The Cult of Work You Never Meant to Join - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jlengstorf/the-cult-of-work-you-never-meant-to-join-cd965fb9ea1a <comment><USER2> There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this will bring about (by allowing recharging, preventing burnout, etc.).

I worry that this already concedes too much. This allows for just as much stressful dominance of work over the rest of life, and shame over any deviation from this script, as maximizes productivity.

Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to worry about.

<comment><USER3> You can't look at yourself solely as an individual (unless you only depend on yourself), but have to look at yourself in the larger picture of our ecosystem. If your 'shorter-work-hours' results in everyone else needing to put in 'longer-work-hours' to satisfy global needs and/or demands, then there is an argument that you are a free-rider.

Instead, the totality of 'work-hours' needs to be examined in detail and we need to think about whether the distribution is 'fair' and how we can reduce 'work-hours' across the board, for all individuals.

<comment><USER4> Bullshit. Everyone else doesn't "need" to put in longer hours so I can have a reasonable schedule, and it's in no way my fault if they decide to do that.

I'm not a "free-rider". If my employer isn't satisfied with what I can do in a 40-hour week, then they shouldn't be paying me. I will absolutely not work 60-hour weeks on a regular basis.

If my individual interests clash with those of the "ecosystem", then my individual interests take precedence. If I don't look out for my work-life balance and overall happiness, then who will?

<comment><USER3> You examine yourself in a vacuum. Does your food come free? Does your water? At the current time, someone must do some work in order for you to remain living. Some of those people who do that work are not afforded the work-life balance others are able to achieve.

Can you eat your employer's bank credits?

<comment><USER5> Considering the vast majority of humans are doing "work" that doesn't help anyone get food or water I think this argument is a little specious. Who defines the necessary attributes of this environment?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that(vast majority)'s accurate. I'd guess many people go to a food distribution center daily, or at least weekly, to select and transport food for their family and friends. Many work in the food and beverage service industry, either serving or preparing food for consumption. Many are employed by manufactured foods factories. Transport trucks that go from production sites to distribution and/or manufacturing centers don't drive themselves yet. There are also those who actually work on raw production.

<comment><USER6> Most of the jobs you're listing here are hourly jobs with 40 hour workweeks; or they're at least paid overtime.

The salaried workers doing 60-70 hour weeks every week are not doing anything related to providing food or beverages. They're programmers, advertisers, sales, lawyers, etc. Not exactly life giving jobs.

I'm sure some Coca Cola, Nabisco, and McDonalds employees work 60+ hour weeks but they're not serving food, they're maximizing profits for the company.

We could all be well fed and hydrated without a single person working 60+ hours a week.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, it sounds like you only consider people in the United States, which is only about 5% of the human population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It has always bothered me that it's so common for people (including me) to say something like, "Man I've been working since 7:30 this morning" as a way of bragging "oh look at me I have such good work ethic, I'm so much better than people who work less than me."

But what really bothers me about it is that it's so hard to NOT work that much when other people ARE working that much. Like sometimes I'll come into work in the morning and there will be pages upon pages of conversation from the night before on HipChat. I have to now read all that stuff and try to understand the context or I'll fall behind just because I didn't want to stay up until midnight working.

I recently took a vacation. Only 4 days. I had a lot of fun but I couldn't help but feel regret for taking a vacation when I got back and realized how far behind I was because of how much stuff has moved on in just 4 days.

So am I part of this cult? Yes, absolutely. Luckily for me I'm not super deep into it: I still go to the gym and play piano. But I know I have a problem because every time I think about having kids, this resentment wells up inside of me because I know having a kid will make me less competitive at work. That can't be healthy... but I'm competitive and I fear getting left behind because my co-workers might choose NOT to start a family and instead stay up until midnight working.

<comment><USER8> I've been there. I'm officially topped out in my career field for the next 20(ish) years because of children. Anyone who moves past my current point either has no obligations, or have children who are out of the house as adults already. I made the choice to not let that stuff bother me. I miss out on some choice assignments. I miss out on some really interesting work. I miss many late-night brainstorming sessions and conversations with coworkers that are intellectually and professionally stimulating.

But I also got to take my kid to the circus for the first time last fall, I took two weeks' vacation this spring to just monkey around with the 2 year old for a while because the weather was supposed to be nice and trees were starting to leaf out, and tonight we have a play-date at a local jungle-gym while I know some of the other individuals at my level will be here until 8 or 9 working on a new center (and big-time resume boost).

As with everything, it's all about identifying and sticking to your priorities. You'll lose in some aspects professionally, but work isn't everything.

What did it for me was volunteering at a nursing home. Listen to the folks in those places. Do they talk about the choice work assignments they had? Do they talk fondly about the long hours they worked? The money they made? The stuff they bought?

Nope. They talk about travel, family and friends.

<comment><USER9> > _I miss out on some choice assignments. I miss out on some really > interesting work. I miss many late-night brainstorming sessions and > conversations with coworkers that are intellectually and professionally > stimulating._

That's not very nice of them, actually. Have you tried raising the point (civilly, of course) that it might be more convenient to switch to midday brainstorming instead of late night? A good employer ought to play to everyone's strengths.

<comment><USER10> At most companies sitting around and brainstorming etc is not really considered work. Nobody really minds when you are doing it late at night though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the cult of work has a different meaning for me. I've found that work is the one place where I am respected by many, and appreciated for output and creativity. Thus, I am drawn towards it to satisfy my own desire to have worth. I value it more than almost any other activity in my life, and that causes me to work more often than not, simply because it's the way I can feel better about myself?

Having a bad day? I can help another team's project and clear tons of their roadblocks. I now feel successful.

It's less subordination, or the other aspects for me. It's validation of self. I've spent my entire life working on technology, and I know it better than I know anything else.

That's where I need to escape. I am in the process of trying to create new hobbies to gain value in, because even though _I_ don't think there is a problem with me working constantly, it clearly is a problem to my family and friends who don't see me as often as they could.

<comment><USER12> If you're looking for places to gain value, your family and friends is a good place to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is an even more interesting, medical story hidden in this article.

Hyperthyroidism is thought to be affected, even caused, in some cases, by an abundance of stress. Having your beard turn gray and "ultra fine" are literally direct results of having too much thyroid hormones in your bloodstream. There aren't other pathologies that would lead to such a symptom, especially when presented suddenly, and ephemerally.

In other words, this guy might have had a temporary case of hyperthyroidism that could be directly attributed to a period of high stress.

Disclaimer: This is not medical advice or advice of any kind, and I'm not a doctor.

<comment><USER14> > Having your beard turn gray and "ultra fine" are literally direct results of > having too much thyroid hormones in your bloodstream.

I'd love to see if this is true via a blood test. I'm 32, and my beard has gone from a dark brown to very much gray in the last 12-18 months due to a highly stressful life. My brother calls it the "Obama Effect" due to how quickly Obama's gone grey over the last ~8 years (supposedly due to how stressful being POTUS is).

<comment><USER13> Also note, the graying of your hair or beard isn't necessarily related to thyroid hormone levels, unless the hairs themselves are also becoming very fine. Graying, of course, can also be related to stress.

<comment><USER14> I guess I'll get a blood test and find out :) Could also be something in my genome, will have to check that tonight on Snpedia.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Henry Ford introduced the 40-hour work week in 1914 because he saw — through > research — that workers on five eight-hour shifts kept up the highest > sustained levels of productivity.

Why does this ridiculous meme keep popping up? The 40 hour work week was a long and hard-fought battle, full of blood, tears and sweat. It was an uphill slog against the most powerful corporations in the world; lavour unions fighting tooth and nail for every minute of time away from work. It wasn't some flight of fancy by Henry Ford because it made his workers more productive, or so they had more time to buy stuff, or whatever other pieces of false history have been dreamt up.

</comment><comment><USER16> While I don't agree with everything in the article, I did enjoy its hyperbole and think it touched upon some really good points that are sometimes difficult to convey. Especially within an organization where the standard groupthink is hyper-driven and hyper-competitive.

I've observed similar patterns since joining the workforce at a large consulting shop several years ago. It's one of the reasons I started freelancing and will always seek to BYOB (Be your own Boss).

<comment><USER17> The problem with freelancing is that you are essentially becoming your own company and shifting the burden of finding continuous work, as well as absorbing all the inherent risk of running a business, on to your shoulders. Given that there are practically zero social safety nets in the US, this is a large undertaking not to be taken lightly. Simply put, it will add to the amount of hours you are working per day, not reduce them.

<comment><USER18> Going from working for a company to freelancing has definitely increased my number of daily work hours.

However, in between contracts I have the ability to take long breaks to work on my own projects or travel. Overall, the benefits have outweighed the risks for me, but then again, I'm just one data point.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, in this scenario, since a freelancer does not receive paid vacation time, they suffer 100% of the opportunity costs of missing out on billable hours as well as lost funding for things like retirement, paying for healthcare or the rising costs of housing. These are all exceedingly high costs that they must burden just to take time off. The situation gets even worse when there are large gaps between contracts. If a freelancer is young, he/she can absorb this for a while, but eventually it will become unsustainable and then they are right back to where they started from of working 40/50/60+ hours a week without vacations.

