Google Maps One-Hand Zoom on iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one-hand-zoom-on-iphone <comment><USER2> Think about everyone who doesn't see this post. Will they figure this gesture out? Did you? If it takes a blog post at the top of Hacker News for people here to find this, it's pretty far from discoverable. Is it really that great if most people can't use it?

On the other hand, you don't need any instruction for pinch-to-zoom. Intuitive interactions like that — or even double-tap-to-zoom — are much harder to come up with, but they're also accessible to everybody. This is a cool piece of trivia, but it's far from solving the one-handed zooming problem. I hope Google (or anybody else) is working on something to make this better for everyone.

<comment><USER3> In usability tests you'll see that pinch-to-zoom is hardly discoverable, or even particularly easy. It's a learned behavior.

Once users "get it", it's powerful. They'll attempt to pinch to zoom all over the place. I guess I don't see how this is any different. It's a gesture, and I find it to be intuitive (it's been available on the Android version for a really long time).

<comment><USER4> Which usability tests? Anecdotal evidence - my 2 year old picked it up quite easily on her own back 4 years ago when iOS was a lot slower and buggier.

There's no "metamode" here and it's tripped over quite easily during normal interactions.

<comment><USER3> Test I've previously conducted as part of product development. I've, anecdotally, have heard similar reports from others as well when we've shared data.

Are you sure your two year old didn't watch you first?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Confirmed that it works on my Android phone (JB, 4.2.2).

This is super useful, thanks! (I've nearly dropped my phone several times trying to do a two point zoom with one hand).

<comment><USER6> Google Maps for Android has had this since September (version 6.12). But in every other way, I'm always jealous when I see GMaps on my friends' iPhones.

<comment><USER7> Why? Unless I am completely missing something, the iOS version is a subset of the Android version. The latter is everybit as usable and smooth, with more integration and functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also, I wonder how many people here realize that supporting this tap-release- tap gesture requires adding a forced delay to tap recognition.

After a single tap happens, you can't react instantly because it's not yet known if the user will tap a second time until some threshold time (around 200 ms) passes. Alternatively, something else can gets in the way (e.g. quickly tap anywhere else to "break the combo" and skip the 200 ms tap delay).

It's not a big drawback in this particular case (tapping on things on the map makes the pin appear slightly delayed), but it's important to realize the negative effects of recognizing more elaborate gestures.

<comment><USER9> Isn't the same delay required for recognizing a simple double-tap-to-zoom?

<comment><USER8> Yes it is.

<comment><USER9> And roughly every zoomable view on iOS supports that, so this doesn't add anything more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _> Dear Apple, I'd love to see you implement this in Apple Maps. Dear developers, I'd love to see you implement this in any pinch-to-zoom app._

Better yet:

Dear Apple, I'd love to see you implement this in iOS, so that developers don't have to.

<comment><USER11> Why? They already have a perfectly intuitive way of doing this. It doesn't make any sense. I just tried it and its not particularly useful, doesn't feel anywhere nearly natural and I can already do zoom one handed just hold the phone so that there are two fingers free to pinch.

<comment><USER12> Are you serious? I'm curious to see how you normally hold your phone with one hand now, I'm figuring you as some sort of contortionist, or one of those guys that can cut a deck of cards in half with just one hand. I personally love this gesture, and I use it all the time, especially when it's too cold outside and I'm using my phone with one hand, with the other one in my pocket instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone else touch their nose to the screen and use their thumb to zoom?

<comment><USER14> I actually do this

<comment><USER13> I just employed this technique to comment to this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great, because you know the most annoying feature of google maps? When pinching to zoom, it also rotates.

The map not rotating is great!

<comment><USER16> Is that on iOS only? It doesn't do that on Android. If you are rotating, you may also zoom, but if you pinched to zoom before rotating, it locks the rotation and you only get zoom.

<comment><USER17> Right, but sometimes the fingers rotate unintentionally before zooming (or separate on an arc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of people have a problem with this as _an optional gesture they are welcome to use, if they want_.

What's the problem here? Should Apple remove keyboard shortcuts, because they aren't as discoverable?

I use the _exact_ same gesture in Apple iBooks, when I want to highlight paragraphs, and it saves me so much time and interaction, it's not even funny.

</comment><comment><USER19> How long before this is considered obvious? Does Google have a pending patent on this? I can honestly say I wouldn't have thought of this.

</comment><comment><USER20> So this is what has been making Google maps sporadically zoom! I have been wondering why navigating around a Google map on my iPhone means that it zooms every now and again. I tend to make a lot of fast and small movements which must get interpreted as a double tap and then a drag.

Funnily enough, I don't have this problem with Apple maps as I suppose their sensitivity is less.

</comment><comment><USER21> I first encountered this method of zooming in and out in an Android browser called xScope a few years back. The developer called it "pin zoom," and it was one of the major features he touted.

Incidentally, xScope was also the first multi-touch browser for Android. I'm not sure what that dev is up to now, but I like to give him props when this UI technique comes up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Worst part about Google Maps for the iPhone: the drawer. Half the time when I pinch to zoom in or out it opens the damn drawer. This gesture is a great alternative but not very discoverable. The drawer should really be done away with.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool. Ain't it? From a Usability View, it's OK not to have made this through an instruction or tutorial. We were living without it but I moment I accidentally stumbled on it the other day, I liked it. I always believed I was the last one to find it.

It's my opinion that these are few of those gestures which are OK to be left as something to be 'discovered'. Just yesterday, my daughter struggled with my Macbook trying to zoom-in on the photos she saw, pinching them, dragging them on the screen. Such gestures and its variations are ones that we have to consider 'should/might work'.

</comment><comment><USER24> While this gesture may not be intuitive, I have to give credit to the initial stage double tap and then the zoom calibration with the vertical slide gesture.

There's another app that has a very similar gesture, Readmill. They allow brightness adjustment with a vertical slide. The downside is the lack of initial gesture to toggle its activation. So, while reading, trying to vertically scroll the page has caused the gesture to activate brightness adjustment. It becomes frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting that pulling your finger up is zooming in while pulling it down is zooming out which I guess is supposed to correspond to "+"/"-" symbols. I would think the opposite is more intuitive which is pulling down is moving the camera down from zoomed out position down closer to the map which enlarges it while pulling up moves the camera back from the map which zooms out.

<comment><USER26> I think especially if you think in terms of height the functionality makes more sense as it is. Think of an aircraft where pulling the yoke in your direction goes up and pushing it away from you goes down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is fantastically useful. Not so much for zooming in- you can already double tap for that. But to be able to zoom back out... brilliant.

<comment><USER28> Although it is rather unfortunate that it only zooms to the center of the view rather than where you double-tap.

<comment><USER29> I think it makes sense to zoom to the middle.

Since you're using this with one hand, tapping anywhere other than the area where your thumb naturally rests would be uncomfortable.

Also, and more importantly I think, what if you wanted to zoom in to a position near the top of the screen? You would have to tap near the top of the screen and move your finger up, causing your thumb to go off the screen. So you wouldn't be able to zoom in to an area near the top of the screen or zoom out from an area near the bottom. If such a large segment of the screen is unusable for this feature, you might as well just have it zoom to the middle, and make the user center the place they want to zoom to on their own.

<comment><USER28> _Since you're using this with one hand, tapping anywhere other than the area where your thumb naturally rests would be uncomfortable._

Not any more uncomfortable than single tapping any other part of the screen one-handed. Of course this depends on screen size...

 _what if you wanted to zoom in to a position near the top of the screen?_

Point well taken.

Assuming that the content of interest is a good centimeter or so in from the edge, you could map that point-to-edge distance to cover the remaining zoom scale. If it's inside that centimeter, zooming into the middle is useless anyway.

<comment><USER29> _Not any more uncomfortable than single tapping any other part of the screen one-handed. Of course this depends on screen size..._

You're right, this would probably be perfectly fine on the iPhone, though it could be annoying on something like a Galaxy S3, especially for someone with small hands.

 _If it's inside that centimeter, zooming into the middle is useless anyway._

True, but if it always zooms to the middle, the user knows that they need to center the point that they want to zoom into before they actually zoom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love google and all the nice tricks... but every time something google does, people have orgasm.

Samsung Browser on Galaxy S3 has one hand zoom already. In a browser, drag your finger up and down to zoom in or out. I miss it on Chrome on Android.

So.. that being said, I am not sure, who is first in implementing one hand zoom, Google or Samsung or somebody else.

<comment><USER31> Nokia N900 had one hand zoom back in 2009. Due to lack of multitouch screen the zoom gesture was spinning your finger around in circles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do we actually need multitouch? For zooming webpages I always double tap to zoom in and have the Android browser rewrap the page. I figured that I actually don't need multitouch, except for maps. And with this, I could get rid of it and back to resistive sensors for example

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know what to say here other than that I already knew this for a long time. :/

Some other tricks I know but no idea if others know also:

\- double tap with one finger to zoom in

\- tap with two fingers simultaneously to zoom out

\- tap and hold finger over selectable content, then move finger to move selection

\- shake iPhone to undo typing

<comment><USER33> And Chinese best Map APP AMap has done it long ago on all platforms also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> You can zoom out with one hand using the spread technique...... it's just more awkward (you use your thumb tip and the bottom half of your index finger).

