Cofounders - how high a bar? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I am sure this is just one way but from all the times I remember having a great experience working with someone else, it just happened without me analyzing beforehand bullet by bullet how good the guy is. And I do have couple instances where the paper analysis of the guy was great but once we started work it wasn't so great.

My experience is that if you aren't deep into a stage where you HAVE to give away a cofounder title, just start working with the guy! When we associate the cofounder title it carries the stereotypical image of a cofounder which makes us double guess if this guy is "co founder material"--but there is no such thing as "cofounder material."

All you have are people passionate and skillful enough to help you start and execute your venture and people that aren't. Before thinking of someone as a "cofounder" think if he can practically help you with a skill you need that you yourself lack or aren't best at.

<comment><AUTHOR> To answer a few questions:

One of my issues with this person is that while I do like his company, and respect him in a lot of ways, we think differently about how to move things forward. I'm much more of a "below the radar, live cheap and get something working" guy, whereas he's more along the lines of "VC funding or bust", without even having much of a prototype. That just sounds bad to me. Though I recognize that funding at a later stage in the game would certainly help, I think we'll have a better bargaining position if we have something that sort of works in hand.

That's another thing... I believe more in having mostly technical people. Different skill sets can certainly be a good thing (the Paypal story in Founders at Work was a good example), but it's also a good way to start thinking "hrm... I'm building the code... what is that other guy actually doing?"

Juwo: I'm not planning on stealing the idea or anything like that. I have plenty of ideas of my own. The one he's hatched up is pretty good, but it's not going anywhere in terms of code or a web site or stuff like that. Just paperwork for investors...

<comment><USER2> I know several first time entrepreneurs from several years ago that "tested" waters in initial stages trying to raise VC money. And it's damn hard! So unless this guy has some inside connections and has been there, done that--I'd personally say it is not only a bad idea but potentially a huge waste of time --same thought I'm sure you must be having.

If you can get going without any funding(which it appears you can) START. Yet if this guy insists on getting funding before ANYTHING else, he might just be an excuser or nonbeliever hoping the funding will validate his idea. Both bad things in a cofounder of a company that isn't even in development yet.

I'll leave some room because obviously you know more than I do about this specific guy and your situation. But if I had a cofounder who INSISTED on raising VC, he would have to be DAMN GOOD seller for me to buy into it--and chances are, we would still part ways as far as working together on that specific venture.

<comment><USER3> +1 best post ever. Loaners want to be repaid with interest. They want to know how you expect to repay them. And the repayment has to come with customer money, obviously, not more loans. VC's "loan" money as well, but they want you to make them ten times as much money as they are investing; never mind a few percent interest. They also want to control your company.

His idea of "if nobody is going to fund my future idea, then the world doesn't deserve it," is still actually... factual. Exactly. Don't fund that idea. DO NOT bootstrap that idea. Do not do that idea. If that idea really does require millions of dollars, do something similar and more basic to start. Don't do a half-assed job if you really calculated it would take you millions just to get launched. Remember, the world doesn't deserve it, and you can't build your idea. So build a smaller version. Simple. And you only have to get a few customers to be in the black, instead of millions. You just won't be on the news.

Oh, and it gives you something to do--scaling it up and adding new features-- after your initial launch. While, if you spend all these years and all this VC money before you can launch, and nobody cares about your product when it's launched, you're probably going to abandon ship. So, if you need VC money just to launch, you're nuts.

<comment><USER4> Well, _someone_ needs to fund the idea. Programmers gotta eat. Is it going to be the venture capitalists, or is it going to be the users, or is it going to be the advertisers once you've attracted users to the site?

If you accept the first one, it raises the bar for how much of the other two you need to acquire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your relationship with your co-founder is EXACTLY like being married. Think how high your bar would be for marriage and set it at the same level (namely very high - you're going to go through stupidly stressful times with his person so make sure your relationship can cope)

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends what you want him to do. Things can be learned and you can always use an extra hand. What you want ot worry about is "why is he getting into it?" In the "world is Flat" T.Friedman states P+CI. That is Passion + Curiosity Intelligence. Your startup and mine have less than 5% chance to succeed and yet we believe like no-one else that 5% is big enough to go thru this journey.We like the money, but if money is your first drive then you will eventually quit at some point when evrything says it is going to be over in One minute. At that point the co-founders who were in it for the money will walk out. The one who were in it for the passion and the challenge to learn and master the ultimate startup language ( not Technology, but "loyal and satisified Users") )will get 2gether and ask themselves " How the F _& $ we got into this mess and how the F%^$ can we clean it up now, make it look good and have more users?

<comment><USER7> wise

"if money is your first drive then you will eventually quit at some point when evrything says it is going to be over in One minute. At that point the co- founders who were in it for the money will walk out. The one who were in it for the passion and the challenge to learn and master the ultimate startup language ( not Technology, but "loyal and satisified Users") )will get 2gether and ask themselves " How the F&$ we got into this mess and how the F%^$ can we clean it up now, make it look good and have more users? "

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [I submitted this anonymously because the person in question may very well read this site now or at some point in the future.]

In short: I have a potential co founder, which is something that everyone seems to say is good. The problem, though, is that I don't think this guy is perfect (he may well think the same of me), for various reasons. Ok, no one is perfect, but I know people that I think would be "about as good as you could get" (unfortunately they aren't available), and this guy doesn't measure up.

Better to strike out on my own, or throw in my lot with someone who's perhaps not the right person?

