Ask HN: What's your worst Uber Eats/Door dash experience? - <AUTHOR> I've just had an UberEats food order canceled after waiting for 1 1/2 hours. The food is actually at the restaurant and has been for 1h. Has anyone else seen this? Is that common? <comment><USER3> Unlike many of the other replies, I have had largely positive experiences with UberEats, especially compared to some of the other available services. Doordash's wait time is long at 60-90 minutes usually. Postmates has some insanely expensive delivery fees, sometimes as much as $25, fully doubling the cost of the order. Grubhub doesn't have a large selection. And Amazon Restaurants seems to be rolling out via zip code, so even restaurants in close proximity are unavailable because my zip code hasn't been activated yet.

A few things that UberEats does well: the live-updating map of your driver, which makes it seamless to anticipate the delivery time and meet your driver at the curb in the event that their GPS doesn't accurately locate the address. Speed of delivery, which may be due to having a larger network of cars and drivers to pull from. And price / checkout flow - it's very easy to place an order with pre-saved checkout information and the prices are usually lowest (edit: even including raised menu prices - the total price is less).

I personally have no love for Uber as a company and have actively avoided it for transportation, so I feel that UberEats UX has done a lot to retain my business despite it being Uber. If there's ever a Lyft of restaurant delivery (maybe an official Lyft offering?) I'll switch.

FWIW, my UberEats experiences have been in the Dallas area.

<comment><USER4> At least Postmates has transparent pricing. UberEats and Doordash raise the prices on the menu items 10-20% in addition to charging you a service and delivery fee. And on Doordash you can't even change the tip after delivery for poor service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ordered a tub of ice cream using UberEats. ETA 45 minutes. after an hour and 15 minutes I start trying to contact someone because my driver was "3 minutes away" dropping off someone elses order first.

Call my driver and am unable to communicate clearly with them. Get handed over to the guy who's door he was at and have a quick chat because both of us are annoyed (him for having someone knocking on his door at 11pm, and me for no ice cream).

Call Uber support and they call the driver, then say he should be at my place in 5 minutes or so.

A couple of calls back to Uber and about 2 hours after I ordered it, I finally get my ice cream. At this point in time it is all liquid.

For Reference: Ordered around 10PM (Friday night from memory), located in Perth Western Australia

Call Uber again and they say they will refund me. Still haven't seen the refund...

</comment><comment><USER6> I had a postmates order cancelled after 8 hours -- twice. I went on twitter and saw a ton of other people having the same issue. They did no postmortem, no mass apology; instead, they offered me delivery credit. Yeah, that'll make up for essentially not eating dinner til after 10pm. I told them to delete my account.

Half the time my order was wrong anyway. Half the time they would delete the food allergy notes I added. 80% of the page loads resulted in a 500 error -- I basically just had to keep refreshing until something worked. Their UI jumps all over the place and deletes everything from your cart once you sign in.

I know you only asked about two of the competitors, but I just had to rant.

</comment><comment><USER7> UberEats decided that I lived in the very center (i.e. GPS lookup) of my city for a booking despite numerous bookings before and after. This meant I had to drive in, park, and meet up with my my poor UberEats delivery driver who was on a bike and had no chance of making it to my place anytime soon.

UberEats drivers who accept delivery of multiple orders, so you wait for everyone else's orders to be cooked and delivered before your cold burger and fries arrive. This problem is exaggerated by either these orders being on opposite sides of the city or the delivery driver being on a bike (why either of these are permitted I have no idea). Have even had my order delivered to someone else and vice versa this way before.

In general, slow deliveries and the usual process of having to walk up the street to find lost/lazy drivers. The ETA always being wildly wrong (I get cooking delays, but delivery ETA from pickup should be spot on, and is usually off by 100%). Then add in general restaurant problems with mixing up orders, missing items, or selling food that doesn't transport.

Would happily pay $10 (maybe even $15) per delivery rather than the $5 they charge now if all of these problems went away (e.g. guaranteed prompt and direct delivery).

<comment><USER8> _UberEats drivers who accept delivery of multiple orders, so you wait for everyone else 's orders to be cooked and delivered before your cold burger and fries arrive. This problem is exaggerated by either these orders being on opposite sides of the city or…_

Unfortunately the Eats drivers (of which I am one) don't have a choice. If the Uber dispatch algorithm determines that we should pick up two orders at the same time, then it gives us instructions to that effect. It also decides which of the two orders to deliver first. We don't even get to see where the second order is going until the first has been dropped off.

And yes, the algorithm is terrible. Sometimes we drop off the first order all the way across town, and the second order turns out to be for a customer a few blocks away from the original pickup location! It's also quite common for a new order coming in result in the driver (who has just arrived at the restaurant to pick up your food) needing to wait an extra 10 minutes while the new order is prepared and cooked.

The end result is customers getting cold food. I'm amazed that Uber Eats has repeat customers.

(And here in New Zealand, the restauarnt pays Uber 35% of the menu price - plus the customer is still paying a delivery fee on top! It's again amazing that any restaurant would even bother with Uber Eats.)

<comment><USER9> In my city, if you're a driver, you're not required to accept a double delivery, and if you do accept, you aren't required to follow through. (After accepting, you have the choice to either pickup and confirm receipt or opt out by canceling, in any combination.)

As a driver, doubles are overwhelmingly not worth it in my city. For example, if I get paged for an order it may be for delivery from restaurant A to dropoff C. At any time before I arrive do the pickup, I may get paged to pick up an additional order. There only a narrow set of circumstances where it is worth it to me, the driver, to accept a double. Here's a list of things that would make a double unfavorable for a driver:

\- The dropoff for the additional order may be at some point B that more or less lies somewhere along your route from A to C. Uber will route you to B first and then C. You're essentially delivering to B for free; you could have rejected the second order, forgone the double workload, and delivered directly from A to C and get paid the ~same amount.

\- The first order, i.e., the one you originally accepted, is ready, but the second is not. The kitchen may or may not lie to you about how much longer it will take. As a driver, you have no insight into the final destination of the orders until you confirm receipt, so you cannot tell whether you're dealing with a a pathological case for B as above, or whether the order will actually be worth your while. Both customers pay the full delivery price AFAIK, so the only party benefiting here is Uber.

\- The first order is ready, but the second one is not, the kitchen knows this, and they know that it will be 5-10+ minutes longer for the second order to be ready, but they never communicate this to you to give you the option of opting out of the second order. So the first order sits cold while the second is prepared, with you the driver believing that your choice is actually between waiting for the first thing available from the kitchen or canceling the whole thing altogether, which would mean being unable to recoup anything of your sunk costs for the trip to the restaurant (and possibly back to a "hot zone" if the restaurant is outside the city).

\- You cancel one of the orders, and the staff gives you a bad review (unprofessional) as if you've robbed them of something. You haven't. If a driver sits idle for 10 minutes waiting for the order to be completed, the driver pays that cost while the restaurant gains _nothing_. This is infuriating, and I was strongly reminded of it by front page link to "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" a couple weeks ago.

There are exactly two scenarios where a double is "worth" it:

\- Geographically speaking, the second order is well past the first one that you would have delivered. This means you don't have to bear the costs of waiting for the next request to come in nor the cost of travel for pickup, because you already have work queued up.

\- Geographically speaking, the route between A, B, and C are disjoint (i.e., B and C are in opposite directions from the restaurant). Congratulations, you actually end up making more than if you had made the same two deliveries as individual trips. This is fairly rare, not good for the (second) customer, and it still doesn't eliminate the risks above about arriving at the restaurant to find the orders aren't ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Had a couple of good encounters with UberEats;

1\. Ordered some burgers and milkshakes, guy rocks up quite late, quickly hands me my bag and shouts (very loudly) "BEWARE". Turns out "BEWARE" meant, "I've spilled both your milkshakes all over the rest of your food". To their credit, Uber refunded me the whole order.

