Workflowy is to TODO as git is to svn  - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/workflowy-is-to-todo-as-git-is-to-svn/swizec/1494 <comment><USER2> I was in the same boat with regards to TODOs, and I asked myself, given how well steeped we are in technology nowadays - surely this is a solved problem?

Turns out, it is. emacs' org-mode does pretty much the exact same thing WorkFlowy does, only it's tied into all the other niceties of emacs (and to admit that is saying something, I was a vim user). Plus, thanks to Dropbox, and MobileOrg for iPhones and Android, you can sync it to your mobile device quickly and easily.

Each to their own and all that, but I really, really like org-mode. The only reason I've slowed down on it a bit currently (using Astrid atm) is because the Android client is still relatively weak; as soon as that picks up a bit I'll be back on it full-time.

<comment><USER3> I like the idea of this, but there's not an Android version of MobileOrg at the moment - so I'll hold off trying it for a while.

<comment><USER2> There's <https://github.com/matburt/mobileorg-android/wiki/>, which is fairly decent. It's still very rough around the edges, and nowhere near the quality of the iPhone MobileOrg, but it's a decent enough start - sticking the orgs in Dropbox keeps everything in sync :).

But yeah, I basically came to the same conclusion (there wasn't a usable solution), and switched to Astrid on the Android tied to Producteev (as it had a plugin for that off the bat) - I put immediate things to remember into there, and most of my notes and other organisational stuff stays in org-mode. When the Android MobileOrg improves, I'll probably use that full time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep trying new tools when they come out, but find myself always snapping back to Notational Velocity.

Workflowy reminds me of OmniOutliner, they share a very similar, hierarchical approach. Sadly they also share similar problems; a GUI that's too slow for my fingers and too complex for my little brain.

The GUI-complexity stems from the enforced hierarchy. Indenting stuff seems nice at first, and makes it look tidy. But after a while I'd find myself constantly futzing with the indentation in the futile attempt to structure what doesn't want to be structured.

And finally workflowy has the added drawback of living inside the browser - which is not nearly as close to my fingertips as a native app.

For me NV is ultimately the better approach. I can not praise it highly enough. Think: "full-text search for your brain". Try it out if you haven't yet.

<comment><USER5> When I switched to Linux, I found that Zim

<http://zim-wiki.org/>

came close enough to Notational Velocity for my purposes. The key feature both share is giving me the ability to very quickly jump to a note by typing its name in. (With Zim you do this by typing cntrl-j.) I'm reluctant to try any note manager that doesn't have that feature.

<comment><USER6> Does it allow for easy syncing between multiple machines?

<comment><USER5> It works on formatted text files. So you could use Dropbox, version control, rsync, etc.

<comment><USER6> Sweet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are people really okay with both giving lots of details about what they are working on to an untrusted third party and committing to a tool that may uncontrollably change or disappear depending on what the maintainer decides to do with it?

I suppose I could use it for hobby projects. For work stuff, untrusted third parties having a free view at my workflow is just straight out, so there goes one big use for the system.

For everyday household stuff, my TODO list could be leaking medical and financial information, which is again a privacy problem. At the very least I would have to make sure both my account info and the contents of the tasks were carefully scrubbed of any identifying information. Seems like troublesome enough that I'd probably give the thing a pass in this situation too.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a simple solution to this problem -> realising that it is surprisingly easy for anyone with the interest to track you around town as you do your stuff and to plant bugs in your office. The info they get that way is much more useful and detailed than anything you ever write down on a TODO list.

If they're just reading your stuff as a passing curiosity because they accidentally can, then they are not a threat as they have no use for the information.

<comment><USER8> _There's a simple solution to this problem - > realising that it is surprisingly easy for anyone with the interest to track you around town as you do your stuff and to plant bugs in your office._

This is completely false. There might be a handful of people with the time and willingness to do this who also find themselves in a suitable location. There are probably hundreds of thousands who could do it on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess I don't understand the analogy in the title. How is workflowy any more "distributed" than a to-do list? I mean, instead of carrying around my notebook of ideas and to-dos, I put it all on workflowy. It seems like I've traded one centralized system for another.

That's not to say that workflowy doesn't have advantages over a notebook, but the svn/git analogy is flawed in my opinion. Maybe if they'd compared other task management systems to cvs and workflowy to svn the version-control-system analogy would have fit better.

EDIT: Grammar.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have been using Workflowy for about 2 weeks now and have a 2 week history of things I have done, didn't get completed and meeting notes.

I love that I can keep all of this in one place without worrying too much about formatting.

<comment><USER3> I like the look of it (and the intuitive way it functions) - but (even though my fear maybe irrational) I'm slightly worried about becoming dependent on a tool that might not be around in the future.

EDIT: actually, with an export function - there's not so much to lose.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I echo this worry. I wish I could pay for this.

Not sure if investors are going to be interested in this given the fairly narrow focus of the feature set and potential market. That being said, I think these are the things that make the service so great. Adding much in the way of features in order to increase potential market could ruin its awesomeness.

<comment><USER11> Hi Chris. We have simple export working now and we're working on regular, automated exports of your whole document.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. I'm not so much worried about my data as I know that can be easily exported already.

I'm more worried about becoming reliant on the interface and product as there really isn't anything else like it out there.

Totally rooting for you guys and will love to follow your success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's embedded on this guy's blog? It's using a massive % of cpu.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, this question gets posted every time something from my blog appears on HN.

It's a live-chat tool for websites that I'm testing for a friend and his startup. Honestly it's proving pretty useless with the kind of traffic I'm getting (high churn), but on websites with videos or long posts it's pretty awesome.

<comment><USER13> Well it crashed my browser (Chrome 6 on W7) and caused me to not read your post, might want to rethink it as it ruins any attempt at using your site.

<comment><USER14> same here. crashed chrome on w7 (an extra data point)

<comment><USER15> Definitely reproducible. Chrome on w7 crashed for me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks pretty similar to BasKet (<http://basket.kde.org/>).

I used BasKet for a while and it's pretty good. Ultimately though using TODO lists for non-computer tasks on a computer always breaks down for me.

Also, this doesn't seem particularly distributed. How is this like git? There are better ways of saying "it's neat and new".

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant like git in that it makes branching and such painless. It's not distributed at all as far as I can tell.

And yes I agree, if the checklist isn't tightly bound to the workspace it's meant for, everything breaks down. But being a founder of a web/mobile startup means pretty much everything I do happens on a computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I switched my homepage to Workflowy when I saw it first here on HN and it has been a great boost to my productivity since. Maybe nothing specific to Workflowy itself, but just the fact of having a todo list as homepage.

<comment><USER18> I made a simple HTML page with a large font that said "You're working on XYZ" and set it to be my home page. Embarrassingly, I was very productive that week.

Even though I didn't keep up with updating the HTML to represent what I was working on, I became much more aware of my actions and their relations to my responsibilities since then.

I found it to be a valuable lesson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've also tried lots of different tools.. The best one so far is to stop spending time thinking and writing tasks and just start executing them.

</comment><comment><USER20> Workflowy looks interesting, but the part of the marketing that turns me off is that there is very little information available without signing in, instead we see a video. The video makes claims of being "the first" in a lot of things, but the demo shows workflowy off as a crippled version of mind-mapping software, which honestly makes me think they haven't done their homework.

</comment><comment><USER21> I just noticed workflowy has an export tool at the bottom of the page. Pretty slick.