<comment><USER8> One of my sayings is "Perfection is Difficult" meaning that it is actually impossible. I wouldn't want to start up a company with someone I couldn't completely trust. Having different skill sets is actually a very good thing, but you need to really like the company of the person.

<comment><USER9> > I wouldn't want to start up a company with someone I couldn't completely > trust.

You can never completely trust VCs ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Better to strike out on my own"

are you planning to steal his ideas, or any part of them?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

update: thanks for clarifying that you wont! \</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

My 2 cents:

WAKE UP!

He is doing the best he knows to do - pitch to VCs and raise funds.

You are doing the best you know to do - build a prototype and bootstrap.

Both are valid paths.

In fact, a former advisor - I say former because he was your cofounder's type. He had "no skin in the game" but kept forcing me for months, to abandon work on the prototype and pitch the idea and raise funds. But it worked for him - he sold a company in China to Disney.

Truth is relative - at least in this area.

However, when you say your cofounder is not up to par, "does not measure up" - even though he came up with the idea, to me that is not very respectful. You dont really value him. I can see a big fight looming ahead. Several months down the road, you will want to spend 90% time bootstrapping; while he will want you both to be pitching to investors instead. Unless - you do both.</comment>


Redesigning the Netflix API - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/02/redesigning-netflix-api.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I've worked with a lot of 3rd-party APIs and I liked Netflix's the best by far. They stuck to the REST concept the best of the ones I've seen and it made it very easy to start using it and to write a simple wrapper around it. I actually still use it as a reference when I'm building APIs. I hope they don't lose that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is that mystery device that jumped requests in October the PS3? That's when the disc-free update was released that used the new HTML5 interface. It fits.

<comment><USER4> I would venture it's a combination of disc-free PS3/Wii and the (Sept.) release of the iPhone app.

<comment><USER5> The apple tv was also released in October, that could also attribute to the growth.

<comment><USER4> That too (the atv increased my Netflix consumption 3-fold).

The influx of Netflix apps and devices just before the Holiday season seems to have been a very smart strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see an absolute scale in number of requests. It seems that the mystery device making 50% of the API calls was introduced or gained Netflix playback in October 2010 :)</comment>


Show HN: Free, offline, portable, security vault to store keys, photos etc. - <AUTHOR> https://prosecrec.com <comment><USER2> It will be pronounced "seckwreck", if you don't change the capitalization you use, or change the name somehow.

How does this compare to other products, like 1Password?

I hope those aren't real credit cards that you're blurring, because if they are, then they've already been de-blurred and stolen. Blurring is no longer a valid method of applying security-through-obscurity. Of course, security- through-obscurity isn't a valid method of securing anything anyway, but please do make sure you're using images of fake cards with obviously fake names and fake card numbers. Maybe the. You won't need to blur them?</comment>


Music and Measure Theory (2015) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw <comment><USER2> I love 3B1B, but it's a little disingenuous to attribute small integer ratios being are consonant to our brains/taste because of the simple polyrhythms. Our brains never receive the waveforms in that way; the ear performs a mechanical fourier transform, first. Small integer ratios mean many harmonics overlap, so the frequency-space signal from the ears is also relatively simple. The simpler the picture in freq-space, the more consonant (not necessarily more beautiful or pleasant, but specifically consonant)

Unfortunately, that reality is a very poor setup for the math he wants to demonstrate -- he needs to imagine someone for whom _all_ ratios are consonant to motivate the measure theory question. So I'm not sure music was the best road to the goal.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the few people who connects math and music in a way that's both useful and interesting. I followed this channel back when I found the video on Fourier transforms[1], but never looked at other videos. I've never really thought about the math of consonance and dissonance, but I use it all the time without realizing it.

For example: a hypersaw. That's 7 saws slightly detuned played at the same time. The more you detune them, the worse it sounds. If you own Serum, you can hear this in realtime if you make a 7 voice saw and play with the detune knob.

You can use an LFO to modulate this and get a sound that's a little uneasy while still somehow being harmonious. It's perfect for dark/spooky music.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY)

<comment><USER4> A little detuning goes a long way! It gives it that full warbly phase sound. 5-10 cents down is usually my sweet spot for synth plugins. I even detune one string on each key on my piano about 5-10 cents down, it gives it some life! Natural phasing sounds awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a fun personal discovery in mathematics when you realise there are different degrees of infinites.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that all countable subsets of the real numbers have Lebesgue measure zero (as proved in the video) implies that the real numbers are uncountable. Otherwise the real numbers would have Lebesgue measure zero, which is absurd.

This approach to proving R uncountable is carried out more formally here (proof A.3): [https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-1-4614-8854-...](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-1-4614-8854-5%2F1.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Speaking of absurd. I remember when I found out that Cantor set (uncountable) has measure 0, my mind was blown. No wonder Cantor ended up in an institution (as I heard).</comment></comment></comment>


Rolling Stone, Once a Counterculture Bible, Will Be Put Up for Sale - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/business/rolling-stone-magazine-sale.html <comment><USER2> I like to read about the 1960s counterculture in Europe and North America. It was always funny to see _Rolling Stone_ in the list of "underground newspapers" of the Sixties, because for my generation, it has always been a completely ordinary and conventional magazine that you can buy anywhere.

Also amazing is that _Time Out_ , which will strike most people today as an unremarkable and boring listing of events, was considered a key achievement of the London counterculture when it first came out. Apparently any countercultural vibe was gradually purged from it over the course of the 1970s.