2\. Looked at the app and noticed the driver was sitting at the end of my street and had been for about 10 minutes. I called and got no answer, so I wandered down to see what was up. He was angrily pounding on some random door, apparently thinking it was my house. Then he got mad at me for not coming down to find him sooner?

These days I prefer to use apps like EatNow that let the restaurants use their own delivery drivers - much more reliable in my experience as the drivers are actually accountable for what they do and have a direct relationship with the restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER11> The driver picked up my food and drove home with it. I didn't know it was UberEats until I completed ordering it. The place was nice enough to refund me and resend my order. But I'm not ordering delivery from them again.

</comment><comment><USER12> Food delivery service by city: [https://www.recode.net/2017/10/3/16384050/food-delivery- serv...](https://www.recode.net/2017/10/3/16384050/food-delivery-service- ubereats-grubhub-doordash-city-takeout)

Experiences might differ accordingly.

On a personal note, we have Swiggy in Bangalore and there were tons of issues when it was starting out. Now while the wait times are longer at least the food is delivered promptly.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't remember if I've had an UberEats order canceled, usually it's been a good experience. One time the driver forgot a milkshake and went back to get it, another time it was too late (restaurant closed) but UberEats credited me. I stopped using them though because their restaurant selection was too random / inconsistent, and their delivery fee too high, and they bumped or got rid of the minimum order to waive delivery fee, and Uber/UberEats drivers now expect tips. I use Postmates now, because I can order from anywhere (including my favorite chinese place that isn't on anyone else's app), but it has even more inconsistency with when drivers are available, and I've had many orders canceled (fortunately not from my favorite place). I only use it when the delivery is free (there's still a "service fee" that's kind of high but whatever) and so long as the driver gets my food to me in ok condition I'll give a small tip to encourage them to keep doing it, since if you go to the postmates reddit it's nothing but drivers complaining about $0 in tips. In the Bellevue area there don't seem to be enough drivers which probably influences how often orders have to be canceled.

</comment><comment><USER14> The last time I ordered from Postmates I got $75 worth of Chinese food for a big group (5 entrees, 2 sides of rice). When the food arrived I got 3 entrees, one of which was sweet and sour chicken without the sauce, and no sides.

I contacted Postmates about it and they refunded me $17. Huge inconvenience since the food took forever to get to me and I was missing over half of the order and had 4 other hungry people. Never ordering from Postmates again.

</comment><comment><USER15> I stopped using Uber Eats when one driver picked up the food, drove near where I live, and then cancelled the ride (presumably stealing the food?) - apparently this is a common issue. I called the support number, but it was some foreign call center and they were unable to understand what I was trying to explain (they just kept saying that they could call the restaurant which wasn't the issue). The Uber Eats Facebook page had support that could actually help.

I only use Door Dash now since the rest of the times I tried Uber Eats the drivers refuse to get out of the car and come to the door even if you have that selected - they just sit in the car and call. Door Dash seems to have a lot better and nicer employees and I've had fewer issues with them in general.

</comment><comment><USER16> I had this a couple of weeks ago -- order placed, waited over an hour and the order was then cancelled. They (UberEats) "couldn't find a driver". Spoke with their customer support, who offered me 50% off if I re-ordered, so we did... Again, after an hour, the order was cancelled again. Same deal.

The restaurant actually cooked the food twice - and the second time, I asked if I just could go down there and get the food - but apparently this isn't possible. Uber just use the excuse that their drivers are contractors - <USER2> they can't do anything.

I'd understand if this were the middle of nowhere, and on a Friday or some other busy time. But at 8PM on a Tuesday in San Francisco... Yeah. Probably they should sort this out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Had an Amazon Restaurants deliver a pizza sideways in his shoulder bag. Opened it to show him the pizza was now a clump at one end of the box and that I was going to need him to try again. He called and seemed very confused as to why I wouldn't accept the pizza in that state.

45 minutes later and had a flat replacement delivered with a refund and credit from Amazon. Other attempts from other services have typically arrived cold and late. Allowing me to see notifications as to when the food is ready, then wait in agony as nothing happens for 30 minutes, gives me a pretty good idea what I'll be getting. So far, I'm not a fan.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here in China going to the restaurant is becoming a lifestyle choice, with more and food being delivered. Swarms of delivery scooters flood the streets of Shanghai, ignoring all the rules and other vehicles in a fervent rush to deliver more orders. They get paid around $1 per order. Over 3,000,000 orders are being delivered DAILY just in Shanghai. Delivery times can be as short as 15 minutes or as "long" as 1 hour. Rarely longer. Tons of plastic waste every day. Awful food. But omg how convenient is that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ordered Uber Eats and when the driver came near on the map, I walked outside and waited on my porch. The driver pulled up parallel to my house but still in the street and parked. Then I stood there waiting for them to pull in the drive way or pull off the road or anywhere besides the middle of the road. The driver just started yelling at me on my porch. I then decided they were more of the common type of Uber driver, so I walked up to their window to grab the food. No tip.

</comment><comment><USER20> That happened to me with Eat24. I was hoping it was the food that took a long time to make and not the driver taking forever, but by the time I got it the box the food was in had soaked through and was falling apart. The food looked disgusting. Ended up getting my money back after being on the phone with their support for an hour. I'm kind of over these delivery services as they tend to be overly expensive and kind of unreliable.

</comment><comment><USER21> FYI - DoorDash just lost their CFO after less than a year. Trouble in Paradise? [https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/doordash-cfo-leaves- less-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/doordash-cfo-leaves-less-than- one-year-after-joining/)

Some technologies I will miss if they don't pan out. DoorDash isn't one of them.

</comment><comment><USER22> My worst experience with DoorDash was recent - DD didn't have enough drivers and so double booked my driver who had to run off two different orders at he same time... had no way to text or call driver and the chat support took forever.

I will admit that DD made it right but I wonder if I would've gotten anything if I didn't straight up ask the support chat person for a credit.

Never used other services.

</comment><comment><USER23> Friend works at a well-rated restaurant in Brooklyn. His restaurant turned UberEats down because they feared it would hurt their brand. At that time, UberEats would buy a few menu items in bulk and then resell them. Those ordering the last items would not be eating food fresh from the kitchen, but inventory which may have been sitting in a car for over an hour.

<comment><USER24> That was UberEAT's "instant" trial in NY. They abandoned it soon; all deliveries are now with the more traditional model of being cooked fresh, picked up, and delivered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Austin Tx here and no bad experiences yet with Uber Eats. Haven't tried the others. They seem to be as quick as could be expected, friendly, and customer service was very helpful on one occasion when the restaurant was difficult. The app had a bug that frustrated me where it wanted to revalidate my phone number constantly but its been fixed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Whenever you order from Doordash, you get three texts: when the food is ordered, picked up, and nearby.

Unless it's cancelled, in which case you just get an email and no text.

It's really annoying when you expect one channel and they use another.

</comment><comment><USER27> UberEats was always a hit or miss for me (in Mountain View). Doordash has been great, it's usually 45 mins from ordering to delivery for most restaurants in mountain view (roughly 10-12 mins with the driver).

</comment><comment><USER28> Toronto here. ordered food through UberEATS; waited 45 minutes then got a notification saying the order was cancelled. We called to find out why and it turns out the restaurant wasnt even open on that day.

