentences with the word sex.

"This just in, Apple pro Russia? Searches for 'Putin corruption (sex)' are blocked by apples content search!"

Oh and it doesn't block NSFW subreddits because Apple was expected to what? Compile a list of nsfw subreddits? Intrusively scan pages for certain HTML elements?

And it doesn't block searches where individual words aren't threatening?

Was Apple supposed to invent General AI capable of knowing "how to beat women" is not a morally upstanding thing to search?

<comment><USER3> OK, thanks for clarifying.

I don't think the simplistic algorithm makes it a non-story. To me, that _is_ the story. Why did Apple release something so under-baked that people had no trouble finding problems with it in practice?

It's like if Apple released the "Mac Robot Nanny," and it was unable to tell the difference between a baby and a pineapple.

People really care about automated "babysitting" features, so it's something Apple shouldn't release so casually.

And I also think we can see how badly Apple is losing in the (very) nascent AI product battle. Siri is far worse than Alexa and even Google Assistant, and now this.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook: The Normalization of What Should Never Have Been Accepted as Normal - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2019/01/26/facebook-the-normalization-of-what-should-never-have-been-accepted-as-normal/#690c52831e41 <comment><USER3> A simple test for figuring out which of Facebook's arguments are sensible is to substitute "Facebook" for a different entity such as, say, a neighborhood association, the phone company, or a government agency. For example, take the subtitle of Zuckerberg's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: "We need your information for operation and security, but you control whether we use it for advertising." Substituting:

* Would you be OK with _your neighborhood association_ installing spyware on your cellphone because they "need your information for operation and security, but you control whether they use it for advertising?"

* Would you be OK with _the phone company_ installing spyware on your cellphone because they "need your information for operation and security, but you control whether they use it for advertising?"

* Would you be OK with _a government agency_ installing spyware on your cellphone because they "need your information for operation and security, but you control whether they use it for advertising?"

<comment><USER4> Yeah but fb didn't install spyware on my phone. I intentionally give data to fb so that they can share it for me...

<comment><USER5> No, you intentionally give fb a photo or a piece of text to share. They hoover up everything else.

For example, they will record your physical location when you send a message or share a post, as well as randomly several times per day. They will also record which photos, posts, and ads you linger on as you aimlessly browse.

This is information that most people are not sharing intentionally, and it's not optional. Fb uses this information to build a profile on you that's separate from anything you share intentionally.

It's being referred to as spyware because most users aren't aware that Facebook does this, and wouldn't have agreed to it had they been offered a choice.

<comment><USER6> If I say "no" on iOS when the FB app asks for location how are they exactly recoding my location?

P.S. No idea about Android.

<comment><USER7> Theoretically (i don't work at facebook) there's a number of ways you could go about it.

\- Geocode down to the lowest applicable level of IP address

\- grab it from the photo metadata

\- Piggyback off of similarities to other people obtaining similar photos or activity

\- grab it from other database sources that do have your location

\- correlate it to your interactions with other hardware/infrastructure with known locations

\- transitively deduce it from your friends and acquaintances who share their location and tag themselves and reply to your stories/photos

Theoretically you could try to train some neural nets on images themselves. Geoguessr.com is a fun game website where you can try to do so as a human, and you can usually get pretty damn close. Images themselves leak a tonne of information on time/place: clothing styles, fonts and languages on signs, shadows, light colour, fauna/flora, asphault + stone types, arichtecture and design quirks. In many ways the neural net might even have some advantages over humans, because not many humans memorise the thousands of minutae: eastern USSR uses this particular kind of road barrier and reflector type and this kind of font on its road signs.

But aside from a research activity, i imagine facebook already has the data it needs most of the time...

<comment><USER8> I once posted a shot including a friends daughter. FB tagged her mother before I shared the post. We were all creeped out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I doubt I'm the only person in their 30's+ who can remember warning people that giving so much data to Facebook is a bad idea, and the response was just outright, sanctimonious screeching and accusations of unreasonable paranoia. I'm talking borderline religious zealotry from hipsters who consider themselves progressive and free-thinking.

