Rate my startup: Qwerly, a whois for Twitter - <AUTHOR>

I'd love to know what you guys think: http://qwerly.com. Sample result page: http://qwerly.com/twitter/parislemon
Positioning is as a people search for the social web. Queries can currently be done for a Twitter username. That results in a page with other social networking links for that person. Long term vision is to build an open "DNS for people".
I'm wondering where we should take it next. Open to all suggestions and ideas.
P.S. API documentation is here: http://qwerly.com/about_us/api <comment><USER2> I am wondering what this does beyond twitter.com/username?

<comment><AUTHOR> See e.g. <http://qwerly.com/twitter/parislemon>, <http://qwerly.com/twitter/scobleizer>, <http://qwerly.com/twitter/paulg></comment></comment>


Open Source and Free Trading API with Python, Forget Robinhood - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/automation-generation/quick-review-of-setting-up-alpaca-api-with-python-dd31f3ac045f <comment><USER2> So this might be a great api and I'm excited there is competition in the api trading market place. But it not a great api unless it has a paper trading account. That's why I'm stuck with IB.

<comment><USER3> Ah yes, well. It does indeed have free paper trading.

<comment><USER2> My bad. [https://docs.alpaca.markets/broker- functions/papertrading/](https://docs.alpaca.markets/broker- functions/papertrading/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...and I'm bankrupt.</comment>


Apple II Game Server - <AUTHOR> http://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/ <comment><USER2> This is fantastic! I'll have to get my 37-year old Apple ][+ out of the garage and give it a try.</comment>


Show HN: Rate your technical interviews - <AUTHOR> https://ratemyinterviews.wufoo.com/forms/rate-my-interviews/

<comment><AUTHOR> Glassdoor but just for engineers and probably just the Valley.</comment>


Ask HN: Anybody knows a sentiment analysis API I can use in my web application? - <AUTHOR>

I have built a web application where people write their pain points about specific products/ brands and services.
I want some sentiment analysis being done on the collected data to derive some important matrices.
Example for a post A
I want to know if
it is positive about the product neutral - merely suggestive negative overly negative super pissed off
Are there any ready-made tools available for this ? It need not be real time. <comment><USER2> I'd just use Weka to train a classifier based on a batch of manually-sorted entries. Check Naive Bayes and K-means to start. The result will be more specific to your content and you'll be more able to refine it later to improve and optimize the error rates.

Sentiment is fiddly, hard to grasp. Trying for fine gradations is also the road to lots of errors. I would stick to positive, negative, neither.

While you're at it, there has been some work done with distinguishing valid vs. fake reviews.

<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1612762.1612776>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.alchemyapi.com> has worked pretty well for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> you can look out for Beevolve products <http://www.beevolve.com/>. its preety good and cheap :)

</comment><comment><USER5> EffectCheck

</comment><comment><USER6> May be you can see <http://code.google.com/p/voxpoptc/> it is based on NLTK.</comment>


Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny's effectiveness - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-voicespam-analyzing-lennys-effectiveness/ <comment><USER2> Lenny is the most effective time waster for telemarketers I've ever heard. He's truly awesome.

I have seen the reverse problem, where the spammer who called is trying to get off the phone. Many years ago, I had a job as a manager in an outbound telemarketing center. We had a policy that we could not hang up once the call started -- the person we called had to hang up. Supervisors took escalated calls where someone whose dinner we had interrupted was upset that we called. Very rarely, those calls would then be escalated to me.

One time a lawyer in Philadelphia (not even kidding) refused to hang up, and instead continually berated the rep on the phone with cursing. He refused to hang up. The supervisor couldn't calm him down, and had repeated all the stock responses we had apologizing for upsetting them and promising not to call them back. He just kept cursing and said he was going to stay on the phone all night since we couldn't hang up. After about ten minutes of this, the call was escalated to me.

I went through the same items with him when he paused to take a breath. He chuckled and said he was going to keep me on the phone all night. I told him that was fine, since I was paid hourly and had gone into overtime five minutes earlier. (It was five after the hour.) I said, I'm now making $22.50 an hour listening to you. I'm happy to stay on all night. How much are you getting paid? That made him hang up.

These days, though, most call centers have a policy where the rep on the phone can hang up if the customer continues to curse after being asked to stop. Requiring the rep to stay on the phone beyond that can get an employer in trouble for creating a hostile work environment.

<comment><USER3> heh, I might have just left the phone going, that 22.50 an hour was coming from somehwere...

<comment><USER4> Yes, telling me the call was costing them at least 22.50 an hour would incentivise me to stay on the call for as long as possible.

<comment><USER2> For some reason, that made all his rage evaporate. And I really wanted to go home. That kind of work is emotionally exhausting.

<comment><USER5> _That kind of work is emotionally exhausting._

As well it should be.

<comment><USER2> I completely agree. Much as ex-smokers despise smoking more than those who have never smoked, I despise marketing and advertising.

I don't want to know about your new product or what it can do for me. I've been living quite well without it so far, thank you, and now please FO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would pay $0.01 a minute to forward calls to something like this. (Up to $1/call or something)

I'm invisioning a marketplace of chatbots trying to pass the turing test (ideally armed with cancelled credit card numbers, fake postal addresses and bogus identities -- and willing to do absolutely anything to waste the callers time).

The beauty of it is that normal spam calls have assymetric economics in favor of the spammer.

A team of chatbots turns the economics around.

<comment><USER7> $2/month or $6/year.

[http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/](http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/)

You can pick a specific chatbot: [http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/pick-a- robot](http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/pick-a-robot)

<comment><USER8> I wish there was a service like this in Australia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see this akin to adblockers that generates fake clicks. The sentiment here is if we can waste their time (and money) at scale, it's all for the better.

But with fake clicks, I often read on HN that it is the wrong way to respond. Can someone explain the difference?