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's nice. I'd also like to be able to import from gTasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Historically I'm not a guy who likes "fancy" note-taking or TODO-tracking tools. I tend to prefer things like vi or TextMate. That said, I played with WorkFlowy last night and I really liked it. I think it provides a very useful kind of tool experience. Scratchs a useful itch. I was surprised. The only thing that I don't like is I'm uncomfortable with it being a webapp hosted by some company. I'd much much much prefer it if I could run a native app version of WorkFlowy, with my data stored in a file on my own computer. And if it's stored in a file(s) that I control, then I could, say, use something like DropBox or git or rsynch or TimeMachine or TrueCrypt or whatever to make sure that data is shared or backed up or encrypted exactly how I want or need. Right now if the WF company goes away or I have no connectivity, I can't access my data. (I'm aware of their "copy-and-paste out" feature but that doesn't address this particular problem, and is hacky and will be prone to having out-of-date data stored in your backup cache. And it's too manual.) This is my only negative with it so far. Otherwise, I think the UI is great and I think it's really useful for certain cases. Possibly a killer app for those use cases. Turn this into a native app for Mac with all my data stored locally wherever I wish, with no connectivity requirements, and you can put me down for a purchase. Great work!

I also want to throw a shout out to Notational Velocity. First time I've heard of it was in this discussion thread. Just played with it now. Also like it. Nice use cases supported. I can see this really being useful. It's a different beast than WorkFlowy so I don't think they compete, they are complementary or orthogonal tools, at best. I could see using both. Couple advantages I see with NV are (1) native app, (2) open source, and (3) it stores your data locally where you control it and own it. NV does _not_ have the cool collapsible hierarchical bullet point UI mechanism that WorkFlowy has, however, so again they don't really compete directly or scratch the same itch. The 100%-keyboard-drivability aspect is awesome and very useful. I wish I could control the font size, the default is uncomfortably small.

Anyway, glad I discovered this thread, and I'll be adding both of these tools to my toolbox going forward. Kudos to the folks behind both.

</comment><comment><USER23> Workflowy reminds me of google tasks. Simple tasks easily indented.

<comment><USER9> Right. The advantage of Google tasks over Workflowy in my opinion, is that Google tasks works on mobile devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 502 Bad Gateway

</comment><comment><USER25> I would love to run something like this on my personal webserver.

Is there any free software solution that provides such a web solution? (I've played with various wikis for a while but it never was never 'addictive' enough.)

<comment><USER26> I've been using TiddlyWiki for some months successfully:

<http://www.tiddlywiki.com/>

Very simple (single HTML file, web server not required), local, lightweight, can sync with Dropbox easily.

For teams, we're heavily using the Open Source version of Etherpad. Not a wiki, but a great collaborative text editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> todo.sh + Dropbox is working well for me. On every computer I want, easy editing via mobile devices, plaintext.

</comment><comment><USER28> Very much looks like a nicely done but nevertheless small subset of emacs org- mode for the web.

I'll stay with org-mode: \- I'm in emacs all day anyway. \- Much more feature rich: priorites, dates, coloration, etc. \- Full editing (duh) capabilities. Cut&paste to shuffle things around. Key combos for everything. Fingers never leave the keyboard.

Since I maintain the file in git I check it in and out from anywhere on any system. Full version history as well.

Still Workflowy is nicely done for what it is.

</comment><comment><USER29> I feel old-fashioned. I still use a piece of paper and a pen to jot down ideas. Not a fancy Moleskine book either, just one or two Sheets of A4 folded twice. I feel productive.

What do you think is the secret for Workflowy's success? Is it the novelty? The geekiness? The design? Stuff like that fascinates me, because I don't really need it. How am I to discover what people like if I wouldn't use it in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER30> I am absolutely loving this site. I am not normally a list person but I am going to try. If they ever add collaboration then I will be all over this.

</comment><comment><USER31> Workflowy looks... almost identical to Google Tasks.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think you're more likely to stick to and maintain todos on a mobile device that syncs to the cloud.

Maybe that's just how I'm wired, but I never could stick to any one system until I got a smartphone, now I run my life out of it.

<comment><USER33> In the WorkFlowy Help section at the bottom it says:

What we're working on: Mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android), export & backup, collaboration & sharing, better moving, and about a million other small improvements.

<comment><USER34> That is what I am waiting for. I want access to my TODOs anywhere, otherwise I will lose things or have a hard time looking things up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I like Workflowy. However, I'm used to jumping between words using ctrl+arrow keys. When I do that in Workflowy, I'm taken a level up or down. It's very hard to get used to.

</comment><comment><USER3> If Workflowy also produced a time tracker - to monitor how long Workflowy tasks took (and record which task I've been working on, and when) .. I'd pay money for it.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've been working on a similar project, but I've been moving away from the tree structure lately because I found it too rigid.

I don't think all my ideas fit into a tree.

<comment><USER3> It's a top-down approach. The question is, can your ideas be subdivided into small(er) tasks?

<comment><USER36> What if my ideas are smaller parts of different things (i.e. a cycle, which can not be in a tree)?

Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way.

<comment><USER3> A cycle is a linear process, which is repeated. You can take the (x) steps of your cycle and make a heading out of each, and then divide those stages into their smaller steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Vimoutliner does the same - letting me use a real text editor. With dropbox or sshfs synching is a no-brainer, too.

</comment><comment><USER38> I prefer teuxdeux.com, but Workflowy looks good, the export feat is nice

</comment><comment><USER39> I am surprised... OneNote is one of the best tools out there.

</comment><comment><USER40> totally needs some collaborating features to be useful for a team.

</comment><comment><USER41> the site appears to be down</comment>


Google removes SIMD.js support from Chromium - chroem- https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4124&can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary%20HW%20OS%20Component%20Stars&groupby=&sort= <comment><AUTHOR> This is a good decision. SIMD.js never made sense to me. Writing vector code that outperforms scalar code requires not only fine-grained control over issues like alignment, but also requires targeting specific SIMD instruction sets. You must write your vector code with the emitted assembly in mind, because if you fall off the fast path and the compiler switches to scalar code or does a library call or something, you've lost any performance gain and then some.

A generic SIMD API on a high-level language like JavaScript is as bad as it gets. I looked at what it would take to port some of my vector code to SIMD.js and it wasn't remotely plausible.

Also saving 10% of the v8 code size is enormous.

The right path forwards is for JITs to emit SIMD code when possible, and for JS engines to provide OpenCL-like GPGPU-targeted APIs, following the trail that WebGL blazed with JS shaders.

<comment><USER2> _This is a good decision. SIMD.js never made sense to me. Writing vector code that outperforms scalar code requires not only fine-grained control over issues like alignment, but also requires targeting specific SIMD instruction sets. You must write your vector code with the emitted assembly in mind, because if you fall off the fast path and the compiler switches to scalar code or does a library call or something, you 've lost any performance gain and then some._

I think this highlights the absurdity of writing vector code in higher-level constructs rather than the direct ASM. Writing in ASM is not that hard, and the gains can be enormous. I've seen graphics operations sped up by 5x or more, just by writing hand-optimized vector ops in assembly.

This is one of Visual Studio's core strengths vs GCC. Writing an __asm { } block is much more pleasant than the syntax GCC forces on you. Unfortunately this inertia is one reason games tend to be windows-only, even in the post- Apple era.

In other words, phrases like "You must write your vector code with the emitted assembly in mind, because if you fall off the fast path and the compiler switches to scalar code" invokes a feeling of "What? Why does the compiler get any say in what the vector code looks like? Oh, right, everybody shies away from writing ASM by hand nowadays." Which is valid, but sometimes having ultra control is extremely nice. It just feels cool to get a 2x speedup by being persistent and clever. (Those speedups come with future technical debt, though, so there are good arguments against it.)