</comment><comment><USER35> Never knew about this. It'll probably be something that will catch on fast in different (non google maps) apps over the next few years.

</comment><comment><USER36> This has been on Android for quite sometime.

</comment><comment><USER37> Uh... when I downloaded the new update it specifically mentioned this gesture and suggested I "try it myself!"

That was months ago.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow this is the best find ever! Thanks! I have also found myself nearly dropping my phone attempting to zoom!

</comment><comment><USER39> Brilliant. Wonder how long it is until this sort of thing is standard on iOS (a la pull-to-refresh).

</comment><comment><USER40> This was too good (and not that obvious) I first thought it's an April fool's prank.

</comment><comment><USER41> I need to double-tap+hold then move up/down to zoom, not just tap and hold.

</comment><comment><USER42> Neat but I sure hope you aren't using this to drive while using your phone.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is one of those stupid UI tricks that's really clever and neat -- if you're savvy enough to have already known about it or smart and curious enough to discover it on your own. In other words, it's like an Emacs keybinding.

What it is NOT is intuitive. Which Apple's pinch-to-zoom IP is.

<comment><USER44> I know I'm being pedantic, but Emacs actually has a _really_ nice built-in help. You can call up a list of _all_ active bindings, sorted by mode, and then jump to documentation, and then jump to the elisp implementation. It's like having your own cheat sheet -- something the iPhone couldn't do.

...why am I comparing iphones to emacs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> That's not very useful. It just zooms to the center of the page. That's not really what I want in a map. Two finger zoom lets you pan around while zooming. So much nicer.

<comment><USER46> It is useful for people who either lack a second hand entirely or might not have it available for whatever reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> FYI it is a Maps app feature, no an iOS Maps app feature.</comment>


Barack Obama 'approved tapping Angela Merkel's phone 3 years ago' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10407282/Barack-Obama-approved-tapping-Angela-Merkels-phone-3-years-ago.html

<comment><USER2> It so desperately disappointing when a man who was elected largely for his understanding and respect for the constitution turns out to have been systematically dumping over it for the last few years. Like so many people, I expected better of Obama. He's not the man I thought he was.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, spying on the leader of a foreign nation is not in anyway dumping on the constitution. Not going to make commentary on other programs, those are a completely different matter, but spying on the leaders of other nations, allies or not, is not illegal nor should it be surprising.

<comment><USER4> but spying on all Americans is dumping on the constitution.. as well as assassinating American citizens without any court order/trial ([http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html)).

EDIT: another source [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57585798/who-were- the-4-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57585798/who-were- the-4-u.s-citizens-killed-in-drone-strikes/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And then one year later Obama, the Nobel prize for peace winner, gave the 'freedom medal' to Merkel praising her:

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2011/06/07/remark...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2011/06/07/remarks-president-obama-and-chancellor-merkel-exchange- toasts)

"Told by the communists that she couldn't pursue her love of languages, she excelled as a physicist. Asked to spy for the secret police, she refused."

</comment><comment><USER6> This just shows he is willing to lie to get his way. Again can't be trusted. He told Merkel that if he knew, he would have stopped it. That's the smoking gun. Proves he lied.

[http://weaselzippers.us/2013/10/26/breaking-report-obama- lie...](http://weaselzippers.us/2013/10/26/breaking-report-obama-lied-to- angela-merkel-he-personally-ordered-the-bugging-of-her-phone/)

<comment><USER7> So long as both of the anonymously sourced stories are true... We don't know what Obama said and we don't know what Obama approved. For that matter, we don't know what the NSA actually did. It's safe to say that the NSA has been using their "required to fight terrorism" programs for non-terrorism spying, but beyond that everything is murky.

<comment><USER8> _The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal discussions_

Thats from the NYT article explaining how his AG lied to the SCOTUS until the snowden leaks forced his hand. Seems like a bit of a pattern. Multiple reporters, multiple countries, multiple public figures. The common thread is blatant lying with a straight face? I dunno...

<comment><USER7> Or from the WSJ this morning (hardly a defender of the Obama administration):

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230447050...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304470504579162110180138036)

Obama Unaware as U.S. Spied on World Leaders

> The National Security Agency ended a program used to spy on German > Chancellor Angela Merkel and a number of other world leaders after an > internal Obama administration review started this summer revealed to the > White House the existence of the operation, U.S. officials said.

...

> The White House cut off some monitoring programs after learning of them, > including the one tracking Ms. Merkel and some other world leaders, a senior > U.S. official said. Other programs have been slated for termination but > haven't been phased out completely yet, officials said.

> The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without > knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials > said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't > have been practical to brief him on all of them.

<comment><USER8> Good ol' plausible deniability. What is interesting, is that this is the exact same construct and "excuse" for lying as in the case I noted above. In both instances, the senior executives claim to be caught unawares.

<comment><USER8> I suppose cracks in the facade may be starting to show...

 _WASHINGTON — The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.

Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies._

[http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-spying- phones-20131029,0,...](http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-spying- phones-20131029,0,3235295.story)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only good thing about the mess that is Obama's presidency is that people might finally learn that it generally doesn't matter who you elect, most presidents and politicians will act similarly. Politicians tell the country what they think >50% of them want to hear, then do whatever they want in office. While the things Obama and his administration (and Bush's!) have been doing are awful, I've enjoyed watching the public outcry. Hopefully it lasts.

<comment><USER10> > whatever they want in office

are you sure it's what _they_ want?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It isn't like the world didn't have any interest in German policy 3 years ago. Not when Angela Merkel was deciding whether to continue with bailing out Greece, create massive changes in EU fiscal policy or otherwise use Germany's new found place as the dominant EU player for other ends.

Quite why Germany's intelligence services let her use "an old Nokia" is beyond me anyway - it isn't just vulnerable to the NSA spying on her, it's vulnerable to all sorts of people, let alone states, spying on her.

All this talk on here of the need for digital security, random people talking of needing to deniably encrypt hard drives and not being able to trust Lavabit and the German authorities couldn't, or didn't try, to persuade their elected leader to use something more than an old phone.

<comment><USER12> The "old nokia" she used is actually a party (as in political party :) mobile. The reason for owning and using that mobile is simple: Most of the people Angela Merkel communicates with do not own a secure mobile that's encryption capable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This probably isn't the change his supporters had hoped for.

</comment><comment><USER14> Most people expect and accept "007-style" spying for security purposes. But exactly what kind of threat are Germany, France and Brasil to the US? The general suspicion in these countries is that the main motive behind the overzealous NSA activities is state sponsored industrial espionage, which is completely unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER15> I didn't see mention of evidence.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you want to understand why Merkel - and people from all political leanings - are so upset, just watch "The Lives of Others" \- [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM)

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, who could have thought she was a terrorist. Good disguise.

You know what would be funny? Tapping the Nobel Peace prize committee.

</comment><comment><USER16> How can NSA tap something in Germany?

<comment><USER12> can as in "is technically and organizationally capable"? Fairly simple, especially when we're talking about the government and mobile phones. The US Embassy is about 200 meters from the Reichstag, just at the edge of the area where most of the government is located, just as the British Embassy. The Brits have a radome on the roof [1] and the Americans are reported to have hidden equipment behind fake walls [2][3]. Sufficiently sensitive equipment should give them a good reception on what most mobiles in that area do. Otherwise see the hack on belgacom: Root the provider and you have the mobile. Not all of that is legal, but I'm not certain under which law the Radome on the embassy is illegal.

[1] [http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&where1=Wilhelmstra%C3%9Fe%2071...](http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&where1=Wilhelmstra%C3%9Fe%2071,%2010117%20Berlin&form=LMLTSN&cp=52.51566162514916~13.380592854080874&lvl=19.456198038832422&sty=b&encType=1#Y3A9c3JrYmdiajNmamIwJmx2bD0xOS40NiZkaXI9MzQwLjQ1JnN0eT1iJnE9V2lsaGVsbXN0cmElMjVDMyUyNTlGZSUyNTIwNzElMjUyQyUyNTIwMTAxMTclMjUyMEJlcmxpbg==) [2] Infrared picture of the American Embassy that claims to be an indicator [http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-930301-561363.htm...](http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-930301-561363.html) [3] [http://www.duncancampbell.org/embassy- bugging](http://www.duncancampbell.org/embassy-bugging)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nixon reborn.

</comment><comment><USER8> wow. just yesterday they tried to pin it on Bush.

<comment><USER18> The article makes, or at least reports, the following claims about the tapping of Merkel's phone: (1) it began in 2002 (when, yes, GWB was in office), (2) Obama was told about it in 2010, and (3) at that time he approved it and allowed it to continue.

If all this is true, then it seems to me it's perfectly fair to "pin it on Bush" _and_ to blame Obama for the fact that it continued past 2010.

It also seems worth remarking (a) that actual evidence for the claims seems to be in short supply, and (b) that if they're correct it's pretty weird that Obama wasn't told until 2010 that the NSA was tapping the phone of the leader of a major foreign nation allied with the US.

<comment><USER19> Yes, "they both suck" is a reasonable conclusion.</comment></comment></comment>


TweetPsych: This is your brain on Twitter  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10266918-2.html <comment><USER2> This is really interesting. I've been trying to come up with something similar for use in forums but it's really aggravating as everyone insists on using a different format to store everything. I miss usenet :-(

<comment><USER3> Don't they all have news feeds these days?