<comment><USER10> I think people don't understand the power of that data. I think they also believe that organizations only have the data they explicitly give. I think this, because this is what others convey to me when I talk to them about data. People are realizing now the extent and power. I talk about why Facebook doesn't need to listen to your conversation to make those creepy ad suggestions. This is the best way I've found to explain it

<comment><USER11> Personally I don't find any kind of ads creepy. I would prefer highly relevant ads to spam.

<comment><USER12> Sadly such an opinion as yours would be deemed, as the GP mentioned, as just not understanding. Those that willingly accept the tradeoff are often assumed to be ignorant and most don't voice their opinions online making the narrative appear one sided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've heard so many creepy Facebook stories by now.

I know a psychologist who is well aware of privacy, which created a pseudonym account only to avoid her patients, which had the whole thing blown in her face when she installed Facebook app which then immediately suggested those patients she tried to avoid just because she had their phone, and those patients could briefly see her as a suggestion too. Nothing could help at this point, it didn't even need her permission for the phone contacts, just her phone number was enough for Facebook because it had already gotten the contacts of her patients which contained her number.

Just think about how ridiculous this is for a moment: anyone, including that shady taxi driver you ordered, or the plumber, or whatever, can suddenly get you as friend option in Facebook because you happened to call each other the other day and you're living in the same city. It gets super creepy really fast.

<comment><USER14> Similarly I visit mental health hospitals and facebook recommends patients of those hospitals to me as new friends.

It's really fucking creepy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For context, I have a stub facebook account with practically no activity, mainly just to show people in our society i exist. I don't like social media and i think the whole phenomenon is a net negative for humanity.

Professionally, people might call me a data analyst or a data scientist, but to the layperson in terms of describing 'what I actually do for money', I think its basically 'imagine sherlock holmes grew up being able to program'.

There's an element of those 'what I think i do' memes in that statement, but I think there's an important philosophical concept I've been dealing with lurking under all that and I'm not sure how our society is going to deal with it.

Excluding those instances of 'actual spyware', people just ooze and leak information perpetually throughout the day. This information is being put out there whether they are aware of it or not, but its primarily the reciever's sensitivity, infrastructure and use of that information that determines whether its:

a) perceived as information at all

b) is captured

c) is then used for some purpose of the capturing entity

The character of sherlock holmes gets away with it because he's an anomaly, because people perceive him to be good and working against the 'bad guys', and honestly, because people just don't really think about the privacy and lifestyle implications of being in his presence.

Now however, we're at this point where corporations have an ability to collect the information that exceeds the average person's ability to comprehend/process that information. Its not as good as sherlock, buts its above that of the average person. Part of that is just because our educational systems do such a piss-poor job of getting people to interpret or analyse information, but part of it is just the natural evolution of systems and infrastructure now being able to capture, process and use the information being output into the world that's always has and always will be there.

A power company doesn't need to install any spyware: you just need to look at the patterns in your power consumption to determine what a person is doing at what times.

A phone company doesn't need to install any spyware: they need your hardware details, your physical location, metadata to serve you websites, metadata to provide you calls, your billing details and identity.

Your grocery doesn't need to install any spyware: they know the product mix in your trolley tells them everything they need to know, and if you pay with non- cash means or have a loyalty card, they also have sufficient identity and personal details as well.

Your bank doesn't need to install any spyware: they know the merchants, time, place, amount, and identity details of your transactions.

A government agency doesn't need to install spyware: you have a birth certificate, (will have) a death certificate, and you verify your identity each time you interact with them.

If you think those companies aren't doing this already, congrats, you're living in ignorance.

Facebook doesn't need to install spyware (whether they are or not is another question). People are participating in their ecosystem and on top of that, providing huge amounts of additional information out into the public stream in a systematic way that previously was not previously available and not previously being shared on such a scale.