<comment><USER3> The compiler should vectorize functions automatically, without user intervention.

Writing assembly code to use SIMD instructions is a vote of no confidence on your compiler.

If your compiler of choice can't do automatic vectorization switch to one that can, or get people to implement that feature in your compiler of choice.

<comment><USER4> Well, the compilers don't do a good enough job, end of story (at least using C; not sure about OpenCL). To achieve top performance it is necessary to make sure everything in the computation is organized in the right way. And try out multiple strategies on the high level of the program, to see what achieves best performance at the low level. At that point, trying to obfuscate your SIMD logic in regular C so that the C compiler _maybe_ figure out what you meant is just frustrating anyway.

What you are saying is basically "you don't need top performance, just deal with what the compiler gives you".

But sometimes you work on stuff where the whole point is to be best in class in performance (libsharp in my case).

If you think that what you are suggesting is possible, feel free to improve the compilers so that normal C code beats OpenBLAS. You will be famous. I will wait....

<comment><USER3> Writing inline assembly to get SIMD performance is likely to cost immense time of an architecture expert and doesn't scale.

So my point stands: If a compiler can't produce vectorised code, the compiler needs to be improved. Spending time on improving the compiler is sustainably spent time. Spending time on programming SIMD in assembly by hand likely is not.

I believe you that the vectorization support at the moment is not good enough, and I completely understand that not everyone can spend time on improving the compiler.

However, it seems you know exactly what a compiler should be able to do and what feedback from the compiler, or annotations for the compiler, would be helpful for your use-cases where optimization somehow didn't figure out what to vectorize.

I was just pointing out that communicating with compiler people and getting them to improve the compiler is likely a better move than asking for better support for inline assembly.

<comment><USER4> The problem is not communication. To quote Paul Graham in a keynote from some years back: People have been waiting for "sufficiently smart compilers" to cut programmers out of the loop for 30 years. It is a neat idea in theory. In practice it is just very hard. You need to design the algorithm for the hardware, so it is sort of an AI problem. Programmers do fill a role usually in coming up with the best algorithms...

The point is simply that C doesn't have the concepts you want to program with. Vectorization only gets you so far, there are many other things you can do with AVX/SSE. It doesn't need to be ASM, it could be supersets of C instead (like CUDA).

Intrinsic functions for AVX is what I use and I don't see the problem with using those. It sort of is such a superset of C.

In practice a few numerical computations (BLAS, FFTs, etc) are reused a lot by many. It is worth it to write those few libraries in assembly (or at least intrinsics).

For the rest we just have to live with a small performance penalty.

I am just saying "if you want to go the extra mile to get high performance, you can beat compilers". In most scenarios of course it makes most sense to not bother.

<comment><USER3> I get your point.

However, I don't think it is useful to consider a compiler to be a replacement for programmers. Compilers are tools for programmers. The more time a compiler saves a programmer, the better it is.

I think there is a middle ground between writing inline assembly and fully automatic vectorization that would be less time intensive than manual vectorization and more predictable and available earlier than fully automatic vectorization. I wonder what would have to be done to find it and provide support for it in GCC/LLVM.

<comment><USER5> So... SIMD intrinsics?

You also need to take into account that a huge chunk of the work in SIMD is the need to rearrange your data to be more amenable to the CPU. C++ compilers are very restricted in what they can do for you there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting fact: the owner of that bug wrote Raster Blaster <[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_Blaster>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_Blaster>) and Pinball Construction Set <[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set>).

<comment><USER7> Thanks. The links don't work unfortunately -- no need to format them, but that is a fun detail to know about

<comment><USER6> Oops, bad habit. Thanks. Too late to edit, so for posterity: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_Blaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_Blaster) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seemed shocking as I thought SIMD was still on track for inclusion in the next ECMAScript release as the proposal was on stage 3 the last time I checked (stage 4 means "it's in the spec", so stage 3 generally means "shipping ASAP"). I first thought Google had single-handedly decided to violate the spec.

However it turns out the SIMD proposal has been dead since at least April: [https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_simd/commit/c6ca655dcbfc0...](https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_simd/commit/c6ca655dcbfc014d82f3ec500c2e41db34a1dee8)

So this isn't really "Google kills SIMD" but "Google kills implementation of dropped proposal".

It's still surprising to see proposals get canned this late into the process. The only other example of a late-stage retraction I can think of is Object.observe, which was originally expected to become part of the 2016 edition: [https://esdiscuss.org/topic/an-update-on-object- observe](https://esdiscuss.org/topic/an-update-on-object-observe)

</comment><comment><USER9> Better explanation at [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=6020&desc=2](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=6020&desc=2)

</comment><comment><USER10> Comment #145 back on Feb 13 actually has the commit: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4124#c145](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4124#c145)

The bug links to the actual discussion ("The V8 binary has a considerable amount of code that could be trimmed"): [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5948](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5948)

There's a nice treemap of the size of pieces of v8 in the first comment on that bug.

Comment #3 on the bug notes that SIMD.js is large: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5948#c3](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5948#c3)

Finally, comment #6 "There's no reason to keep the simd.js stuff around. I'll take it out ASAP.": [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5948#c6](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5948#c6)

Someone notes that v8 is reduced by 500KB on Android. Looks like it got reverted a few times for breaking Node.js tests, someone notes "can you wait a day until we sort out Node first?" then SIMD.js gets removed again the next day. So I assume they "sorted it out w/ Node" w/e that means?

Also, trying to learn how the macroassembler is laid out; seems pretty neat. Kinda baffled that s390 and ppc are supported. Was kinda for mips but I guess that's an Android supported platform...

A lot of the code that looks like it's being assembled by the macro assembler has double underscore followed by a space, followed by argument lists, which is curious looking at first glance.

Looks like the double underscores are defined as:

#define __ ACCESS_MASM(masm)</comment>


Ask PG/HN : Replacing Email - What problems/solution comes to your mind? - <AUTHOR> One of Paul Graham's frighteningly ambitious startup ideas (http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html) is "Replacing Email". He visualizes his inbox as a disastrously bad todo list and email as the way things get into it. He shared his thoughts on what may be a better solution that can eventually replace email. Here are some points from that :
1. Email has to be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not a messaging protocol.
2. The new protocol should give more power to the recipient than email like
a)more restrictions on what someone can put on my todo list.
b)Information about what action I need to take on a to-do list item. Like, do I need to read something or take any further action on it like replying, forwarding, viewing attachment, paying attached bill, watching video etc. ?
c)How important it is? There obviously has to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.
d)When does it have to be done? Is it urgent? Do I need to do it before a given time?
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
I would like to ask some questions about it from both PG and HN community :
1. In an email there are only few actions one is supposed to take, like "Read", "Read & Reply", "Read & Forward", "View attachments". What other actions you think that should be incorporated in new to-do list based system?If not all, what are the important ones for you?
2. How would you like to prioritize to-do items by importance? What are the rules? Like, giving importance to to-do items from specific "circle" of peoples you know - Colleagues, family, etc.? or by type/content of to-do item? or anything else?
3. What kind of things one can put on your to-do list? What kind of things one shouldn't be allowed to put in your to-do list?
4. Do we really need a new protocol? Can't it be done by making a distributed client/server system where anyone can setup an open source to-do list server(if they need to own and control their information for privacy reasons) and clients can communicate through HTTP protocol (REST API)?
5. Is there any YC company or other startup that is working on this idea?
Please share your thoughts. </comment><comment><USER3> I just don't get this constant fascination of being the one who changes email. This constant race to invent a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Email is not the problem here. Its a textual piece which is parsed by email servers and your email client to deliver 'stuff' to you. That stuff can be anything in the world. This is what makes email such a success that not PG nor an entire pantheon of gods will manage to 'change' or 'reinvent'. Its the simple technologies that end up being the most genius ones. And every two days someone wants to come in and make simple into complicated because they have this idea that the world will actually prefer complicated. Its not a 'todo list' Mr. Graham. Its a generic piece of message or content I'm being sent or sending. Some of it are tasks to perform. Some of it is my nan asking how her grandchildren are, and some of it is Mr mamboto of Nigeria who wants to give me 35 million dollars - Win!