</comment><comment><USER29> I once ordered (aug 2017, seattle) breakfast from UberEats at 10 am. They cancelled my order at 11 am saying they are unable to fulfill it. No further details. Decided to never use them again.

</comment><comment><USER30> Prime restaurants has been the only one reliable for me. Shame it's not available in my new zip despite offering prime now here.

</comment><comment><USER21> Doordash routinely underestimates by 30 mins. After enough discounts I just deleted the app.

</comment><comment><USER31> Where are you located? I wonder if it is a geography thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> SF Bay Area

<comment><USER32> Man, if a startup can't figure out how to make it in the Bay Area, what makes them think they can make it in the real world?

<comment><USER27> For driving related startups I don't know if it's the best area to start. I feel like even driving 1 mile down the road is not constant time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Completely raw chicken..service was fast tho :X</comment>


So you think your audience are just blocking ads? Well think again - <AUTHOR> https://oriel.io/blog/adblocking-blocking-more-than-ads/ <comment><USER2> "While we believe adblocking is a consumer right we also believe that publishers whose content we access have the right to protect the Integrity and Delivery of their web content from any form of manipulation, change or censorship."

Lol, yes, you have a right to download malware, annoying video and audio and related junk on my system first in its entirety before I block it. This site also calls ad-blocking a 'racket'. Give me a break.

I have a simple policy. If you ask me to unblock ads nicely and clearly and explicitly state your ads have NO video, NO audio, NO pop ups or other _crap_ then I unblock them. 99% of times I regret unblocking ads and block them again immediately because they are so terrible and in your face.

The advertising industry has no one to blame but themselves.

<comment><USER3> I have to agree. Oriel's position is incredibly self-serving. It also asserts things that are not actually true:

"[... W]e also believe that publishers whose content we access have the right to protect the Integrity and Delivery of their web content from any form of manipulation, change or censorship."

Protection from the government manipulating, changing, or censoring - yes (at least in the US and some other jurisdictions). Protection from the _user_ doing the changing? Um, nope. Didn't work that way with newspapers or magazines; doesn't work that way with the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Once a webpage is delivered to a user as intended by a publisher and just > like we receive a book, a magazine, a newspaper from a traditional > publishers

In the traditional medium, the user sees the ads. On the internet, the ads see the user.

If publishers can figure a way to make money from advertising without resorting to voyeurism, I'll be happy to turn off the ad blocker.</comment>


Snap: too soon to IPO - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@timothyconnors/snap-too-soon-to-ipo-38f0934d4f44#.hrpq001bp <comment><USER2> A good point, which, of course, will be ignored ... because money.</comment>


Challenges of Memory Management on Modern NUMA System - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2852078 <comment><USER2> My masters thesis is building a super low-latency, lock-less IPC mechanism for passing cache lines between cores. NUMA systems are crazy, for numerous reasons. For instance requesting remote cache lines across sockets have asymmetric latencies. For example on the r820 server we use for testing requesting a cache line from socket 1 to socket 0 (Socket 1 receives the cache line from a core on socket 0) the latency is 528 cycles. But if you reverse the experiment and socket 0 receives a cache line from socket 1 the latency is 384 cycles. So when building an application, if you're into reducing cycles things like this creep up on you and become very confusing until you do experiments like above.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure you measured correctly without systematic errors caused by out of order execution? Did you serialize execution by using RDTSCP or CPUID? Any chance you accidentally compared TSC counts between two separate sockets? Did you keep in mind that each CPU socket has a different unsynchronized TSC.

Not accounting for those could give you an illusion of asymmetry.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, when we got results we didn't expect we made sure that the experiment was setup correctly, and actually made sense. We use the timing instructions illustrated in this intel white paper, which does do serialization [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/embedded/training/ia-...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/embedded/training/ia-32-ia-64-benchmark- code-execution-paper.html). More over we tried a few different programs, CCbench, custom home-brewed, and BenchIT, all giving the same results. There's a paper about Asymmetry:

Thread and Memory Placement on NUMA Systems: Asymmetry Matters

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc15/atc15-p...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc15/atc15-paper- lepers.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> NUMA systems are annoying for also other reasons. RDTSC is typically CPU socket dependent. Different CPU sockets have different counts. So even with constant TSC (time stamp counter), you can't compare TSC values between different sockets. As a workaround, you need to also somehow record the CPU socket information together with timestamp. Which is hard unless you're in kernel context. Well, there's RDTSCP, but it also requires kernel to load appropriate values to IA32_TSC_AUX MSR.

When requesting high precision time stamps, some operating systems fall back to APIC or HPET. The issue is these are 2-3 orders of magnitude slower to query than TSC. TSC takes a few nanoseconds to acquire, APIC / HPET can take a few microseconds, which can sometimes be too much.

Thus precision timing and timing sensitive code is somewhat tricky on NUMA systems.

Another annoyance is how easy it is to saturate a NUMA interconnect with synchronization traffic. Atomic ops (and by extension, mutexes, semaphores, etc.) can easily bottleneck a NUMA system.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you build on top of a supermarket API? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking of a grocery delivery API in particular as something that doesn't exist but I wish it did. What would you build if supermarkets had extensive APIs? <comment><USER2> A couple other things: Price monitoring, product availability notifications, Comparison shopping, etc.</comment>


The air in the valley - <AUTHOR> http://yoda.posterous.com/the-air-in-the-valley

<comment><USER2> The article seems to extol the virtues of founders who were and are willing to lie about experience and make up numbers. And instead of planning and saving up to fund their startup they maxed out their credit cards and nearly got evicted because they couldn't pay their rent.

</comment><comment><USER3> "then goes ahead and mis-represents to them that he is an iPhone Cocoa whiz"

There is a difference between a creatively solving a problem and an unethically solving a problem.

<comment><USER4> True - but, what seems to be a pretty common (almost universal) thread amongst successful startup entrepreneurs, is that unlike us employees, they don't always have the luxury of being ivory-pure. They push the limits.

And, if you notice in the story - the entrepreneur delivered - his mouth wasn't writing checks that his (coding) fingers couldn't cash. He came through. So, in my books, he _was_ an iPhone Cocoa whiz.

Great Story!

<comment><USER3> I hear what you are saying, but I dislike that it often seems normal and expected for entrepreneurs to be unethical.

<comment><USER5> When the adrenalin is pumping you do what it takes and sometimes you get in a box, and you get out anyway you can.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, either you are all in when the chips are down or you fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _On their way to meet an investor, one of them runs out of gas and pulls up to fill gas. He tries each of his credit cards and it doesn't work as its all maxed out and its the same case with the other founder. Finally they call a family member who drives up to the gas station and fills gas for them so they can drive to the investor meeting._

Really? Isn't that story slightly embellished by the founder? As an investor, I'd be concerned that this guy is taking me for a ride, especially after I read this:

 _Well unfortunately he doesn't know Cocoa - but that doesn't stop him. He sends an email to the firm who advertised for a bid to code an iPhone app -- then goes ahead and mis-represents to them that he is an iPhone Cocoa whiz_

<comment><USER7> Didn't Bill Gates sell a product to someone(IBM?) before they'd a single line of code written?

<comment><USER2> If you're referring to DOS, IIRC the code was written, but it wasn't owned by the fledgling Microsoft yet. They made the big deal with IBM and then went across town and paid the Pickles&Trout guy something like $5K for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was going to simply say that all the tales seem to be various distractions that don't seem to be factors for success. But then there is an idiom in Chinese 破釜沉舟 which roughly means breaking your cooking utensils and your boats (removing your means for a retreat) and fighting, which has historically proven to be a great psychological motivator. So I wonder if that psychological urge outweigh the time spent on these distractions. I have to say tho, it must take a special kind of a personality to deal with that kind of stress and uncertainty.