The existence of facebook and social media (the structure of the thing itself, as an instance of a particular phenomenon on a certain kind of telecommunications and tech infrastructure, rather than the individual instances of companies) leaks and necessitates this information being put out there to be used.

Now, we can say to people 'i don't like that they're doing this with that information', but its important to separate that from the actual information being put out there, and from the fact that there are many individuals who can use and successfully interpret that information, whether they work for facebook or not.

You can try to ban facebook from using that information (god knows what that would look like, i imagine it would be a horrible set of laws), but its like trying to ban sherlock from having thoughts and piecing together the mud on your shoe from the footprint in the lobby: only there's a lot more sherlocks running around out there now and people are voluntarily putting cameras into their own home and broadcasting it.

<comment><USER15> Everybody always told me I'd always make a good private investigator - <USER2> for selling me on data science!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > When all is said and done, advertising is also the basis for Google's > business model; with one fundamental difference: advertisers on Google > choose their segmented targets based on many variables, but Google will > never give them the identity, address or personal data of its users, which > it zealously guards, applying far superior security to do so than most of > its competitors.

This article starts off well, but then it reveals its true colors.

</comment><comment><USER17> > I still believe social networks have a future, but that this future will > have to be based on radically different business models, ones that do not > see users as a commodity to be bought and sold, and that instead, respect > them.

I don't accept the assumption that a social network must have a business model, or that it must be a business.

</comment><comment><USER18> Listen, FaceBook monetizes social interaction. It is completely normal and good to socialize, but Facebook is like someon read your mail and sold it. Oh wait, that's GMail. My point is that they montitize and manipulate and obfuscate the real truth of their platforms.

<comment><USER19> Except that FB now has a consistent track record of leaking those "mails" (or friend lists, or interactions, or whatever) to 3rd party entities that I've never authorized to have that data.

Gmail on the other hand has one of the best security track records in the industry, minus state-sponsored snooping (but that's a bit of a different issue, I think). There's zero instance of my Gmail mails being used by Google in anything other than algorithmic ad targeting.

<comment><USER20> Even algorithmic ad targeting can be dangerous. If you are writing love letters to your secret gay lover then that should be between you two and you shouldn't get gay ads during other browsing activity, which might be in presence of others like your employer or family.

<comment><USER21> Exgoogler here: they have list of sensitive do-not-cross-ad categories that will not show up on your other devices or networks you are or been part of.

Example: google "buy lawnmover" on your cellphone. Most likely other participants of the same LAN will sooner or later experience ads for lawnmovers. Now, google "Best online dating apps" or "im HIV positive how to protect my environment", noone else than your own device, in limited scope, will see a followup-ads.

<comment><USER22> Is there a public list of what Google does and doesn't consider sensitive?

Or is that - just guessing here - considered too sensitive to share with the public?

<comment><USER20> That's a good point. The presence of the list is only beneficial when people don't know it exists: then everyone acts as if they wouldn't know it existed, so all its doing is preventing those sensitive details to be leaked. However, if you know that the list exists, but you don't know what's on it, you might trust it too quickly... and might only find out that something is NOt on the list if it's too late. So then the existence of the list also contributes towards exposure of private details in some instances, while preventing exposure in many others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let's look at the bright side of this article: (almost) nobody cares.

</comment><comment><USER24> what an accurate, non-clickbaity and non-karmawhoring submission

</comment><comment><USER13> If you don't like Facebook don't use it, it's that simple. Social networks need a critical mass of people to run, even a naive user would stop using Facebook when most of his friends aren't there.

Facebook isn't the first social network and it isn't the last. It gained the most momentum, sure, but it will eventually fall. The trend is already downward. Anything other than just moving on not using Facebook is half measure. If you're still using Facebook by now, either you are naive or misinformed.