<comment><USER2> Most of them, but it's not the same - that usually lists top posts only. I'm interested in the thread structure of all the comments and such. It's doable, just a pain in the ass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's nice & working.

Just use it right away <http://tweetpsych.com/></comment>


Lulzsec Exposed - <AUTHOR> http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> I guess in the age of cyberworld immersion, multi-faceted pseudonymity, and other postmodern concepts, to be revealed to be a finite human being is the only form of ammunition.

Makes me think of the older times: it use to be if you wanted to prove something you swung a sword at someone's head. But because of the monopolization of violence in modern societies (relatively speaking), your armor is layers of pseudonymity, proxies, and other net paranoia; battles are taking place over virtual fields where to fall is to be exposed as a person, a regular human being (credit card, email, all pathways to "meat world" mechanics).

Sociologically interesting or am I overthinking what could be a travesty if these exposures aren't accurate (or are)?

<comment><USER3> Well, when you're out there trolling the world, the appeal of anonymity extends beyond a sociological concept. It's your only way of staying out of jail. The ability to remain anonymous is the ability to operate, and operating is the game. This gives rise to the social system you're observing, but it's very pragmatic.</comment></comment>


Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2009/12/06/criticism.html <comment><USER3> Great post. The only detail I disagree with is found in the following excerpt:

 _"That sucks" is negativity. "That sucks, here's why, and here's how to fix it" is criticism, and it comes from a place of love. That's the difference._

I agree with this in general, but sometimes I don't really know how to fix the thing that sucks. Yet I'm still passionate about the thing I'm criticizing and I'm not doing it as an expression of negativity. It's just that I can plainly identify and explain what is wrong, but the fix is beyond me.

<comment><USER4> I agree. The most common example for me is visual design. I know when something is ugly, but that doesn't mean I can actually create something better.

<comment><USER5> You might find the answer after 5 Why's.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another way of putting it:

It all comes down to details. An effective critic can point out _why_ something sucks, _what parts_ of it suck, _under what conditions_ it may suck, _what other alternatives_ might not suck, and _how to improve it_ so it doesn't suck any more.

A hater only knows that it sucks. A cheerleader only knows that it rocks. In both cases, their opinion is completely binary: it either sucks or it rocks. There's no room for nuance or shades of grey in that assessment.

I suspect that passion is correlated but not causative here. When you're passionate about something, you tend to notice the details. That's the same skill that makes you an effective critic. But you can remain an effective critic even when you're no longer passionate about something. Take Jamie Zawinski, for example. His opinion on software matters to a lot of people, even though he probably cares a lot more about nightclubs these days. That's because he spent 10-15 years being exceptionally passionate about software, and in the process accumulated the skills he needs to make informed, nuanced judgments.

</comment><comment><USER7> I understand your point. I've work with people at both extremes:

\- Negative people ruins ambiance and creates resentment. They think everything is doomed, and criticizes everything all the time. Their usual last words : "Anyway it won't work".

\- Cheerleaders as you are calling them refuse to face the real problems, delaying the inevitable until it's too late.

None of these attitudes are productive, and they are not held by people who both care and grasp the situation. Sometimes cheerleaders care, they just don't understand what's happening (eg managers who don't understand anything about technology...).

By saying "here's why, and here's how to fix it", you show that you care, so you're definitely on the right path. The problem is that once you've said "That sucks" whoever you are talking to will stop listening. So it doesn't matter whether you say "That sucks, here's why, and here's how to fix it", or just "That sucks". It's pretty much the same.

And that's the hard point. How to make people understand that something is wrong without making them go defensive. A common "trick" is honest praise. Honest. It must absolutely be honest otherwise it will fail. Something positive. Just find something great, praise it, and only then you can throw your critic, in a humble way. A critic must never feel like a critic, but more like an encouragement.

It might sounds stupid, but it works. It's often easier to have people do a u-turn by pushing them forward.

And it will give much more weight to your words when you actually have to throw a "Well, if we continue like that, we're doomed.". If you are known are someone positive, that will make people think...

</comment><comment><USER8> I criticize by creation, not by finding fault. - <USER2>

From this old but good HN thread on criticism: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424699>

<comment><USER9> Not to be too critical, but that quote is traditionally ascribed to Cicero, not Michelangelo. (Though sourcing the quote to something that Cicero _actually_ wrote is absurdly hard on the Internet.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yup, this is a great point. Writing is an act that requires a lot of feedback. Unfortunately a lot of (poor) writers can't tell the difference between well meaning criticism and soul crushing negativity. I hate phrases like, "If you can't find something nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Criticism is an absolutely fantastic tool in entrepreneurship. Want an idea for a company? Try someone else's product and write down all the problems with it. After having to put up with the Common Application as provided by Hobsons.com I can't wait for someone to take a crack at putting them out of business.

</comment><comment><USER11> Many indigenous cultures have evolved a natural distrust of people who smile too much.

<comment><USER12> That's interesting. I've noticed that over time, in pictures, people smile more. Compare pictures of people today with pictures of people from the 1800's.

<comment><USER13> That's usually because exposures took many minutes in early photography. Smiling for 5-10 minutes wasn't really possible :)

Some photographers even used metal rods to hold people's heads in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is true that cheerleaders when treated wrong will disappear and critics will weather the storm with you, it is with the caveat, in most context.

In the context of corporate culture and internal critics, I have seen numerous occasions when critics have left after weathering the storm when corporate bosses do not share the same passion towards users (employees and customers). In such scenarios critics have little to no control to implement fixes and are labelled negative under the definition of not meeting business goal (read: does not make the boss look good).

This may very well be because 'in American culture, that criticism and negativity go hand-in-hand', tho, I think this is unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good post.

Two resultant things that bother me:

1) Many people avoid constructively criticizing others' work primarily _because_ it is so frequently mistaken for negativity. Criticism is a necessary part of continuous improvement. I find myself frequently encouraging others to take no fear in criticizing my work, because I otherwise receive little valuable feedback. If it sucks, I _need to know_ , and I need to know _why_.

2) The common desire for cheerleaders breeds "fake cheerleaders" looking for acceptance and praise. These people provide no value, and worse, can lull people into a false sense of success.

</comment><comment><USER16> Criticism can be done with a positive or a negative twist. Agree with the author that showing approval or casting insults is independent of criticism.

Being passionate about something doesn't mean ignoring the nuances of social interaction. It means caring enough to learn how to best suggest positive changes. Also, if we accept the possibility that our assumptions are false it can lighten the severity of our criticism.

It's hard to listen to a loud mouth know it all, even if you know they're right. The social inclination is preference to crash and burn and drag them down with you.

</comment><comment><USER17> The worst thing to happen to a critic is to have to talk to a person who complains about their problems but is mainly looking for comfort, not solutions. Advice in these instances is met with variations on "no, that's too difficult," or sometimes angrily: "stop bugging me, I don't want to change what I'm doing!"

At different times in our lives we come from both angles and sometimes it's hard to know which one the person is looking for.

</comment><comment><USER18> Summary:

It's not the easiest way to approach the world, but the cycle of passion, criticism, vulnerability, conflict, and resolution is perpetually educational.

</comment><comment><USER5> From whom the critic comes from is also of value. "It sucks" from my mother, and "it sucks" from a professional designer often means two different things.

</comment><comment><USER19> As a critic myself, I don't think someone that is a good critic will disable comments(critics) in his blog.

</comment><comment><USER20> i don't think passion is the defining difference between criticism and negativity. if anything it is _thoughtfulness_ or possibly _respect_.

</comment><comment><USER21> And _I celebrate my failures._

</comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately, Alex is making the exact mistake he outlines. In criticising the notion that criticism is associated with negativity, he tries to associate criticism with love. He says:

 _The reason a person is critical of a thing is because he is passionate about that thing. In order to have a critical opinion, you have to love something enough to understand it_

Now you may say that you don't really _care_ about something, unless you're critical of it, but saying you have to _love_ it, because you are critical about it, is a bridge too far. That would have exactly the same kinds of problems as the association with negativity.</comment>


Use Cases for Thread-Local Storage - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2014/n4324.html

<comment><USER2> errno was of course a mistake once things went threaded. It is not of course supported by system calls, with the error number values either being in the return code, ie return -errno not -1 and that chunk of values is invalid, or returning two values, depending on OS and architecture.

Obviously it is going to be really hard to change...</comment>


How I've Made $200k in the iOS Education Market - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lescapadou.com/2011/10/how-ive-made-200000-in-ios-education.html <comment><USER2> As a kids iOS dev, I'd also like to thank Lorraine of "Moms With Apps" for her support. "My PlayHome" & "Pocket PlayHome" are just starting to be profitable but at the start Lorraine really helped get things going and is still actively helping me get the app out there.

Lorraine also gave me some advice which I think is really the "secret" of your success: Make a really good app.

Tangentially, I've found Twitter to be remarkably useless for marketing. For the most part on Twitter, nobody is listening. Everyone has thousands of followers but nobody is actually reading. Thanks to bit.ly's public analytics, I can see it's not just me either.