There is no problem with email. You don't want to change email. This is not the problem you're looking for. What you should be looking, perhaps, is a smarter email client which can represent the contents of various email's differently based on the context of the message. Some messages are todo lists, some are letters from nan, some are offers of a better life from Mr. Mamboto.

<comment><USER4> While I would tend agree with you that we don't need to change email, your examples actually do fit quite nicely into the "email as to-do list" idea:

An email from Nan would be a "read and reply" task. The email from Mr. Mamboto, assuming it's not caught by my spam filter, also requires me to take action.

<comment><USER5> I disagree with this quite strongly. If you think that 'an email from Nan' is a 'read and reply' task, then you can turn everything you ever do into a to-do list. Buying a steak is a to-do item because you have to cook it. Discussing what someone's reading at the moment is a to-do item because you have to decide whether to buy the book they suggested. Etc, etc. Almost everything we do either completes a task or creates a new one, if you want to see it that way.

For extremely busy people, everything becomes a to-do list. And this is why I'm somewhat unconvinced by PG's notions of email as to-do list. It probably is if you're a busy and successful person who gets a lot of business information and requests via email.

To my mind, the reason email seems that way more than other communications is largely because email clients give you pretty good ways of turning those communications directly into to-do items (unlike, say, the telephone, where you have to explicitly consider and organise the tasks that come from those communications).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The two biggest issues for me have to deal with communicating with groups of people.

First, I hate being involved with an email conversation between several people that lasts for days and you end up with a 100 email long chain. It's difficult to wade through the crap, everyone has their 10 line signature and the useless privacy warning for a 1 line email. It's annoying and very inefficient.

The other annoyance is not being able to unsubscribe yourself from threads that no longer are of interest to you.

This happened recently at work. I was communicating with our QA manager and our clients QA manager. I had taken care of my part, and they continued the conversation through email yet I still received every email because they would just reply all. Eventually I had to send an email and say "next time you send an email, please remove my name from the list unless I actually need to read the contents of the email."

To me, a simple solution to this is a threaded message board (even ones as simple as like vBulletin and the like from the early 2000's, obviously built with better technologies).

With a message board you have control over how much information you consume, but if someone really wants to send you something, they can send you a private message and ask you to join a conversation. You subscribe to threads of conversation, and then unsubscribe when they no longer interest you.

Find a way to do that in an email client and I'd easily pay $100 for that piece of software.

<comment><USER7> This was the problem with google wave. It tried to solve the distribution problem, but that's easy and solved. The real problem is the opposite, signal- to-noise and information overload.

Also, there is the general problem of keeping information up to date. If every new participant to a conversation has to follow all the convolutions of the original email thread (some of which may be missing because face-to-face meetings probably happened at one point) then that's a huge waste. Figure out how to create a system which naturally encourages people to sum up the current state of the discussion (perhaps with automated aids) and you'll be ahead of the game.

<comment><USER8> I feel like google wave tried to tackle these problems as well.

Specifically, it was possible for people to join and leave a conversation much in the same way that facebook messaging threads work now.

While Wave did subscribe fairly heavily to the traditional message and reply model it also had support for wiki-style messages, so it was possible for a summary to be maintained in the top message of each thread. (The instant replay tool I always thought was very cool, too.)

And towards the end it did start to introduce some tools to encourage people to summarise information (although admittedly nothing revolutionary). I'm mainly thinking of its widgets for event organisation, date planning and voting which are always horrible to do via email.

I think Wave had a lot of problems and, it may be, that the problems it did solve it didn't solve well but I do think it at least tried and had a few good ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not about a to-do list.

Email is a generic container. It can contain to-do's, sure. But it might also be a letter from a friend, an invitation to a wedding, a mailer about discounted products.

The way to improve this is to redirect emails to the relevant place. To-do's to my to-do app, invitations to my calendar, mailers to my Flipboard like app that sucks in all offers and puts them in one place.

The point is none of this stuff should ever touch my inbox. Additionally, if I don't have a "offers mailer app like flipboard" I'll never see those offers.

This can't be done at the client level. But it could play nice with existing email. As the message comes in, you either have an app (registered on the server) that says it can deal with that email content or the message gets bounced. It's kind of harsh, but I suspect most people's inboxes are taking way too much time out of their day - more that it should.

Then on the client side, you'd have a collection of apps that would be designed specifically to deal with those message types.

<comment><USER10> This, to me, is the winner, minus the bouncing. Email servers or clients can append headers based on what content is in the mail, and that information can be used to provide context sensitive app links. I can imagine a big button next to an email that says "Add to Calendar" or "Send to Evernote" or "View Map/Directions". I think Gmail does a good bit of this, so if they can provide hooks for more external services to capture, it would be a huge win.

<comment><USER9> the bounce is a bit harsh I'll admit. but the point I wanted to make was that if I don't want that _type_ of message then return the message to sender.

i.e. if I don't have a to-do list app registered, don't send me a to-do.

<comment><USER10> Ah, that makes more sense. I don't make appointments over email, so bounce an invitation and they can see me in person. I've always liked the idea of email as a non-guaranteed protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The easiest thing to look at is all the pain that people have with email as it exists today. There is the core of email, but then it is festooned with many additions, extensions, associates, and helpers. All of those things are there for a reason, because they solve a real problem with email. But, of course, those things don't have the luxury of rebuilding the whole system from the ground up, and doing so could lead to a design that doesn't have the pain points and weaknesses that need to be mended by additions. Consider a few common aspects: at a big company the MO is typically for individuals to join a large number of distribution groups and then also set up a lot of filters to move the mail they get for those groups into different folders because they have different levels of actionability (if any). Similarly, automated emails tend to require special filtering rules to make sure they don't drown out the S/N. Add to that the common difficulty of personally or publicly archiving email, because so often it tends to be used as an information storage system for key bits of data (contacts, decisions, technical details).

Personally I think the "todo list" model is good but lacking. I think ultimately what you want is something that would look to us like a mashup of issue tracking, messaging, wiki, and maybe even twitter from a certain perspective. I think switching from "private default" to "public default" for messaging is the biggest toggle, with the second one being pull vs. push (or search vs. signup).

</comment><comment><USER11> Instead of thinking it as your list, turn it around and think of it as lists of people (or circles/bubbles if you please). The bubbles live in your "tank" of tasks. Your tank has different layers.

Each circle/bubble starts at the bottom but has a certain buoyancy - <USER2> guides its ascent to the top. For e.g., family bubble is very buoyant - so if you get a mail from your wife, it bubbles to the top really fast. In the time it takes to rise to the top, it can grow larger (more messages from your family) - which in turn increases its buoyancy.