<comment><USER5> I also like to add that after that stress and uncertainty phase, things seem kind of flat and boring.

Which is where I am now. What's next?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You could argue that the actions described in the article define a good startup founder. Having a vision and single-minded focus to follow up on it, regardless of convention, is not easy.

As someone mentioned, he always followed through (i.e iPhone dev) and if these slightly dubious anecdotes detail the difference between success and failure... well, they will become history in the birth of a company.

Good luck to them!

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess this is why most of us are just reading HN and are uncertain if we want to take the plunge :) This story is exactly the kind of worst-case scenario I'm afraid of.</comment>


Be careful what you ask for. How 2 words dropped CTR 36% - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appsumo.com/be-careful-what-you-ask-for-how-2-words-dropped-ctr-36/

<comment><USER4> At the end the author makes the conclusion that this "sexy change" was sub- optimal but the problem was a copywriting issue. A large red button that says Buy It? How could anyone not guess that wouldn't get clicked much. People don't want to immediately buy something without reading about it first, especially when coming from an email.

Also: why a huge red button instead of green or any other color? Red has many negative connotations (and is also used to signify the end of a process) so it was probably the worst possible color choice. I bet if it said See It and was green or blue the CTR would've eclipsed the unstyled email very easily.

The problem wasn't going from an unsexy email to a sexy one, it was the boneheaded copywriting errors and color choices. He should find a new designer.

<comment><USER5> > _why a huge red button instead of green or any other color?_

Red has been known to outperform green: <http://blog.performable.com/631526233/>

<comment><USER6> That's true... but generally what it comes down to is how much the button stands out from the background rather than the colour itself.

On a green site, green buttons will get lost, but red buttons will stand out from their surroundings. It's all about contrast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _In our recent emails we changed the wording to "See it."_

What wording? Buy Now? It's not clear.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what he was saying too. He changed the "Buy Now" button to "See it" so people would be more likely to explore before making the decision to buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would have liked to see more data. Step 1 - change text email to graphics every thing else stays the same. Step 2 - Change the wording. Step 3 - <USER2> step 2 wording and go back to ext email.

This way you can compare like for like and figure out what is actually causing the increase/decrease for the CTR.

As it stands, the article didn't include enough data to see if their changes actually fixed the situation.

<comment><USER10> Sebg

True. The overall CTR dropped. The main difference b/n the two emails was having that button. Stats showed a low # of clicks to that button vs. other links.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reply. I agree with shanonm on this one in that while it looks like the "main" difference between the two emails was having the button there were actually a ton of changes made. Because the one thing that can easily be measured is how many times the button is clicked, that is the first place to start.

That said, it also looked like that was the only way to see if the changes worked. So the button itself could have made your percentage change down, but the rest of the ad make it change dramatically up, so overall the effect is up. But, if the lesson you learned was button = less CTR and didn't test the rest of the changes, it might hurt you in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah the best thing to do would be to 50/50 test the email to measure the true impact. But I think the conclusion that "See it" is better than "Buy Now" is certainly reasonable.

The first thing I thought when I saw the two images was about mobile - <USER3> seems like the first version was a lot more friendly for mobile devices than the second design. Since more and more people are clicking through promotional emails like this on their mobile devices, that could also play a role in CTR.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. Did the clicks convert differently?

I think the sweetspot is a well designed email/site that is consistent with your brand AND converts well. This wasn't a fair fight between the two designs!

<comment><USER10> The clicks did convert as once we changed the button to "see it" that email outperformed the previous one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _I asked a design buddy to sexify it_

Here's your problem. Instead of doing proper A/B testing, you asked some clueless designer to "sexify it". Instead of thinking, he/she made it look like a typical spam email.

Also, most modern email clients block images by default. So your email probably looks like crap to most recipients.

<comment><USER14> > Instead of doing proper A/B testing

I disagree. It is not easy, if not impossible, to go from ugly to beautiful, with A/B tests. A/B tests can make judgments on things, but they aren't going to make it much more beautiful. Making it more beautiful, and doing A/B tests, seems like the best approach.

<comment><USER13> Who gives a fuck if your email is beautiful?

The goal is to make money, not to be pretty.

<comment><USER14> But many times, making something look better gives people a better understanding and more confidence, therefore you get more money.

<comment><USER13> And many times it makes it less readable.

Beautiful and efficient are orthogonal terms. They are pretty much independent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interspecies Pair (Purr) Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.polyglotprogramminginc.com/purr-programming-2-0/

<comment><USER2> Some of you may recall Sleepycat Software, which was in business to support the open-source Berkeley DB until it was bought by Oracle in 2006. Some years ago I had occasion to email them about something, and thinking that a company called Sleepycat Software would still be a one- or two-person enterprise, I added in the email that I liked their name and, as it happened, I had a kitty on my lap at that moment.

The reply gave me a chuckle, as it made clear that the company had grown significantly and that some of the new employees found the name a bit embarrassing.

Anyway -- one thing I've learned about Purr Programming -- don't let the cat have the keyboard. Their code never works :-)

<comment><USER3> Sleepycat has both the best name and logo ever.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software>

So good...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of rubber duck debugging: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging>

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds of Dan's review (at that time, his site was 90% about hardware & gadgets): <http://www.dansdata.com/kitten.htm>

</comment><comment><USER6> Cats make great bosses. They don't know what exactly you're doing but they just love to supervise.

</comment><comment><USER7> > _Allie prefers to not have her own keyboard._

Not my experience at all. Purr programmer would demand to be part of the process and would lie across my wrists, because she needed to be close to the action.

Best damn programmer I ever worked with, even though I had to vacuum the keyboard regularly.

</comment><comment><USER8> A little off topic, but: I like to have my small Meyer's Parrot on my shoulder when I work. Disadvantage of a parrot over a cat is that the parrot will talk to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting variation. I never had thought of that! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Heh, I even used to let our cat join in the odd conference call. When she was new and very talkative, if the meeting was dull I'd just hold the phone out so she could miaow at people.

Nobody ever mentioned it, though they must have noticed after the first couple of times...

</comment><comment><USER10> You are such a weirdo ! Love it !

</comment><comment><USER11> is duct tape an acceptable facilitator of purr programming? great post... hilarious!

</comment><comment><USER12> Hysterical!</comment>


Wireless MIDI ring allows you to perform musical effects with hand gestures - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/13/16868970/enhancia-midi-ring-keyboard-music-effects-ces-2018 <comment><USER2> reminds me of a another French musical invention which provides a ring: the Ondes Marteno [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrBUMZ7aNBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrBUMZ7aNBQ)</comment>


Ask HN: Which Non-Tech SubReddits Do You Recommend to this Virgin? - <AUTHOR> I'm embarrassed to say..but I've never been on Reddit.
Do I live under a rock? No. It's just that Reddit's UI/UX always confused me, to say the least.
However, I'm willing to look past these cosmetic transgressions and finally dive into the unique content and conversations which most HN folks here swear by.
Having said that, please list your top 3 subreddits ( the more off-the-grid the better ) which I should definitely check out. thanks! <comment><USER2> Reddit is at its best with its smaller communities. The only time I ever use reddit is to check in on one of these. Just find a subreddit for one of your interests and enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are interested in quant trading, the algorithmic trading SubReddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/algotrading/](https://www.reddit.com/r/algotrading/) is good.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks but no Tech, Biz, or dumb Meme stuff please.

and more like: [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/)</comment></comment>


Agile Backlogs. Sigh. - <AUTHOR> http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/agile-backlogs-sigh/

<comment><USER3> This is a great point. I know it sounds shallow but its a really really good point.