<comment><USER3> "You either die a counterculture or you live long enough to become the culture."

The young/anti-establishment people of the 60's and 70's are the old/establishment people of today.

<comment><USER4> And, at the same time, there are no young/anti-establishment people of today of any consequence.

Not in any such numbers as to constitute an actual counter-culture anyway...

<comment><USER5> I think it's shocking how normative the culture is today. Fringe media says exactly the same things - pro-social justice, pro-a large social safety net, deep concern about climate change - as the major media. The only actual "counterculture" seems to be Breitbart et al, which is ... a change.

Paper Magazine, the New York Times, and Gothamist now mostly reflect the same cultural ideals. It's fascinating. Was this what the 80s was like?

<comment><USER6> Funny that you mention Breitbart. Their founder Andrew Breitbart claimed that he helped start Huffington Post in an effort to show that mainstream news sources (NY Times etc) actually share most of the views of groups toward the far left, ie the former counterculture.

Was he successful? He certainly convinced most of the people on the right, but they were already on his bandwagon anyway... As someone in the middle, it's looking more and more like he had a point. (Even if the site that bears his name has become.. well, whatever it is, now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was on and off reader of RS. Their non/half apology for their University of Virginia rape story really turn me off.

They didn't seem to understand (or care?) what they did wrong and thus didn't really apologize.

<comment><USER8> I also do not think the author or editor were removed from their positions

<comment><USER4> Why should they? Should everybody that makes a mistake in their job be fired?

The magazine retracted the story and apologized. The author apologized as well. The editor handed over their resignation (it was not accepted).

What do you want, to have them be some parriahs that never find journalistic work again?

<comment><USER9> All mistakes are not the same, and there are ones that ought to end a career. When the captain of a Navy ship has an accidental collision, his career is over. A sufficiently bad news article can wreck the lives of multiple innocent people, and kill public trust in the newspaper and the author. In this way, a bad editor or writer can do more damage in one decision than they can make up for in the entire rest their career.

I don't have an opinion on this case in particular, but there are cases where no amount of apologizing is enough. Becoming a copy writer for the rest of one's career does not strike me as a particularly cruel and unusual punishment.

<comment><USER4> > _When the captain of a Navy ship has an accidental collision, his career is > over._

Is that always true? I'm not so sure. And even if it is true, perhaps it should not be so. All kinds of professionals have accidents or errors and continue to work.

There's this apocryphal story that makes some sense.

Tom Watson Jr., CEO of IBM between 1956 and 1971, was a key figure in the information revolution. (...) A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson's office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, "I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me." Watson was said to have replied, "Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you."

<comment><USER10> Easy to find examples:

[http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top- stories/2017/08/23/remain...](http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top- stories/2017/08/23/remains-found-after-us-destroyer-collision.html)

Start at the top and start firing.

"Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, who headed America's Asia-based 7th Fleet, has been relieved of his duties following the damage to the USS John S McCain."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/world/asia/fitzgerald- col...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/world/asia/fitzgerald-collision- investigation.html)

Next up is the commander of the ship and the senior officers.

Being relieved of duties doesn't mean firing though. Could be that they become paper pushers. The next step would be court martial.

But yes, there are career ending mistakes. Especially when they cause the death of 7 people and takes a 9000 ton, $1.5 billion ship out of commission. The Arleigh Burke class also forms a good chunk of an aircraft carrier group's defensive perimeter, so by taking out these ships, these mistakes (whether one mistake or many mistake doesn't matter) puts approximately $30 Billion worth of military assets (not to mention the 5000+ people) at risk.

How's that for a career ender?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 2 things caused me to decline a Rolling Stones subscription which I just cannot get over: 1\. A Rape on Campus 2\. the Marathon bomber on the cover looking like a rock star

<comment><USER12> I'm surprised that the Boston Marathon bomber cover was not brought up in the article as well.

<comment><USER13> fwiw, in the print edition the bomber cover was included in the covers displayed on the front page of the business section

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Rolling Stone has become a sad graveyard of top 50 songs lists and photos from the 60's. It's a joke for anyone under the age of 50.

<comment><USER15> You might be unaware of some of the good journalism on non-music current affairs that they have published, e.g. Matt Taibbi.

<comment><USER16> The only reason I ever go to RS online is to read Matt Taibbi, who has been a valuable documenter of our era of too big to fail bank antics and the bizarre US political circus.

The rest of it seems run of the mill corporate entertainment shilling and promotion...

<comment><USER15> Yep, what have the Romans ever done for us? :)

What about, going back a bit, but David Foster Wallace's piece on John McCain's election campaign?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jann Wenner was on a recent How I Built This podcast [1]: which was very interesting. He was very adamant there that his son was being prepped to take over. So this is a bit surprising. [1] [http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built- this](http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this)

<comment><USER18> He struck me as prickly and on edge for portions of that interview.

While the question about lack of gender diversity in RS's writers seemed aggressive compared to the normal _How I Built This_ "So a billion dollar valuation. That's a lot of money. What does it feel like to be...rich?", Wenner's response seemed out of touch and dismissive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a different (but intersecting) market, _Outside_ magazine is very good.

<comment><USER20> _Outside_ , the magazine that just published a puff piece on Lance Armstrong that ended up on HN somehow? Yeah, that magazine has become about as vapid as RS has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ironically reported in the Failing New York Times. :)

<comment><USER11> Seems to me the NY Times is doing OK, digital subscriptions are way up.