The biggest event for me on Twitter was when @glinner (Father Ted, IT Crowd, _hugely_ influential tweeter) tweeted a recommendation: <https://twitter.com/#!/Glinner/status/103123278650028032> ...and that resulted in about 40 extra sales. 40.

<comment><USER3> Wow that is interesting regarding Twitter. It might be more useful longer term for customer engagement though?

Do you think it is specific to your market to suffer from this or is it a wider problem?

<comment><USER2> A lot of the problem is that many people seem to treat Twitter like a game where the aim is to get the most followers. People agree to follow back if you'll follow them. Therefore you get the ridiculous situation where people have 5000 followers and are following 5000 and obviously nobody really gives a damn about what anyone is saying.

Now when I'm deciding if it's worth pushing the app to someone on Twitter, I check if they have a rational following to followers ratio.

Even when following a normal amount of people on Twitter, the sheer amount of traffic means that your link will probably get lost in the feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if Education or Music is a bigger App Store category?

I have an app that could fit into both, but went with Music. I'm curious if Education would be a better fit.

<comment><USER5> The education section is typically dominated by apps for designed for the owner's children. Parents go in there looking for stuff to occupy their kids in a healthy way. Does your app fit that description? Apps that keep kids quite in the car are very valuable to parents, and they will pay for them.

If your app is something that teenagers would want, then it should go in Music.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Guys ! As I've said in the post, it's a pleasure for me to share after all I read on hackers news and others places. if you have questions don't hesitate to ask.

<comment><USER6> I noticed that you're aiming a couple of your projects at kids.

What are your thoughts about EDU platforms like SmarTots? Other than expanding the reach of your app are there any sorts of features such as click analytics, reporting for parents or achievements that are appealing to you?

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/smartots- raises-750000-offe...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/smartots- raises-750000-offers-mobile-apps-platform-for-kids/)

(Disclosure- I'm an early employee there and focus on dev support, so it's not merely an academic question!)

<comment><USER7> xiaoma, I was really interested in smart tots sdk and really want to implemented in my app but I was really having difficulty in trying to find out what the sdk does. I created an account, downloaded the sdk, looked around and I couldn't figure out what it does or how some of the stuff will show up in my app. Because of that I didn't follow thru.

<comment><USER6> Right now the documentation is definitely lagging the features a bit.

This is what we offer end customers (i.e. parents): reporting on how much their kids play which apps, breakdown by subject, feedback on how their children are doing (if implemented by the developer), organization of educational apps by subject and age level, and finally recommendations for subsequent app purchases.

What developers get is the following: parents who buy more apps than the average customer, a sales channel via parents looking for their next SmarTots app, usage data of their app broken down by demographic, and a free evaluation of their app by a qualified educator.

We're also offering a few more things on a beta-basis: a system for developers add achievements for children to earn and "anti-achievements" that we call areas for improvement. Parents have been very positive about this kind of reporting. We've also the option of sharing the achievements on FB, which can serve as another marketing channel for app-makers. Also in the pike is the tracking of user data. This will be useful for app-makers in much the same way as analytics are useful for website creators. If you can test what actions users are making, you'll have more data to help you refine and improve the app.

One thing I can offer is help getting the app integrated if you want to give it a try. Either way, thank you for the feedback!

<comment><USER7> do you have contact info i can reach you at so we can take this off line

<comment><USER6> Sure. Email firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll take care of it from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing Pierre!

These are the posts that encourage one to continue on, I strongly believe that, as an Indie Developer, you need to laser focus on a niche and do the best you can on it, sometimes it's best to have a small and concise goal instead of a really broad one. It's all about baby-steps.

I hope to finish my app soon, also in education, a category that has a lot a potential. As a parent you go to great lengths to enhance your child's education.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks Pierre!

Although it looks like you experienced very early success, I'm sure there was a period of time where you questioned your decision to become an indie developer (or you were at least unsure what to expect). When was the moment when you realized that you really could make a sustainable living from developing these apps?

Also, what do you find most challenging in being an indie developer? Is it difficult to stay focused or motivated at times?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes of course there is some risks but you cannot succeed if you don't try. I just put some targets according to the money I've got in the bank. It was OK because we (family) have had enough money for more than one year without income. When my first app was mentioned in the NYT, I realized that there was a market and it was possible to do a sustainable living. I also realized that promotions was the key once you've got a good product - OK everybody know that but when you are an indie with a software engineer background it's not easy to do it because you are reluctant to do it.

biggest challenge : designing innovative apps and doing the promotions (then artwork)

my family was a great help to stay motivated. My most important issue was money and being able to feed my family, but My wife told me that it was better if we didn't have a lot of income and I was happy with my jobs and stayed at home with her and the kids. She was so right. Doing something that you enjoy (and of course where there is some money) is the key to stay motivated (for me and I think for a lot of people).

<comment><USER10> what kind of promotions did you do ?

<comment><AUTHOR> please check the post. But actually everything is good to promote your app, you have to try and see the result. The difficulty in promotion is that most of the times difficult to evaluate to ROI and it is a kind of weird thing for software engineer - you don't know if it works or not (except if you've got a mention in a major blog/newspaper). But mentions in major blogs or newspaper don't appear by magic, you have to make some noise about your product.

So You just want that your app is visible to everybody. If, by magic, everybody was aware of my apps I would sell 100,000 units in one day I think !

<comment><USER11> You mention that Children's Technology Review gave you an award. Did you contact them and pitch the app or did they find the app on their own?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just sent them a code to review the app as I did with a lot of blogs or children's technology specialist

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks Pierre, great stuff!

The common thread I keep seeing in app developer success stories is the app being featured in NYT or on the App Store. What do you think most contributed to you being discovered and featured like you were? What can "normal" devs like me do to increase our apps' chances of getting noticed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Journalist in big blog or newspaper cannot be reached directly (I think they should receive hundred of mails everyday!). So you need to have a nice app and make some noise and perhaps they will hear about it. I was very lucky for my first app (check the previous post on my blog), but for the second it was easier because people knew about my apps already (it was through Children's Technology Review that I've got an article for Word Wizard) For the App Store, it is still a mystery but of course you need a great app and with great artwork (I noticed that all the featured app have georgous artwork).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks Pierre for sharing your story. It proves that solo entrepreneurs can indeed succeed, as can bootstrapping! The insights on how you broke down your time were very valuable! You definitely serve as an inspiration to anyone look to that same.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for sharing your figures, it's always great to see indie developers succeed. I'm constantly surprised by how many hidden opportunities there still are in the iOS market - you just have to be creative and produce really polished stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great info. Thanks for taking the time to post all this information in detail and to provide some background. It's very helpful to those of us trying to make a living in this market to see what works and what doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for sharing your success... It is an insparation for a lot of us.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting to see some concrete data about the size of the educational market for iOS - and I only see this growing in the future.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love the fact that you worked with your wife and kids when developing and perfecting the apps. Congratulations on your success! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> actualy, it was great way to be motivated ! I always look for ways to do things with my kids that they love and I love, and I also thought it was a great way to show them what is "working"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Damn I really should have stuck with the education iOS market. Was in the top ten for quite a while when the app store first launched and was making good money, just could only ever manage to keep an app up in the rankings for a few months. Focused on the physical product side instead of the mobile app side... Wow that was a mistake...

</comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting article. We launched (are in the process of updating the website) a kids educational app as well -- Alphabet Fruits which can be found at <http://www.apps4tots.com>

We will definitely be tweaking our pitch and app after reading your insight.

</comment><comment><USER20> I bought Word Wizard a few months ago for my 2 year old and he absolutely loves it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome Pierre! Thanks for sharing with us and giving back to the community!

</comment><comment><USER22> way to go, pierre! if anyone is interested in the analytics he used, here's a shameless plug: <http://www.appfigures.com>

<comment><USER23> Hi, Just wondering, with appfigures, do i need to include a library in my app so that it'll send data to their servers? If not, it sounds pretty neat, and i'm definitely interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great post, thanks for sharing and congrats on the success!

</comment><comment><USER25> Very impressive, fantastic breakdown and a great post. Congratulations on your success and best wishes in the future!

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, very cool to see a post from you top-ranking here :-) Hope to see you at the next Open Coffee Sophia :-).

</comment><comment><USER27> Cool!

It would be even more interesting if we would know how much money you've spent to achieve this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just worked hard (and time is money!) + some money for hardware and some Press Release and ads (about $2500 I think). I've done everything myself so far. I will add this to the post, thanks the comment

<comment><USER28> Your time is not free is it?

<comment><USER13> I don't really understand comments like this. No, his time is not free, but his 'salary' is the 200k he made while doing this.

You wouldn't say to someone who is making 200k with a cushy corporate salary and ask "but what's _your_ time worth?" - it's redundant.

<comment><USER29> $200K if you count all the benefits, insurance, and tax reductions, $150K base on W2 is equivalent to bare $200K.

Many developers make $150K.

<comment><USER13> Indeed. So what?

He's able to do this while running his own business and working for himself.

I think most developers would rather take $200k running their own business over $150k working for a corporation.

This is HN after all - we know many people here are taking _much_ less than $200k in order to build their own businesses.