This is the reason that even though lots of shops think they are agile, in essence their processes are really just granular waterfall.

I had one pm who wouldnt know what "agile" was if you asked him but he ran his product more agile than I've seen anyone else do.

We would sit every 3 days, with his excel sheet. He would then pick the next important task to do. No priortities, no color coding, no gantt chart - <USER2> linear list of what needs to be done and what could be done in the next week.

He stored the things we couldnt do on a "backlog" excel sheet.

Every meeting we would pull out the main excel sheet and he would decide whether he needed something brand new to be built or something from his "backlog" excel sheet. I never had to look at the backlog at all.

We would keep releasing the software weekly and delivering features. It was the best business relationship I've ever had in my life.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny, was just talking about this at lunch earlier.

I've been trying to wrap my head around how to continue building my 1-person project (boxrowseat.com) in an agile-ish format. Not that I'm getting confused with the work to be done, but so that when I do bring in number 2, we can continue on the right path.

Any suggestions from those more experienced than myself?

<comment><USER5> Process will emerge, and once you take another person on it may be apparent that Agile is the exact wrong methodology for you two. So, don't worry about it. At all. Just make your stuff.

<comment><USER4> Solid. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 5 paragraphs talking _around_ "agile backlogs" before you get to the ad at the end for their forthcoming book on...guess!

<comment><USER6> Spot on.

Why do you need a book on backlogs? That's just insane.

That's like buying books on driving cars: "volume 4: the steering wheel" and "volume 5: the indicator stalk".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do Atom.io and Sublimetext include spyware? - <AUTHOR>

When your application calls home constantly, inadvertently tracking me, or calls back to some analytics server effectively allowing third parties to track me, this is spyware. Most half decent applications have two off-by-default options for this type of tracking:<p>* Check for updates on startup?<p>* Allow us to send anonymous statistics to help improve product?<p>Both Atom.io and Sublimetext do call home and Atom also calls out to some Google services. And yet they are missing configuration options to disable this tracking. Is this the result of developers whose education comes from the walled garden environments of mobile where you don't give 2cents about privacy anyway? <comment><USER2> Most developers don't care as long as it's not intrusively impeding on them. And only google services at least Atom uses I think is Google analytics. It's not like it's snooping on your member details. I think these editors should give the user ability to opt out from getting tracked though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would like my location and IP to be private. It just be that developers were aware of this possible want and would ask if it is okay to turn ON these features. Now it's changed to where these features are impossible or difficult to turn off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just looked, and unless you're talking about something different, Sublime Text 3 allows disabling telemetry by way of the "enable_telemetry" setting.

See [http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev](http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev) under build 3023. It was turned on by default on build 3030.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that disables checking for updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://discuss.atom.io/t/network-connects-or- else/1869](https://discuss.atom.io/t/network-connects-or-else/1869) According to this you can opt out?

<comment><AUTHOR> For atom.io you can opt out of google analytics 3 steps in the preferences tree. you cant up out of update call backs. on sublimetext i haven't found where you can opt out of call backs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are local firewalls not cool anymore or something?

</comment><comment><USER7> You could try using a firewall to block the calls

</comment><comment><USER8> Let's not forget Atom also sends usage metrics.

Turns out it's the same thing as Google Analytics; I did not think of it as the same at first.</comment>


After Stock Slide, Apple Puts 40 Percent of Tim Cook's Pay Package At Risk - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130621/after-stock-slide-apple-puts-40-percent-of-tim-cooks-pay-package-at-risk/?mod=tweet

<comment><USER2> LOL! "Cook might lose 40% of his shares, worth $413 million as of today" \- Yeah, that's certainly a huge blow. I mean, he will have to settle for one yacht, instead of two... or something like that.

It is certainly good to have some incentive for executives to work harder, but don't you think it's a bit silly to call this a risk? Also, working harder doesn't necessarily mean doing what stock market wants.</comment>


Facebook acquires Pushpop - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/02/facebook-buys-digital-bookmaking-service-push-pop-press/

<comment><USER2> I've read this as: "Facebook acquires Photoshop" and felt like WTF?</comment>


The easiest way to query Postgres in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@forbeslindesay/the-easiest-way-to-query-postgres-in-node-js-56765997919c <comment><USER2> The issue I found with the raw SQL approach was receiving back flat results. I made PureORM[0] to do only and exactly that: map flat data to correctly nested business objects.

It is called "pure-orm" both because it is _purely_ an ORM (no query builder api), as well as because it returns _pure_ business objects (instead of db- aware objects).

[0] [https://github.com/craigmichaelmartin/pure- orm](https://github.com/craigmichaelmartin/pure-orm)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks like a pretty cool project. I wonder how much work it would be to integrate with [https://www.atdatabases.org/](https://www.atdatabases.org/) to get the proper protection from SQL Injection.</comment></comment>


List of Nuclear Close Calls - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls <comment><USER2> Forgot this one.

"Lt. Jack ReVelle, the bomb disposal expert responsible for disarming the device, claimed "we came damn close" to a nuclear detonation that would have completely changed much of eastern North Carolina.[10] He also said the yield of each bomb was more than 250 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, large enough to create a 100% kill zone within a radius of 8.5 miles (13.7 km).[14]"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash)

<comment><USER3> Yeah. It literally says right below that portion you pasted that several authors dispute that claim based on declassified reports of the recovered weapon:

They point out that:

\- "the arm-ready switch was in the safe position, the high-voltage battery was not activated (which would preclude the charging of the firing circuit and neutron generator necessary for detonation)"

\- "the Rotary Safing Switch was destroyed, preventing energisation of the X-Unit (which controlled the firing capacitors)"

\- "The tritium reservoir used for fusion boosting was also full and had not been injected into the weapon primary. This would have resulted in a significantly reduced primary yield and would not have ignited the weapon's fusion secondary stage"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash#Late...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash#Later_analysis_of_weapons_recovery)</comment></comment>


OpenSSI is an open-source single-system image clustering system - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSI <comment><USER2> I remember back in 2006, when multicore processors were rare and multisocket servers were expensive, how cool and powerful our OpenSSI cluster seemed to me as a junior sysadmin. Technology really went in a different direction, though, and we're buuilding new abstractions that bridge machines (e.g. kubernetes) instead of trying to extend unix across them.

<comment><USER3> I never used something like OpenSSI, but I'd be surprised if running over (presumably) Ethernet of the time worked well for an SSI compared with the "expensive" things like SGI Origin with fast links and hardware coherence. Solutions like that still exist, and there's the SCI standard. Current things like NVlink and CAPI seem to be rather in the same direction.

I don't think Kubernetes is a fundamentally different abstraction to the (HPC) distributed resource managers that ran on shared- and distributed-memory systems of the time. (In that space MPI somewhat standardizes remote memory access and process spawning.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could be interesting. Some kind of opensource zOS parallel sysplex or zVM single system image. Shame that the last update was done in 2010. Any other known alternatives?

<comment><USER5> Plan9 :]

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone gotten it to work in useful way in recent years?

<comment><USER7> This. I'm really bummed that so many of these things-- OpenMosix, OpenSSI, Kerrighed, etc, have died.

There's a lot of utility in stitching together many systems into one-- a middle ground between loosely coupled application-controlled distributed concurrency and tightly coupled SMP/NUMA.

Like if you want a big multiuser build farm, for instance, where you're not drowning in IPC and synchronization, but not everything maps well to distcc.