<comment><USER10> I don't have an opinion on this technique with ads vs. calls, but ads are transactional. You get some piece of content or an app in exchange for your attention, usually initiated by the user, and with low friction to close the tab or uninstall the app. With calls, the moment it rings you are interrupted, the other party reached out to you, and you get absolutely nothing in return for your wasted time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favorite Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

<comment><USER12> The guy whos runs that bot is super weird about sharing his recordings/code. I'd love to implement this on my PBX but he won't share to "prevent abuse" (unclear what abuse he's afraid of). Idk, it sketched me out.

<comment><USER13> The author explains why very nicely:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/5lcfwq/lennys_his...](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/5lcfwq/lennys_history_why_he_isnt_creative_commons/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to implement Lenny yourself with FreePBX and copies of the Lenny audio files: [https://www.crosstalksolutions.com/howto-pwn- telemarketers-w...](https://www.crosstalksolutions.com/howto-pwn- telemarketers-with-lenny/)

</comment><comment><USER14> While these conversations are undeniably hilarious to listen to, it's a little concerning to me that by the end of the conversation the only explanation you could really come to here is that he has dementia. If this countermeasure becomes widespread, I'd be concerned about unintended consequences for actual humans with age-related cognitive decline.

For example, imagine an older person who easily loses track of the conversation picking up the phone to talk to a telemarketer. The telemarketer mistakes this person for a bot, and yells at them in frustration.

This might be mitigated by adding some actual AI, so that the bot can convincingly imitate a person without mental health problems.

<comment><USER15> The telemarketer assuming they are talking to a bot is possibly a better outcome for the older person than the telemarketer taking advantage of their mental state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, it quite helped me. At least I don't need to talk to them. However, some of them still insist on calling me. I think legal approach is the best way for us to make them stop, like what I read at [http://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins- massive-229500-robo...](http://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins- massive-229500-robocall-lawsuit-against-time-warner-cable/) about a well-known company which has been sued by a consumer because of telemarketing calls/robocalls.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lenny's author wrote a lovely description of how he designed Lenny (skip to "If you're still reading, you might be interested in Lenny's background"; a few paragraphs after explaining why he doesn't want to open source the voice recordings):

[https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/5lcfwq/lennys_his...](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/5lcfwq/lennys_history_why_he_isnt_creative_commons/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I have grown very fond of Jolly Rodger Telcom ([http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/](http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/)). I will have to check Lenny out.

<comment><USER18> Listing to the demos they aren't really boots but rather just pre-recorded sound bytes. Lenny actually changes it's response depending on what the caller does. Pauses, keywords, etc.

<comment><USER19> > Lenny actually changes it's response depending on what the caller does. > Pauses, keywords, etc.

It's actually a sequence of recordings played in the same order every time in a loop from the 5th. Telemarketers usually realize it a few recordings into the second loop.

Now imagine combining machine learning with conversation analysis to create the ultimate Lenny.

<comment><USER20> You should listen to some on youtube, they are not simple loops

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarke...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarketer)

one of them keeps trying for over 50 minutes

<comment><USER21> They are loops. I just listened to the 50 minute one, and 35 minutes in he's saying the same phrases he's already said near the beginning. "3rd eldest daughter..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> RoboKiller.com has an app that intercepts robocalls and uses bots to waste the callers time. It feels good to get payback on those bastards.</comment>


Cryptographic File Systems Performance: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://www.filesystems.org/docs/nc-perf/index.html <comment><USER2> This is pretty dated -- the document is 14 years old, at this point. While it was an accurate study of its time, many of the technologies referenced have been replaced --- and some were found to be defective.

<comment><USER3> Yep. There are other things that significantly affect perf in addition to newer technology (like XTS): for most users, the block device is an SSD, and for most users, your CPU knows how to do AES quickly. Both have significant improvements to performance, up to the point where turning on FileVault 2 for a Mac is a no-brainer now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Needs a [2003] tag. Great for its time, but everything from the systems they evaluate to the benchmarks they use to the hardware they ran on makes this almost inapplicable today. It would be fantastic to see an updated version.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please read up on ZFS. Once your inner computer scientist has overcome the "blatant layering violation", you will understand how they minimise the encryption cpu effort with much caching, and how they leverage transaction groups to reduce latency impact. The corruption issue is being addressed by very large blocks each with their own checksum (outside the crypto container), scheduled onto independent devices and a scrubber to regularly re-validate the integrity. Yes, yes, this was published a bit after the linked article.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've long refrained from encrypting my file systems because of a worry that a tiny bit of file system corruption (like during a power outage, or from stray cosmic rays) could cause the entire file system to become un-decryptable and thereby losing all my data. Is this a valid concern or can are encrypted file systems as resilient as unencrypted file system to such limited, local corruption?

<comment><USER3> Most modern disk encryption mechanisms have settled on XTS (with AES). That includes dm-crypt, FileVault2, BitLocker... XTS is effectively a way to build a really wide block cipher: typically 512 (== 1 classic sector) to 4096 bits (== 1 modern sector) instead of the usual 128 bits (for AES). (Yes, yes. Technically a tweakable block cipher, four points for Gryffindor &c.)

With these systems, file system corruption is not a significantly different issue than it is with other systems. It is not the case that a filesystem is much more likely to become entirely or largely inaccessible than it would be if it had not been encrypted, unless if course if you lose the key!

I'd be in remiss if I didn't mention that while XTS is the standard, it fixes a very specific kind of problem, and you probably still want something on top with a more traditional form of encryption for specific sensitive files. To be clear, the advise is not "don't use FileVault 2"! It's: "do not only use FV2". My work machine, for example, is FV2, but all important credentials are GPG'd using a smart card that's normally not attached to the machine.

<comment><USER7> >typically 512 (== 1 classic sector) to 4096 bits

it's bytes

<comment><USER3> Oops! You are of course correct :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Pixel Buds are wireless earbuds that translate conversations in real-time - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-pixel-buds-are-wireless-earbuds-that-translate-conversations-in-real-time/ <comment><USER2> If you're a technologist looking for ways to save the world, enabling communication between people of different countries is about as important a task as you can find. The web was a good first step, but language is still a barrier. Being unable to communicate with someone dehumanizes them. Automatic translation isn't going to automatically bring about world peace (and it isn't going to automatically enable us to transcend cultural barriers), but it's an enormously important next step.