Not to mention with a corporate salary, that $150k _stops_ once you stop working. With recurring revenue from selling products, it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Never tried creating any applications for iOS, It is a very good idea working some similar idea, hope it works for me this time.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think the JavaScript toolchain explosion is out of control? - <AUTHOR>

Looking at the current state of Javascript toolchains (RequireJS, browserify, Gulp, Grunt, and all the millions of plugins that come with these tools) I feel like there has been a toolchain explosion that's getting out of control.  Looking at any one example of a Javascript build script I find references to dozens of other tools all of which needs to be pulled down with the current FOTM package manager... It feels like a collection of russian dolls just trying to get my head around it. Just as an example here is the first build script I found navigating from the Gulp site:
https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/recipes/browserify-uglify-sourcemap.md
So. Many. Moving. Parts. It's not normal for a toolchain to be this complicated. Do you think it's getting out of hand? For those of us building real-world projects that are still going to be running in 15-20 years, what are our options? <comment><USER2> _For those of us building real-world projects that are still going to be running in 15-20 years.._

Anyone who chooses a build tool now on the assumption that they'll still be using it in 2029 isn't thinking properly. Develop code in a way that's as agnostic as to your tools possible. Expect to change what you use when something better comes along. People _will_ have brilliant new ideas over the next decade and a half and deciding _now_ that you don't want to benefit from them is frankly stupid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately reality just doesn't work that way. Projects are completed. Developers move on. New developers eventually are employed to make upgrades only to find the entire toolchain was built by some guy in a coffee shop 15 years ago and no longer works.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and that's exactly why you should be agnostic about your tools. Your build process shouldn't be "Use this tool because it'll still work in 15 years", but rather "Use this tool, but in a way that means you can swap to a different tool very easily so the next developer can use something that works if the current tool is broken."

That means using straightforward techniques that don't rely on 'magic', UNIX style chaining rather than a single app that does everything, clean input and output (keep the tools and the source code you're using as separate as possible), and _writing documentation to inform the next person what 's supposed to happen_. Arguably it also means using the popular like grunt and gulp because they're more likely to have working versions in the future and there's more likely to be tools in the future that migrate a build process to the next big thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The lack of a module system in JavaScript is at the heart of many of these problems. While ES6 promises a solution to this, uptil now the ecosystem is fragmented unduly because of this: there's multiple competing ways to create JavaScript modules.

Otherwise, you can avoid a lot of hassle by skipping over the pre-proccesor trends. For example, templating languages come and go, and there's lots of transpiled languages like CoffeeScript, also new CSS pre-proccesors appear regularly… In our agency of designer/developers we stick to HTML based templating like Jinja, Django templates or Handlebars. We don't use Coffeescript, and we only started using a CSS preprocessor when LESS arrived, which used the same syntax as CSS.

All these tools might be great when you are working by your self, but I see it as detrimental in collaborative settings. Working in small rapidly changing teams, the amount of new stuff you can learn per project is just limited. So why reinvent JS, CSS and HTML when you know that is the stuff that is going to stick around…

Finally, working with JavaScript one toolchain that I found that succeeds at hiding a lot of this complexity from the developer is Meteor. They did it by creating their own package manager—yet again :( But they remove a lot of friction of build scripts and front-/back end discrepancies. Meteor is firmly rooted in the _now_ though, 15-20 years is a long time :)

</comment><comment><USER4> The reason is that coding for the web sucks and is broken in many ways, and there are two causes:

1) Browsers have never been a unified platform.

2) It's hard to get ~100% of people to use a modern browser.

So because we can't fix these things at the client layer, we have to fix them during development. That's where all these things come from.

You'll also notice a recent explosion of languages that compile to JavaScript. Why? JavaScript sucks, and we're nowhere near a widely-supported replacement.

<comment><USER5> I perfectly agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, I would not recommand using grump or gulp for a project that must last 15 years. Well, in the first place, I would not recommand doing a web project that must still work in 15 years: the technology is changing every 6 month, and I would advise on a 6 / 7 years longevity max for any web application. If you do need (or your client needs) that kind of longevity, I would use only good ol' robust libraries included in the source code, such as jQuery or Backbone, and stay away from trendy stuff such as Angular or Rust.

</comment><comment><USER7> most places just evaluate the best of the best and decide as a group of devs which: template language, backend language, migration tools they like and go from there.

personally i like jade stylus bower, drop in whatever js u need to get the job done. check out unheap.com they have a nice curated list of JS for UI.

<comment><USER6> Did not know of unheap.com, that's the stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> * [https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/recipes/brow...](https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/recipes/browserify-uglify-sourcemap.md)

</comment><comment><USER8> Work is nonlinear. (Because "progress" or "advancement" seems like a value judgment, when it may only represent effort. ;)

Time tends to sort these things out...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And what's the deal with giving these projects meaningless names? Gulp and browserify mean nothing to me, whereas gcc and make are basically self- documenting. Can we please stop giving these projects trendy names and instead name them by what problem they are designed to solved?

<comment><USER3> Browserify, as far as I can tell, packages up server-side code so it can be used in the browser. Seems pretty self-descriptive to me.

And yes, gulp is a bad name, but giving opaque names is not exactly 'trendy'. The Unix tradition is probably worse: grep, awk, sed, less etcetera…

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> People said the same thing when jquery came out...</comment>


Ask HN: How would You "Demoform" a City - <AUTHOR> This may look like a weird AskHN and probably is but theoretically speaking I believe it may be an interesting topic. If you were planning to buy a flat in an overcrowded city, what could be large scale ideas to decrease its real estate cost? <comment><USER2> So, what would be the best way to lower the cost of a property in a city with a building on it, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly - or even on a larger scale, decrease the whole city square feet market value.</comment></comment>


Show HN: TCP over sound on Android - brian-armstrong https://github.com/quiet/org.quietmodem.Quiet <comment><AUTHOR> Seems like this would benefit from not using standard TCP (which assumes that a dropped packet is always due to congestion), and maybe use one of the WiFi retransmission protocols (the names are slipping my mind at the moment).

Might increase that bandwidth from 7kbps to something more comfortable.

<comment> brian-armstrong Maybe - in my experience with this, when the devices are within a foot or so, there really isn't much packet loss, maybe as low as 10^-6 or so. But I haven't really explored moving further apart. I suspect that this suffers from a sharp knee where it starts out reliable and then very quickly fades off.

To be clear, the 7kbps is the raw frame throughput, not the effective rate with TCP. There are two ways I can see to boost this number. One would be to pack more bits into each symbol, e.g. to use a wider QAM mode. I find that in practice the degradation from using speaker/mic makes this somewhat impractical. The other would be to use a more broadband signal (the width of the the main audible channel is a few kHz). But this is also kind of undesirable since it has to compete with more interference across the spectrum and can also be a less pleasing sound.

<comment><USER2> Is the packet loss the same when there is background noise?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> some home appliances use this technology. I have a refrigerator that can you hold your phone next too during a support call whereby the refrigerator emits some tones that the support person can receive presumably into some computer program designed to decipher the tones as some error or diagnostic codes.

I'm old enough to know all about those old school modems. I think this is stuff is cool for those niche type applications.

<comment> brian-armstrong That's a neat idea. You could imagine doing this in DTMF. The fridge could even place the call!

<comment><USER4> In most modern networks like GSM DTMF are send via non-sound channel. Actually that was done because of famous Woz's blue box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone interested, there is an app called Chirp by Animal systems that attempted to make data transfer over audio a relevant form of communication. It actually works quite well to push links from my computer to my phone on Airplane mode with the help of a custom python script.

<comment><USER6> Further offtopic: Chirps include reed-solomon error correction. I'm seeking assistance with reverse engineering it [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/663643/discover- par...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/663643/discover-parameters- of-a-reed-solomon-code-from-its-output)

<comment> brian-armstrong If there's anything that Chirp does that you feel is missing from Quiet, please let me know. I'd love to expand the feature set and make it more useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brings home just how easy it can be to break out of an air-gapped computer.

<comment><USER8> Vacuum-gapped computers, anyone?

<comment><USER9> Might have a small problem with heat dissipation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would be great for cross platform zero-config party games. A lot of game genres can get by with surprisingly little bandwidth. Although for a noisy environment like a party you may need to do a little mesh networking in order for everyone in a room to be able to participate.

<comment><USER11> AFAIK, this is actually the only way to do Android <=> iOS multiplayer games without connectivity ( iOS restricted the usage of bluetooth too much ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would it be feasible to implement this on a microcontroller, lets say medium sized Cortex-M or ESP8266? Would be useful in IoT, especially for initial setup phase.

<comment><USER13> Why would you add a reasonably expensive ADC+microphone if you can just use BLE that's likely to have some other useful purpose for your IoT device?

Or, well, WLAN or 6LoWPAN, it is IoT after all.

<comment> brian-armstrong In general, I think you are definitely right about this. Sound does have some potentially interesting applications. For example, if you had an exhibit that you wanted guests to interact with, that would probably eliminate many wireless choices. NFC would be a valid option, but not all phones support it, and you might need to make the user install an app. Quiet's sound transmission can work from the browser by using quiet.js. In general I think it's ever so slightly more versatile, or at least until browsers make it easier to access wireless options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Data over sound is a common enough thing in the IoT space. For example: [https://help.canary.is/hc/en-us/articles/204772717-Why- can-t...](https://help.canary.is/hc/en-us/articles/204772717-Why-can-t-Canary- hear-my-device-)

(I work at Canary.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Missed naming opportunity: AirgAPP

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't have much to say other than I love the concept of doing something like this.