<comment><USER22> Most likely the parent was using the phrase in jest.</comment></comment></comment>


Covid-19 population divided by cases 11-03-20 - <AUTHOR> https://pastebin.com/jsQ5SM81 <comment><AUTHOR> I was just curious what the column on the left means.

[https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2DN248XLUI-6QEWq97Dpl6NJyT- it5NjGH_Yc_cWh7_guotHxvCaCvics#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)</comment>


Doloto: Improving the Performance of Web Apps Transparently - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70518

<comment><AUTHOR> Summary: Doloto acts like a proxy sitting between a web application server and the browser. It dynamically modifies the javascript code so that only the frequently used code is sent to the client, the rest are kept as stubs to be filled in later (i.e. delayed evaluation).

The research comes out of Microsoft Research, and has been used on projects like BingMaps(<http://www.bing.com/maps/>) and gMail.

Key point: The web application does not need to be aware of Doloto. From the client and the server's point of view they are still communicating directly.</comment>


Swift Programming Language Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution <comment><USER3> To me, the most interesting empirical result of the Swift language evolution so far is the lack of urgency on language-level concurrency.

If they think they can be competitive for years (at the very least vs. Objective-C) with only platform-level concurrency support, it makes me wonder whether concurrency is generally better provided by the platform instead of the language for most needs.

Conventional wisdom would have it that for a systems & application language designed in 2014, a good concurrency story would be close to job #1.

<comment><USER4> Go (which I think you're alluding to) has language-level concurrency because its syntax is extremely rigid. Swift's syntax is flexible enough that this isn't needed.

Specifically:

* Support for annotations; the compiler/runtime can be informed about safety and marshaling concerns. * Anonymous function bodies. You can implement Go's "go func() { ... }()" pattern yourself, and a concurrency runtime can implement it. Rust uses the exact same pattern. * Generic iterators/streams. No need for channels as language primitive since you can write a generic channel implementation.

Go is nice, but its language-level concurrency is very much a side-effect of its intentionally impoverished type system. For example, the built-in "chan" type exists because otherwise a generic channel implementation would have to use interface{}, which is not type-safe and would be hell to work with.

Here's what's lining up to become Swift 4.0's concurrency support (all the concurrency models!): [https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/proposals/Co...](https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/proposals/Concurrency.rst).

<comment><USER5> I like this particular example of how easy it can be to make Swift act like it has language-level concurrency features: [https://github.com/beeth0ven/BNQueue/blob/master/BNQueue/BNQ...](https://github.com/beeth0ven/BNQueue/blob/master/BNQueue/BNQueue/BNQueue.swift)

Some enum and extension magic easily lets you write things like:

      Queue.UserInitiated.execute {
        let url = NSURL(string: "http://image.jpg")!
        let data = NSData(contentsOfURL: url)!
        let image = UIImage(data: data)

        Queue.Main.execute {
          imageView.image = image
        }
      }

<comment><USER4> That's awesome. Blocks were always my favourite part of Ruby, and I think it's really cool that it has been adopted into Swift and (to a lesser extent) Rust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?

<comment> kris-s My favorite thing about Swift is that is seems to get out of the way - <USER2> when it gets in the way it's usually with a nifty language feature (like the { $0 + $1 } closure syntax). I'm very excited for the future - between Go and Swift we now have two compiled fast languages that are almost as expressive as their slower dynamic/interpreted cousins.

As an aside, I like that Apple is betting the farm on ARC. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they were discussing ARC versus GC.

<comment><USER7> There is a pretty good comment from Chris Lattner about ARC versus GC : [https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of- Mo...](https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of- Mon-20160208/009422.html)

<comment><USER8> I really like the `deinit` construct that comes with ARC, which lets you know when an object is about to be deallocated. Makes it much easier to find memory leaks, imo.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. `deinit` has saved me from things that would have caused much greater problems later on. It's probably one of the more subtle features that one would miss the most when moving to a language that doesn't have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Swift is fun. I'm having a great time playing around with it. There are some nuances that take some getting used to, but overall, it's a powerful, fast and fun language to work with.

If you are interested, I have taken on implementing all major design patterns in Swift. I've gone through about 10 of them right now, (7 published on my blog).

If you've never worked with Swift but wish to get a feel for it without going through overly simple tutorials, check them out: [https://shirazian.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/design- patterns-i...](https://shirazian.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/design-patterns-in- swift/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Are there any plans in place for locking down the syntax? Major release 3 is coming and developers are still being expected to hit a moving target.

One of the nice things about C is that K&R era C is just as valid as C written nowadays, but Swift appears to be going in the opposite direction, every major release adding and removing bits of syntax.

As someone unfamiliar with the language, it makes me not want to pick it up, since guides and documentation I read now will be incompatible with the newer release when it happens. Some early toying around during Swift's original announcement led to hard-to-debug errors (in part, caused by terribly useless error messages) when trying identical code on newer releases.

<comment><USER11> C got started in 1972, and K&R C dates from 1978 and includes compatibility- breaking changes.

You want a young language to change a lot, because you don't really know what it needs until you get it out there and people use it. You want to make necessary changes as early as possible to cause the least pain. Major changes at the two-year mark will be a lot easier than major changes at the five or ten year mark, and waiting too long to fix a bad decision will probably mean it sticks around forever.