From my point of view, being a consultant/freelancer/contractor, whatever you want to call it, isn't a solution to the "Overkill Cult". If anything, it exacerbates the problem in the long run. What we need (in the US) are cultural shifts and at minimum basic policy changes such as mandatory maternity/paternity leave and increased annual leave that matches other western countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's important to balance work and life. Whether you do it on a daily basis, a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, make sure to do it. I worked 70 hour weeks for the first 10 years, and my health suffered, but then I learned to take long vacations and enjoy the fruits. I recommend you consider the same. Similarly, I may not have been able to take these enhanced balanced actions if I hadn't worked so hard early on. But, i believe it's more about working smart then hard.

</comment><comment><USER20> The patches of beard that stopped growing looks like alopecia areata[1]. It's an autoimmune condition, and can't find any indication that it's stress- related. I have it in my beard, it started a couple of years ago for no apparent reason. (in particular, I was not/am not overstressed at work).

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

<comment><USER21> Almost 7 years ago, I started suffering from Alopecia Areata on my head. Also, my beard hair started to slowly turn grey/white. At that time I was working about 90h/week. I still suffer from it to this day and it's most active when I'm stressed about something in my life, more and bigger bald spots than usual.

Not to say that all cases of the disease are caused by stress, but I've meet a few people (via my dermatologist at the time) where stress seems to have some relation to it.

<comment><USER22> Wow, I had the exact same thing start happening to me, roughly 7 years ago as well. And yeah it comes and goes, even to this day. My head hasn't had it in a few years, but I get it on my beard occasionally. Sometimes clears up within months, sometimes persists for a year.

At one point a blood test did show a blip in my thyroid levels but not within the range of a diagnosis for hyperthyroidism.

Periods of stress can definitely induce it. Which is why I'm trying to exercise a lot more and reduce stress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is really interesting. When is John Keynes' prediction we'd stop working because of massive gains in efficiences going to come to fruition?

</comment><comment><USER24> I am always working in the sense that ideas pop into my head at times that I can apply to my "work"...but I really only work about 20 actual hours a week, that being said, I am salaried and do not really get paid that much, I work with cult members but am a marked non member which makes things interesting and conversely makes me valuable. Try it out!

</comment><comment><USER25> The "Overkill Cult" is an artifact of a working world built on subordination rather than progress. When the VP is working till 7:00, the Director better be there with him and then some (if the VP delegates out the door). In many companies, this ripples down the chain. It's a very old rule: don't sit when the king stands, and never appear more relaxed than your boss. To not participate in shared suffering is taken as rude, even if there's no good reason for that suffering to exist. Unfortunately, an attempt to remove that suffering from existence will upstage the VP and end one's career even faster.

The Big Lie is that most people aren't being paid for their intelligence or creativity or even their "potential", but for their availability. They're excess capacity. For a variety of social reasons, though, management needs to come up with 8 hours per day of work for them. Worse yet, there's a fucked-up incentive structure. Since a manager's job is often to make work, set meetings, and change what people are working on, you have a culture where overachievers end up overmanaging and that usually devolves into micromanagement or some other pathology. If a manager over-does his job, you don't get an efficient organization: you get monstrosities that look like Scrum. A good manager over-does his job upfront and very briefly (to remove standing problems) but then sits back and underworks at the management thing. His job is to make himself not needed.

Before about 1975, the culture of subordination made sense. It's an age-old pattern: subordinates do the work, and dominant people "lead" or "manage" or "order". It's failing us now because computers simply outperform us in all ways-- availability, cost, reliability, context-agnosticism-- when it comes to subordinate work. They work 24-hour days and don't give a shit about whether they're being trained up to something better (like their boss's job). We now live in an era where there's a strong social pressure to work in a way that makes one eventually replaceable by a machine or, at least, a person of lower skill (e.g. a "commodity Java programmer" instead of a hacker magician).

The old industrial regime didn't only require widespread subordination, but it required layers of educated, intermediate subordinates. They had to be given a sense of importance (19th century clerks, 20th century middle managers and "junior executives") but their working lives needed to be mediocre, because making people into a machine is hard and making a large group of people into a machine is _so_ hard that it demands hierarchy and it demands an elevated-but- still-subordinate tier. This need for intermediate subordinates meant that our (errant?) tendency, in human organizations, to promote people based on their being good subordinates, rather than creative ability or leadership, didn't hurt us that much-- not back then. Now it does, because this skill of turning a mass of people into a machine is far less useful, because actual computing machines are better machines than we could ever be.

Unfortunately, I don't see this changing, because humans are short-sighted and too often focused on relative dominance rather than absolute prosperity. It's like the Chinese finger trap. Technological unemployment and underemployment are real and the severe mismanagement of the prosperity that technology generates means that average people (and even computer programmers) have to fight harder to get the dwindling number of jobs. You don't deliver genuine progress by "fighting"\-- it takes time and reflection and collaboration-- but our instinct amid scarcity is to fight each other and the behavior of competing-to-subordiante (as in a chieftain's harem, or in capital's harem, also known as the corporation) is quite old as well. You get the macho- subordinate culture (i.e. a race to the bottom) of Scrum and open plan offices (violent transparency). It's a losing battle because we're fighting to do something that we, as humans, are no longer competitive at. Ultimately, anything that can be done by a ScrumDrone in 2015 will be done by a compiler or a tool in 2030.

Personally, I would rather accept this and focus on progress instead, but it's hard to make that statement without drawing the "you just don't want to be a subordinate" rebuttal (and that's true, I don't) and be painted as "not a team player". So little progress is made and, from what progress does occur, the prosperity it generates is badly invested. Thus, we have a world in which people work harder _and_ more productively, but for a personal take that is stagnant at best and quite possibly (considering hyperinflation in the Satanic Trinity of housing, health expenses, and tuition costs) declining.

Long hours persist because, ultimately, the most measurable way to subordinate is to spend an ungodly amount of time in the office, which is a place where no one-- _especially_ not the people who enjoy the work and want to be productive-- really wants to be.

<comment><USER26> "never appear more relaxed than your boss."

This is so true and has gotten me into trouble many times.

I'm highly focused, I worry a lot about the downside, I work hard but my calm exterior and relaxed, aproachable manner has led this type of comment: "You're a pretty laid back kind of character, aren't you". Meant as a criticism, not compliment.

I hate it. Not sure what to do about it. Submit to the corporate BS, or startup on my own with my own rules.

<comment><USER27> Stop being a slave to looks. I'm as laid back as I can be. I don't panic when something happens. Yes, I've had management get mad at me for not screaming in a panic with them, but I don't care.

Of course, I don't care about their profits either or how they look to their boss. Yes, that makes some management types annoyed that you don't sell your soul to the company.

Show up, do your job well. If you do you will be calmer. You are just there to do the job you were hired for. Stop caring so much about anything else.

<comment><USER28> I think that reflects more poorly on you than you might think. Not because you're calm and laid back but because you don't care. If you're working a job that doesn't excite or, at least, interest you, you're not doing anyone any favors by continuing to work that job.

Do yourself a favor and find something you like to do and a place you like to do it in.

<comment><USER27> > I think that reflects more poorly on you

Only if you are interested in climbing the corporate ladder. And I don't care about that.

Yes I suppose it's bad that I'm not passionate about making money, heaven forbid.

<comment><USER29> You're advocating simply refusing to participate in the game, which may be a good choice for you personally but probably isn't applicable more broadly. As an overly-extreme example, imagine if a woman responded to sexual harassment by refusing to ever get a job again. It may have solved the problem for her, but it's not good advice to give someone experiencing the same thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


40 Years of Unix - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8205976.stm

<comment><USER2> Semi-obligatory companion link to _The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_ :

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook>

Now entirely obsolete, of course. Today everyone has come to love everything about Unix, the most perfect OS in this best of all possible worlds. ;)

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, the worst operating system there is—apart from all the others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Multics: carefully engineered, fail.

Unix: small and hacked together, success.

Plan 9: carefully engineered, fail.

I'm not sure what the lesson is here... there's that "worse is better" essay... maybe it's that when great engineers let their hair down, they do much better?

<comment><USER3> The lesson to be learned is, surely, the same one as we should have learned from the web: creating small pieces, loosely coupled is the best way to build large systems. Ecosystems, not clocks.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't explain why Plan 9 failed, it's really a better version of Unix but it never caught on.

<comment><USER6> "Better" isn't enough to gain traction. You need to provide something completely new.