<comment><USER25> In some places, saying "If you don't like Facebook don't use it, it's that simple" is akin to "If you don't like Facebook don't use the Internet, it's that simple"

[https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no- id...](https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre- using-the-internet/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook- free-basics-developing-markets)</comment></comment>


VNC, image analysis and data science – part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.binaryedge.io/2015/09/30/vnc-image-analysis-and-data-science/?utm_source=hnews&utm_medium=mark&utm_campaign=vnc_30092015 <comment><USER2> You guys, you guys, we're trying our best not to ban you! Please stop it with the upvoting and instead make sure you have email addresses in your profiles so we can invite you to resubmit your good work.

Did you miss this from yesterday? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10308900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10308900)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dang, sorry we sent an email to the one on the first comment and thought we could just repost sorry about this.

<comment><USER2> Oh, so it was we who missed your email. Sorry! Will reply soon.

But please, no more ring-voting. HN's software has lots of measures to detect that and then your accounts get penalized, which we don't want to do.</comment></comment></comment>


Autopilot not on during crash in PA, Musk says it would have prevented accident - <AUTHOR> http://electrek.co/2016/07/14/autopilot-tesla-model-x-crash-pa-elon-prevented-accident/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if the driver thought the autopilot was on. A few times I've thought I'd enabled it, and only discovered that I hadn't, when I noticed the car starting to drift to the edge of the lane. It's especially easy to make this mistake when traffic-aware cruise control is on, providing some degree of automation but less than you think.

If you're using the autopilot to provide smoother control, and as a second set of eyes on the road, then thinking it's on when it's off isn't of much consequence. There's been speculation that the May fatality involved using autopilot as a _replacement_ for real-time human oversight. Whether this driver had the autopilot on or off, the root cause – thinking that the presence of the autopilot makes it safe to ignore the road – was the same. If the autopilot was off and the driver thought it was on, though, then one of the suggested solutions – requiring hands on the wheel – might not have addressed this case. Or maybe any cases: I imagine someone who thinks the autopilot relieves them of responsibility is just going to rest a hand on the wheel while they zone out anyway.

<comment><USER3> > If you're using the autopilot to provide smoother control, and as a second > set of eyes on the road, then thinking it's on when it's off isn't of much > consequence

I understand the sentiment behind this statement, but I'm not sure I agree.

Compare with simple cruise control -- ordinarily, the driver needs to provide constant gas pedal input to overcome inertia at highway speeds. If for a moment the driver thinks that cruise control is on but it's actually off, the car will begin to appreciably coast, making it clear that it's off. The 'failure mode' of this scenario is rarely surprising or dangerous to the driver or others, and easy to recover from.

Whereas features like automatic lanekeeping, blind-spot warning, pre-collision emergency breaking... those are features that _need_ to work unless explicitly disabled, because the failure modes all end in a potential accident.

<comment><USER4> There is more than one failure mode for cruise control.

EG: * Cruise control leaves throttle full open. * Cruise control fails to disengage. * Cruise control compression brakes on ice causing skidding. * Cruise control activates without driver's knowledge.

For an example see here: [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-12-16/driver- recalls-freeway...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-12-16/driver-recalls- freeway-cruise-control-horror/1180688)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's probably allowed in the T&C of owning a tesla, but is anyone else bothered by Musk calling out details of log files that "normals" probably aren't aware of?

Should people expect any privacy with regards this data? Maybe just share it with the NTSB and allow them to issue the statement that this accident was entirely not tesla's fault?

<comment><USER6> _It 's probably allowed in the T&C of owning a tesla, but is anyone else bothered by Musk calling out details of log files that "normals" probably aren't aware of?_

It's quite common in investigations of plane crashes that the aircraft manufacturer is involved in the investigation and makes public statements (usually to the effect of "we've ruled out any problems with our plane... must be those darn pilots again"). The situation with cars is a bit different in that it's (usually) private individuals rather than professionals, but I'd say that the track records of car safety vs. aircraft safety definitely point towards following the model used for air crash investigations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At last some "positive news" with regards to autopilot. As much as I love the feature and it's progressiveness, I'm afraid the authorities might shut it down because of public safety concerns. Which might have some truth to it in the short term, though in the long run it almost certainly will be superior to the average human safety record.