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, ScaleMP will still sell you something more-or-less like that, at least for HPC systems, but I've never used it, and it seemed to have significant restrictions. There's also still (proprietary) bproc: [https://www.penguincomputing.com/documentation/scyld- cluster...](https://www.penguincomputing.com/documentation/scyld- clusterware/6/admin-guide/admin-guide/sysdesign.html#bproc-distributed- process-space)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was aware of this project, but not the fact that it originated at Compaq - the home of VMScluster and Trucluster at the time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems pretty similar to VCS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritas_Cluster_Server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritas_Cluster_Server)</comment>


Why are Millennials investing so conservatively? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The headline doesn't mean anything. Primarily because I don't know what you mean by "invest".

I'm doing a PhD in Chemistry. My personal investments are (1) spending money to go to conferences (2) buying semi-respectable clothes I wear once a year (3) buying food that won't destroy my health.

I haven't got spare cash to get in on the ground floor of whatever cyberspace social hack that happens to be popular somewhere I don't live and is valued at a price I'm pretty sure is completely imaginary.

Your first move should be to hazard half a guess to your own question.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably because their broke and/or barely making ends meat? That's my excuse anyways...</comment>


The Great Man Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-great-man-paradox/ <comment><USER2> Bell's Theorem has (correctly in my opinion) been called the most profound discovery of science.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem)

It is our most precise characterization about what's weird about quantum mechanics. John Bell had no competitors and his work (1964) went unappreciated for a very long time.

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

Without him, it is very likely his theorem would have remained undiscovered for many decades. At the least, we would have waited for quantum information theory to pick up steam in late '80s and early '90s (and I don't have a good sense the degree to which he contributed to that).

Ultimately no one is irreplaceable in science, but Bell arguably came as close as is possible in the modern era. The best argument against lionizing great men like him is that the property that makes them great -- a lone discovery unlikely to be made without them -- also means their work is often in an unpopular area and so has little impact...until the area gets so popular that it would have been discovered anyways!

<comment><USER3> I would add Noether's theorem.

In essence, Noether's theorem re-founds physics on an axiomatic basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think a lot of "great man" thinking is really motivational - people want to believe they can make a dent in this massive universe of ours. If we always said "well, progress happens, regardless of what you specifically do", that is pretty depressing and may actually lead to fewer people trying to push things forward. just a thought -

<comment><USER5> But I'm _more_ likely to believe I can make a dent in the universe if I believe that Einstein was just one of many possible great men (or women) who could have done what he did. I don't believe that I, personally, am a "great man" on the order of Einstein, so a "great man" theory like presented would convince me to not even try.

<comment><USER6> To piggyback off of this comment; in bleeding-edge research, one needs a degree of creativity in order to (a) try new things, and (b) have a greater willingness to roll with failure. For me personally, knowing I that "great men" constantly make simple mistakes, have bias and egos that they need to keep in check, and are struggling with other scientist, lifts weight off of my chest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The given answer to the paradox seems sort of like constructing a rationale after the fact to keep the status of Einstein and Newton and Galileo as unique "great men". But why do we need to keep it?

Is it hard to acknowledge that the three of them were certainly great scientists, but many other people in the world could have done what they did were it not for fortune? Is there a limited capacity for greatness in the world?

Does it diminish Einstein's _accomplishments_ to say that other people could have done what he did and achieved the same things he did, but that he was the one who happened to do it? The research was still incredibly important and the impact on human knowledge and on society was still massive; it doesn't get less impactful because other people could have done it too.

<comment><USER7> "Does it diminish Einstein's accomplishments to say that other people could have done what he did and achieved the same things he did, but that he was the one who happened to do it?"

Well, yes it does. That's the paradox. Greatness must surely be, no pun intended, _relative_ to something. If other people not only could, but _would_ have achieved the same feat, how can it _not_ diminish the special-ness of a particular person doing it? And yet, many people feel, instinctively, that what Einstein, Newton, etc. did is, in some sense, special.

You argue that the resolution to this is to recognise the importance of the results themselves. I would argue that is missing the point. The historical importance of the _theory_ is a different thing from the achievement of the person who discovered it, although the more impact theories will, inevitably, draw more attention to the accomplishments of their discoverers.

My resolution to this paradox is to recognise that the standards of greatness for an _individual_ 's achievements cannot be fairly compared with those of a _group_. They can only be fairly compared with what could be expected of the average individual human in the same circumstances.

When judged against the abilities and achievements of the average, or even above-average, human, what Einstein achieved was incredible. Likewise, we instinctively respond positively to any story of success against adversity, even if the actual achievement isn't special out of a particular context. A person injured in a car accident, who spends a year obstinately learning to walk again, isn't achieving anything that most children don't do, but we applaud their determination, and the outcome in the context of their individual situation.

Great scientists present us with achievements on the opposite end of this spectrum. They are gifted individuals who did even more than could have been expected, and in the context of what the average individual human achieves in their lifetime, there's no doubt that they are something special.

<comment><USER8> I am not concerned for Einstein's status - he's firmly among the greats as far as I am concerned - but Great Men historiography diminishes the role of all the other contributors to the progress of science. Most importantly, this gives a false impression of how science works.

From popular expositions of Einstein's work, you would think he came up with the profoundly counter-intuitive ideas of spatial contraction and time dilation single-handedly and out of the blue, yet the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis was already well established within the field. This short article gives an idea of how the relevant ideas developed through collaboration:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jacob Bronowski appeared to believe that if Ludwig Boltzmann hadn't done his bit for atomic theory then Physics would be set back "decades, and perhaps a hundred years".

[https://youtu.be/LPBjcMKiezg?t=36m50s](https://youtu.be/LPBjcMKiezg?t=36m50s)

Either way this clip from The Ascent of Man is always worth watching, as is the whole series. It was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's Cosmos which I understand is fondly received in this community.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article doesn't touch on that the "great man" phenomenon also has a lot to do with the intersection of the person and their time in history. The atom bomb and the atomic age cemented Einstein, Bohr, etc. as "great men" along with a lot of other physicists of the time.

It is not only about who could do X, but also when they did it in a historical context.

Of course sometimes it really is merely a matter of propaganda, or being the first widely publicized person to do X.

I mean people have been doing this since the myth of Prometheus :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> "There's nothing you can do that can't be done" \- The Beatles

</comment><comment><USER12> I understand the desire to wrap an entire blog post in a caveat like the one the author posted which reads: "Over the years a fair number of the blog posts here have been fairly speculative, basically me thinking out loud about something that has recently crossed my mind or my path. What follows is one of those posts and as I begin writing I have a germ of an idea what I think I want to say but I can't guarantee that what will come out is what I initial intended or that it will be particularly illuminating or informative. "

But that adds nothing to the post. It could have been left out entirely because it is implied in every single blog post on the internet. And if you really are uncomfortable enough with something you are publishing that you feel the need to explicitly add a hedge like that to it... maybe you should leave it in draft mode for a couple days until you either decide it truly is ready to publish, or figure out what else is needed.

<comment><USER13> I agree, that was odd to see. I think its because the author is writing outside of his comfort zone? It seems most his work is physics or history related, and he is stepping into something well outside of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "not the originality or uniqueness of their work but the quality and depth of it that makes these researchers great men."

I felt a similar way about the philosophers I had to read while studying the subject in school. Some of the strange beliefs many early philosophers seemed to describe in their works always led me to think (a) there were probably a large number of philosophers during that time who had ideas more worthy of exploring, but (b) since these philosophers in particular were so prolific it was probably next to impossible during those times to have fruitful conversations across generations without large works to act as a fulcrum from which future conversations on the same topic could continue.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't find any paradox or trouble in celebrating great scientists. Physics is often taught alongside a brief motivating history of who and what had occurred before.