I would expect Swift 3 to be the last release with major source-breaking changes.

<comment><USER12> However:

\- Almost nobody actually _used_ C prior to 1978.

\- Most C compilers have supported both current and previous versions of the C standard via _-std_ flags.

\- Other languages with breaking changes, like Java, are similar. Java has always supported specifying the source language level via _-src_.

Swift is unique in breaking old code completely, without recourse other than semi-functional code rewriting tools.

<comment><USER11> Almost nobody actually used Swift prior to mid-2014. Did any 1978 C compilers offer both K&R and prior as options?

IMO the example of Java is a great illustration of why Swift shouldn't be tied to source compatibility too soon. You don't want to be stuck supporting your 1.0 syntax until the end of time, or you'll end up like Java!

<comment><USER12> Used everywhere, with decades old libraries that still function fine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While the language is nice, I find it hard to work with existing frameworks, given they are designed for a language as dynamic as objective-c. For example, NSError, NSNotification's userInfo is a `[AnyObject:AnyObject]`, but its member types are specified in documentation. It would be nice if we can have specific error will typed userInfo. Working with storyboard is the same story, there is no type check for VC and segue because identifier is a string, instead of something like `R.id.view` on android. Working with this kind of API requires lots of casting, I wonder will Apple design Swift-centric API later.

<comment><USER14> Apple has already done a lot to make this sort of thing nicer. They added lightweight generics to Objective-C, so arrays are typed now. NSError bridges to ErrorType. They've also announced further plans to Swift-ify existing Objective-C APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite surprised to see no mention of Kotlin here since both languages are very similar, main difference is Swift is LLVM based while Kotlin run on the JVM and has excellent Java interoperability.

See [http://fr.slideshare.net/andrzej_sitek/swift-and-kotlin- pres...](http://fr.slideshare.net/andrzej_sitek/swift-and-kotlin-presentation) for more details ...

</comment><comment><USER16> I've never understood the fascination with Swift. What's wrong with Objective C?

<comment><USER11> Objective-C has no safe collections for non-object values. If you want an array of ints, for example, you either get to use a C array with lots of manual management and potential for error, or you use an NSArray of NSNumbers and pay for a bunch of overhead.

It has very poor support for custom value types. Objective-C structs basically can't contain object pointers, so they're limited to simple things like CGRect. They also can't contain methods, so you end up writing associated code in global functions.

Protocols are extremely limited. They're basically just collections of method declarations. There's no way to add functionality to every class which conforms to a protocol.

Objective-C is often verbose to the point of painful redundancy. Consider:

        NSString *x = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%d", number];

Versus:

        let x = String(format: "%d", number)

Other examples include having to write the signature of every public method twice (once in the header and once in the implementation) and the need to do an annoying `self = [super init]` dance in every initializer.

There's almost no functional programming stuff available, like map and reduce. This is not strictly a language complaint, but since the standard libraries are pretty tightly woven in, I think it still counts.

Generics support is really limited. What's there was only added to interoperate better with Swift, anyway!

That's a quick overview of some of the ways Swift improves on ObjC. I'm sure there's more.

<comment><USER17> I'd add typed enums to the list of notable bug-avoiding improvements in Swift. I sometimes describe Objective-C as "all of the memory safety of C with the type safety of SmallTalk".

<comment><USER18> I may steal that quote; I think I like it better than calling Objective-C the "wild west of OOP".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one as a JS dev, who find it hard with types & casting in Swift?

<comment><USER20> Probably not. Types and casting seem complex to people coming from more dynamic languages – that's okay though! It formalises something that you generally don't have to think about in Javascript – the tradeoff being that you have more consistent, less buggy software at the expense of more effort while writing it.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. I am yet to formally make my app available but had tough times mainly while doing Ajax calls, typecasting the JSON i got. Infact took time to understand some concepts like ARC, Optional Chaining when you are from JS background.

<comment><USER21> > typecasting the JSON i got

This is where a typed serialization comes in handy. (Protobufs, Thrift, Cap'n Proto, etc.) It is also possible to use an IDL to generate a type-safe API to deal with JSON -- although I don't know of any tools that emit Swift. Interfacing with third-party JSON APIs can be a pain though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does "will be portable" include any notion of a cross-platform UI?

<comment><USER20> Languages don't have UIs - frameworks do. I realise it's a pedantic distinction, but it's an important one.

<comment><USER22> I get the distinction, but there appears to be a deliberate direction to make Swift more portable. Thus, I was curious if that effort might include something UI related in the future. The interest level would certainly spike up if something were available.

<comment><USER23> But, that wouldn't make any sense to include UI components in a programming language. And I think the interest level is already "spiked".

<comment><USER22> Okay. I was under the (perhaps not true) impression that the vast majority of swift apps were iphone apps, with the apple specific UI bindings. Such that one of the first questions on a new platform (Linux, Android, etc) would be "how do I create the UI?".

It sounds like instead, the cross platform appeal is that back end or background services can now be written on non-apple platforms?

<comment><USER23> That's correct. UIKit isn't like, baked into Swift. Whatever platform you're writing for would need to provide to you UI components and then some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It would still be great if everything would be a value.

</comment><comment><USER25> The removal of prefix and postfix ++ and -- operators and the removal of C-style for loops are mistakes, IMO.

<comment><USER26> I gotta disagree with this one. Those operators have always been confusing and unnecessary. j = i++ being different from j = ++i alone is enough to convince me it's gotta go.