On another note, it's interesting how often the autopilot is often blamed despite not being on. Thankfully that can easily be verified. The damage has been done nonetheless..

<comment><USER8> >> I'm afraid the authorities might shut it down because of public safety concerns

Yup. Dead people are certainly a public safety concern. Pesky dead people!

<comment><USER9> Like the 30,000+ dead people from car accidents caused by human driver error every year?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Logs are a great thing, however I have had situations where once pointing out someones error (and obvious lie) that I was required to provide information to auditors how the data could not have been tampered with (difficult because lets face it, it could).

I wonder how its working in these situations, obviously a good/dodgy lawyer could easy spin the record as being tampered so I would want it rock solid.

<comment><USER11> That's why we have trials, right? If the facts were always perfectly accurate, there would be no work for juries.

In the real world... I imagine that the "dodgy lawyer" would provide a theory as to why the data is wrong, and Tesla's lawyer would provide a theory as to why it's right, and then it's up to the jury to decide what's true and not true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Remember, a touch to the brake disables Tesla's "autopilot". Looking forward to the NTSB report.

Where is this data from? It would seem to require physical access to the vehicle. Was Tesla given access to a wrecked vehicle that's the subject of NHTSA and NTSB investigations?

<comment><USER13> Surely they must stream the logs back to Tesla as they're taken.

<comment><USER14> Things like "Car just had an accident" get sent immediately -- Tesla will call the owner and/or 911 -- but it appears that most logs accumulate on the car or are downloaded when the car is attached to WiFi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I didn't lookup the exact Tweet, however based on the precise language of the linked article it is possible that the following occurred:

* Driver engaged the autopilot (assist)

* Driver did not have hands on the wheel long enough for the Tesla to disengage the autopilot.

* Driver may have instinctively reacted by applying acceleration to stay at speed, without further reacting.

* Vehicle crashed due to no steering control; auto-pilot not engaged and driver reckless for not being in control and situational awareness of the vehicle.

If I needed to get a new vehicle today (and there wasn't a waiting list) I think I'd probably get a Tesla; however I don't think I'd use the automation as I agree with the Google Self Driving Car stance on this form of technology. For that same reason I don't even like contemporary cruse control.

<comment><USER2> When the Tesla autopilot disengages because it doesn't detect your hands on the wheel, it takes a large number of seconds with increasingly obnoxious dashboard and audio warnings. It's hard to miss if you're paying any attention at all.

Is "contemporary cruise control" constant-speed, or traffic aware? Having driven tens of thousands of miles with each, I feel that the first increases the chance of an accident and the second decreases it (unless you let it lull you into ignoring the road). Tesla's cruise control has some blind spots (going around a curve into stopped traffic), but they're complementary to my own blind spots (the car in front suddenly decelerates; zoning out in stop- and-go traffic); my subjective impression is that the two of us together are much safer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if we'll ever see Tesla's autopilot defaulting to a "watching and ready" mode, whereby it detects signs of inattentive drivers (hands not on steering wheel, drifting within lane, etc.) and _turning itself on_ to bring the car to a safe stop.

<comment><USER16> That would be amazing for those who were having a sudden unexpected medical issue.

<comment><USER6> That's definitely the extreme case of "inattentive driver". There are different tradeoffs though -- if the driver is having a heart attack, you want to pull over and signal the emergency ASAP, whereas if the driver is merely distracted it's probably better to only take over when there's a danger to be averted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like he intended to slam on the brakes and instead slammed on the accelerator. And he turned the wheel left to avoid the obstacle.

If autopilot auto disengages, it is not the fault of the driver, but the fault of the design.