I criticize Google and Microsoft a lot, and I will continue to do so when necessary, but I applaud their efforts toward this goal, especially since there's so little financial incentive to do so. Even if this product is as limited in practice as I suspect, it's heartening to see such crucial technology mature.

<comment><USER3> People are quite able to communicate, willing is another issue.

Name one current conflict in which language and the inability to communicate is a barrier.

While the sentiment is nice and fluffy it's also without any substance.

This is a toy for tourists and expats not a tool for world peace.

<comment><USER4> If Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other they won't sit idly by while the fear-mongers use the other to justify terrorism/enforced liberty importation. At least in theory.

<comment> brown9-2 This would seem easily disproven by any country that has sectarian conflicts where both sides speak the same language. Or for instance, racial division in America.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the argument here is. That the US would be better off if Republicans and Democrats spoke mutually unintelligible languages? By what logic does it make sense to say "group A and group B are at odds; group A and group B speak the same language; therefore we disprove that speaking the same language will ever resolve anything"?

<comment><USER5> The argument is that

> _If Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other they won 't sit > idly by while the fear-mongers use the other to justify terrorism/enforced > liberty importation_

is easily disproven by the fact that this still happens all the time among people who speak the same language. Speaking a different language doesn't help communication obviously, but speaking the same language doesn't magically remove prejudice and hatred.

<comment><USER6> Saying that example disproves the grandparent is being pedantic.

What they were saying was that "if Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other, _[more often]_ they won't sit idly by while the fear-mongers [...]"

The counter-example of single-language conflict ignores the larger forest of language being a key leveller of cultural differences (i.e. necessary but not sufficient), as well as gp's obviously statistical rather than absolute example.

It's pretty clear he or she wasn't saying that 'as long as two people speak the same language, there will _never_ be conflict between them.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "translate conversations in real-time" part seems to have nothing to do with the Google Pixel Buds - it's already live in the Google Translate app.

In fact, you can try it right now. Open the Google Translate app on android, put on a pair of headphones with a mic, and tap the audio translation. As you hear spoken word in another language, it'll translate in realtime back to your non-google headphones.

*note - The trick is you need to press the button so it enables translation across both languages, as that seems to be the only way to keep translation on even after the first phrase.

</comment><comment><USER8> The translation stuff seems to all be handled by your phone, so what is it about these specifically that makes them required for this type of functionality? I'm having trouble seeing why this shouldn't work with any set of earbuds...

<comment><USER9> I think what completes the puzzle is that the Pixel 2 phone omits a headphone jack. Without a headphone jack wireless earbuds are required. Normally wireless earbuds would be superfluous, so they're introduced with a use case that highlights their advantages.

That's to say, I don't believe the Pixel Buds are necessary at all for real time translation. But I think they're presented with the real time translation to give people some positive and cool imagery to associate with the earbuds. It's advertising as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER8> So any old bluetooth headset will work, or have they artificially limited it to pixel buds?

<comment><USER10> Only Pixel Buds will work. You can read this comment chain by someone who worked on the project to learn more about why they made that decision: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404395)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else not see the irony in the pixel name. Google became big by tracking people online using tracking pixels, now their tracking people in the real world using physical pixels

<comment><USER12> When I think pixel, I don't think tracking pixel. So no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use Bose Soundsport Wireless headphones currently and the mic is terrible at filtering background noise. Given this is about the same price range it seems like a worthy competitor even as an iOS user.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this a Babel fish?

<comment><USER15> in my experiences as a user of and developer for speech recognition systems, I have concluded that the best any machine translation system is going to be able to do is translate really basic, imperative communications.

e.g, "Don't eat that!" "We are friendly, don't shoot" "There is food in the kitchen" "Where is the nearest bathroom?"...That will all work relatively well.

Punishing others with Vogon poetry in their own native tongue... never gonna happen.

<comment><USER16> Google's remarkably good at translating anything that reads like news. Because there are so many news articles written about the same topic in different languages, that data is great. Google is not so good at translating things like love letters, because it's hard to get someone to write one in two languages and publish both.

<comment><USER15> certainly the relative paucity of some subject matter to train on is a factor.

The other factor is that complex use of natural languages depend on and require ambiguity and layered meaning and hosts of other factors that are really hard to handle.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure love letters are more complex than the news. It often turns out we're not as complex as we think. Or that doing simple calculations on very large amounts of data captures all those nuances. That was the result described in "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data".

<comment><USER15> there's (far) more information in-band in a snippet of language than there is in the "plain" "meaning" of that snippet. All of it's relevant for translation, and none of that is easily tractable.

A fairly trivial example is a pun. Translating highly idiomatic things of this nature turns out to be extraordinarily hard, and just throwing more data at a DNN is not going to get you too far down that road.

<comment><USER16> That depends on how often that pun appears in the corpus. If you observe the translation enough times, it'll be easy for the computer.

<comment><USER15> this misses the point. There do exist untranslatable idioms, and puns are an easy example. They rely on language-specific features like rhymes (or sight- rhyme) or homophones that are not preserved across corpora.

You can absolutely make a "direct" word-for-word translation of a pun in english to, say, russian. It's just not a pun any more when you're done. Often there are no "pun equivalents" with totally different words, because usually they hinge on culturally specific references that also don't translate well.

Basically none of this matters when what you're interested in is subway directions or ordering food or whatever, but it becomes intractable really fast whenever you're interested in talking about something more meaningful.

<comment><USER16> Au contraire, it doesn't matter if the pun is translated directly. Heck, Google might be doing whole paragraph translation for all we know. It's certainly not at the level of individual words.

Translate words and it's gibberish. Pairs of words and you start to get slang. Triples and you can distinguish word that are different parts of speech in different contexts. Quads and grammar is mostly in the bag. 5-grams and most puns are handled. 6-grams and you've taken care of all simple sentences. Etc.

No need for semantics when n-gram counts does just as well.

With enough people talking, we'll eventually have taught Google all the translations for all possible sentences. (joking, but only halfway)

<comment><USER15> >it doesn't matter if the pun is translated directly.

you can't do this anyway.