<comment><USER7> Better can be enough, if it's ENOUGH better. The rule of thumb is that something has to be at least twice as good to replace a similar but already functioning system (the real costs of retraining and lost productivity during the changeover can almost never be accurately calculated, that's why there is the rule of thumb). For an academic view, see "The Fable of the Keys" <http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html> about qwerty vs Dvorak; and the version that was expanded into a book about Dvorak, Microsoft, and the internet [http://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Stan- Liebowit...](http://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Stan- Liebowitz/dp/0945999844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250787834&sr=8-1) .

ADDED: And Christensen in "Innovator's Dilemma" [http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary- Busin...](http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business- Essentials/dp/0060521996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250788049&sr=1-1) shows how slight improvements can gradually replace something that was originally better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is really sloppy and full of errors; it's not worth reading.

 _Unix had computer networking built in from the start_

Bill Joy and his buddies added networking to Unix in 4.2BSD around 1977, 8 years after the _start_.

 _Work on Unix began ... after AT &T, ..., MIT and GE pulled the plug on ... Multics._

AT&T pulled out in April 1969, but the development of Multics continued elsewhere; GE/Honeywell/Bull worked on it until 1990: <http://www.multicians.org/chrono.html>

_The syntax of many of those commands, such as chdir and cat, are still in use 40 years on._

 _chdir_ doesn't exist on Unix. It's _cd_.

 _The idea of users directly interacting with the machine was downright revolutionary._

In a way, yes. But this revolutionary idea was also present in CTSS and Multics before Unix started, heavily backed by DARPA, and the major reason for the ARPANET project that began in 1969. By the time Unix V7 was out (in 1977?), in addition to many timesharing systems, PARC was pursuing Alan Kay's 1969 Dynabook vision, there were Altos in operation at PARC, the Star was well on its way to production, and thousands of Altairs had been sold, not to mention things like the COSMAC ELF, the IMSAI, the Osborne 1, and the Apple ][. All of these had, as their central principle, the idea of users interacting directly with the machine.

 _What helped this grassroots movement was AT &T's willingness to give the software away for free._

Not to anybody but universities, and I think even an academic license included some derisory fee.

 _In May 1975 it got another boost by becoming the chosen operating system for the internet._

Not even close. If there was a chosen operating system for the internet in the late 1970s, it was TOPS-20.

 _The wars are over and the Unix specification is looked after by the Open Group - an industry body set up to police what is done in the operating system's name._

That is a severe misrepresentation both of the origin of OSF and of the current activities of the Open Group.

</comment><comment><USER9> _the Unix philosophy heavily influenced the open source software movements and the creation of the Linux desktop OS_

Of course there are plenty of desktop Linux distros, but most Linux machines in the wild are running servers.

<comment><USER10> I'd say most Linux machines in the wild are running on consumer devices.

<comment><USER11> Both can be true simultaneously. My server is running on a consumer device.

<comment><USER11> Scratch that. I just realized that he wasn't referring to desktop computers when he said consumer devices. I now think he meant set-top boxes and things of that nature.

<comment><USER10> Bingo, the tivo's and tomtom's of the world. and if you go by generic unix- style systems, you can throw in iphones and ipod touches to that list too.

<comment><USER10> tivos and tomtoms rather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have the book "A Quarter Century of UNIX", published June 1994. I bought it some time later. Still, this is making me feel old. ;)

[http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Addison-Wesley- Sy...](http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Addison-Wesley- Systems/dp/0201547775)</comment>


Any site with pagination to subdivide content into 2 or 3...  - <AUTHOR>

... needs to die <comment><USER2> did ... needs to die really need to be on a separate page?</comment>


Scientists Question Validity of Major Hydroxychloroquine Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html <comment><USER2> @dang any reason this disappeared from the home page?

Other hydroxycholoquine articles weren't buried, it'd be a shame for the correction to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people got hung up on the politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There may be safer zinc ionophors and we have to reserve some of the chloroquine supply for the important people. Thankfully many doctors are smarter than our news media workers.</comment>


A bunch of coding challenges solved in one line of code - <AUTHOR> https://swiftoneliners.com <comment><USER2> "rm -rf /" ought to do it.

</comment><comment> java-man if I see this nonsense in a pull request, it would get "more work needed" and a comment to make it human readable.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sounds like you missed the point here.</comment></comment>


Fighting Fakes Was a Big Reason Behind Amazon's Big Vendor Purge - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-09/fighting-fakes-was-a-big-reason-behind-amazon-s-big-vendor-purge <comment><USER2> Here's what is sorta amusing about this... nearly every time the topic of counterfeits on Amazon comes up here on HN, somebody posts some variation of "Amazon don't care about this problem", or "they have no incentive to ever fix it", etc.

And yet in the past week or two it appears that they are, indeed, taking rather substantive action to try and address this problem.

Moral of this comment: don't put too much faith in analysis gleaned from anonymous Internet comments? :-)

<comment><USER3> They are trying to do something, that much is certain.

I am not yet convinced they are actually trying to solve the problem of counterfeit goods being sold through them.

I think I will wait to see what the results are, before I come to any conclusions.</comment></comment>


Pocket Lists sales: $13500 in first 3 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.1312.ru/blog/Pocket-Lists-sales-13500-in-first-3-months/

<comment><USER2> When you consider that this took two people 10 months to write and that lifetime app sales are usually heavily front loaded this starts to look like a pretty poor value proposition, particularly when you consider how much money people with the skills it takes to write these apps could have made consulting in the same time.

 _No matter what kind of movie you are watching and how expensive the movie was to produce, either it is a blockbuster or an art house film, the ticket price is the same._

Indeed. And this means you're way better off consulting for somebody else unless you think you can get an app into the top twenty. I've had apps in "New & Noteworthy" and "What's Hot" and I can still make as much in a day consulting as I do in a month selling my own apps.

<comment><USER3> > I can still make as much in a day consulting as I do in a month selling my > own apps.

I suppose it's worth bearing in mind that the app will presumably continue to generate money for a long time to come for little to no work, whereas you will always have to do a day's work to get a day's consulting pay.

<comment><USER2> In my experience and in most of the reports I've read the "long tail" is pretty thin. Unless you're continuously updating and marketing your apps sales will trickle off. I'm sure some apps are an exception to this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been said before but this; "7. At the first hand, release the app for yourself and your friends. If they don't use and don't like your app, it is hardly that everybody else will."

Hugely important! Congrats guys and thanks for a useful write up

<comment><USER5> For clarity, are you saying friend test before releasing to the app store or before advertising?

<comment><USER4> I'm saying that you need to go beyond dogfooding - it's all well and god if you like the app, as you have a market of one at least :)

But you really need to get your app out to non tech friends as soon as it's workable and get their feedback. If they don't like it or get it, it's unlikely customers who don't know you will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks a bunch for this, very helpful stuff. And congrats on your well-earned success!

I just launched an app a couple of weeks ago and am past that first spike on your graph (we were reviewed on AppAdvice last week and on TheNextWeb yesterday).

So following your formula for success, I need to add some iOS 5 features and get Apple to feature it. I'll get on that right away. ;) It seems like every single success story of app devs has that in common: they were featured by Apple. That's the maddeningly frustrating part of it all because that process is such a black box.

<comment> k-mcgrady It's not totally black box. Some sections (e.g. New & Noteworthy) aren't too hard to get into. I've been featured in them a few times when I launch a new app that gets a high number of sales in the first week. To get into the section therefore you need a good app and good launch marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its interesting that they broke down their earnings over the 3 months and how certain review sites don't affect sales.

However it took 2 of them 10 months to build it full time? I can understand if they didn't know how to code but it appears that can, I seriously don't get how it took them that long. Sure the app does look great but, this has to be a side project...

</comment><comment><USER8> > _The situation changed when we released an update to version 1.1 ... the > Pocket Lists app was featured in the New & Noteworthy section in both > Russian and (hooray!) US App Stores._

So was it just blind luck that you were featured there? What will you be doing with your next app to ensure you're similarly featured?

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for saving me a few dollars by avoiding paid reviews. The pricing information/perspective was very helpful too.

<comment><USER9> And I'd love a follow up article telling how much hitting the front page of HackerNews helps your sales bump!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, not bad. I was surprised to see a new to-do list app do pretty well, knowing how many are out there. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER11> Yet another "get featured by apple, make money" story.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for sharing. Could you have achieved more/less with outsourcing the development? Bulk of sales came from spike-can the exceptional sales be maintained?</comment>


Rogers Phone Finder - What happens if you only learn jQuery - <AUTHOR> https://www.rogersphonefinder.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is horrible, yet from Canada's largest(?) wireless carrier??

Checkout: <https://www.rogersphonefinder.com/javascripts/conf.js> <https://www.rogersphonefinder.com/javascripts/fq.js>

and you can bypass all the business logic, including checking someone's location I think.

Did I mention that they store your password in plaintext in a cookie? #facepalm

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit confused is the problem the fact that they implement a full API client in javascript and you can read the code?