I wonder what we need more of ... better autopilot design, or better pilot training.</comment>


WIMP UI paradigm won't scale down to touch UIs - <AUTHOR> http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/the-end-of-wimp-and-the-rise-of-touch

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a rather long article, but has good observations by someone who has tried different tablet OSes.

I personally believe that we are on the verge of a fundamental shift in computer UIs. And it starts by scaling up from a simpler solution (e.g. iOS UI, Android, Meego), not by scaling down from a more complex solution (traditional desktop UIs).

Now the interesting question is that when we need to support a lot of different kinds of actions/tasks in an application, how will this be supported in touch UIs. Russ mentioned Photoshop as a good example of such application.

In our upcoming iPhone game, we have played around with circular context menus and at least in that setting they seem to be quite promising. However, you can really only have a few choices (4-5) in circular context menu on iPhone. However, on iPad or tablet, you could have several "rings" of actions. Traditionally, in mouse-based systems, circular context menus haven't have several rings because of the Fitts' law, but on the touch based system, I don't see that as a problem.

Any thoughts of possible directions, where touch UIs will evolve?

<comment><USER2> The problem with circular menus comes down to limited choices (as you pointed out), and the simple fact that it's difficult to read a circular menu. They will work best when the choices are adequately represented by an icon or single word, the choices are hierarchically flat (no drilling through submenus), and when the menu is accessed so frequently that the user can quickly map those choices to muscle memory.* Outside of these conditions, they don't work so well, because their advantages in terms of Fitts' law are greatly outweighed by their lack of readability. Unfortunately a "rings" system would only exacerbate that.

* A circular menu is also especially good if there's some natural mapping between the choices and a circular layout, like choosing a compass direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points, especially the case for readability, i.e. the need for either a good iconic representation or a short word. In our game setting, there has been so far a good iconic match with a short word (e.g. buildings that you build to the specified position), but I can see that this will be a big problem in a more abstract cases.

I don't see scrollable list-like context menus (as suggested in an another comment) very good either, it seems to work against the benefits of touch UI. Maybe I need to play with Android first to be convinced.

Now that I think, Photoshop-style 'temporarily' modal actions picked from toolbar could be actually a good pick for a multi-touch UI. In mouse-based systems, frequently switching between tools can be really cumbersome (without keyboard shortcuts), but in multitouch systems it could actually work quite well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I dont know whether he installed the Microsoft Multi touch pack.

[http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windows7/archive/2009/0...](http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windows7/archive/2009/05/27/introducing- the-microsoft-touch-pack-for-windows-7.aspx)

[http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b15...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b152fadd-82e4-4ddb-a46a-aebe49944428&displaylang=en)

<comment><USER4> I did - but the IdeaPad only has an Atom processor, so the apps ran _really_ sluggishly - also, it doesn't add any multitouch additions to the main Windows UI that I noticed. That said, I didn't realize MS had released the Surface stuff, so it was still fun to play with.

-Russ

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the beefs I have with current touch solutions is that they require me to move my hand a lot. I set my mice to high sensitivity and then just do things with tiny movements. Most current touch UIs have a 1:1 mapping between screen movement and finger movement, I keep wishing someone implements a microflick based UI where users have to make tiny movements.

<comment><USER6> I'm the same way. Honestly I don't think the current WIMP paradigm works that well for desktops either.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Maybe desktop-style UI's are dead for - well - desktops, too?

What are the pain points in desktop UI's for touch devices? 1\. Drag and Drop - many inexperienced users find drag and drop difficult so killing it wouldn't harm anyone. It always was a bitch with overlapping windows anyway.

2\. Managing overlapping windows in general just sucks. I've often argued that tiling windows are a much better idea and these could be made to work on touch devices with larger screens too.

3\. Scrollbars are useless on touch-devices and not much fun on the desktop. Luckily touchpad scrolling and mouse-wheels mean I don't have to use them much so maybe they can die too.