>No need for semantics when n-gram counts does just as well.

They don't. neither do bag of words, word2vec, or whatever.

Simple imperative language? Absolutely, this all works pretty well. Anything else? Ha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This would be invaluable for patient encounters. If anyone at Google is reading this -- is there any plan to make a set like this available with a BAA / HIPAA compliance?

</comment><comment><USER18> My in-laws don't speak English. I have to try this with them around the holidays.

<comment><USER19> I can understand using these for situations where you're only going to be around a language for a limited amount of time (business trip, vacation, etc). But presumably your in-laws are going to be around for a while, so what's the rationale for not learning to speak their language?

<comment><USER20> Not the OP but trying to learn another language so that you can speak it with people you see maybe twice a year seems a little silly. I would agree with you if OP lived with their inlaws or something, though.

<comment><USER21> I see my inlaws twice a year or less, still learning the language (or at least trying).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pixel Buds? What does a _pixel_ have to do with an audio device?

Google's branding department, as usual, leaves much to be desired.

<comment><USER23> Alphabet's Google Chrome Pixel Buds

<comment><USER24> Sounds like that old Microsoft iPod parody, the Microsoft iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition.

<comment><USER23> Ahh Classic, thanks for that, made me choke on my snack :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Its cool that you can use the earbud case to recharge your phone (or vice versa). However, as a lefty I think it'd be annoying to be forced to use my right hand whenever I want to control my headphones.

</comment><comment><USER26> * if you have a smartphone connected and a decent connection to the internet to use google translate.

<comment><USER27> Did you expect the earbuds to have a wireless connection and processor inside of them? (and if so, wouldn't you have complained about privacy issues anyways?)

<comment><USER28> It seems we need better words. They do have a wireless connection and processor inside of them.

The problem is that the processor probably isn't powerful enough and the wireless won't connect to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Pardon if this was asked but it's not clear to me, since they are Bluetooth, wouldn't they work with any device that also runs Google Translate?

<comment><USER29> I have an answer... of course they're work but the language detection isn't automatic. You have to run the app first but if you have a Pixel 2 phone, it will run the app for you when it detects a different language. Or so the ad reads...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have Google Assistant on my OnePlus 3. Would these work with it the same as with the Pixel 2? Would these work with a Pixel 1 the same way?

<comment><USER31> It _seems_ these only work in this fashion with Pixel devices.

I understand they're trying to create an air of exclusivity but it really just comes off kind of greedy and dickish when in reality, _any_ earbuds with a microphone should be capable of doing the same thing through Google Translate.

<comment><USER32> As a big Apple fan, I have no idea why Google should take flack for making this an exclusive (other than their previous "we're more open and open==good" hypocrisy).

Exclusivity means they have a limited hardware profile and control the quality out of the gate. Rolling it for use on all e.g. Android6 devices is sure to be a support nightmare.

It also may expand to other (Android|iOS) devices in future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I may have poor reading comprehension but per [https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7544332?hl...](https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7544332?hl=en&ref_topic=7544331)

The "killer feature" of realtime-ish translation only works with the Pixel phones.

 _To use as a headset, you need a Bluetooth® enabled companion device running:_

Android 5.0 or higher iOS 10.0 or higher

 _To use with Google Assistant you need:_

An Assistant enabled Android device Android 6.0 or higher A Google Account A data connection

 _To use with Google Translate you need:_

Pixel or Pixel 2 The Google Translate app (A list of supported languages can be found here.)

</comment><comment><USER34> It seems like we're getting to the level that people talked about in Science Fiction not that long ago. Even when Google was started in 1998, I'm not sure that people would believe you if you said that in 20 years Google would be putting out a product that automatically translates spoken conversations in realtime.

Sure the technology isn't perfect, but it actually works surprisingly well (at least the translation part). I have been learning Mandarin Chinese recently, and the translations provided by Google Translate are pretty darn good (if not exact, they are close enough to understand).

<comment><USER12> You mean the level where we can contact almost anyone in the world at anytime? We have full access to the worlds knowledge at anytime? On a device that fits into your pocket?

We have been hitting sci-fi goals for a while now, and it is awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Performing translation on the fly with technology is a HUGE win for humanity. I'm glad to see others besides Hear One taking this seriously for your average consumer.

It's unclear to me though; will these work with any phone?

</comment><comment><USER36> Very neat, but I wish it came in an over-the-ear version. I'd like to travel to Japan some day soon, I'd like to buy some rare vintage stuff, and I can't imagine handing an ear wax encrusted earbud to some elderly farmer.

As wireless ear buds these are somewhat interesting, as a translation device these are fascinating, why can't google sell more translation stuff?

<comment><USER37> As pointed by ss17n:

> The two way functionality works with only one pair of buds - the other user > holds the phone

So just keep the ear wax encrusted earbud for yourself. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It took me a long time to find, but here are the 40 languages supported: [https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7547959?hl...](https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7547959?hl=en&ref_topic=7544331)

</comment><comment><USER39> Really cool feature, curious how it works in practice. This kind of thing could sway me from iOS.

<comment><USER40> It's really not that remarkable, given what parts already exist. In pseudo command line:

       speech_to_text --language=english | google_translate --from=english --to=swedish | text_to_speech --language=swedish

All this product does is hook up a few pieces that Google had already developed.

<comment><USER41> It is remarkable because it happens in realtime.

<comment><USER40> Spoken language is actually very slow compared to what computers can handle. Google Translate would have no trouble keeping up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> You may be able to hear, but how does it help you speak back to them in a different language?

<comment><USER43> It's, IME, _very_ common for immigrants (especially those that immigrated in middle age) to be intelligible to native speakers when speaking the local language, but have more trouble understanding native speakers. So one-way translation may be useful.

(OTOH, it may also mess with code-switching.)

<comment><USER44> That's the reverse of the common case -- it's much easier to learn receptive language than expressive language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I remember a Kickstarter project which demoed a small device that you can keep in front of you and it will act as your very own real-time translator.