Was there some element of luck that let them succeed first over their contemporaries? Would the same things have been discovered just several years later? Probably but the class of people who could have been substituted for Einstein is small enough and unique enough that celebrating Einstein, Maxwell, Plank, Newton, etc, seems the same as celebrating that class of people as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER16> If Elon wasn't around, I doubt anyone would have started a company to reduce space launch costs and some day colonize Mars.

<comment><USER17> Not sure that I agree. I'd say he's just doing something sooner than we expected. Exciting and bold, but I don't see people reacting as, "wait, what is this space travel that you speak of!?"

<comment><USER18> Investors would take that risk?

<comment><USER17> They currently are, by investing in Musk's companies. Am I wrong? (Lebowski)

<comment><USER18> I don't know exactly. Surely Paypal helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr: There are no "Great Men" in science (like Eisenstein, Newton and Galileo) because everyone used previous work, and had highly competent rival scholars working on the same problems. If one would have been "thrown under a tram" another would have produced the same results soon after.

I find this a bit superficial: If only one person can do something, s/he is great. If there are only two, both are not great.

We have some redundancy of greatness, but not a lot: If you'd thrown the top 10 physicists in the world under a tram, at any moment in time, progress would suffer greatly.

Bonus fact: There are about 100 recorded runners who have ever ran 100m in under 10s. While that achievement is now considered "mundane", I find all 100 of them Great.

</comment><comment><USER20> _Put simply it is not the originality or uniqueness of their work but the quality and depth of it that makes these researchers great men._

In some cases, if their work was not of that depth and quality, the field's progress may not have proceeded as rapidly.

<comment><USER21> So much for the paradox.

Edit: Is their quality and depth unique then? I feel sorry for this paradox, it was really going places for a minute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is this called "The Great Man Paradox"? Is it that we think Marie Curie would never have been dumb enough to fall under a tram?</comment>


Why most people aren't downloading apps anymore - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/266280/why-most-people-arent-downloading-apps-anymore/

<comment><USER2> It's costly to switch apps, migrate data and triage new apps. If you've found an app workflow that's good enough, why change?</comment>


RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES by Daft Punk = PURE GENIUS - <AUTHOR>

It may not be what everyone was expecting from the robots. Yet, being revolutionary is not about meeting expectations. It's about knowing the rules yet breaking them to create something truly unique and start a new way of thinking. R.A.M is pure genius since it has been revolutionary on all fronts.
Firstly, Daft Punk sell their audience the idea that just like people created sounds of the future in the past, they are giving life back to dance music. Their album is a sales pitch. It's a handbook of how real dance music should be. Listen to Giorgio by Moroder and you will get the gist.
Secondly, R.A.M is pure marketing genius. Music is about fans, and the artist-fan relationship is of epic importance. Through RAM, Daft Punk cut out all the "middle men" and create material for the actual fans. For example the RAM Collaborator sessions on Youtube: the featured artists speak about the sessions with the robots like some extraterrestrial experience. Daftpunk also streamed their album (for free) via itunes before it went out for sale, generating a huge buzz online.
I believe that this album is truly revolutionary and will mould a new wave of dance music. People will look at this album and say: "This is what started it all" and that is exactly what Daftpunk wanted from the start. <comment><USER2> Do you really think this is relevant for HN?</comment>


The 8 Strangest Communities on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=2271 Every once in a while you'll stumble upon a forum or an online community that is so specific, so insane, so completely ridiculous that you are forced to conclude that you have reached the end of the Internet. <comment><USER2> 4chan? I dont think 4chan is one of the strangest communities on the web. It is where all horrible memes spring from and go to die.

</comment><comment><USER3> Loved that you put this up to share made me smile this morning, THANKS!</comment>


Computers are fast (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/05/12/computers-are-fast/ <comment><USER2> This is cool, but yet I'm continually unimpressed with how slow the actual experience of using a computer is. Some of the simple text-based UIs from the 80s respond in <50ms, but it takes 10+ seconds from opening the Facebook app on iOS 11 on a 6S+ before I can start typing into the post text area. We can load a gigabyte in 2 seconds, but how long does it take to complete an actual task? Basically, I think that we're not solving the actual experience problems with computers or in mobile. UI lag has gotten noticeably worse in the past few years. Android was terrible at this when it first came out, but iOS 11 did _something_ that causes the Home button to now skip a few beats before responding. Excel was reasonably fast, but then everyone moved to GSheets, and it's back to being as slow as an original Pentium running Win95 doing the same calculations (I'd love to actually benchmark this — "normal" $600-ish PCs from every 5 years going back as far as I could running some spreadsheet responsiveness tests).

Computers are fast, but software is slow. Software gets slower faster than computers get faster. "What Andy giveth Bill taketh away" is still as true as ever. I'd love to see the industry move to focusing on responsiveness and e.g. timing on productivity tasks for power users (automate the tests) instead of thinner bezels and flatter UIs.

<comment><USER3> UI is incredibly slow just about everywhere. Electron is a good example.

The lack of people developing desktop UIs using native toolkits (or libraries with native wrappers) is disturbingly low. It seems everyone is using these cross-platform behemoths that are just slow as hell.

<comment><USER4> that's because UIs are about the most uninteresting, unfun thing to program. If you have to do it, you sure don't want to do it for more than one platform.

<comment><USER5> I beg to differ. I find UI programming (and by extension any kind of graphics programming) interesting and rewarding. I can see the results of my work immediately. The visual confirmation after each code-compile-debug cycle is satisfactory. I believe many UI programmers share this view.

Personal taste aside, UIs tend to be slow for different reasons:

I think the major reason is the mindset of "oh, it's just UI", thinking that UI is not really 'that' important [part of a bigger system] or that anyone can do it. Not enough attention and expertise then goes to UI.

On the other hand, if UI gets enough attention, the effort tends to go to design mostly. You end up with a design department producing beautiful artwork and one poor overworked programmer putting it together. Management tend to overlook the fact, that UI is not just Photoshop or Aftereffects work, but someone needs to actually write the code that uses those pretty graphics assets. This programming part is often misjudged as a trivial step.

Don't even get me started on motion design. This whole discipline can be summed up as "how can we use up more CPU/GPU cycles and make things less responsive".

Then the market became saturated with UI frameworks built on top of web browsers which by itself is a thick, slow and bloated layer - a far cry from native UI performance. Unfortunately this is becoming the norm due to obvious commercial advantages - it's cross platform and it's easier to hire JS UI programmers. I mean good luck finding a programmer with experience in several native UI kits (say Cocoa, MFC and Android) at once. Even finding someone with adequate experience in one of them is hard enough nowadays.

Doing UI properly is expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >The movdqa instructions have to do with accessing memory, and it spends 32% of its time on those instructions So I think that means that it spends 32% of its time accessing RAM, and the other 68% of its time doing calculations.

I think that's wrong? The first movdqa (15%) moves from RAM to a register, but the second movdqa (17%) moves from one register to another?

17% seems a lot for something that simply moves from a register to another register! It's even slower than the first movdqa, moving from RAM to register, but registers are supposed to be something like 2 orders of magnitude faster to access than RAM (don't remember exactly).

Maybe it's because there are data dependencies? The 3 instructions before the 2nd movdqa use the register xmm0, so the movdqa has to wait for these to finish before it can execute (aka bubble or pipeline stall)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_\(computing\))

<comment><USER7> Also I'm not sure it makes sense to say the program spends X% time with memory and (100-X)% time with computation. Really a CPU will overlap memory access with compute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Processing 1GB in 250ms seems rather slow for such a simple problem. That's about 0.5-1 CPU cycles per byte. I would have expected well written SSE code to be several times faster than that.