The plain-text password in the cook seems to be it's huge flaw, but I don't see the problem with the fact that you can circumvent the javascript as long as business rules are still validated on the server side.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, and they don't - it does return a random location when I put in a random user_id (they simply expose a user object in the global space with all sorts of attributes in it). They totally upped Apple's "Find My Friends" with this "Find My Strangers" site.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Mobile image cropping that doesn't suck - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lharding/CropCircle

<comment><USER2> doesn't look like it does ellipses? I had looked into doing something similar for faces but needed to use ellipses.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does indeed do ellipses - just pass a falsey value for forceAspect in the constructor options and it will let you select an arbitrary ellipse. You can also pass a float value for forceAspect to get that aspect ratio (e.g. 1.777 = = 16:9 TV screen).</comment></comment>


FaceTime looks to go 3G in iOS 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.9to5mac.com/71240/facetime-looks-to-go-3g-in-ios-5-up-to-carriers-to-enable/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29&utm_content=Twitter <comment><USER2> I just used this for the first 'real time' with my wife and kids while I am half way across the country. And it was simply an amazing value add to the call

Add 3G support and getting carrier approval would allow this to become more universal. I hope this is the case and not another 'tethering' moment.</comment>


Temporary Web Hosting. Free - <AUTHOR> http://yesse.io/ <comment><USER2> Why are you offering this service?

Why is it structured like this?

Help me wrap my mind around this.</comment>


Ask HN: Subscribe to SEO Book or no? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like a basic rundown on SEO techniques, the latest research and tools, etc., and I came across SEO Book (http://www.seobook.com/join/).<p>Has anyone used this service?  Any thoughts about whether it's worth the $300/month (steep!)? <comment><USER2> The reason our pricepoint is $300/mo is because our service is nearly/roughly comparable to buying SEO consulting from a top SEO company. The speed with which questions get answered in the forums, the depth of the answers, and how noise free it is makes it an unparalleled/unmatched experience. Rather than creating around "what would sell" I created around what I would want to buy. And since we make plenty of $ elsewhere, part of why we pushed the price up on SEO Book was to increase the quality of the membership base. And it worked well!

And a lot of times when you buy SEO consulting you get strung along, etc. Whereas with us you get direct access to us on the forums and quick direct answers. Amongst our staff and subscribers there is literally over a thousand years of SEO experience you get to tap into. I have been doing SEO since 2003 & some of our moderators have been in the game twice as long as I have.

At some point we will launch multiple tiers / access levels & those who are not paying for access to the forums will have a much lower pricepoint...likely closer to ~ $50 or $60 a month (though we are still thinking this through).

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your pitch, it's definitely compelling. I'd like to sample some of the content first, though, so I'll poke around some more on the site, see what I can find.

Thanks for responding directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SEOBook and SEOMoz are both excellent services. I would recommend using all of their free resources first. SEOBook has a free 7 day "course" you can sign up for to get a feel for it, plus a lot of free content. SEOMoz also has excellent tools and information as well.

If you are just looking for the basics there is a ton of free information out there. Hit seo.alltop.com to see the majority of the best sites for SEO news and information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic. Thanks for the tips and the link.</comment></comment>


Tomorrow, a Spacecraft Will Try to Land on a Comet for the First Time Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/11/rosetta-philae-attempt-comet-landing/

<comment><USER2> It's an amazing thing, this living in the future.</comment>


Show HN: Review aggregation Demo: iPhone 6s Plus - <AUTHOR> http://app.feedcheck.co/demo?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> If anybody is interested by this tool you have many info here: [https://feedcheck.co](https://feedcheck.co)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please give us feedback</comment>


How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke - <AUTHOR> http://cnnsi.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Recession+or+no+recession,+many+NFL,+NBA+and+Major+League+-+03.23.09+-+SI+Vault&expire=&urlID=34801184&fb=Y&url=http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1153364/1/index.htm&partnerID=289881

<comment><USER2> _"The solution to the problem is, without a doubt, education," the adviser says. "Change won't happen until grown men start wanting to learn."_

That sums it up right there and by "it," I mean "all of it." _The_ problem. The problem with our society. The problem with the educational system. The problem with our national debt. With our dependence on foreign oil.

Why don't people want to learn anymore? I don't understand why it seems so easy, so obvious, that "this" just isn't the way.

Am I the only one frustrated by the continued bad decision making? We sell these poor athletes, and I mean _poor_ in every sense, the illusion of wealth and fame and happiness and then _rip_ the carpet right out from under them. It takes years, decades of dedication to a dream and then they are bankrupt. Not only do they not have the millions they were "promised," but they have no education, no skills applicable outside sports, their bodies are too old to do the only thing they can do.

Why do we keep doing this to people?

It's really sad. It makes me really sad.

What's going to happen? I can't see anything good coming from this. I can't see any good future down this path. It feels so much like the _wrong_ path. I feel like I'm being taken down this bad path against my will. I don't want to go down this path, but it's like I'm stuck in this huge pack of people all stampeding toward a huge cliff and I don't want to run over the cliff. "There's a cliff ahead!!" I yell and no one hears it, they're too busy running, not even knowing where they are going.

What am I supposed to do? What are people who don't want to go off the cliff supposed to do?

<comment><USER3> "Why don't people want to learn anymore?"

Most of these athletes never did.

They are the opposite of us. While we were misunderstood for all those years working our butts off in anonymity, they were getting their butts kissed. From the time they were toddlers. All the way through school where they were promoted along whether or not they ever went to class.

When you have nothing left for the ass kissers to kiss, then what are you going to do?

<comment><USER4> I was shocked the other day to read that basically really good athletes at a top-tier sports schools are basically professional athletes. Boosters lease SUVs like Cadillac Escalades, give the athletes the keys to the car - and it's all quasi-legal because the Boosters aren't technically directly affiliated with the athletic program.

When in the States there is so much societal pressure to be athletic/look athletic/enjoy the spectacle of sports, I think we are in trouble where Asian tigers like China have societal pressure _and_ strong peer approval to study hard and aspire to become engineers.

<comment><USER5> Sports programs in US schools are quite remarkable. They clearly bring in a lot of revenue for the schools and it seems to me that's a good thing.

The bad thing is everything having to do with the student athletes.

So why not just make college sports professional. Just like the NFL and the NBA, this would simply be another league, made up of college branded teams.

Ah, but we can't do that, we can't call a spade a spade. Society has to maintain a charade. It's like collectively we're in the closet. And we're very passionate about college sports but we just can not get out of the closet and say fuck it, just make the sports program professional.

<comment><USER6> Only a few schools make money off the football team, for example UTexas and Duke. Most lose money on sports.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that many externalities, both positive and negative, are ignored (sometimes selectively) when schools make statements about the profitability of a sports program. A few months ago, I was surprised to learn that the daughter of my wife's friend was not accepted to Ohio State. She was an in- state resident with a 23 on her ACT. Hardly a stellar score, but above the National average. Back in my day (15 years ago), she would have been rubber- stamped. Apparently, OSU was able to parlay its success on the football field into lots of undergrad applications. So, they were able to become more selective. This may be the start of a positive feedback loop that results in a reputation more like U of M than some random state college.

[No, I don't think reputation is everything. But, if that's what they wanted to improve, sports may have been a very efficient mechanism for all the wrong reasons.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sorry but I feel really unsympathetic about this story. And I've read basically the same thing in multiple places. You will always find examples of people with the extreme misfortune of having more money than brains. These people are in a special class because nothing you do or say will ever change the outcome.

I've sat through the classes as the coach brought in a "life coach" to explain money, contracts, and being an adult. Most will absorb the information and understand. You get the few wayward knuckleheads where nothing matters. If you present a real life case of misfortune they will imagine a scenario where they dance around. Example:

Coach: ...this star athlete let his best friend be his money manager. He mishandled it and our athlete was broke and owned the government $100ks in taxes.

Knucklehead: That won't happen to me. I'd let my mom handle the money, she's good with numbers.

Coach: Son that's not the point. YOU have to be aware of YOUR finances or you could find yourself in the same situation.

Knucklehead: Nah, I trust my mom. She'd never do me like that.

>> Not the actual conversation but similar.

If they were in the 40s or 50s when star athletes were starting to post large numbers I could feel a little sympathy. They might not have known, but if you are in the 20s or 30s chances are someone has given you the speech on protecting your interests first.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this the same article as the one submitted earlier?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530151>

It sure looks like the same article. It's hard to tell at a glance with this kind of URL, which evidently doesn't trigger duplicate detection.

</comment><comment><USER10> Posted here before, but still good.

I wonder if this happens to founders? Surely there are some twentysomethings who saw their balance go from three digits to seven in a day. They probably do not have seven kids or a poverty mindset to be unlearned, but surely some have problems.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just counted 14 people that I know who did a master's degree. Almost all of them in the Engineering, math or Comp Sci fields.