</comment><comment><USER17> If I remember correctly, the DS game Bangai-O Spirits used sounds to share player-made levels between consoles.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting use of the JNI. Why did you need to use JNI?

<comment> brian-armstrong Well, the JNI means you get to run native code. For something like this, I think that's actually a requisite. My reasoning would be

a) This is real-time and could potentially be disrupted by GC pauses

b) JNI means you get to use OpenSL, the best and lowest latency sound engine on Android

c) This builds on top of libquiet, a C library, which itself builds on liquid dsp, another C library. Rewriting these in Java would be significantly more work than building the JNI wrapper. Especially true for liquid which is a mature library with lots of code

<comment><USER19> So why not JNA then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What range of wawes can a typical microphone record ?

<comment> brian-armstrong It really depends. On average 100 Hz - 20 kHz isn't uncommon. Some only go down as far as 16kHz though.

<comment><USER21> One needs to also take into account what the microphone is plugged into. For instance, you could use this to transmit data over a walkie talkie, but they are choked at around 6khz

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> CMIIW but didn't modems use to work like this? Like, put your phone receiver on top of the modem while it makes strange bleeping sounds?

</comment><comment><USER23> What modulation scheme does this use?

<comment> brian-armstrong The main audible profile uses OFDM + QAM. It also has a GMSK profile. This is thanks to liquid dsp's myriad modulation choices.

If you want to see quiet's configuration flexibility try this in Chrome [https://quiet.github.io/quiet-profile-lab/](https://quiet.github.io/quiet- profile-lab/)

<comment><USER23> Cool, thanks.

Years ago I was playing around to learn some DSP and made a simple modem for speakers and microphone to send text messages via sound. I used "continuous- phase frequency shift keying" on a couple of different frequency pairs, and the receiver used FFT for decoding...

Never managed to get it working reliably above 300 bps. It would probably be much better to use the Goertzel algorithm tuned to the specific frequencies instead of using chunked FFT.

I'm curious about why some modulation schemes are better than others in this situation, but it seems like a lot of tricky math and information theory is needed to get it.

OK, some Wikipedia articles later: so OFDM basically means you send relatively long pulses of many parallel bit streams on many "orthogonally" spaced frequencies, each stream itself being modulated by some other scheme (in your case QAM, which uses four amplitude levels to encode two bits). The frequency spacing is chosen to avoid spectral interference, and the pulses are spaced to avoid temporal interference. With the relatively long pulse times and the many frequencies, FFT is probably the best method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does it also solve collision problems, when there is more than one transmitter?

</comment><comment><USER25> How about TCP over light?

<comment><USER26> Actually p2p file transfer via an infrared port[1] was a fairly common feature on laptops back in the day (this was probably before bluetooth took off). If you're on Windows, have a look in the "Network and Internet" section of the Control Panel. You may still have an Infrared utility there if your computer has that functionality.

[1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa940293(v=winembed...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa940293\(v=winembedded.5\).aspx)

<comment><USER27> IR was also used for syncing with phones, and printing. Some PDAs (I'm looking at you psion) could print over IR

<comment><USER28> Back in the day. i used an Orange contract nokia 8310 ir modem and the free phone 0800 number that came with BT internet to give my laptop intenet.

Lasted around 6 months of near 24/7 use before Orange started detecting data and charging contract customers to call 0800 numbers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Led Effort for DNT Finds Broad Support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/privacy/2012/02/23/mozilla-led-effort-for-dnt-finds-broad-support/ <comment><USER2> To be honest I have no confidence in DNT. It relies on me trusting the very companies whose business it is to track users. I'm not their consumer so they have no incentive to treat me fairly or reasonably. In the last month we've seen how companies will do anything to get as much information about users as possible, even it means 'working around' obstacles. Even if DNT was law there would be no way to validate it was actually being adhered to, without examining every line of code in play. Even then someone will find a novel way (flash cookies etc). For the moment all I have is Firefox Addons like Ghostery, AdBlock, Better Privacy and regularly cleaning my cache/local storage/flash cookies. Even then it's an arms race.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The big problem with DNT is the lack of an enforcement mechanism. Basically any company can profess to comply with DNT, ignore it, and enjoy the false trust until they're caught. And once caught, there are no consequences.</comment></comment>


Middle management is one of the biggest enemies of creativity - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2015/05/27/mbf-10th-anniversary-maximilian-busser-is-making-outrageous-230000-watches-and-his-business-is-thriving

<comment><USER2> Wrong link</comment>


Where does the code in movies really come from? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zxj487h#zxq9d2p <comment><USER2> I remember being all excited when i realized the console red text scrolling over the (first) Terminator view was an Apple II monitor 6502 disassembly!</comment>


Instagram loses half its hipsters in a month - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/14/instagram_bombs/

<comment><USER2> Here we go again. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4978143></comment>


Touched by the Goddess: On Ramanujan - <AUTHOR> http://inference-review.com/article/touched-by-the-goddess <comment><USER2> "In another scene, Ramanujan goes to the post office to see if there are any letters from his wife. When a dejected Ramanujan leaves the post office empty- handed, he is approached by a group of young men in military uniform. Ramanujan is mocked, kicked, pushed to the ground, and his face left bloodied. This event never occurred. There was not a single instance when Ramanujan was physically abused because of racial prejudice."

Why do you think this scene was manufactured? Should it be chalked up to trying to make reality more interesting or to an effort to deliver themes aligned with audience expectations?

This convenient story seems to be picked up by a lot of people who have not read the book, e.g. "World War I throws the campus into chaos and exposes Ramanujan to more pointed racism." ([http://www.filmjournal.com/reviews/film- review-man-who-knew-...](http://www.filmjournal.com/reviews/film-review-man- who-knew-infinity)) or "...what we received instead was a shameful expose of twentieth century racism, an exploration of otherness, professional jealousy and small mindedness" ([http://teachingmathsscholars.org/news/the-maths- scholars-sch...](http://teachingmathsscholars.org/news/the-maths-scholars- scheme-reviews-the-man-who-knew-infinity))

In fact I've always found Ramanujan's story to be an excellent example of open-mindedness and the meritocratic approach to judging people.

<comment><USER3> Drama, that's all. For a movie about math, there was pretty much zero math the entire time...

<comment><USER4> It wasn't about math, but the mythology of a mathematician.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I coincidentally watched the movie last night. Overall, I recommend it. As a nerd, I felt they were a little bit light on the details of what his work meant. Unfortunately, unlike with computer movies, they couldn't create a tangible mock-up ("this is Unix, I know this...", "I'm hacking a Gibson") so it felt like there was a vacuum in the room every time they stressed how important the contents of his notebooks were but said nothing about what they actually contained. There was also a little bit of preachiness around one character being an atheist and that being a kind of bad thing, so heads up.

For a good after-movie read, someone also did a more detailed write-up of his wife's life, here: [http://www.imsc.res.in/~rao/ramanujan/newnow/janaki.pdf](http://www.imsc.res.in/~rao/ramanujan/newnow/janaki.pdf)

<comment><USER6> There was a really good play I saw about Ramanujan's life that actually talked about the mathematics part. It was a fictional piece of work but quite enjoyable. It was called A Disappearing Number

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great blog post. I really enjoyed the film, and of course an incredible story.

Stephen Wolfram also has a fascinating, in-depth blog post on Ramanujan - [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was- ramanujan/](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/)

I wonder if we'll ever understand how intuition like this really works in the brain.

<comment><USER8> You may like reading this [0]. each one of us has an infinite source of creative power mostly dormant. For some like Ramanujan, it's awakened with a greater degree. The book goes into steps to awaken it and I can attest to it that with quality meditation and perseverance, this can be gradually awakened and channelized. A sincere practitioner starts to get experiences (verifying he's onto something) within a month of regular, quality practice.

This can be awakened by meditation, devotion (like in case of Ramanujan) or by selfless work. All of them falls under Yoga, which means "to unite" with your true self, the infinitely powerful, whose nature is self-existence, knowledge and bliss.

0: [https://www.amazon.com/Kundalini-Untold-Story- Himalayan/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Kundalini-Untold-Story- Himalayan/dp/0994002793)

<comment><USER7> Thanks, will have a look at the book. If it is an easily repeatable process though, I wonder why we don't have more Ramanujans? Is there a genetic component to it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you like reading up on such topics, I strongly recommend S. Chandrasekhar's "Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivation in Science".