The big difference is that you can change the buoyancy function at any time, causing the bubbles to start sinking/rising according to that change. Bubbles burst after some time - which means they get automatically archived or some sort of autoresponder sends an apology-for-delay email

You can play with different visual dimensions as well, like stale bubbles floating to the left.

</comment><comment><USER12> An email client that lets me edit the title and body of the mails in my inbox would be a good start. I use email as a to-do list and oftentimes, 90% of the text in the email is not pertinent to that purpose (greetings, signatures, "polite" introductions, etc). Just being able to edit out unnecessary text would be really convenient. The changes would sync with across devices that have this specific mail client and you can restore the original text with just a click.

TL;DR: Mail client that lets you edit other people's emails in the inbox so that you can edit out things that don't fit the context of your mail usage.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell "1. Email has to be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not a messaging protocol."

We will always need a distributed, general messaging protocol. That's what email is. If you create a "todo list protocol", it wont replace email. It will either run on top of email, or along side it, but it wont replace it.

<comment><USER13> Your comment nails the point. Email is to internet communication, as text files is to storing file data. It's the most basic form that's usable.

Sure, you could bolt on abstractions over it like doc/rtf etc. but at the most fundamental level you need some form of cross compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe PG conceptualizes his email inbox as a bad distributed todo list, but I'm sure lots of people don't. I don't. My work processes are in an _actual_ distributed todo list of sorts.

That said, clearly email _is_ being replaced by other messaging techniques. There was an infamous Slashdot story in _2004_ (christ I'm getting old) _In Korea, Email is Only For Old People_ [0]. Back then, it was blogs, IMs and SMS, these days it's, well, still blogs and IMs and SMS but also Twitter and Facebook messages. Particularly Facebook messages.

Which is reason enough to think about replacing email -- with something that is as attractive to people as these techniques, but not proprietary, but rather at least as cross-platform, distributed and reliable as email.

[0] [http://slashdot.org/story/04/11/30/0034259/in-korea-email- is...](http://slashdot.org/story/04/11/30/0034259/in-korea-email-is-only-for- old-people)

<comment><USER15> IIRC, the followup story proclaimed that "In Soviet Russia, email only reads old Korean people". But I might have misremembered that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1) Read, Write, Attach, Forward and Reply. Like it's right now. Maybe a "Mark as done" although the current mailbox system can easily do that by using folders and having an "Archive" folder (oh wait, we already have all that)

2) Labels and stars get me there. Oh wait, that's already in email as well. And remember the priority flag that lets others indicate how important they think it is?

3) Anything, as long as I can decide what's important and what's not.

4) Let's just stick with email. If it doesn't work for you as it is right now, stop using that webmail client you use and get a proper client. Email has always worked fine for me.

5) I sure hope not. I like email as it is.

Bottom line: I really don't want email to change. It's pretty good as it is right now, and mail clients such as Thunderbird offer all functionality any new system is possibly going to offer. If email doesn't work for you, you're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER17> 1\. I think you're misunderstanding; actions are a more general concept. Most emails I get fall into one of several boxes: "confirmation, no action required"; "event you might like to attend"; "request for email reply"; "request to do some thing in the real world"; "notification that something you were waiting for has happened". I'd like it to be possible for an incoming email to be marked as one of these (and the client can use it to determine e.g. whether my phone beeps). I'd like closer integration with my calendar; currently if an event email has been formatted right (which most of them aren't) I can "add" it to my calendar, but that's a one-way, fire-and-forget process.

2\. Eh. I can handle my priorities. Maybe some very simple high/medium/low priority based solely on sender, but I don't want anything complex.

3\. Anything can go on there. If I don't want to do it I can handle that myself.

4\. Eew, my buzzword bingo went off. A REST API is still a new protocol. Anyway, the point of making this a new protocol and not email is that if I just add tags to email, 99% of incoming emails won't have these tags and they'll become useless. The only way to make senders adopt the new format is if they gain a benefit by doing so; with a separate protocol, maybe I'm willing to have my phone interrupt me for (some) new-protocol messages, but not for email. That will give people an incentive to use the new system.

</comment><comment><USER18> The problem is, if you want to replace email it needs to play nice with email. You're not going to prise that from businesses unless it's out of their cold, dead hands.

A distributed client/server system would probably work, and you could go via REST, but if you're wrangling data along those forms as well as trying to fluidly integrate email into the experience (as it's not going anywhere), it might be easier to spec out a data format/protocol from scratch, you could even base it off REST if that floats your boat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think any such system can work in isolation. We would need to integrate it with existing email system and SMS and may be also HN/Twitter/G+/etc if we consider reading all these as a to-do item.

One solution that comes to mind is to let users integrate their existing email accounts by allowing them to periodically fetch email through POP and converting it into to-do items. We can also add "Reply as email" and "Forward as email" actions to implement outgoing email functionality.

<comment><USER18> But at that stage what you want is effectively a messaging client with heavy to-do functionality, rather than some transformative. Bolting the to-do functionality on is probably a lower-hanging fruit than a new protocol.

Ideally you'd need a protocol system that allows for multiple data formats to be specified through a plugin mechanism to cope with things like social networks and SMS on top of email, but then you're squarely in the territory of being at the whims and mercy of constantly ensuring the plugin works with the backend data APIs for the services (for social networks), and sticking to the letter of the RFC law for email.

It's a great idea, but as they say, going to need a bigger boat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Think of it as a classification problem. Every message falls into one of four levels:

1\. Should read immediately (generates an interruption)

2\. Must read, but can wait (goes in a queue that I look at regularly, and must be marked read)

3\. Maybe worth reading, but okay to miss (goes in a pool that I look at sometimes, but disappears if ignored. This pool should be bottomless.)

4\. Should not read (uninteresting stuff, spam, and duplicates)

We have many ad-hoc systems for performing this classification, and email is only one of them; we use the medium itself as a proxy for parts of this classification.

Gmail's Priority Inbox is meant to distinguish level 1 from 2, and its spam filter to distinguish level 2 from 4, but it breaks down when level 3 messages (such as mailing lists) get into your inbox. RSS is for level 2 only, and can neither escalate to 1 nor filter to 3 and 4. Forums are for level 3 only. News aggregators like HN distinguish between levels 3 and 4, but they suck at escalating to levels 1 and 2, and their ad-hoc nature means that they have pretty serious duplication problems; an awesome post is still a level 4 message if you've already seen it.

If you want to replace email for me, you need to go broader; let me pull everything into the same system, then get the classification right.

</comment><comment><USER20> One thing that is broken in most cases: email signatures. I can appreciate that they serve as a practical branding opportunity like a business card or letterhead, but no one needs to see their own in a chain of replies.

I recently converted from Outlook to Gmail and end up with email tails that consist of a stack of signatures. I'd rather easily insert a signature (easy shortcut in Outlook) in the first contact with a client than have to delete one that is automatically appended to a sequence of replies. I suppose my best bet is some tweak/add-on that allows quickly choosing a canned response?

Wish there was a concise signature format that combined fixed data pairs (Phone = 1234 5678, etc), branding chances, and a maximum size+. Then (as some mail clients or web apps do) show this info as a 'card' in a right sidebar, and stack those cards in the event that multiple people are in the conversation.

\+ And automatic stripping of those "Keep it green, read on screen" messages. If someone's going to print an email, they'll print the email.

<comment><USER21> I think the solution to that is simple on the client side. Any text that repeats itself in two emails from the same person (including one's own) can be considered a signature and hidden. Gmail does a pretty good job of that.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't seem to do it for my signature - does it only happen in Conversation Mode or whatever it's called?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Rather than trying to replace the entire system, try thinking about the individual problems.