None of those people paid to do it. I wasn't aware that anyone actually paid to do a Masters. I always assumed that grants, scholarships, fellowships and research dollars paid for a masters.

Do people, outside of an MBA*, actually pay for their Masters degree?

<comment><USER12> Not sure what that has to do with the article, but...

Yes, it's pretty common to pay for a master's. A lot of departments will only fund PhD students (automatically). Master's only people usually have to "pay their own way", although that might consist of finding their own research or teaching assistantship, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Around the house is my grandfather's ca. 1911 yearbook from a midwestern engineering school. I was entertained to read a two page item by the yearbook staff calling for a better sports program to draw attention to the school. The school survives, but probably remains in D III.

</comment><comment><USER14> Over the last decade from time to time I've been trying to figure out how to make contacts in rural America to gain startup funding and these athletes are investing in total crap?

Instead of VCs, I should have been pitching football players.

<comment><USER15> Read the article again. They invest in crap businesses because the ideas are simple and the products they offer are physical. The thinking goes, if the t-shirt company goes I still have the t-shirts which I can autograph and sell.

Your idea wouldn't go very well, stick to VCs.

<comment><USER14> I didn't gather that. I mean, I got the part about _Securities are invisible, after all, and if you don't study them, they're unintelligible. Not to mention boring. Inventions, nightclubs, car dealerships and T-shirt companies have an advantage: the thrill of tangibility._

But flotation devices for furniture? Inspirational movies? Restaurants? Missing prenuptials?

I grant that athletes might tend towards more physical goods, but I'll bet you good money there has been a lot invested in less tangible ones as well.

Actually I've given up on VCs for now. Their track records are worse than mine. Bootstrapping is much more logical for technology in this climate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As Rod the Mod said a long time ago: He's got a lot more money than sense...

</comment><comment><USER17> A good reading for anyone who feels bad about being a programmer.

<comment><USER18> Why? So we can feel better about ourselves because some other person found more financial success and still managed to botch it all up? I don't understand this. People read garbage tabloids for the same reason. Why does seeing someone else's hard fall make people feel better about having never achieved their own goals?

<comment><USER19> Yes, precisely, and not necessarily because we think they didn't deserve their short-lived wealth, but rather for the same reasons that people prefer relative wealth to absolute wealth (citation needed): Because you can't stand it when others fare better than you. And what's wrong with that? It is the foundation of a healthy competitive spirit which drives people to succeed.</comment></comment></comment>


HP outrages printer owners after it blocks the use of cheap ink cartridges - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/hp-outrages-printer-owners-after-it-blocks-the-use-of-cheap-ink-cartridges-by-stealth-20160921-grl6ea.html <comment><USER2> Much previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524031)

</comment><comment><USER3> So 10's of thousands, maybe even 100's of thousands of people had working inks in their printers, then HP pushed their way into those printers and did something, and now those people don't have their ink anymore.

You might argue that HP was "allowed" into those printers by some EULA agreement so that makes it somehow better, but if the cable guy whom you allowed into your house tried to walk out with your TV you might call it stealing...

If they're seriously allowed to do this, how is that different from just ordering all of the printers to dump their inks into the spill tray whenever they need a revenue bump?

So "remember that time when HP hacked all those printers and stole everyones ink?" seems about right to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a stupid move, but I've pretty successfully gone without a printer at home for several years now. I've had to actually print something only once in the past few years. That was for work and work has printers so I don't need one at home.

</comment><comment><USER5> Using printers has become so unpleasant that most people are just giving it up, or trying to.

(Warning: loud auto-playing video.)

</comment><comment><USER6> While being a despicable business practice, if it contributes to people going paperless....

</comment><comment><USER7> I just use Brother Laser printers -- Ink Jet is just a brutally bad way of printing. The multi-function printers are ultra reliable and cheap to operate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Always read the fine print when you agree to automatic software updates, folks (and read the fine print on manual updates, too!)

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, with the sheer number and pace of updates for the myriad of devices and apps we all have, combined with the Byzantine wall of legalese that most of those agreements are, that's practically impossible.

Not to mention, you shouldn't have to make a choice between accepting a security update or disabling features that you bought.

I think it's actually a consumer protection issue, especially where hardware is concerned.

Any update that fundamentally alters the way a device functions from the time of purchase should be disallowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> But only on a handful of LaserJet (or OfficeJet?) Pro models.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised people are reacting so badly: these are _laser_ printers— _toner_ cartridges (which for some reason the headline is calling "ink") are dirt cheap, completely unlike inkjet ink cartridges.

<comment><USER12> The article is definitely about ink not laser toner.

As to your assertion, cheap? Wait until the printer is a couple of years old or more. For my Laserjet:

Genuine HP toner from their UK store: £83 each colour, £49-£58 Amazon.co.uk

 _Lots_ of generics in the £15-£30 range on Amazon, and a couple of sets of 4 at £40.</comment></comment>


Tony Hsieh Steps Down from Lead Role at Las Vegas Downtown Project - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/09/30/tony-hsieh-steps-down-from-lead-role-at-las-vegas-downtown-project/ <comment><USER2> Wait, wasn't it just _yesterday_ that Re/Code published its glowing profile of Hsieh's Downtown Las Vegas?

Yes, yes it was. [http://recode.net/2014/09/29/downtown-las-vegas-is-the- great...](http://recode.net/2014/09/29/downtown-las-vegas-is-the-great- american-techtopia/)

How did they miss this until today?

<comment><USER3> Saw "Connie Yeh, a former Citibank trader, nows runs an entrepreneurship preschool" and couldn't continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone explain why it makes sense to build a new community/ecosystem in Las Vegas? Not only is the climate terrible, there are problems with even having enough water: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/05/lake_mead...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/05/lake_mead_which_supplies_most_of_las_vegas_water_is_at_record_low_levels.html)

There must be plenty of cities across the Midwest without such problems that would be a better choice for such an initiative.

<comment><USER5> Bad climate and lack of water are two common misconceptions applied to both Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Both are hot and dry, which many people love. Hot and dry > hot and humid, which is Texas, Florida, and most of the area in between. Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Florida are the top retirement destinations for folks from the Midwest and Northeast, sick of cold and snow. Personally I prefer Las Vegas to the others because it's dry and doesn't have bugs (unlike Texas and Florida) but it's not quite as hot as Phoenix (which runs about 10'F hotter).

Water wise, Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, less than an hour's drive away from downtown Las Vegas. Lake Mead's water is used by several states under a complicated water sharing agreement, but push come to shove, you can't physically move it out of Nevada. No significant water use restrictions have been placed on Las Vegas. By contrast, look at the situation in California, where some towns have had to resort to trucking in water because even their groundwater resources are entirely depleted.

<comment><USER6> > Water wise, Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, less > than an hour's drive away from downtown Las Vegas. Lake Mead's water is used > by several states under a complicated water sharing agreement, but push come > to shove, you can't physically move it out of Nevada.

Actually, it really wants to move out of Nevada on its own, which is why it takes the Hoover Dam to keep it there -- and, even so, its not all in Nevada to start with.

And, push come to shove, the Colorado River is dammed further upriver than Lake Mead, so, in a sense, the reservoir _could_ be moved out of Nevada. (As the reduction in releases from Lake Powell to Lake Mead recently demonstrates.)

Or, more importantly, it could cease to exist as useful reservoir with only a few more of the poor water years without a significant break that have been the norm since 2000.

<comment><USER7> > Or, more importantly, it could cease to exist as useful reservoir with only > a few more of the poor water years without a significant break that have > been the norm since 2000.

I've seen Hoover Dam from the inside. I'd pay to see it again at the bottom from the former lake bed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> His presentation at Long Now was inspiring: [http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/apr/22/helping- revitalize-...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/apr/22/helping-revitalize- city/)

(I only listened to the podcast, didn't watch the video)

It sounded like everything was coming up roses and money back then. Hoping to hear an update.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've always been interested in the Downtown Project but haven't had a chance to visit. Can someone more familiar with it comment on the state of download Las Vegas now?

<comment><USER9> I know a couple of people who live in Vegas who are familiar with the project. Based on what they have been saying, it is a prime example of why it is not possible to create a "startup hub" just by pouring money into some random city. You also need great educational institutions nearby as well as a healthy mix of angel investors and VCs. Attract enough smart, curious and self-driven people to create a "critical mass" and then have lots of money available to fund the ideas that emerge. That's what made SV what it is.

I was actually asked if I'd be interested in moving to Vegas to join an accelerator to seriously pursue one of my ideas, but I declined. In my mind, Vegas is for weekend getaways. I could never live there.

Besides that, the project seems to suffer from typical nepotism. When you're giving jobs to family and friends without paying any attention to whether they are qualified, you are shooting yourself in the foot and significantly decreasing your chances of success in a project that's already very ambitious. I hope things work out but it isn't looking good right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you read reviews from Zappos employees on GlassDoor starting a couple years back, you got the impression that Tony's heart wasn't in zappos anymore, it was in the Downtown Project.