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do we keep hearing so much about Ramanujan? Of the greatest mathematicians, is he even in the top 10? 20? 30?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure how one would go about compiling an objective list of the top 10 or 20 or 30 mathematicians (which would be required to answer your second question), but to answer your first question - we probably keep hearing about him because he was undeniably a good (if not great) mathematician and that his story is both inspiring (or feel-good) and tragic at the same time. We like narratives, and his life story is a narrative that is almost "magical" (to quote Steven Wolfram's blog post on him, "Will there ever be another Ramanujan? I don't know if it's the legend of Ramanujan or just a natural feature of the way the world is set up, but for at least 30 years I've received a steady stream of letters that read a bit like the one Hardy got from Ramanujan back in 1913 ... Are these numerical facts significant? I don't know. Wolfram|Alpha can certainly generate lots of similar facts, but without Ramanujan-like insight, it's hard to tell which, if any, are significant." [1])

[1] [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was- ramanujan/](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/)</comment></comment>


A Look at Eyeglass Lens Materials (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.eyecarebusiness.com/issues/2012/august-2012/a-look-at-lens-materials <comment><USER2> A blog post of mine explains why I switched to CR-39 for computer work: [http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights- and...](http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and-eyeglass- lenses.html)

I've learned since then that RGB LED backlights, specifically, are not actually all that common, as other wide-gamut technologies become more common -- GB-r and RB-g, which use two colors of LEDs and a phosphor for the third color; and quantum dots. This doesn't change the outcome, though, as these technologies also produce spectra with a wider spacing between red and green peaks than the old CCFLs or WLED.

I wear my CR-39 glasses all the time (except for driving or biking) and am quite fond of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I made glasses at LensCrafters throughout college (super enjoyable job btw!). My main takeaway was to avoid polycarbonate lenses. People returned them often due to headaches, and I experienced headaches myself as my safety glasses were required to be polycarbonate. Polycarbonate can be a decent compromise in some situations as the lenses will be thinner than equivalent plastic lenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think of Trivex / Tribrid?

<comment><USER4> Tribrid is newish (2013) and targeted for stronger prescriptions in the +/-3.00 to +/-7.00 diopters range. It's a little heavier (1.23 vs 1.11) than Trivex and slightly worse Abbe (41 vs 44) but has refractive index of 1.60 vs 1.53.

[http://www.visionmonday.com/article/ppg-launches-tribrid- len...](http://www.visionmonday.com/article/ppg-launches-tribrid-lenses-in- north-america/)

I want a tool where I can find out if a lens for my prescription is lighter in one material vs another. Trivex is lighter than Tribrid but has a lower RI. I'm at -3.

<comment><AUTHOR> This one calculates center & edge thickness: [http://220.127.116.11/tools/thickness.php](http://188.8.131.52/tools/thickness.php)

This one claims to calculate weight: [http://www.glassfab.com/tools/weight- calculators/weight-of-a...](http://www.glassfab.com/tools/weight- calculators/weight-of-a-lens/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was one of the five sites I found for eyeglass materials. These are the others:

\- [http://www.allaboutvision.com/lenses/how-to- choose.htm](http://www.allaboutvision.com/lenses/how-to-choose.htm)

\- [https://web.archive.org/web/20090815102701/http://www.hbutz....](https://web.archive.org/web/20090815102701/http://www.hbutz.com:80/wwwboard/messages/201.html) (table at end)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_lens#Ophthalmic_mat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_lens#Ophthalmic_material_property_tables)

\- [https://web.archive.org/web/20160322110111/http://www.optica...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160322110111/http://www.opticampus.com/tools/materials.php)

Trivex is impact resistant and lighter but it's also a little thicker than some of the high index materials so the weight ends up being the same. MR-8 was the one I hadn't heard of and was most curious about.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4v3ts4/what_was_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4v3ts4/what_was_your_why_didnt_i_start_doing_this_sooner/d5vncsk/?context=1) has some notes about scratch resistance

With high index lenses, the chromatic aberration (low "abbe number") was annoying me (see ScottBurson's post), especially on a wide screen monitor. I ended up getting lenses made of _glass_. But these aren't so great outdoors because you don't want shattered glass in your eye.

I ended up getting glass for use at home at the computer and MR-8 for the rest of the time (hiking, driving). For the computer lenses, I got a slightly lower prescription (-4 instead of -5) and they're a lot more comfortable for reading (people may find these useful after the age of 40). I think next time I'll go for CR-39 instead of glass, as the glass lenses are rather heavy.

</comment><comment> gm-conspiracy Does anybody know where to order high-index lenses (1.74) in the US?

I can get them from China for about $150.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seiko 1.74 lens + premium hydrophobic AR for $140, [https://www.39dollarglasses.com/product_info/use_your_own_fr...](https://www.39dollarglasses.com/product_info/use_your_own_frame.html)

Essilor 1.74 + Crizal Avance for $230 at [http://www.replacementlensexpress.com/single-vision-clear- ul...](http://www.replacementlensexpress.com/single-vision-clear-ultra-high- index-1.74-lenses.html)

Jins has frame + lens (up to 1.67) for $120 flat price, [https://www.jins.com/us/our-commitments](https://www.jins.com/us/our- commitments)

MR-8 1.60 has better optical quality (higher Abbe, less chromatic aberration) than 1.67 or 1.74, even though it's cheaper: [http://ophthalmiclenses.blogspot.com/2012/05/all-about-mr- se...](http://ophthalmiclenses.blogspot.com/2012/05/all-about-mr- seriesmr-8-mr-7-mr-10-mr.html)

<comment><USER6> I've had 39 Dollar Glasses' 1.74 index for 2 years and am very happy.

Before 39DG, I ordered Zenni's 1.74 (in almost identical lens dimensions and effective lens PD). The lenses on Zenni's glasses were much thicker than any I'd previously had, and than 39DG's subsequent pair. I don't know whether Zenni mis-ground them or what. I'll gladly reorder from 39DG though.</comment></comment></comment>


Handling client-side routing and dynamic parameters (NX framework) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nx-framework.com/blog/public/routing/ <comment><AUTHOR> NX is a modular client-side framework, with three separate, focused middlewares for path routing, state-query parameter synchronization and in app navigation. Each of these are 100-200 lines long and easy to use.</comment>


PCSS – syntactic sweetener for CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/harmankang/pcss <comment><AUTHOR> it helps speed up designing with css. parser isn't complete yet, but still translates lots of my css</comment>


Dennis Crowley (foursquare cofounder) is holding Office Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.officehours.tv/senseis/dennis-crowley

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty cool concept. I like how this essentially opens up connections and opportunity to anyone.</comment>


Trump says he is suspending immigration over coronavirus, need to protect jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-suspending-immigration-over-coronavirus-need-protect-jobs-n1188416 <comment><USER2> possible dupe of:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931179) (earlier, twitter)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931290) (later, twitter)</comment>


The front pages of China's top newspapers are all the same today - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1112320/chinas-19th-party-congress-the-front-pages-of-chinas-top-newspapers-are-all-the-same-today-and-all-about-xi-jinping/ <comment><USER2> > Today in China, all the front pages have just one story to tell: The all- > powerful leader Xi Jinping was again elected general secretary of the > Chinese Communist Party.</comment>


Re-thinking WYSIWYG editors for Web CMS - <AUTHOR> http://www.amaxus.com/cms-blog/rethinking-web-cms-wysiwyg-editors

<comment><USER2> I'm experimenting with this as well as I'm layering TinyMCE over a wiki for my side project, Bibdex (dev image <http://bibdex.org:8080>). I have tried extending TinyMCE with a wiki syntax parser. However, I'm unconvinced there is real value in confusing the text with magic syntax, with one exception.

Wiki markup is mostly cosmetic, so you can throw all of it out--except for auto-linkification. Linking makes the wiki.

This was easy with CamelCase links, but much harder for free links or other types of links.

I do wonder if it's possible to train people to use exactly one syntactic form, the square brackets.

      [words] -> free link
      [http://url text] -> descriptive link
      [http://url] -> escaped link (useful to pick up trailing punctuation)

Presumably when you write a left square bracket, a floating div could appear with contextual help and auto-suggest.

If others are interested, I'm happy to share my efforts.

<comment><USER3> I think the article has it exactly backwards. Start with the link, and the popup part should prompt you for the plain text part. ie. I paste in "<http://example.com/> and the javascript/tinymce pops up a "Link Text >" prompt.

Much more intuitive IMHO than highlighting things which aren't obviously links, or adding extra syntax.

<comment><USER4> it should work both ways. sometimes you think of the link text first, url second. other times it's the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These rich text editors have control keys for linking. It's easy to link text without leaving the keyboard at all. Select text with arrows, press control+L, enter url, press return. You can also jump through words by pressing control+arrow. So, control+shift+arrow, control+L, url, return. It's basically what he's asking for with the last suggestion.

<comment><AUTHOR> But I guess that's still a shortcut for each formatting option? i.e. you need to remember each shortcut key (L for link, etc)? (If I read what you're saying correctly); whereas the blog is suggesting a single formatting shortcut that then shows more 'novice' users what the available options are, relative to what they already know (the buttons at the top).

Something like that! I'm still thinking it through (I wrote it...)

<comment><USER5> I think the issues raised in the post are interesting but not the biggest slowdowns people face when using web-based rich text editors. The biggest issue is simply moving around in the text. emacs / vi allow you to skip almost anywhere without leaving the keyboard once you're familiar with the method. That's the biggest save.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So similar to what Word 2007 is currently offering? You select text and an almost invisible ghost box appears, move your cursos in the box makes it appear fully.

</comment><comment><USER7> Instant rendering of markdown sounds like a good idea, if users care to invest time to learn it.