4\. 'Hover' type interactions are usually inessential. and when they aren't it's usually a sign that something is horribly wrong with the UX

Maybe even with touchpad/mouse/keyboard, the changes made necessary by touch devices might force desktop UI's to shed some of their weaker aspects.

Another thing to think about is the '10 foot interface'. This suffers similar limitations to touchscreens and with Google TV and similar products spreading their influence, the remote control could become the most commonly used input device of all.

<comment><USER8> Points 1 and 2 are solved (at least on OS X) to a degree where I would be annoyed if those things were taken away.

<comment><USER7> How so? Last time I checked 'drag and drop' was still the primary method of file management in Finder and Apple hasn't added a tiling window manager.

<comment><USER8> Yes, drag and drop is widely used in OS X and it works very well. Your windows aren't tiled all the time, but Expose puts them into a tiled structure, and it works with drag-and-drop. So I can have all the windows open I want, in whatever configuration I want, start dragging something, enter Expose, and drop it wherever I want.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


F.A.T.- Free Art and Technology- Graffiti Meets R&D - <AUTHOR> http://fffff.at/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those technically inclined who also happen to like to tag stuff up and make a counter cultural point. Please see, share and enjoy.</comment>


Socket.io websockets Twitter streaming api - <AUTHOR> http://www.dizorg.net I've built a simple websocket tcp stack with socket.io to stream twitter feed for tonight's ufc <comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to make comments on the code. Alert: newbie to coding here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> or if you have the time to build a styleshit for this crap. lol</comment>


Google down? Unpingable. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=is%20google%20down&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

<comment><USER2> I can't access Gmail or Google Maps. Christ, do I have to use Bing now?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been a 30-minute learning from me... Realizing that bing or even wikipedia can be valuable starting points for _some_ searches

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems to have lasted only about an hour 4:30a-5:30a MDT.</comment>


Techspecs: Google Fuchsia operating system hypervisor - <AUTHOR> https://techspecs.blog/blog/2017/3/15/fuchsias-hypervisor <comment><USER2> TL;DR - Google might run virtualized Android apps in containers on Fuchsia OS.

There's no one repo to point to, but you can at least look at code review for the hypervisor: [https://fuchsia- review.googlesource.com/q/hypervisor](https://fuchsia- review.googlesource.com/q/hypervisor).</comment>


On undoing, fixing, or removing commits in git - <AUTHOR> https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html <comment><USER2> On a similar note is this flowchart which walks you through recovering from various Git mistakes: [http://justinhileman.info/article/git- pretty/](http://justinhileman.info/article/git-pretty/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I came expecting another proclamation of global perishing of kittens, caused by relentless use of git rebase. Instead i came to find an excellent guide i can link to all my coworkers. This is a really pleasant surprise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for this, it's excellent. Even after several years of using git, I still have to look up several of these things every single time I need to fix anything, I don't know why the commands don't stick in my head (just the generally non-intuitive syntax maybe?), this is exceptionally useful.

<comment><USER5> this is the biggest weak point of using git in my opinion. if you are not in the habit of using these undo/remove/fix operations in a regular basis, these commands slip away from you...

however, you can also look into this as a safety feature :) removing stuff is dangerous work in version control and thus, maybe, it's good that every time you have to do a dangerous thing, you need to refresh your memory by checking things. doctors and pilots started using check-lists that they go through before operations so that they don't do any mistakes and it seems to be decreasing the number of 'unforced-errors' so to speak... maybe this non- intuitive syntax also helps git in preventing committing simple errors...

<comment><USER6> If git's biggest weak point is not having to fix (most likely human) errors then we're pretty good off I'd say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We use this guide often in the #git irc channel where Seth Robertson used to frequent.

It's a nice guide because sometimes people don't even know what they really want because terms like revert are overloaded.

</comment><comment><USER8> I discovered this link a few weeks ago while writing an internal 'howto' wiki to help our developers move to git from svn and linked to it right away. Really well written and constructed article.</comment>