I wonder where his heart is now? It's sad to see, Tony's Vegas ambitions were so wild and unique. It was impossible not to root for him.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't help but conclude that someone who is so obsessed with creating "Happiness" is actually not that happy. Otherwise why would he be chasing it with such desperation? One profile of Tony Hsieh said that he has literally read hundreds of books about how to create happiness, and of course he wrote one too.

A person who is happy is not reading hundreds of books about happiness. And that person will also not become happy through doing that. Happiness is not something you can create externally. (Yes, if you're starving and homeless then having some money and material possessions would definitely make you happy. But we are talking about multimillionaires and billionaires here who are not in that situation.)

I think the entire downtown project has much less to do with creating some sort of startup utopia than it has to do with something personal that Tony is seeking for himself. But he won't find it outside of himself.

</comment><comment><USER12> More from the LVWeekly: [http://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-see- it/2014/sep/30/breaking-...](http://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-see- it/2014/sep/30/breaking-bloodletting-downtown-project-layoffs/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Editor, is there an editor around!? Or do we just have _people_.

"Hsieh's move comes as the project has laid off about 30 percent of its staff, or 30 people, which does not include the community of entrepreneurs funded by the project. or about 30 people, these people said."

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm really impressed that he set this up -- optimistic about it in the long run.</comment>


YouTube unboxing and how it is changing the toy industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/22/18275786/youtube-video-unboxing-toy-industry-lol-surprise-dolls <comment><USER2> There is a precedent for regulating this sort of thing. Advertising to children is regulated to some form or another just about everywhere.

What's new and challenging here is that when a person simply posts a video they made on YouTube, that's freedom of expression. If I want to post videos of me unboxing things, there's nothing morally or legally wrong with that.

The grey zone is the money being traded between toy makers and video makers. As soon as money is exchanged, that should logically be considered sponsorship and be subjected to advertising laws.

Just because it's on YouTube doesn't change that a company is paying money to an entertainer to promote their products to children. There are already laws in place about this. It's only a matter of time before prosecutors get involved.

Of course, the toy companies know this and have factored in the legal risks into their calculations. YouTube will be able to skirt the issue because they're just a platform for other people's stuff, and they're not being paid for these sponsorships. The real risk is being taken by the content producers, who almost certainly don't realize how liable they may find themselves to be.

<comment><USER3> > The grey zone is the money being traded between toy makers and video makers. > As soon as money is exchanged, that should logically be considered > sponsorship and be subjected to advertising laws.

This strikes me as the obvious solution and really not all that gray. Kid posts video on Youtube? That's free speech. Kid posts video on Youtube and company pays them? That's now an ad, and can/should be regulated.

Throwing a wrench into all of this somewhat is Citizen's United saying money is speech... but that's a stupid ruling so let's interpret it as narrowly as possible.

<comment><USER4> This will be a fun supreme court decision when it happens in the next 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unboxing videos were one of the reasons YouTube got banned from our kids in my home. There really aren't any redeeming qualities in those videos. Kids don't learn anything and they were constantly asking me to buy the merchandise and crying when I said "no". After a few rounds of this, YouTube got banned.

<comment><USER6> I just imagine armies of 2 and 3 year olds watching videos of toys they can never have. For some reason that makes me sad.

<comment><USER7> Well, we already watch reviews of $1k phones, $2k laptops and >$40k cars that many of us will never have.

<comment><USER8> yeah but we're not three years old afaik

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I think it was the Dad in me thinking of a 3 year old watching it and thinking "Wow that is cool" and not understanding why they can't have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Video games felt this first: games are made now to stream well; it is almost as important as gameplay for many studios.

<comment><USER10> Many games now even have a "streamer mode" that integrates with Twitch and lets viewers interact with the streamer through the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like we will be seeing more loot-box type toys that are optimized for the box-opening experience rather than long term value.

</comment><comment><USER12> It isn't just toys - opening trading card booster boxes and packs is also very popular, especially when something rare is pulled :)

<comment><USER13> > especially when something rare is arranged to get pulled

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36702905](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36702905)

[https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/01/04/2158259/youtubes- bi...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/01/04/2158259/youtubes-biggest- stars-are-pushing-a-shady-polish-gambling-site)

[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtubers-charged- promoting-...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtubers-charged-promoting- gambling)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So we should expect kids toys to be significantly easier to unpackage in the future?

Or are unboxers armed with scissors, Stanley knives and wire cutters?

<comment><USER15> > The biggest change to come to the toy industry as a result of YouTube, > though, is in packaging. Toy brands are riffing on the unboxing trend by > developing special boxes or wrapping that specifically look good on camera, > and by creating as many surprises as possible.

Nah, they are making the unboxing more elaborate.

<comment><USER16> It's gotten really bad. They sell toys with superfluous packaging on purpose now, toys where there's next to nothing fun to play with once they're unwrapped. You're left with a trash-bag full of plastic waste and a tiny, badly made, doll.

<comment><USER4> Or that fake snow stuff with mini jewel like square creatures in them.. or the pirates in the sand crap. I am amazed with how viral and successful they've become.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How many times do you enter password a day? - <AUTHOR>

So it came to mind that I face a lot of passwords in a day. My phone, I don't know hamy times, they say we check our phones average 150 times a day? Almost every time we face that password screen? Although session durations and remember me checkboxes and most importantly auto-fills, help us a lot, yet I find myself many times facing a password. So there we have passwords yet we have shortcuts. When are we solving this whole password problem? <comment><USER2> about 250 times a day</comment>


The best and the brightest - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/best-and-brightest.html

<comment><USER2> Can we please stop cluttering the front page with every post to the google blog? If we care what google has to say, we can subscribe to the RSS feed.

<comment><USER3> Yep, seriously. I'm not sure I understand why this post is of general interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> oh no! ... i'm not in the list T_T

</comment><comment><USER5> Next</comment>


Thousands More Americans to Die in Heat Waves Unless We Meet Paris Climate Goals - <AUTHOR> https://earther.gizmodo.com/thousands-more-americans-will-die-in-heat-waves-unless-1835270385 <comment><USER2> ...not just Americans btw....

<comment><USER3> Probably fewer Americans than others. See my comment on another thread about air pollution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why does this seem to me to be iffy science? Or even that big of a deal?

We could take all the money invested over the next 30 years in combating climate change and save ~90k people in the US, or we could put it into something with real results, such as curing cancer, IMHO.

<comment><USER4> What's the point of curing cancer if we're all dead?

<comment><USER3> We won't be dead. Curing cancer will eliminate the effects of air particulate caused-cancer, negating the massive kill-off of humankind by heat waves.</comment></comment></comment>


President Obama answers America's questions live now - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRBT4JtmrMY&feature=inp-lt-oba-02

<comment><USER2> Am I wrong in predicting this to function as a massive PR failure for him? It'll be interesting to watch it pan out. Regardless of political persuasion this is really something completely new in politics regardless the motivation, intentions, etc.

<comment><USER3> Simple, direct, favorable questions will be planted or cherrypicked so that the president can have a suitable platform for exposition. Softball, meaningless questions will be answered spontaneously in a lighthearted manner.

Real questions will be ignored. Critical questions will be ignored and possibly hidden.

<comment><USER2> I assumed this, but I guess theres a large part of me believing a troll can make their way through and do _some_ sort of damage. It's literally begging for it.</comment></comment></comment>


My Semester project : Replacing mouse using hand , Web Cam needed - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnKk07-YNFw

<comment><AUTHOR> any comments are greatly appreciated :)</comment>


Meet your new language tutors: the Duolingo Bots - <AUTHOR> https://www.duolingo.com/comment/18155544 <comment> dugite-code As mentioned in the article comments it's not available for Android, that's disappointing</comment>


10 UI Ideas to Learn from Gumroad - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jasonshah.org/post/17385407466/10-ui-ideas-to-learn-from-gumroad

<comment><USER2> incredibly insightful analysis, i learned quite a bit! i'm always jealous of amazing UI, and i'm well aware that the beauty derives from simplicity and designing for intent/ action, which takes a great deal of time to achieve with customer development, and paring elements down in response.

i'm grateful to have you point out many choices i would have glossed over at first blush (perhaps several views, even).

your comments are definitely valuable, but one thing that might make these UI posts stand out even more would be to get comments from prospective users, as if doing customer interviews. i know such activities are beyond the scope of posts like this for multiple reasons, but if it could be done, it would be amazing to see what "regular" users think/ do in the context of your break- down.