But this is super dope. Great job by the team at Google.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is just an early iteration for the future. Imagine the possibilities while travelling, attending conferences, eating at foreign restaurants.

Can't wait until this becomes commonplace.

<comment><USER31> I feel like this already should be commonplace. I used Google Translate back in 2014 on a trip to Japan. Really came in useful when a hotel didn't have my reservation. Since then they've added the conversational mode that effectively makes Translate work identically to what was demonstrated with these earbuds.

<comment><USER47> That's my beef with the feature. Since the earbuds already require a phone with Assistant, why wouldn't I use the conversation mode in the Translate app instead, which is superior in every way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Linux tech tip had a review of such device that they found on kickstarter a month ago. Is google adding something to the concept?

<comment><USER49> Link here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TayZG3aFubs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TayZG3aFubs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone have a link to the demo video?

<comment><USER51> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWb1ysqtc4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWb1ysqtc4o)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Sorry for the short comment but won't this be the next "Google glasses"?

</comment><comment><USER53> Are those conversations also stored on Google's servers? I know I _shouldn 't_ even have to ask this question, but who knows these days with Google.

<comment><USER54> Does it matter? They pass through Google's servers; results of analyzing them are stored on Google's servers; the full audio is probably stored on the NSA's servers; if Google says they don't store the full text, does that meaningfully alter the level of privacy you can expect?

<comment><USER55> >Does it matter?

In states that require two-party consent in their wiretapping statutes, it probably does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Translating conversations in real time is cool, but I need that feature how often? I switch my earbuds between my phone and laptop multiple times a day and it's a pain for every pair of bluetooth earbuds ever.

At least Apple tried to solve the problem. Google appears to be acting like Samsung here, adding gimmicks while releasing a lesser product.

<comment><USER57> I think this is more a problem of you not being the target audience.

I'd use it lots... and lots. I'm an immigrant, and though I do alright with the local language (Norwegian, and I'm a native English speaker), conversations are sometimes difficult. Neil Gaiman in Norwegian is a difficult read for me, but I*m past kids books. Some folks would talk to me more, since lots of people understand some english but aren't so comfortable speaking it. Google translate isn't perfect, but it continues to get better.

I can see retail employees having access to a pair at work. Restaurants. Travel. And so on.

<comment><USER56> I understand the appeal. I've lived places where I can't even order off a menu. My in-laws don't speak any English. If/when this works flawlessly it has the potential to change the world. It just amazes me that there's a company that can ship star trek level tech yet nobody can make wireless earbuds easy to use!</comment></comment></comment>


The After-Work Email Quandry - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/the-after-work-email-quandary/391313/?single_page=true <comment><USER3> I've been working remotely for the past fifteen years, five of the most recent being a full-time employee for a large company. Because of this I've grown very accustomed to sending emails that start with "Don't read this until morning". Eventually my coworkers learn that they're going to get late-night emails from me, and that I don't expect an immediate reply - nor should they. After all, email is meant to be asynchronous.

I personally recommend not checking work emails when not working. I certainly don't. It allows for a clear head when I sit at my desk ready to work. It also allows me to work at whatever hour I'm most productive without worrying whether my colleagues are going to jump out of bed to answer one of my off- hour work emails.

<comment><USER4> Outlook 'delay delivery' option (or whatever your email client supports) is an even better way. If you don't intend someone to read and act on it until morning, you can enforce that trivially!

<comment><USER5> I work from home sometimes, and its a baseline assumption that my emails are being read by my employer. Therefore, his email serves two purposes, 1. it communicates to any line manager that he is in fact working, and 2. Letting his Coworkers know that he's expecting them to work odd hours like himself.

<comment><USER6> 1) I've worked IT or IT/operations at a handful of small to large companies over the past 15 years where I've been directly in control of email and any "snooping" requests needed to go through me. I can count on one hand the number of times a manager has asked to read their employee's email. It's either been due to some HR related issue (harassment, misuse of resources, etc.) or because the employee was unreachable and some critical info had been sitting in their inbox. Employers snooping on email in a business environment is super rare.

2) My experience managing and being managed has led me to believe that most managers want their employees to work less, and most people believe that their manager wants them to work crazy hours. Frequently these people are the same people. eg. a middle manager wants his employees to go home and not work after hours, but they assume that their manager expects them to work from home between 7 and 11 PM every night. the GP of your comment even said this - <USER2> tells his employees to not work odd hours, but he does so anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just another symptom of dehumanizing work-life balance as promoted in the US companies. People feel like they need to get a leg up on each other in order to retain jobs and be promoted within jobs, so they make themselves available for work purposes when they are not being paid. Effectively, people compensate for the wriggling anxiety of an "unfulfilled" work obligation (an unanswered email received after hours) by giving away their labor for free (answering the email despite not being paid during that time period to do so). I think this is also why people may claim that they enjoy or don't mind answering work emails after work; the reduction of anxiety after tying up an email provides a tangible upward delta for emotion. I am of the opinion that 99% of after-work emails would be eliminated if employers had to pay for the hour-block during which employees are answering emails.

"But when asked what aspects have the most negative impact on work-life balance, work emails ranked rather low at 18 percent—topping the list were bad bosses, working after hours, and employers being inflexible about vacation."

Ah, the article is pretending that answering emails after hours isn't working after hours. They're the same thing, because thought and communication about details of work equals work. Bad bosses will tend to email after hours as well. Employers not respecting the majority of their employee's time (which is spent outside of work) is also closely related to being "inflexible" (not respecting the contract) about vacation. I think the article could have easily said that working conditions and labor rights in the US are extremely poor rather than pretend there is something magical about answering emails after hours.

</comment><comment><USER8> I know it isn't the core of the article, but complaining about an out of office message is missing the point of out of office messages. They do not really mean that I won't see your email for a week. But they do mean that if you just sent me an urgent problem, which normally would invoke an immediate response, you won't get that response. It lets people know that the normal communication patterns will differ, and leaves it up to them to decide whether they need to contact someone other than me.

<comment><USER9> That's what email is for already. An out-of-office message just reiterates the fact that email is not reliable and not time-sensitive anyway. There's no point. Every single email could have an out-of-office message, saying if you need urgent help to call/text/send something else.