For instance, Dropbox have replaced a big chunk of where people used to email files to one another. I've seen this both inside companies and when operating as an independent consultant. In fact, I've had a surprising range of otherwise non-technical people ask me whether I have it installed.

<comment><USER23> Exactly, the problem with e-mail is that it is not RESTful. Nothing is hyperlinked by default. Sending a huge binary to a group of 100 people results in 100 send messages including the huge binary, even though maybe 50 people actually did something with the binary attachment. But the same problem is sending a mail to a large group of users. For example if Amazon sends an e-mail to its user the complete content is transmitted N times. If with a RESTful architecture they only had to transmit the URL to that message with a subject. Users that are interested would open the message.

<comment><USER24> To rephrase how I understand your comment, an email sitting in your inbox would just be a link to a glorified webpage hosted on Amazon's servers, where everyone can click through to that.

That's a pretty interesting idea. Emails from, for example, Amazon are pretty much just HTML files being sent to each user already. Obviously you would be able to customize the links sent as emails so each user can see the information they want being pulled from the database so it looks functionally like an email right now. Seems like it would be a nice bandwidth-saving protocol. It would also get around the issue of email storage and file attachment limits. It would offload the cost of receiving a message away from Google or the user and shift that burden back to the sender. Someone could easily tell how effective their newsletter is because it would count as a page view. The page could even be opened "within" Gmail as an iframe (or whatever people are using these days).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I need to reach someone, I usually want them to respond as soon as possible. That's why I'm trying to find a way that I know they receive. Sometimes it is skype/gtalk (if i know that the person is at a desk with clients online), sometimes it's sms (if i know that they have their phone). And of course, voice call, if text doesn't cut it.

If I know their main communication agent is email and it's business hours, I will send an email.

My point is, you can make a perfect replacement for the email, from point of view of recipient, but people who are in control most of the time are the senders.

THEY will choose a way to contact you. If they see that FOR THEM it is more efficient to send a chat, SMS or email, they will do it.

Of course, you may try telling them: "That's it, I'm using only my new perfect todo tool", but I don't think it will hold for long.

I may definitely be totally wrong.

</comment><comment><USER26> The thing that jumps out at me is your first question: the majority of the actions I get from e-mail come in the text of the email and are external to the mail client (implement this feature, fix this bug) rather than part of it (reply with an answer, accept meeting request).

I think the reason why email works for this is that somehow email "comes to me" whereas everything else I have to consciously "go to it" to check it. I recognise that some of this is habit, some of it is how the email client is integrated into the computer (outlook at work, mail on my iphone) so that it presents new stuff to me directly, and some of it is that it presents a single place to check rather than having to hit refresh on a bunch of webpages to see if anything has changed on each.

</comment><comment><USER20> Are there any mail clients that handle CCed mail quite differently to direct mail in the inbox?

BCC to me, in most contexts, is "You can eavesdrop on this if you want." CC is sometimes "Just showing you that I am on top of this" and sometimes "I'm mostly dealing with Rollo, but there could be a question/task for you in here too."

In inbox terms, something very roughly like this: if I'm CCed on a message from employee Bob to client Rollo, it could say "Bob emailed Rollo about 'The contact form bug' and included you." And maybe alert me if my name/alias/nickname (hard to catch them all) is mentioned in the body.

If BCCed, maybe "Bob emailed Rollo about 'The contact form bug'; you can read it if you want."

In each case, neither should really be given the importance of an email sent directly to you.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the current email protocol should not be changed, for maximum backwards compatibility. The solution should be a web (or native, why not) client that does all those things based on the email content.

The difference would be giving feedback to the sender ("your email has been marked as important" or "your email has been converted to a task" etc.), with obvious incentives to convert to said email client. Thus, if both recipient and sender use the solution, this feedback happens in-app, without emails being sent back and forth.

There's a lot of room for creativity when designing a client. I liked someone else's idea of integrating with the various web apps such as todo lists, calendars etc. to keep from reinventing the wheel.

</comment><comment><USER27> Everybody uses email differently. Any one person proposing a "solution" to email or a new client design or workflow or whatever is going to be shouted down by the 90% of the population that doesn't do it the same way.

The best thing, then, might be to let everybody design their own email client. I'm imagining something that lets you drag around GUI widgets like "this email has a to-do item associated", "displays this email's author", or "mark this email as being high/medium/low priority". Provide a few layout tools, maybe a really simple domain-specific scripting language in case someone wants a widget that you didn't provide, and everybody's happy.

<comment><USER28> Very true, perhaps something along the lines of sublime text. So at it's core it's just a fast simple email client. Then have a really nice plugin system so people can create their own plugins really easily to customize it or add functionality as they like.

Of course non-geeks won't really understand installing plugins however others could create services (whitelabel versions) that have a bunch of plugins pre- installed so they work well out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> IMO the core problem is that we're trying to use asynchronous service with poorly linked messages (email) for conversation between people which is synchronous, strongly linked and subject-oriented by nature.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't see how a todo list can match the informational nature of an email. For example I've subscribed to some mailing list like misc from OpenBSD, how can it fit in the system you are describing ?

</comment><comment><USER23> Relevant? → [http://web.archive.org/web/20110607224446/http://www.prescod...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110607224446/http://www.prescod.net/rest/restmail/)

Also interesting:

[http://code.google.com/p/rmep/source/browse/wiki/References....](http://code.google.com/p/rmep/source/browse/wiki/References.wiki?spec=svn34&r=34)

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dusseault-httpmail-00>

<http://www.mailgun.com/>

</comment><comment><USER31> This is ridiculous - its like saying replace the car, because gas is too expensive, so we're not doing it right. Its simple - people use email incorrectly - they use it for task management (as you state). So maybe task management tools (the one billion of them) aren't doing it right. If you use email properly - solely as a ways of communication. Than it does it's job correctly.

</comment><comment><USER32> The SMTP protocol is not going anywhere. Deal with it.

It's really straightforward to fix your griefs with e-mail: Write a MUA.

If it provides good value over normal e-mail clients _and_ handles normal e-mail well then it will quickly become popular. If it's not backwards compatible then it's just yet another "todo-app" and will very likely not take off.

tldr; There is no such thing as "replace e-mail".

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't shake the thought that if I could only forward an email to my trello boards, (a la Evernote) my problems would be solved.

<comment><USER34> This is something you can use Zapier for: <https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/trello>

also Evernote: <https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/evernote>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think google wave was really fucking close; if it had been backwards compatible (to a degree) it would have been a headshot.

<comment><USER36> There were some email interop tools built on top of it, including an email notification system from Google. I think it was an excellent solution to several problems, but the default client was just too heavy and slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I want something along these lines: <http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html>

</comment><comment><USER38> Being able to mark an email in a to-do system as "Waiting for reply" with an expiration date would be useful. This way, such to-do system could alert you when an email has not been answered to and prompt the next action.

Emails could be cross-linkable and have tags (among the tags, there could be the ID of the project they belong to).

</comment><comment><USER39> Email is the worst solution to the problem of general communication except for all the others.

In fact I think that quote goes a long way to explaining why email is so wonderfully useful while also being annoying. Because it is so wonderfully free and open. That's also it's downside

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't really get the TODO list thing (even though I think PG mentioned it himself). Is that because people tend to mail their TODOs to themselves? Or because most email translates to TODOs?

I know that I certainly don't _want_ a system that allows people to push TODOs at me.