(about me: i'm a startup co-founder who isn't a trained UXD but appreciates the importance of UI and UX. apologies for not providing insight at a much higher level.)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the comment! glad the post was valuable for you.

good pt. re: comments from prospective users. you may be right about it being out of scope for me, but if companies were willing to share the videos and data they get from sites like usertesting.com, then i'd be happy to put it together with my ux posts and make it available for everyone to learn from.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if there are certain UI lessons to be learned from other payments startups out there. It would also be interesting to know more about where Sahil gets his inspiration from and how he picked up design over time as a self-taught guy.</comment>


Most People Won't - <AUTHOR> http://bryce.vc/post/64889707700/most-people-wont <comment><USER2> The message seems to be that I should work hard and take risks, but it is illustrated by a story about somebody getting incredibly lucky by talking shit at a bar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very simple, yet inspirational. Thank you for sharing.</comment>


Show HN: Help Me Decide Please - <AUTHOR> http://helpmedecideplease.com <comment><USER3> I absolutely thought I could enter a question and have the site's users decide for me like a strawpoll.

I can't even decide what to put in the choices list. Man.

<comment><USER4> Legit was what I was thinking. I want to make this.

<comment><USER5> after reading yesterday's posts here:

that'd be a nice play project for phoenix and liveview!

<comment><USER6> Link please

<comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22947341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22947341)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Way back when I worked on a lifestyle coaching startup based on these methods.

I was the tech guy, working with a coach. The term we used for this method was Weighted Attribute Matrix. The coach had already implemented it as a spreadsheet which he would use as a tool with his clients. He therefore had a (big) pre-created list of criteria, such as "Allows me to spend time with my family".

Each client would the list the options they were trying to choose between, and then go through the process of 1) weighting the criteria, and 2) scoring the criteria against their choices.

This would take a day or two to do with his clients, and was tedious.

The software we created streamlined all those. First they weighted the criteria, at which point we could then ignore all the criteria the client didn't care about.

We also drastically improved the interface, and used a bit of UX & phycology to make it a bit addictive. This helped users get through it quickly. I think we got initial results down to 30 mins which was kinda revolutionary for his practice. This software was used in workshops/1-to-1 sessions, not self-guided SaaS-style (although we were considering it)

In the end nothing came of it. I think we fell down on the selling and marketing. Sharing the story here in case it is useful.

Incidentally, I also used this process when buying some land a few years ago. Multiple people had to choose, so we each had a Weighted Attribute Matrix to fill out. I then put it into a Django app and we could see where the disagreements & commonalities lay.

What was especially cool was that people could get a rough idea of how much they would personally like the land without having to visit it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm sorry to say this, but, this is not so very good. Having worked with other decision methods such as TOPSIS, AHP, and ANP, and note that those are the simplest and most commented on (and not about its features, but about its shortcomings), in your analysis/software, it is impossible to compare choices among them, which is a huge hindrance to the method.

<comment><USER10> Is there a good introduction to decision methods on general like the ones you describe? I'm very interested in this.

<comment><USER9> Yes. I like this paper ([https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02196220185...](https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219622018500360)) because it explains in general terms what AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) is and related tools. In Google Scholar there are pointers to other researchers, for AHP the most cited one is Thomas Saaty - [https://scholar.google.com.br/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=s...](https://scholar.google.com.br/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=saaty&btnG=)

Remember once again, AHP/ANP are not the most 'useful' ones, having advantages and drawbacks, but they are a good starting point on Multicriteria Decision Methods (MCDM).

You may want to check MAUT/MAVT, PROMETHEE, VIKOR, Best Worst Method, and TOPSIS (this one is quite simple to understand and use).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tip: if you input something and press "enter", it will reset the form. You should attach the event listener to the form's onSubmit, and not to the button's onClick.

<comment><USER12> Is there some book of best web dev practices where stuff like this is written down?

<comment><USER13> You might notice by just using the web, or you might notice it when testing the form on one of your first assignments, that you can submit a form by pressing enter in an input box.

So then you might look up the documentation for the submit event on forms: [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control- infrastr...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control- infrastructure.html#implicit-submission)

And then realize that adding the onclick handler on the submit button handles one use case (clicking the button), but a more general solution would be to add the onclick handlers on the form itself.

Then maybe you start thinking, huh, what happens when someone tabs to a button and presses enter, does the onclick handler work there? And so on and so on...

So the answer for where it's written down, it's in the documentation. But most people these days can't be bothered with things like reading documentation and textbooks and reference manuals, so, uh, I guess you just need to have a little bit of experience combined with an attention to detail?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This site is fun but I think it fails to understand what's difficult about making decisions for many people. The site asks you to make a LOT of decisions.

<comment><USER15> It asks you to make even more decisions than the original one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's my output for trying to figure out what I am going to do for dinner:

        1. pizza: 54
        2. beer: 54
        3. italian: 45
        4. home cooked food: 44
        5. thai: 42
        6. mexican: 34

It's fair to say the quality of the decisions this tool will enable is bounded by the ability of the user to make good decisions :-)

<comment><USER10> Why is food made by strangers even an option in this pandemic?

It's a serious question. Unless the "staying alive" criterion has no value to you.

<comment><USER17> So far there is no evidence of transmission via food delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like this idea in general (I have an Android app that does the same thing as your page, except it uses draggable sliders).

Here are some things I believe you could improve about the implementation:

\- There's no explanation behind the math of weighing that's done. "these scores were calculated based on your ratings for each choice and the weight you gave to each factor" isn't an explanation. "(e.g., "super important" has a weight of 4 and "not that important" has a weight of 1)" doesn't tell me why my choice of one "super important" and one "not that important" gives me the score of _14_. Not knowing the math you're doing makes me not trust the result. I mean, I suspect you're doing "sum of factors multiplied by weights", but a non-math-savvy person may take a while to figure where the numbers come from.

\- Too many pages. I know you're aiming for dead simple (technically) UI, but I think it would be better if I could enter choices and factors on the same page.

\- I'd consider changing the factor score UI from:

      - ( ) 4 (best)
      - ( ) 3
      - (x) 2
      - ( ) 1 (worst)

into something inline, like:

      4 - best: ( ) ( ) (x) ( ) :1 - <USER2>

People are used into this into (that's how you rate stuff on most pages on the Internet), and it will cut your use of vertical space by at least a factor of 4, and also make it more readable - with this, it would be easier to compare between factors and across options.

\--

Quite honestly, a perfect incarnation of this idea to me would be _a spreadsheet_. This problem domain naturally fits into a shape like this:

      What should I eat tonight?

      | Option x Factor   | Effort | Taste | Biosafety || SCORE |
      | Factor weitht     |      2 |     3 |         4 ||       |
      |</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-|--- ----|</comment><comment>-|</comment><comment>-----||</comment><comment>-|
      | Turkey sandwich   |      3 |     2 |         3 ||    24 |
      | Pizza (delivery)  |      4 |     4 |         1 ||    24 |
      | Pizza (homemade)  |      1 |     2 |         4 ||    27 |
      | Chicken soup      |      2 |     3 |         4 ||    29 | < PICK ME

A spreadsheet interface would make this tool _much_ more convenient, and offers plenty of opportunities for futzing with UI (color coding, sliders for input, whatnot).

Something I think you should consider for version 2.0 or as an alternative to test out. Hell, I think I'll make myself one in Excel right now.

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty good at UX and I don't have any issues with the current experience. It actually really helped me for my use case.

I wouldn't use a spreadsheet. While I clicked 'How was this calculated?', I realised I didn't care.

Your mistake is thinking the purpose of the app is to give the user the perfect objective recommendation. For most decisions, you just want some kind of psychological justification - for some people that can even be a coin flip.

<comment><USER18> The "objective recommendation" and "just psychological justification" groups seem to me a _vastly_ different target audiences. For the latter, this tool is already overcomplicated; it could be done as a list of input fields and a button that highlights one of them at random.

I'm glad the tool helped in your case. I can imagine it helping in mine once, but me getting immediately frustrated. In my own philosophy of UX, I generally don't care much about tools you're only going to use once in your life; I focus on ones that you're going to use repeatedly. Repeated use has different priorities - in particular, efficiency over hand holding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice job, it looks very simple and useful.

Decisions that involve multiple options and criteria (like comparison shopping) are difficult because of your limited working memory. That's where techniques like these are valuable, especially if you can simplify the UX and explain how the magic happens, which this app does well.

I enjoy using hobby projects to learn new programming languages and frameworks. My favorite one is called "dcidr" which is a similar decision- making app that uses a prioritization/decision matrix under the hood. I've rebuilt it many times since 2001 in PHP, Java, XAML, Ruby, JS, Rust, and so on. It's great fun.

The current version is a PWA that uses Blazor (.NET web assembly) which was awesome to work with, but it's still in preview and the download is pretty huge:

[https://dcidr.z20.web.core.windows.net/](https://dcidr.z20.web.core.windows.net/)

Enjoy! There are links in the footer if you want to reach out.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is pretty awesome. I just used this to help consider what to get my mom for mother's day. I think the most value comes from actually enumerating your options and considering what's important. It's interesting to get the algorithm's perspective, but I think I settled on a different choice after working through it.