<comment><USER27> Exactly. I am disappointed they're removing function currying/partial application syntax though :(

<comment><USER18> This was my first reaction as well, but then I realized I hadn't done much currying in Swift and half forgot it was a feature.

Maybe you can bring it back when we get hygienic macros (Swift 4.0? _fingers crossed_ )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does Swift compare to D?

</comment><comment><USER29> Submitters: Please don't rewrite titles to say what you think is important about an article. Cherry-picking a single detail is a form of editorializing, which HN doesn't allow in story titles. The guidelines ask you to change titles only when they're misleading or linkbait, which wasn't the case here.

If you think one detail is most important, you're welcome to comment on that in the thread. Then your opinion is on the same level as other users'.

(Submitted title was 'Swift 3 will be portable / be able to run on more platforms'.)

<comment><USER30> Enforcement of this particular policy is one of the things I dislike most about HN. The current title is awful. It gives no information that the URL itself does not and doesn't explain why I'd care about the contents _now_ given I've visited the repo in the past. I'm not opposed to the removal of editorializing but it should get replaced with something neutral that still captures why the URL was submitted, e.g. "Swift 3 Roadmap Update".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There are too many projects named 'swift'.

</comment><comment><USER32> A bit too late for wider adoption, isn't it? Are there examples of similar path to openness?

<comment><USER20> I don't see why that would be the case. The language has been public for less than two years, and I don't see any reason it wouldn't become widely adopted for situations where it's a good fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Swift is great language and an enormous leap forward in the apple-sphere. I'd like to see a bigger investment in JavaScript everywhere. I'd like to see apple make a push to allow writing 100% javascript apps for iOS and mac. I think it could be a huge differentiator for iOS and Mac development and it would bring to Apple the largest developer base out there.

<comment><USER34> Starting with OS X Yosemite, you can use JavaScript for writing Mac apps and scripts. [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/Interap...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/InterapplicationCommunication/RN- JavaScriptForAutomation/Articles/Introduction.html)

<comment><USER33> Using JS for automation is a great start. I don't think they have a way to build a JS app that leverages the full capabilities of either Mac or iOS yet.

<comment><USER35> You can write full OS X apps in JavaScript:

[http://tylergaw.com/articles/building-osx-apps-with- js](http://tylergaw.com/articles/building-osx-apps-with-js)

JavaScript bridging works on iOS too!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft leaks TLS private key for cloud ERP product - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matthias-gliwka/microsoft-leaks-tls-private-key-for-cloud-erp-product-10b56f7d648 <comment><USER2> Inability to get a response upon reporting the vulnerability without heroic measures is more disturbing to me than the vulnerability. Vulnerabilities _will_ happen (even if this one is particularly... basic), but if the company isn't paying attention to responsible private disclosures, that's even more disastrous.

MS's eventual changing of their key practices suggests that they do agree this was a vulnerability, so discussions of how bad this vulnerability is seem irrelevant to me. The disturbing thing is not about how bad the vulnerability is, but about inability, as far as we can tell, to get MS to even analyze and evaluate the vulnerabilty without heroic measures including journalists threatening exposure.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It's very easy to fix a poor security configuration. It's very difficult to fix a poor security culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an article from 2007 [1], quote: "Working in the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) has been voted number six out of the ten worst jobs in science in 2007 [...]"

But I believe (I hope?) a lot has changed since then.

[1] [https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/205327/microsoft_st...](https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/205327/microsoft_staffers_debate_worst_jobs_science_nomination/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those, like me, who were mightily confused by the timeline posted at the end — he switches to euro style dates in September and October but used US style dates in August and December.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for noticing, somebody is reading until the end ;-)

I will fix this right away!

Update: fixed.

<comment><USER5> Please consider using a sane date format.

[https://xkcd.com/1179/](https://xkcd.com/1179/)

<comment><USER6> What's not "sane" about the format most of the world uses? dd/mm/yy

Maybe you meant "unambiguous"?

<comment><USER7> Most of the world does _not_ use that format. It is ambiguous because a large swath of the Earth population uses mm/dd/yy. Including the USA, but also many others.

This is why ISO-8601 was published 30 years ago.

<comment><USER6> Did you have a source for that? Wikipedia disagrees with you.

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

<comment><USER7> Ok then s/most/much

Over 2.8 billion people, a bit less than half of the worlds population commonly use a date format other than dd/mm/yy. My point stands; use ISO-8601 to avoid ambiguity.

We run a SaaS application that spits out ISO-8601 date formats in reports. Hundreds of thousands of "normal humans" seem to under that format just fine.

<comment><USER6> The only thing you took issue with was me saying most of the world uses dd/mm/yy. In fact, I suggested that it is ambiguous for the reason you described. I'm not sure what you're trying to convince me of.

<comment><USER7> I inferred from the tone that you were suggesting the whole world adopt "your" chosen date format.

Text-based messaging is not great for expressing or deciphering non-literal meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Golem.de text that is mentioned in the article is now also available in an English translation: [https://www.golem.de/news/microsoft- dynamics-365-wildcard-ce...](https://www.golem.de/news/microsoft- dynamics-365-wildcard-certificate-with-a-private-key-for- everyone-1712-131544.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> If we have an global scale attacker which can sniff the internet traffic to specific hosts, or an attacker capable of BGP hijacking, this attacker would be able to attack all companies who use Microsoft Dynamics (industrial espionage?). He would just need to sniff the credentials and log in.