<comment><USER7> Every email is a todo. Period. Full stop.

This is true regardless of your work or workflow. Consider that at the very least most emails tend to be an implicit request for a reply. In most cases that reply requires at the very least remembering some bit of information (in the best case scenario something that is trivially easy to recall). And even more fundamental than that, each email message is an implicit command to digest the information contained in it. But beyond that, it's quite typical for work to be tracked or requested through email, for some jobs it's by far the normal way that the vast majority of work is organized.

<comment><USER40> Most emails are spam, actually. Some legitimate, but the majority doesn't warrant a reply (like all the "marvel at the new features of our startup" mails). Of course the mix varies from person to person. And they are TODOs in the sense that you feel like you should delete them, or archive them, or whatnot.

I think it would be better to make most of them go away automatically, though. Perhaps things like "automatically save attachments from x into project folder z" would help (already doable? I don't use filters much).

Maybe it really would be better to make emails a universal transport layer and integrate it better with other stuff. People send you a TODO -> goes into TODO list. People send you an image -> goes into photo library. And so on... Of course I always hated the idea of Outlook of allowing other people to mess with my calendar, so I don't know...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> email doesn't need any replacement. it's a fantastic messaging protocol. It's used by millions and every system supports it. Maybe in the far future it will disappear as other messaging protocol will rise, but we still use phones and snail mail, and there are very old. What need to be replaces is the bridge between email and todo protocol. The task management tools, even now, are not solving the problem of intelligent task management and creating more work than reducing it. You have to file, categorize, make priorities, or even type the tasks yourself. That's the reason people don't use them and use email instead as a task management tool - which it doesn't support.

</comment><comment><USER42> Asana is working towards this (<http://www.asana.com>), though it's currently a mostly closed system, not an open protocol.

</comment><comment><USER43> Umm make it more similar to current postal system?

</comment><comment><USER44> Let me share my thoughts as we have been working on these ideas lately. To see our work please visit <http://bubbleideas.com>

At the outset, let me be straight and upfront to say that it is nearly impossible to kill or replace emails. The idea may be frighteningly ambitious, but from where things seem to be one cannot possibly replace email by creating yet another (so what if better) - mail service.

Current level of email, its provisions, functionality, simplicity and pervasiveness are enough to keep the user coming back in and keep him/her satisfied too. Probably the thinking of having an evolved protocol, that provides for more control on who can/cannot write is also not ambitious enough. At least not so much as the idea itself is.

What I mean to say is that the approach to execute a disruption of this level one has to think on a bit on radical lines. Answering 15 regular questions on a HN post may help but not let you get away from reality. Think deeper, perhaps.

Fifteen years ago emails nearly killed physical letters (yes they do exist even today) with its convenience, simplicity and for being completely free. At that time the need to be able to write to anyone with something as simple as a form hit at the bottom of one's hierarchy of needs.

Now this is not the case. The need to move to something higher or better is not at the bottom of my need-pyramid. I believe this is true for many users out there. One cannot just service, iterate and evolve from the existing to be able to disrupt/replace. That's what my thoughts are.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think of email as a schema-less, dynamically-typed system for communication. Anyone can send an email to anyone, and there's only one "type" for email (a long string of blah)... but most emails are sent to too many people, and often go unread. IT works, but it's a huge mess and it's unreliable. Also, the time behavior of email isn't right for all purposes. Some emails are generally useful 2 years later (and if you think the content is likely to be useful in 2 years, you probably shouldn't use email). The vast majority are not. Inbox search solves the time problem, but it feels "bolted on". Inbox search isn't an intrinsic fix but a late patch; it's using full-text search (which usually works, but not always, because you might not remember any key phrases) because there's no better solution right now.

So one thought is to consider something analogous to static typing, where emails have types (we'd need a different word, because it's not exactly the same concept) and these message types restrict (i.e. you might create a type T for emails sent by user U under 500 characters). Unfortunately, I can't see a way to design a system like this without making it massively complicated. The problem here is that people are _already_ overloaded with email and adding any piece of additional complexity is going to piss a lot of people off. Google added typed edges with Circles in Google+-- clearly a good feature-- but they took a lot of flak for G+ being "too complicated" for "mere mortals" to understand because of Circles. When people are already fatigued and overloaded and starting to get annoyed with the "tragedy of the commons" (all of this being with email, and with social networks) even small bits of additional complexity turn people off.

I think the final answer is: let email be. The problem isn't email itself. There's a place for schemaless, dynamically-typed communication. It (or some form of it) will always be useful and some part of how we communicate. The problem with email is that people use it for too many things and in too many sloppy ways, so the solution might be to identify communication patterns (for example, persistent storage of knowledge) where email is not the best solution and focus on those.

For some ideas, consider one problem with forums and social networks in general: time behavior. Lots of content is generated, but quickly becomes useless. How often do you read a 5-month-old thread on a message board or social network? Occasionally, but not often. This imposes siloization by time, so the value of the content can never grow faster than linearly as a function of the amount of it. A lot of interesting discussions just won't happen if they can't occur asynchronously. They won't get the critical mass.

One forum that I think deserves a lot of props for solving the time problem is Quora. Quora has managed to structure itself in such a way that content generated 12 months ago is still extremely valuable. It doesn't fall into obscurity or become useless because it's "old", and it's pretty common that a 6-month-old answer will get a new comment actually worth reading. Quora is also great in terms of how it handles new threads. On a typical message board, an OP that doesn't get immediate response is just a failed thread. On Quora, it's an open question. A good way to set it up, because not every OP that doesn't get immediate attention deserves to die.</comment>


Releasing Windows 8 - August 1, 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/08/01/releasing-windows-8-august-1-2012.aspx

<comment><USER2> I think the announcement is well-worded. I hold the writers and editors of this press release in high regard.

The message however, is typical of the hyperbole, ultra-positive marketspeak/corporatespeak that one expects for such things.

Here is my list of short phrases and words that I think they clearly want to hammer home:

important milestone; proud; exciting; new; incredibly collaborative; new PC experience; new world of scenarios; preserving an [...] investment; breadth of participation; most widely and deeply used; 16 million PCs actively participated; openness; unique perspective; deeply committed; transparency; promised refinements; meeting the needs; reached our [...] milestone; real world experiences; improve support; "fast and fluid"; thousands of new features; exciting innovations; rapidly expand; opportunity for developers; deliver innovative (and profitable) apps; unique;

I'm sure I missed a few hum-dingers that would be in your summary list.

With a few replacements of numeric values, dates and product-specific wording, this press release would be usable by many software development and software- related businesses.

<comment><USER3> It's a press release, of course it's rendered in market-speak. At least the writer got to the point quickly and presented the meat of the announcement in the first paragraph, instead of burying it in the middle of a wall of text as he could have done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What on earth is the purpose of the "August 1, 2012" date in the title, other than to be confusing?

EDIT: And I mean the title of the blog post itself. I understand that the link here is just echoing the post's title.

<comment><USER5> It's the RTM date; the code is "off to the presses". In this day and age of continuous updates and Go Live licenses, RTM doesn't mean much anymore for the end-user. So, yes, I guess you could say that it's confusing, but it's a big milestone for the teams involved.

<comment><USER6> What is more relevant to the hackers here is that the marketplace is accepting apps now.

[http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-store-in-windows-8-rtm- no...](http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-store-in-windows-8-rtm-now-open-for- paid-app-submissions)

<comment><USER7> It doesn't look like individual developers can sign up yet, I am getting this error "You need to register as a company account, or have a registration code, to continue. Learn more"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone have the text? All I see is: Server Error in '/' Application. And a .NET error page.