</comment><comment><USER22> This would've been great a few days ago when I was making officer decisions for a student club of mine. I had it narrowed down to approximately 10 candidates but the process after that was painful due to the balancing of factors like technical expertise, leadership experience, free time, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> That's pretty cool and a really intuitive way of decision making. I think I like that style of reasoning slightly better than a good old fashioned pro and cons list, forcing you to rank is really helpful. Cool stuff!

</comment><comment><USER24> I would add one more step at the very end.. a feedback/rating question - either simply "Did this help you decide?" Yes or no, and "was it a good/right decision?" Yes or no. "Which one did you ultimately decide"? Or you could add likert scale rating... but I like that you kept the tool simple.

I could see this being mined/modeled later using machine learning, natural language, market basket analysis, a whole bunch of things, to try to help people make decisions. You must have thought about those possibilities.

It's a cool tool/idea!

</comment><comment><USER25> Whoa this is fantastic.

Another idea: it might be too touchy of a subject but a little tool that helps resolve conflict between two parties is something I've always wanted to see.

Just a simple tool to help move forward on a decision. Objectivity-as-a- service for consensus building (though whether consensus building is always the right tool is a separate debate.)

In fact after typing all this I feel like _Help Me Decide Please_ could just as easily be used by two people, as an effective tool. Help us decide! I'll try and see how it works!

<comment><USER26> Reminds me of /r/amitheasshole - can someone in an emotionally convoluted/charged situation figure out if they are objectively (by judgment of strangers) being an ass. Obviously there is a ton of bias based on how the OP presents a situation, but the idea of getting an outside opinion has already proved popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems pretty cool. I originally thought from the name that this would post the questions and then let users vote on them, but this is well-made.

As a note, your label for the highest level of importance should be for="factor-weight-4", currently two labels point at for="factor-weight-3". This means the wrong radio button is selected if you click that label. But props to you for actually using labels and inputs properly so you don't have to try to click on a tiny radio button.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback! should be fixed now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> With this sort of analysis I always feel like: [https://external- preview.redd.it/DodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrP...](https://external- preview.redd.it/DodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrPo3P2T0taaK- lgJCo.png?auto=webp&s=c180684f48b01ff6f2cbc72e080067039943de07)

The problem in making decisions is not obvious calculations, but assigning importance in relative of each other.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love tools like this. Thanks for sharing it. It's nice to go through a process like that and feel extra-good about your decision. :-)

It reminds me of a tool I used some time ago, the "Oracle" script at SimilarMinds.com. One difference is that the Oracle script used forced-choice based on baked-in global factors, even including how much a decision would affect your social standing, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! I'm glad it's useful :) I originally made it because I wasn't feeling confident in a direction I was about to take in life. I wrote it all down in a spreadsheet and actually changed my mind after doing a similar process!

<comment><USER29> That's super cool. A friend was just asking me "how do you use numbers to weigh decisions again" and we laughed at the synchronicity when I sent her your link and she read the title. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice tool!

It would be nice to be able to go back and fix mistakes. For instance, on the first pass after entering something to consider I pressed Enter. I didn't even notice the "important" radio button, so the first choice got "somewhat important". It was actually super important and there was seemingly no way to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this feedback! This seems like a great ability to have

<comment><USER31> My need for the back button was that I clicked "that's enough to consider" when I was done entering things, and immediately realized you wanted me to click "submit", then "that's enough to consider". So the last choice I entered didn't get considered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is cool. It looks like this is a program for creating and evaluating a decision matrix: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix). This got me thinking about an idea for a similar tool, but catered to a specific domain, one that can be populated with data to help make the decision -- e.g., where to live, where to go to dinner, what kind of car to buy, etc. A decision where the options have known important criteria and quantifiable values, e.g. a decision about where to live has criteria like cost of living, crime rate, walk score, etc. Essentially, it would be like criteria filters you commonly see on shopping websites except it would let you rank those filtering criteria as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone remember letsimondecide.com? Early 2010's, it did this and was aiming to be acquired like hunch.com was apparently (I hadn't heard of hunch.com). I think it never happened and it eventually went inactive.

</comment><comment><USER34> I just used it to decide whether practicing guitar or 3d modelling should be my priority. It made me think very clearly about what matters to me, and work through the decision

</comment><comment><USER35> I just stumbled upon a product that helps solve decision making problems while looking for info on the "Rete algorithm" [1].

On that note, it is pretty cool that you made a V1 and just released it. If it was me I would get lost in a bread first search of algorithms and prior art and whatnot :-p

1: [https://www.sparklinglogic.com/smarts-decision- manager/](https://www.sparklinglogic.com/smarts-decision-manager/)

<comment><USER24> Rete algorithm - famous in business rules engines, forward chaining, backward chaining, inference engines - all fun topics in the field of expert systems. Much of it, however, left behind in the pursuit of more complex machine learning and AI approaches, as of late.

I did a lot of work/research in this area while working for a fraud detection company.

You might be interested in an old public domain tool called CLIPS that NASA released many years ago [1]. It is a lot of fun and amazingly powerful, albeit, I don't hear much about it anymore. Still works though!

[1] [http://www.clipsrules.net/](http://www.clipsrules.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't know why, but I was expecting this to just take a list of choices and decide on one randomly, with the idea that sometimes making a choice is more important than what choice is made. I know there are times where I've gotten stuck on something because I couldn't make my mind up on retrospectively, relatively unimportant decisions.

Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER37> I would much rather have the each question ask me to rate all my options on one aspect. I had to keep scrolling up and down to see what I said for other things to see where my answer fit in with what I said about that aspect for other options.

Btw, it tells me I should be using F#

</comment><comment><USER38> Cool prototype !

I've been pondering the idea if software can help us to make decisions in the way you have shown here for a while. If you (or anyone else) would like to have an exchange about it, my email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER39> Since there is nothing in the "about" page, I looked at your HN profile. But it only carries a link to LinkedIn which only shows me a login page.

A link to a personal website or Twitter profile would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER40> I do this mentally when organizing my day. I usually only take one thing into consideration though. Such a simple app with great value to me personally. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER41> I put in "where should I run?" just to get past that first stage to see what would happen next and ended up going through the whole process. Really simple, kinda fun, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER42> Yet another web app that's easier to do in excel.

<comment><USER43> Except now it's already done, can run on any computer with or without an Office license, can be potentially used by orders of magnitude more people than a .XLS file, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I thought it would be a site where you ask a question and then before you submit you have to answer someone else's. Crowd choice.

</comment><comment><USER45> I was expecting crowdsourcing, or deep learning.

</comment><comment><USER46> That app helped me waste 2 minutes of my life.

<comment><USER47> Pls help me decide if I should waste my 2 minutes on this app

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Thanks for helping me decide what to do today on my birthday, during lockdown. Board games!

</comment><comment><USER49> I use an IRC bot - you just say ".choose A B C" and it prints out a random choice.

</comment><comment><USER50> Explain to me how something like this ends up so highly upvoted.

<comment><USER9> Have you read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman? They gave him a Nobel for tackling decision problems. I guess that's one important problem to humanity in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I built a popular tool in the same niche [1]. I think your over complicating it. I got decision fatigue just trying to test it.

[1] [https://easydecisionmaker.com/](https://easydecisionmaker.com/)

<comment><USER52> It's just random right?

Funny I did basically the same app as everyone for the ever common problem of deciding where to go to lunch at work.

[https://ploufplouf.funkybits.fr](https://ploufplouf.funkybits.fr)

It was a long time ago to try AngularJS (the new hotness of 2012), Less, and eventually Redis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> That's cool!

Simple look with standard form elements works well.

</comment><comment><USER54> I tried "Should I wear mask or not?"

</comment><comment><USER55> My Palo Alto firewall reports:

Web Page Blocked

Access to the web page you were trying to visit has been blocked in accordance with company policy. Please contact your system administrator if you believe this is in error.

URL: helpmedecideplease.com/

Category: gambling</comment>


Running the Go Race Detector with -cover - <AUTHOR> http://herman.asia/running-the-go-race-detector-with-cover

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like atomic will be the default in 1.3 for this reason: [http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.3#gocmd](http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.3#gocmd)</comment>


Ask HN: What Android App do you use to browse HN? - <AUTHOR> Searching for "Hacker News" on Google Play brings up dozens of results.
I think there are even more Clients which are not avaiable via Google Play. There are so many and most of them look the same.<p>What App do you use to browse HN on your Smartphone and why would you recommend this one? <comment><USER2> Materialistic, it's available on both F-Droid, [https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialistic/](https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialistic/), and the Play Store, [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidroh.materialistic)

<comment><USER3> It doesn't appear to notify you of replies which is my most desired feature.

<comment><USER2> Wasn't aware! I use it mainly as a "reader" and usually only comment on desktop. Nice to know though, thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mozilla Firefox.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox)

</comment><comment><USER5> Chrome mobile

</comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft Edge</comment>