<comment><USER10> Why does texting or calling have a different "urgency" level? Historical? (Email not historically being pushed to you wherever you might be). Cultural? In the microcosm of my work life they are on similar planes (especially given Google Voice), perhaps because they do the same thing: make my phone vibrate.

Maybe every text or call should autorespond saying if you need urgent help to come find me in person!

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure about texting, but calling is both synchronous and verbose. These are incredibly relevant criteria for determining whether something is immediate. While email _can_ be verbose, it seldom is, and if anything critical is going on when multiple people are involved, a phone call is still the best way to communicate real-time. If you disagree, see whether you do or do not adjust what you are saying on the phone vs what you would type. I know that I favor fast-to-type sentence structure when emailing, which isn't always the most illuminating/explanatory.

Right now, I think the pendulum has swung away from phone calls and too far toward emails. Maybe this is because minutes on phones used to cost money, maybe it is because conference call spam devalued the speed of communication too far. But I think a one on one call is hard to beat and can often accomplish what a whole thread of email can in a fraction of the time. Phone calls are good for communicating fast and figuring out what to do. Emails are good for having a written record and working asynchronously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Come 17:30 work ceases to exist to me and my normal life takes over. I work to live, not vice versa.

It saddens me this isn't the way for most.

<comment><USER13> I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, most companies think that they own you 24/7 as soon as they put you on salary. To them, you are getting paid for it.

A guy at my job got written up for not responding to emails on vacation, even though he had an autoresponder directing people to his boss, and told everyone ahead of time that he'd be dark for a few days. Management's excuse is that you are 24/7 unless it's otherwise defined in your employment contract, and they won't ever put set hours into an employment contract.

<comment><USER15> That's grounds for job-search in my book.

Vacation is a form of compensation and if a company can't respect that then they aren't worth working for.

<comment><USER16> It's grounds for a lawsuit, as I'm fairly sure it violates labor laws. Find the relevant statutes, print them out, highlight them, and watch HR squirm.

<comment><USER17> Probably not. It's been a few years since I took the in-house Employment Law class, but in the US I do not believe that you must be offered vacation time. I remember that you have to have to be able to take at least one morning and one afternoon break, but that's it as far as the law goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > there's at least some anecdotal evidence that workers are not always working > at work

This made me go look up whether hypobole (dramatic understatement) is a word yet.

I email after hours and on weekends/PTO voluntarily and I do rather enjoy it. I certainly enjoy it more than coming back to 1000 emails to deal with on my first day back.

<comment><USER19> >> there's at least some anecdotal evidence that workers are not always working at work

>This made me go look up whether hypobole (dramatic understatement) is a word yet.

Well... Is it?

No - [http://dictionary.reference.com/misspelling?term=hypobole&s=...](http://dictionary.reference.com/misspelling?term=hypobole&s=t)

Yes - [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Hypobole](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Hypobole)

No - [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/spellcheck/english/?q=hypo...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/spellcheck/english/?q=hypobole)

<comment><USER20> You're looking for "litotes" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In my opinion people do this because they don't know what else to fill their lives with, so they fill it with work.

<comment><USER22> There are a few sides to this.

One is, yes, a lack of imagination.

But too: it's _exceedingly_ difficult to find something that you can devote yourself to _given_ the demands of work. A 9-5, 40-hour week is bad enough, but the norm for many, particularly in the tech world, is 50-60 hours or more. Commute, sleep, and other activities tie up yet more time. If you're following guidelines to stay fit, that's other hour, or several hours per week (though time I consider well spent). Obligations to a partner, children, or elder parents can be extensive. If you're in a high cost-of-living city such as San Francisco, New York, or London, you've got very little space to call your own.

The time and space it takes to cultivate a _meaningful_ alternative activity is difficult to come by.

We're awash with messages from advertising and media which further pollute our heads and distract.

And the work many of us do is itself largely mental -- it requires prolonged exposure and deep understanding, and tends to follow you around. Inspiration is as likely to strike in the shower as at your desk.

Given all of this, you're far more likely to be primed to be in "work mode", to understand a quick query or email, and even quite possibly appreciate its distraction from whatever it is that surrounds you.

I'm not saying this is a good thing at all. I don't believe that for a second. Unless your work is _exceptionally_ gratifying and you're the very rare soul who's doing something _actually_ useful for the world, you're far better off with downtime and the ability to get away from it.

But it does explain much of the psychology behind why the behavior is so appealing, and why creating more compelling alternatives so difficult.

<comment><USER23> My away from computer hobby is cycling, I get to combine staying fit with something I love doing and occasionally ride with a local club which fits the social side as well (coffee,cake and a chat after 60 miles is awesome).

It is hard to find time to do stuff sometimes though.

<comment><USER22> A good and valuable occupation, though I'd classify it as fitness actvity principally.

I'm referring more to engagement which occupies your mind. My experience, with employment in tech, is that exploring _other_ technically complex issues is difficult -- there's only so much intellectual capacity a person's got. My own interests are the complex set of topics associated with sustainability: ennergy, climate change, human institutions from economics to politics to psychology to education and more.

As simply alternative mode operations, I've long found that some level of wrking with my hand -- physical manipulation though not necessarily hard physical work -- is quite rewarding. Woodwork, refinishing, building or repairing items, etc. Even cookking and household chores can fill this role.

It's a different headspace.

<comment><USER23> Physical work weather it's woodwork or a hill on a bike is a good way to get some distance from problems and think about them, I solve some of my toughest problems by going for a bike ride and deliberately focusing on the bike, view and riding style which I find clears my mind better than any other activity, usually a solution will present itself at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Why do we find ourselves reading emails during vacation or sick days, even > when we don't have to?

Because we fear to get sacked?

<comment><USER25> I think it's way more than that. There's a number of ways to motivate people, such as involving them in the team mission and empowering them, compensation, and recognition. Motivated people will do what it takes, including thinking about work off hours.

<comment><USER26> I'm having trouble parsing that series of statements. How does your second sentence relate to your third sentence?