Something like accumulating to three separate SSE registers per iteration and then combining them outside the loop.

<comment><USER9> Maybe if you read the entire file into RAM first and then timed _just_ the processing of the bytes.

But I'd wager it's probably limited by the SSD speed and filesystem caching code at this point.

(Would be easy enough for an assembly guru to prove either of us right or wrong!)

<comment><USER10> The 250ms figure does not include loading the file into RAM. It's just memory access and number crunching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Julia Evans is inspiring. I really, really like her humility and tenacity. The write up of her displaying these characteristics is also just superbly executed.

Attitudes are contagious and I badly want to catch hers!

</comment><comment><USER12> Wouldnt you get the SIMD stuff for free when compiling with `-O3` and `-march=native`?

My guess would be that SIMD wouldn't improve this piece of code, because all data is touched only once and the bottleneck is memory.

<comment><USER13> Autovectorization is still largely an unsolved problem. In some cases, yes, but you shouldn't count on that.

<comment> semi-extrinsic SIMD is like people boarding an airplane. If you've gotten stuff lined up correctly, it's blazing fast, but usually you have a random mix that gives lots of idling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand one things: the original scalar version sums bytes, while the SIMD version sums 32-bit values and returns the sum mod 256. The SIMD version might be much simpler if just byte-wide operations were used. Did I miss something important?

<comment><USER15> You didn't miss anything. This code is total crap. It should use paddb, instead of unpacking into dwords. Also the link is from 2014, so AVX2 could do that twice as fast. Bottom line: code could be at least 8 times faster. Kids, don't learn from this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "I'm used to writing in dynamic programming languages, which definitely do not process 1GB files in 0.25 seconds. Fun!"

1GB in .25 seconds = 4GB in 1 second. Kind of a simplistic takeaway considering the article's title.

</comment><comment><USER17> They try to make it faster, but I would guess the bottleneck in the first try is the one-byte fread().

Reading into a reasonable buffer size would likely speed things up.

</comment><comment><USER18> Fun!

<comment><USER19> Prefetching at least one cache line in advance should speed up the whole process.

Also, multithreading.

<comment><USER11> I doubt that. After the second sequential cache miss the hardware will be prefetching for you.

Worth trying like all these things, but I'm not convinced you'd see a different, go ahead and prove me wrong!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TLDR: author wrote a program in C that sums all bytes mod 256 of 1GB file into one byte.

It runs 2.5 sec first time when it reads file from SSD and just 0.6 sec second time when contents of the file is already in the OS disk cache.

<comment><USER13> Eh, that's just the first step. There's also mmapping, SIMD vectorization, cache locality, and using the perf tool.

<comment><USER17> Mmap seems like a silly hammer when each byte is read just once. Just read into a reasonable buffer.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, but it's clear she's just documenting her learning experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google News Should Remove Paywall and forced adblock removers from feed - <AUTHOR> When I visit Google News and click a link I don't expect a paywall, I expect to read the news.
I also have never disabled an ad blocker because one site said I should in order to read their content. Another bad user experience.
I understand in both instances its their right to put a paywall or demand a removal of ad blocker but when aggregated by others, sites like Google News, the expectations of users are different and therefore, these sites should not be included and get traffic that for the most part, get nothing but a quick click to close window or a back button.
If the click doesn't match the user's expectation, you're doing it wrong. <comment><USER2> Beyond me how people expect journalist to work for free, then complain about how hard it is to find good journalist.

Better idea would be for Google News to offer a unified subscription service, or simply license the content and have a unified interface.

<comment><USER3> We don't need journalist anymore just people that can write semi-coherently about interesting thing they actually know something about (not just any random thing they think people will click on). Instead of doing it for money, they can do it for the sake of communicating with other people about something they're involved with.

<comment><USER4> We don't need employees any more. We just need semi competent people who half understand something. Instead of working for money, 'employees' can do it for the sake of contributing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's not that easy to do. GoogleBot would have to look at the code and decide whether it contains ad blocking checks. There's not a universal method to check for this so it would require a lot of customization and testing. I'm sure they have better things to do with their time.

Besides, I seriously doubt whether Google would oppose checks for ad blocking technology. After-all they make 90% of their income from ads.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google has the opposite goal. Since their primary income is ad revenue, they have absolutely zero incentive to improve the experience for ad blockers. As long as your goal is to deny both paying for and seeing ads for content, don't expect anyone to make your life easier, because you're leeching off everyone else.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I can see why they would demote sites with terrible advertising (especially if it generates them no revenue). But not why they would encourage adblocking in general.

<comment><USER8> Sites with terrible advertising is literally the only reason I'm using an ad- blocker. If those sites had an ad free option for reasonably cheap I would just pay for those specific sites to be ad free.

<comment><USER6> That may be the excuse you give, but be away that by supporting or using ad blockers, you're feeding a toxic force on the Internet, and drastically hurting good journalism.

Check out Troy Hunt's experience, with his ridiculously unobjectionable sponsor scheme, and the fact that ad blockers have gone out of their way to explicitly block it anyways: [https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part- of-the-problem...](https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the- problem/)

Even if you believe you only use the ad blocker because of terrible advertisers, you're likely harming legitimate ones as much or more.

<comment><USER9> Just tell me in your web site kindly and unobtrusively that you need ads to survive and that you'd hand-picked ads which are not animated and respect privacy of your visitors. You'll immediately get an exception.

<comment><USER6> Websites need ads (or subs) to survive. The default setting you operate on should not be to starve them, and you should not need them to tell you that before you act. If you were not blocking by default, and only blocked when a site was particularly invasive, your position would be far more defensible.

<comment><USER9> If showing flashing ads wouldn't have been causing me seizures and if that it weren't the norm to show that kind of ads, what you said could work.

Also why am I paying for something without seeing what it is?

"Here's our content, maybe help us keep producing it by showing our promisedly sane ads?"

I buy a subscription or show ads to 90% of the web sites I visit more than a couple of times per month, as long as they offer them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure there is a good way to make this happen. They are an aggregator, and have 10 different sources you can click on for the same topic. The 'top' article for that topic regularly rotates through sources throughout the day. I assume to promote some sort of fairness, or maybe it has something to do with recency of the last update. Not sure how it works. But how do they prioritize a site over another because of a pay wall? What about all the other people who actually pay for a subscription to some news sites? Should those sites really be punished? Should those users not see the results from that site?

If you don't like a site, you can hit personalize and reduce those sites from showing up. If I hit one that is telling me I have to remove an ad blocker, thats what I would do.

</comment><comment><USER11> The same with Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't expect Google to do this, they live on ad revenue. I'd like to see someone else do it though, with much stricter rules e.g. no javascript and no embedded media. And I'd like some idealistic people to write interesting content for it to get it off the ground until it becomes insanely popular and everyone starts writing things in that format so "[Cool Name] News" will pick it. And then the Internet becomes a good place to visit again. _[end day dream]_

</comment><comment><USER12> Most paywalls get automatically disabled when clicking links from Google by referrer.

As for ad blockers, install this: [https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock- killer/](https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Let's not forget that Ad networks are terrible for carrying malware.

It's not going to happen, but it should.

</comment><comment><USER14> I usually block the anti-adblocker message. Works like a charm.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't use GN, but I agree with this from a UX side.

</comment><comment><USER16> I pay for NY Times and WSJ. If more people did that, we'd have less malicious "fake news."

<comment><USER3> If more people stopped blindly believing everything they read, there would be no such thing as malicious fake news, it would just be called "inaccurate information".</comment></comment>