After the Snowden leaks we all know that this is possible.

<comment><USER10> > After the Snowden leaks we all know that this is possible.

This bothers me. A lot of people might remember Narus and Narusinsight[1]

> Narus is noted for having created NarusInsight, a supercomputer system, > whose installation in AT&T's San Francisco Internet backbone gave rise to a > 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against > AT&T, Hepting v. AT&T.

But sure, I'm certain there are people that actually worked for these companies and can tell you how their stuff doesn't really work as advertised. Anyway, what exactly new did Snowden bring to the table in this particular context?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus_(company)#NarusInsight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus_\(company\)#NarusInsight)

<comment><USER11> PRISM [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\)) And also that GCHQ tapped Google's datacenter links. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show- ns...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-nsa-taps- google-yahoo-data-center-links/) After that information came out, Google started encrypting their internal networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "[c]ontrols exist in production environments that render the described > technique ineffective [..]"

That's a pretty naive look at penetration testing. Look, we have controls, so that CAN'T happen. Right.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hanno points out two big problems here that are not so obvious.

Firstly there is supposed to be a Problem Reporting mechanism for the certificates themselves. If you can't get the application developer to pull their finger out but you have acquired a Private Key you shouldn't have, you should be able to file such a report and get satisfaction in hours not weeks. Sophisticated users can prove they have the key without revealing it, but that's polite rather than obligatory. This mechanism either wasn't apparent to the problem's discoverer or didn't work. Neither is OK.

Secondly, even without being able to get a copy of the shared private key, sharing is a risk. If we confuse a remote client into talking to our service rather than the one they expected, they'll never know the difference because the keys check out fine.

The latter is why wildcards, while convenient, are not always a wise choice for security.

</comment><comment><USER14> Darn, I saw this, it's also a bit similar on the onmicrosoft.com domain for 365 clients.

Interesting, Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does the cloud ERP product use only the private key for rdp authentication?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the RDP authentication works using a Username/Password-pair displayed in the Life Cycle Services control panel.

The shared private key was used to encrypt and authenticate the web traffic for all customers.

<comment><USER16> It makes sense that their "quick" solution is to give each customer their own cert/key, but I'm surprised that they didn't go with a reverse proxy approach from the beginning, where the wildcard key would be kept securely at their reverse proxy layer that no customers would have access to. Having to maintain TLS certs in IIS on each of these VMs seems like it would cause them more work than it's worth. Having experience with the platform, do you have any insight into why they would do TLS at the VM rather than via a reverse proxy?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I remember, there was already a Powershell script as part of their deployment mechanism in place to deploy the certificates in the first place. Just the certificate provided to this script was a wildcard one.

I agree on the reverse proxy part, but am not familiar enough with the product and Microsofts history to comment on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is rather common security hole on different app and web hosting services that provide "We will spare you the pain of getting ssl cert by yourself, and get you one for free," but which instead give you their wildcars cert.

Wildcard certs in a shared VPS-like environment is a red flag.

<comment><USER8> If you are aware of such issues specifically feel free to contact me. I'll make sure they get handled properly.</comment></comment>


Suicide Bomb Instructor Accidentally Kills 22 Students in Iraq - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2014/02/10/suicide-bomb-accident-iraq/

<comment><USER2> This one is going to win the Darwin awards in 2014.</comment>


Ask HN: PostgreSQL explain visualizer - <AUTHOR> Someone recently (last month or 2) posted a really awesome tool for being able to visualize postgresql explains, but I can't for the life of me find it on HN. Anyone know what i'm talking about? <comment><USER2> Maybe this one [http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan- visualization](http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization) Original post at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10960344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10960344)

<comment><AUTHOR> YES! Thank you so much. Bookmarking the hell out of that.</comment></comment>


WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40459142/whatsapps-cofounder-on-how-it-reached-1-3-billion-users-without-losing-its-focus <comment><USER2> Here are some numbers i can't find. The number of users chatting on yahoo, aim, facebook, msn messenger, and all the random others combined when it was a thing not to care which people were using.

At my job in 2011, every single member of my team was on using a different client, i was on ubuntu using Empathy.

The point is, chat was already resolved, and it didn't require some sort of "quiet room or distraction free office" to get it where it was.

Kudos to the WhatsApp team for having this many users, but let's not forget that we had no problem chatting until the facebook, yahoo, googles broke the old protocol in favor of restricting users to their own systems.

<comment><USER3> We hear this rant on every chat-related thread. WhatsApp brought the amazing innovation of using your phone number for "login" (and later on - your native contacts as its contacts list). This enabled zero-BS onboarding, and that's why they have so many users. Thanks WA for helping humanity deprecate that horrible XMPP. I don't miss it.

<comment><USER4> People wanted free text messaging, so they used whatsapp.

If they were so great it would have caught on in the US, but it didn't.

<comment><USER5> It caught on in almost all the rest of the world but because it didn't catch on in the US it means that it is shit. Yeah, talk about living in a bubble...

Back on topic, I've avoided using WhatsApp for about a year, even though everyone around me was using it. When I've finally gave in I found out that it was really, really easy to use, even on my relatively crappy iPhone4 (I'm talking about ~2014-2015, at which point that type of phone was seen as a museum artifact; I'm still using it). Sending photos was damn easy, notifications were always "right" (not the crappy shit that Skype calls "notifications") and the "last seen" future was the central point of many personal relationships (still is). Unfortunately WhatsApp stopped functioning for me about one year and a half ago (after the FB acquisition), but you can't dismiss it just because it hasn't caught up in the States.