<comment><USER25> I was saying there's more than fear of getting sacked to motivate someone to work off hours. If you set up the right environment, they'll be doing it without anyone asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I check (and sometimes respond to) business email during off hours, out of curiosity. Also, some of our customers and partners are in very different time zones, and it speeds things up to answer a question or open a ticket to solve a problem immediately rather than waiting 12 hours. My manager and I are both a little fanatical that way. It's not a requirement of the job but it does distinguish our lean, efficient little intrapreneurial unit from the stodgy, slow responsiveness of the rest of the company.

</comment><comment><USER28> I see the connected nature of work and after-hours email as a "symptom" of the blurring nature of work vs. life. Gone are the days where one clocks in and clocks out. I fully expect to check work emails and do other work "after hours" (read: on my own schedule). I also fully expect to check personal emails, read HN, and do other non-work activities during "work hours".

I get my work done, and I do it well. If you want to impose artificial constraints on when and how I do that work, you're stuck in the dark ages. My managers and teams understand that. Sometimes I have email conversations at 11pm at night because we all happen to be up. Sometimes I send emails that people don't even read until the next day: no problem. Sometimes I don't read emails until the next day: similar story. If it's truly urgent, people know to call or text.

I think it's a personal choice, though. I read (and respond to) emails after hours to a) plan and organize my coming day and b) do an ongoing triage of the things on my plate. I could do all this at 9am the next day, but I'd be more stressed as a result.

</comment><comment><USER29> I know it's not healthy (in terms of switching off from work) - but I do generally enjoy getting emails - receiving one more often than not will be a reply I've been waiting for, or even better, sometimes new opportunities/or customers I like catching up. The association with work makes it seem bad, but I think a nice email, regardless of time received is still a nice thing

<comment><USER30> But how to set up your inbox in such a way that it only allows reception of nice emails after work time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can remember one day rate contract I was arranging, where all the replies from the manager appeared to be happening after 6-7pm at night and became slightly concerned that their idea of a day was not the normal 9-5ish. Turns out he answered most emails late evening.

<comment><USER18> I had a new director starting a few years ago when my kids were 1 & 3\. Literally the first email I sent to him was at 11 PM the evening before his first day, so I started with, "Don't pay any attention to the time of this email. I'm sending it now because the kids are asleep and I'm still awake; I have no expectations that you'll be online answering emails all hours of the day."

<comment><USER32> Was it really needed to send that email at that time, or it was something that could have been sent first time in the morning?* And, where you already committed to work on something else next morning so the only/most-convenient time slot available was late the night before?

I don't know you, so I cannot in good faith accuse you of anything. But maybe if you reflected on your ambivalence towards work-life balance, you'd find the kernels for personal growth in there. Let me explain myself.

Speaking in general terms, there is a psychological phenomenon called the double-bind. It happens when a parent or authority figure states some expectation verbally but then subtly undermine it with his/her actions. i.e. I can chastise my kids for spending "too much time in front of screens", but then never have time to take them to play outdoors, or come back home and either keep working or root myself in front of TV, or buy them a video-game to reward some special achievement.

The root cause of the problem in this case would be my own unresolved feelings towards electronic entertainment, which I enjoy a little too much and I am aware to be not quite healthy. But from the point of view of my children's psyche, the situation is much more destructive: each of them can either embrace the label of "coach potato", absorb all the guilt from my chastising, but keep enjoying screens as a hidden pleasure; or they can try to live up to the impossible ideals I've set up for them and embrace the label of "troublemaker", because enjoying some healthy outdoors activity inside the house will invariably end up causing a bunch of disruption, nuisance and the occasional accident.

What they cannot ever dare is to say: "Hey Dad, you always say we should play more outdoors. Turn that gadget off and take us to the park", because if they do I will burst in anger. We all face some of this while growing up, and most of us learn to turn a blind eye to some intractable problems. In the most pathological cases, though, the children can grow up with a shattered sense of reality and develop serious psychiatric problems when they face the correct triggers in their adult lives (I have read, though I have not the reference now, that the double bind was fist discovered by the military while investigating the clinic histories of veterans who had gone into full-fledged schizophrenia instead of the more common PTSD).

What I am trying to say while I have read about this phenomenon from the point of view of development psychology, I have observed the same patterns of interaction in the workplace a few times. In those cases, we are all adults, so there is probably no risk of anyone's mental health; but lot's of needless stress comes from the unspeakable hot buttons, the packs of elephants that dwell in corporate rooms all over the world.

<comment><USER18> Well, it was his "welcome to the company, here are a few things that will be helpful as you settle in, and here's the scoop on where to go for orientation" email, so it would ideally get to him before he arrived, and certainly before orientation started.

Having two kids 3 and under doesn't lend itself very well to methodically planning out a carefully choreographed morning with just enough time to dash off an important email.

(That said, I do have a comfortably blurred line between work and personal, because I genuinely enjoy both and don't see a need for a strong wall between the two. Other people make other choices and I do what I can to not project my preferences onto their behaviors and choices. It's not perfect, but nothing is.)

<comment><USER32> > Well, it was his "welcome to the company, here are a few things that will be > helpful as you settle in, and here's the scoop on where to go for > orientation" email...

You could have said welcome and provide helpful advice at any time during the first day, as long as there was _someone_ ready to great him first time in the morning. The same person could have taken him to the place where orientation will take place. If you are big enough to have structured orientation, you are big enough to delegate the reception of new employees.

I want to say I am not judging you or your work style. I simply notice that you have shared candidly and think you may appreciate a comment with an outsider's perspective.

===

By the way, there was an asterisk in my first post. I was going to say that I am somewhat biased because my current boss prefers to write untimely emails first thing in the morning. I know he's a family guy and has to wake up pretty early to check and respond email before setting the kids up for school. I find his style very refreshing, specially in comparison with the archetypical past- midnight workaholic messages (which I confess to indulge in sometimes).

<comment><USER18> I appreciate the sharing of your point of view and didn't take any offense (nor anything else negative).