<comment><USER9> Body:

Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 8 project. The Windows 8 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we started releasing Windows 8 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners. This means our next milestone will be the availability of exciting new models of PCs loaded with Windows 8 and online availability of Windows 8 on October 26, 2012.

Back when we first demonstrated Windows 8 in May 2011, we described it as "reimagining Windows, from the chipset to the experience," and that is what Windows 8 (and Windows RT) represents for both Microsoft and partners. The collective work: from the silicon, to the user experience, to new apps, has been an incredibly collaborative effort. Together we are bringing to customers a new PC experience that readies Windows PCs for a new world of scenarios and experiences, while also preserving an industry-wide 25-year investment in Windows software.

We continue to be sincerely humbled by the breadth of participation in our pre-release testing. The previews of Windows 8 (Developer, Consumer, Release) have been the most widely and deeply used test releases of any product we have ever done. Over 16 million PCs actively participated in these programs, including approximately 7 million on the Release Preview that started 8 weeks ago. The depth and breadth of testing validate the readiness of Windows 8 for the market.

The openness of the previews presents a unique perspective on product development, and we're deeply committed to the transparency of the preview process. No product used by so many people in so many different ways is developed "out in the open" like Windows 8 has been. This blog, the forums, and the preview releases form an important part of the development process. Major changes have been made at each milestone and as we promised, the final release (build 9200, for those tracking) contains many promised refinements. We are humbled by the responsibility of meeting the needs of such a diverse set of customers and enthused by the deep level of participation in the pre- release process.

While we have reached our RTM milestone, no software project is ever really "done." We will continue to monitor and act on your real world experiences with Windows 8—we've used the preview process to test out our servicing and we have every intent of doing a great job on this next important phase of the product. Hardware partners will continue to provide new devices and improve support for existing devices. PC makers no doubt have quite a bit in store for all of us as they begin to show off PCs specifically designed for Windows 8.

With improvements in fundamentals, enhanced storage and connectivity, newly architected subsystems, the "fast and fluid" user experience, and the WinRT platform (to name a few), Windows 8 has literally thousands of new features. We did a record number of blogs posts (and videos) and did not even come close to covering the full breadth of Windows 8. There's much left to learn about and discover in the product.

Some of the most exciting innovations with Windows 8 are yet to come—the innovations from developers building apps on the new WinRT platform. Today, the Store is open for business and we'll rapidly expand to over 200 markets around the world. The opportunity for developers around the world to deliver innovative (and profitable) apps is unique with Windows 8. We're excited to see the work developers will be bringing to Windows 8. We'll also have a chance to talk more about the Windows 8 platform at the next BUILD conference recently announced.

We know there are lots of questions about how to get Windows 8 and when, and of course more questions to come about exploring and using the full set of thousands of Windows 8 features. Our Windows Team Blog today has posted a lot of new information and gathered up some important details that we hope will answer your questions. Please check our blog and stay in touch on the in- market developments of Windows 8 there.

On behalf of the Windows 8 engineering team, we want to thank you very much for your contributions throughout development and your contributions yet to come to Windows 8. THANK YOU!

Next stop, October 26, 2012 and General Availability!

\--The Windows 8 team

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this build on Technet yet?

</comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't release today it releases on October 26, 2012.

</comment><comment><USER12> You would think there would be some comments on that blog article page for such an important announcement, but there are zero comments. I wonder why.</comment>


An hour of exercise per day needed to avoid weight gain - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8586767.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, what it actually says is "the kind of people who do lots of exercise are less likely to gain weight", which isn't the same thing.

Personally, I can avoid weight gain if I just avoid sugar/heavily refined carbs and watch my intake.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly right. People whose fat metabolism is in working order tend to have more energy, simply because their fat cells aren't soaking up the glucose in their bloodstream and are able to release free fatty acids to power their muscles on demand.

There's good evidence that while the equation:

        energy consumed - energy expended = energy stored (as fat)

is true, tinkering with the left hand side is likely to leave you hungry, lethargic, or both.

If you can keep your insulin levels in check, you can manipulate the right hand side in your favor, allowing you to eat less, have more energy, or both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about all of you...but for me even 1 hour of exercise a day is a high time commitment, especially when you have to look at the overhead (drive to gym, get clothes, change clothes, drive back)...it can easily turn into 2 hours a day

<comment><USER4> I find the whole 'drive to the gym' concept kind of funny from a cynical sense.

These folks are going to drive to the gym and then run on a treadmill facing a brick wall?

<comment><USER5> My wife's previous gym was a 20 minute drive on the freeway, and her neighborhood wasn't that safe. My neighborhood is fairly safe, but I still wouldn't want to jog to the gym at 10PM. 10PM is a great time for me, the crowds are much smaller than peak hours.

Secondly, my routine emphasizes weight training over aerobics, and I prefer to retain my energy for the weights and jog afterwards. Jogging to the gym does not fit my exercise routine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or just cut down on your calorie intake.... It's not rocket science.

<comment><USER7> I would go so far as to say that exercise is a red herring if your goal is simply to decrease your mass. I would also go so far as to say that simply decreasing your mass isn't a great goal to have.

<comment><USER6> True, there's plenty of skinny drug-addicts out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why this article doesn't mention how much these women were eating. From my understanding, the number of calories eaten is just as large of a factor in weight regulation (if not more) as exercise.

<comment><USER9> The main thing is if calories eaten == calories burned, then you should maintain a stable weight. Exercise helps in this equation because it raises your metabolism (as well as other benefits), which in turn burns more calories.

<comment><USER10> There is an additional subtlety that may interest hackers. It is actually if calories metabolized by the body == calories burned. Calories are mostly fungible, but they are processed differently (by the liver or by the cells themselves, for instance) and this has drastic effects on metabolic health. For instance, fructose is processed by the liver and does not trigger the satiety hormones as easily as glucose. So, while the total amount of energy available is the same for calorically similar amounts of fructose and glucose, the impact on fat storage and hunger is different.

For more about the biochemistry of metabolism see: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Misleading headline. Weight gain depends on how much calories you take and how much is burned. This two cannot be separated as suggested.

And the research was merely statistical, not biological: the average middle aged woman needs at least an hour a day to avoid weight gain. It might not hold for different age and gender groups, so unless you are an average middle aged woman, such a conclusion holds little weight with you.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure if this can be truly generalized to the whole population, since this study was conducted on middle-aged women.

What the article (and perhaps the study) does not mention is the dietary habits of the women over the 13 year span. Exercise alone does not define your health, diet is very important, too.

<comment><USER12> I'm absolutely positive that this can not be generalized to the whole population. Furthermore, I am completely sure that this report has absolutely nothing to do with HN's primary, secondary nor tertiary audience. The submitter should be absolutely ashamed at himself for posting something that should not come within miles of a site like this. It is not even fit for Reddit.

<comment><USER12> Really? There are that many 54 year old overweight women who read HN?

My apologies.</comment></comment></comment>


Feedly is down? - <AUTHOR> Is feedly.com down for anyone else?  Both the website and the app are down for me. <comment><AUTHOR> And it's back up for me.</comment>


One of the mysteries of the universe is that it speaks the language of mathematics in 248 dimensions - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10170958 <comment><USER2> "His work, which has been posted on the internet, has not yet been accepted for publication in any journal"

It should raise alarm bells when newspapers and magazines are discussing science before it's been through peer review. I'll wait until a journal picks this up before I get excited!</comment>