<comment><USER8> Not having to move your hand between keyboard and mouse is a huge time saver. It seems to me that the time you have to invest to learn it is minimal compared to what it will save in the long run.</comment></comment>


Steps to Building an Engineering Competency Matrix - <AUTHOR> https://circleci.com/blog/7-steps-to-building-an-engineering-competency-matrix/ <comment><USER2> To save others having to follow the two links necessary to chase down the matrix they're talking about to better understand the article:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhC...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit#gid=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Random story: I was in a team where we were tasked with creating a skills matrix containing everyone in the team for use by management to decide who would work on new projects. It started out simple and high level like having an "automated testing" skill, but then someone would decide to break that down further into "unit tests", "integration tests" etc. and rate themselves for each one as if the distinction was that important.

This then prompted people who had nothing to rate themselves for in those skills to create new skill categories and break those down into more and more little subcategories so they could show off all the skills they had. Pretty soon there was well over a hundred skills.

Your rating for each was something like it couldn't be over 5 out of 10 unless you'd use it in a production project (academic, side-project or open source use didn't count) and higher ratings required a specific number of years worth of use.

The skills matrix was never used for anything as far as I knew.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Consistently writes production-ready code that is easily testable, easily understood by other developers, and accounts for edge cases and errors."

That should be the bar for an E1, let alone E3.

<comment><USER5> You'd expect a new software engineer to do that without code reviews or help from the more experienced?

Lower your expectations ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion:

[https://books.google.com/books/about/Bullshit_Jobs.html?id=i...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Bullshit_Jobs.html?id=iHVEDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button)</comment>


Show HN: Kajero – Interactive JavaScript notebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/ <comment><AUTHOR> Source: [https://github.com/JoelOtter/kajero](https://github.com/JoelOtter/kajero)

<comment><USER2> really nice, was just looking at trying to use Jupyter but their JS kernels gave me issues. Being able to use arbitrary packages would be nice, babel transpiling would also be cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked into Babel but the standalone package is (comparatively) massive. Could be an optional extension, possibly.

I think it has potential for use as a way to write documentation for JS libraries, so being able to use arbitrary packages is certainly something I'd like to add. :)

<comment><USER3> One option to allow arbitrary packages that plays well with a gist-hostable style of notebook is to make use of the JSPM CDN (details towards the bottom of [http://jspm.io/](http://jspm.io/)). I've used that for little gh-pages hosted experiments in the past. It can be a powerful way to access both the GitHub and NPM ecosystems of JS libraries.

The JSPM CDN could also provide a way to load transpilers like Babel, Traceur, Closure, and Typescript.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks really useful. Could be just what I need - thanks a lot. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Upvoted. Running from source. Checking sources to see how to add more libraries. Hope we can use transpilers like coffeescript, truescript, scalajs, clojurejs and others to code on it. This looks like the perfect friendly Frankenstein monster to join all javascript modules and transpilers in one single running notebook.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been playing with developing a similar block-based editor, this was some tremendous inspiration in terms of UI and functionality. I especially like how blocks are rendered until you click on them, and they re-render when you blur the markdown input field. Being able to inject data sources into the document is brilliant. I really appreciate you open-sourcing your work, and I will definitely do the same with mine!

One thing we are both doing is relying heavily on icons to indicate the different kinds of blocks that can be added. To make the role of each icon more apparent, I added a tooltip on hover. This may be useful here as well, e.g. for the code blocks there is an icon that cycles between fa-refresh and fa-users that I didn't immediately understand.

Thanks again for this fantastic contribution!

<comment><AUTHOR> There should be tooltips on hover already. :) Best of luck with your project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome, thanks for sharing! A JavaScript notebook with D3 is just what I've been wanting. I'm wondering, what are the pros & cons of Kajero compared to using JavaScript in Jupyter or Beaker? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127540)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ever seen tonicdev.io? Is it possible to use npm packages in notebooks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, Tonic is super cool. This is more for presenting data than demoing libraries, but I'd like it to be as useful as possible for many things.

If you save it as an HTML file you can obviously add your own client-side JS. Node packages are a ways off right now though - would need to think about how to do it as it's all client-side.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps Browserify would be something that would work in this use case. Awesome job!

In addition, it might be cool to have in-line substitution of data. For example, in your analytics notebook[0], I noticed you referenced the number in text afterwards, but if Kajero was pulling from a live data source, it'd be neat to do something like this:

        Predictably, most came from the US ({{data.analytics[0]}}). There were also a lot ({{data.analytics[1]}}) from the UK - this is probably mainly due to it being posted on my Facebook page, with these hits being from friends rather than internet randoms.

[0]: [http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/?id=3dfe6ba41741626a95b3a717...](http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/?id=3dfe6ba41741626a95b3a7170508d169)

<comment><USER5> I second this - would be nice to have some kind of handlebars or nunjucks integration ([https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/](https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, this would be excellent. I'll look into it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea and great execution! Extremely useful. Thank you

</comment><comment><USER10> Any chance of adding something where code blocks can have some kind of styling applied to them (for example, partial widths)?

Combine that with 'hidden' code blocks and there could be some interesting territory here for non-technical hobbyist data display stuff, like RPG character sheets.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great idea! Might use this for some of our internal documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds cool - do let me know if you do anything interesting with it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> looks awesome!

A link to installation instructions would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER13> Where is the save button?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's in the editor view, beside the undo button, at the top-right.

It's not visible if no changes have been made (if the consensus is that's a bad idea I'm happy to change it).

<comment><USER14> If no changes have been made since the last save you could replace the save button with a message that states something to that effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds about right. Might fade it out and have that as the tooltip.

<comment><USER15> Disabled button is preferable to hiding</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How hard is it for a middle-age man to hit a major-league home run? - <AUTHOR> https://www.si.com/longform/2017/home-run-quest-mlb/index.html <comment><USER2> Over 38,000 practice swings hard. Wow. Really puts professional athlete's jobs in perspective.</comment>


Don't use CSS flexbox for overall page layout - <AUTHOR> http://jakearchibald.com/2014/dont-use-flexbox-for-page-layout/

<comment><USER2> Wonderful advice once there is a bit less red - [http://caniuse.com/#search=grid](http://caniuse.com/#search=grid)

grid is not supported on most locations, at the moment.</comment>


Facebook debuts 60 new Timeline apps, approving apps from all devs - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/01/18/facebook-open-graph-timeline-apps/ <comment><USER2> hrm.. how are you guys on hackernews looking to approach this? mainly by building an extension to your current apps to suit timeline? what are the psychological ticks that you guys find important and different and that we should tap on with the new timeline? LOL.. sorry.. kinda loaded.. :p</comment>


Ask HN: relocate to Bay Area - <AUTHOR>

I have been lived in Dallas, TX for almost 10 years. Currently works as a staff engineer.
The city is great, but I found in terms of startup opportunity, it is not that good. I tried to find some startup to join in, but there are just rare. I want a perm job and I do want to join an exciting start up. However, I am very frustrated that every day the tons of job posting in Dallas area just about J2EE in some old fashion corporation and non-ending short term contractor jobs.
I started to think maybe I shall leave here and come to Bay Area. So my question comes down to:
1. What kind of company I shall approach if I want Bay Area ? I did try some startup, but relocation looks like something difficult, so I am not sure I am wrong about this or not.
2. How much risk shall I take to join startup ? I have a family to feed, so obviously I don't want to stay in a very short-life startup.
3. Maybe my mindset is wrong ? Shall I take some other approach? Any advise, suggestion and critics are welcome. <comment><USER2> 1\. The company you want to approach should be something you're interested in. You don't want to just join any random startup. Relocating from Dallas to the Bay is a huge difference (I know because I lived in Dallas for 9 months before). The cost of living here is much higher so unless you've got something lined up, you probably don't want to move here as any savings you might have will dry up fast.

2\. Risk depends on the individual. You have to access the company, the vision, any funding they've received, etc... among several other factors, and determine whether or not this is a fit for you.

3\. To answer this part, why part of a startup if you just want a perm job?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for advise.

1\. yes, I am aware of COL is much higher. My expectation is that there is more opportunities than in Dallas. Did company has much higher expectation for a person if they need relocate from somewhere else ?

2\. I am totally newbie on "startup" thing, worked mostly in stable company for years. After I got know hacker news, I found that I got to try startup, the boring daily job just got crap out of me everyday and I felt I still can do something. When I searched around Dallas area, it is not even you have many choices, it is just you have no choice.

from what I read in hacker news, look like chances are much greater in Bay Area (Sillicon Valley) than anywhere else. If I can find some company can hire and relocate me, I believe that within a year or two, I can have more knowledge on startup and more opportunities to work for one I like.

3\. "perm" is just in term that it is not a 3/6-month contractor job. I wish company has 401k/health plan. Did most startup in Bay Area provide such thing or just barebone salary ?

<comment><USER2> 1\. Any company that relocates you would probably only do so if they believe you're the right fit and will perform well. Startups require a lot of work. Most people that works for a startup do not work a typical 40 hour week, especially the first hires. Culture fit and time invested is a huge deal for a lot of startups.

3\. Most offer just salary and possibly equity. It's common until the company grows bigger.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to manage health when running startup? - <AUTHOR> <comment> 100-xyz Good question.

Im working as a consultant and working on our startup on the side. Exercise seems to be taking a lower priority and my health is ok, but could be better. I bike to work - 45 minutes round trip. That helps a bit. But need to work out more.

Very interested in how other founders manage this.</comment>