I understand the people working for me who don't ever answer email unless they're on-call. Nothing negative as 24x7 email SLA isn't part of the bargain.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Running Django on Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django.html

<comment><USER2> _That's it! You can now build your application as you normally would using Django._

I'm curious, does this mean that once you do their initial steps, you could run any existing Django application to Google App Engine?

<comment><USER3> No.

"Since App Engine does not support Django models, leave all DATABASE_* settings set to an empty string. The authentication and admin middleware and apps should be disabled since they require Django models. The functionality these provide is covered by the App Engine Users API and Admin Console respectively. Sessions also depend on Django models and must be disabled as well. Finally, you need to set the path to your template directory dynamically."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By not supporting the django models, you're not supporting the ORM as well. Middleware support is included, but sessions are not.

Lots of work left here....</comment>


Show HN: Your custom UX checklist - <AUTHOR> https://userium.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> UX reports are often boring to read - and to write. We decided to solve the problem by making a simple, fast way to make a UX checklist for your project.

We prepared a UX checklist, which you can customise for your own needs and then invite your team and client to check it out.

We'd love your feedback!

Thanks, Nina

</comment><comment><USER2> Demo here [https://Userium.com/welcome/demo](https://Userium.com/welcome/demo)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's a GIF of the app..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Plus one for the seal cartoons on the terms and cond.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :) The seal is our mascot, it's a Saimaa ringed seal from Finland. Btw, it's the most endangered seal ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saimaa_ringed_seal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saimaa_ringed_seal)) in the world, there are only 310 of them left. It was separated from the other seals when the land rose after the last ice age.</comment></comment>


Startup founders reveal their #1 user acquisition tactic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/startup-founders-reveal-their-1-user-acquisition-tactic

<comment><USER2> They said absolutely nothing. Blogging, make great products, and other platitudes are pretty meaningless. I am thoroughly unimpressed.

<comment><USER3> i think i might have said that 1 year ago. now i feel like the secret sauce is that there is no secret sauce except working your ass off. great products and prolific blogging are hard work, but they'll get your name out there. its that slow linear growth that is frustrating, but tried and true.

i'll admit i still read these with the hope of some magic silver bullet that gets rocket lease on track for exponential growth, but i haven't found it yet and i have nothing but respect for the founders that have it in them to relentlessly do PR and write blogs.

<comment><USER2> Oh I absolutely agree with you. It is hard work! And they deserve respect too. But unless this your first time reading startup advice the whole thing is just the same old generic stuff as always. Yeah, we know blogging is important but give us some specifics please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you make a lot of money buying users, you have very little incentive to talk about it. For one, you admit you don't have something magic and irreplaceable like a well known founder or well read blog. Secondly you may give a hint to competitors about which channels or keywords of paid acquisition are working for you.

<comment><USER5> I've heard secrecy thrown about quite a bit but I've always been a bit mystified as to why. The reason I'm confused is because it seems as though any of your well healed competitors would be able to study your product/marketing/etc and determine what you are spending time and effort on to acquire customers.

For instance one of the tactics mentioned in the blog is SEO/Adwords. From a competitors standpoint it seems like it would be pretty easy to reverse engineer where the company is devoting most of their money and effort into and thus their user acquisition strategy.

This of course assumes the competitors are technically sophisticated. Is this assumption really that much of an exception? Meaning, for those in business, are your competitors really that stupid?

<comment><USER4> It's hard to comprehensively study what all competitors are doing. It's probably more than most startups can afford to allocate time for, anyway. You're right it's not impossible, but what advantage do you have making it any easier? Some blog writing about your great user-buying tactics? That's still not a great song to sing, when you could be saying, "our product is so great _users just come to us_ "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see Buffer getting a lot of traffic via their guest posting strategy. I've seen several of their posts on HN. However, I would have a hard time imagining that these posts convert since they cover topics totally unrelated to their app. Also, I think their strategy it's generally dilutive for their brand. I recognize that startup blogs are a great way to get traffic but I'm turned off by it. Maybe I'm the only one though

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen TriplePoint PR recommend buying something like 75k in ads on app launch to get into the rankings, then grow organically from there. Combined with having a bunch of reviews ready on the launch date, etc..

<comment><USER8> Do you have any further information on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> totally surprised nobody mentioned PPC or display advertising. Then again, none of the people asked in the article have mass market offers for consumers.

<comment><USER10> Great point. B2B marketing can often be very different from B2C marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For many startups, #1 tactic is to spam the hell out of the social network of your existing users.

The links is laughably bad. It's just a bunch of advertising disguised as an informative post.</comment>


Shoelace Knots - <AUTHOR> http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm <comment><USER2> I have used the "Better Bow Knot" (<http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/betterbowknot.htm>) for over 20 years. I found it in some book about knots ages ago. This Better Bow Knot is harder to tie, and harder to learn to tie, but it rarely comes undone, even in slick, round nylon laces.</comment>


How Twitch Learned to Make Better Predictions about Everything - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/05/how-our-company-learned-to-make-better-predictions-about-everything <comment><USER2> Seems like a great way to check confident ladder climbers, who have no idea how to actually grow a product.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a 10x better corporate training. I'd expect only 5-30% of people to recommend most of the trainings I've taken.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Serial job rejects - <AUTHOR> I'm a graduate student with 2.5 years industry experience as data scientist at SAP, I moved to US to pursue masters. I applied for summer internships at Github,Google,Schneider in machine learning. All the technical rounds went fine. The interviewer would say be all the rounds are good and we are interested. However, we re interviewing other candidates as well, we will let you know in sometime. All the interviews end up being rejected at all the places. Got last reject from github today which I was very positive about. They didn't give me feedback as well. Not sure what I'm missing. I'm in a clueless position, completely lost. What I could've probably messed up in interview? How can I improve on it. <comment><USER2> Call them and insist on feedback. It's not unreasonable.

<comment><USER3> It's not unreasonable, but a misinterpretation or a bad redaction or even a bad faith reading of the feedback may open a lawsuit. So the legal department in most companies just forbid giving any meaningful feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's your email?

<comment><AUTHOR> firstname.lastname@example.com, but why?</comment></comment>