<comment><USER6> You can add Japan, South Korea, and China to the list of places that don't use WhatsApp.

<comment><USER4> Also North Korea, Taiwan, Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own.

It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or how old, no matter if it is a rich kid with the latest IPhone or the poor with the cheapest phone. Even the telcos had to bend to WhatsApp strength by offering "unlimited WhatsApp usage" on very limited data plans.

<comment><USER8> Same scenario in Mexico, people in the US didn't leave SMS as fast as us because they had unlimited SMS plans. A lot of people in our countries didn't have that option, we had to pay around 20 US cents per SMS that was just insane

<comment><USER9> Same in Lebanon and several other countries in the middle east. 15 cents per SMS, now around 9 I believe. So people started using WhatsApp for all their messaging. When audio messages became a feature, people stopped using their phone service and switched to this annoying method of communication. Many people now default to WhatsApp calls for regular calls as well.

When I was there, my monthly bill was over $50 USD per month for very minimal usage of both data and calls. That's ridiculous...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to > get started with

And they succeeded. I've been using it for years and the only new feature I remember is end to end encryption, despite they probably added new features. I don't care about status and stories, if they're still there they managed not to make them in the way of people that only want a SMS alternative. This is great design.

My only wish is that they stay using the very same chatbot backend of Messenger. WhatsApp is the only major chart platform without chatbots and given it's the number one in many countries, included mine, I'm a little tired to tell customers, yes but your customers will have to use Messenger or Telegram (which many people don't even know to exist.)

<comment><USER11> The other significant feature added was voice chats. The fact that it's easy to forget or not notice is a strong indicator of how much humanity has adopted text chatting as the primary mode of remote communication.

<comment><USER12> "Humanity" may be overstating it. In Brazil people very commonly use WhatsApp to send short spoken messages, for instance.

<comment><USER11> You're right, China too. I should have said asynchronous messaging rather than text messaging. Whether short voice, text, gif, or emoji messages, the synchronous phone call is increasingly secondary.

<comment><USER13> but reason in china is overcomplicated writing system. now young people have no problem to write in pinyin, but older generation will rather send voice message, since it's the easiest way to communicate, 2nd would be handwriting, my father in law is exactly like this, not sure what kind of keyboard use my MIL, my wife is fully westernized in this aspect using google pinyin with QWERTY (!) keyboard, which is rare even by CN standard when most young people still use T9 keyboard

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm kinda surprised to read that WhatsApp hasn't really caught on in the US—in the sense that not everyone you know uses it (on the contrary, very few do).

Here in India, the term 'whatsapp' has creeped its way into regular hinglish (mix of hindi and english) that most working professionals speak in. All schools, colleges, offices and even parents use WhatsApp groups to communicate. It has simply been embraced as the default place to communicate. Even drivers and servants on my contact list put up WhatsApp stories and send broadcasts; the intuitiveness of its adoption truly amazes me!

</comment><comment><USER15> In India, Whatsapp is HUGE. I would go as far as to say if it were to go down for a day, we will see a dip in the per-day GDP. It is not that so much business is conducted on it, but also it is the dominant social messaging glue.

Whatsapp probably has about 220 million users in India[1] and also because of dwindling mobile data prices, it also has now become the alternate voice channel [2]. Also I read that 90% of all smart phones in India have Whatsapp installed.

(1) [http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/whatsapp- hits-...](http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/whatsapp-hits-200-mn- user-milestone-in-india/article9559045.ece) (2) [https://www.medianama.com/2017/05/223-indian-whatsapp- users-...](https://www.medianama.com/2017/05/223-indian-whatsapp-users-video- call-for-50-million-minutes-per-day/)

<comment><USER16> >so much business is conducted on it

WhapsApp could probably monetize there by tacking on a payments system, possible a bit paypal like. Could make money and not annoy existing users much beyond an extra button they don't use.

<comment><USER17> This is in the works, as far as I remember. They plan to plug into the UPI (financial service by the government) to bring P2P payments. Will be quite the gamechanger, especially with how popular Paytm (another p2p payment method / wallet app) has become with shopkeepers and the like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Which is cool in itself.

What is deeply regrettable is the fact that they ended up selling to Facebook and thereby contributing to Facebook's aggressive and relentless mass surveillance system.

<comment><USER19> I wonder if they also cut themselves a raw deal in selling. They could have built a whole platform on top of WhatsApp without any innovation more subtle than copying WeChat.

<comment><USER20> Nobody is going to complain about selling for $19bn. Sometimes you just need to take the money.

<comment><USER21> And sometimes you don't. Zuckerburg famously had the chance to sell out for billions quite a few times [1], and basically said, "I'm doing what I want to be doing. If I sold out I would just start another social network company and I already own the best/biggest one."

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that- ever-t...](http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-tried- to-buy-facebook-2010-5/#in-june-2004-an-unnamed-financier- offered-10-million-1)

edit: Closer and better quote. Thiel's paraphrase of Zuckerburg, "I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have."

[2] [https://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark- zuckerberg...](https://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg- luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html)

<comment><USER22> Did anyone offer him 19 billion?

<comment><USER23> Are you suggesting they never had a chance to sell for 19 billion? Because I'm pretty sure all Zuckerberg had to do was pick up the phone in 2009, or even earlier.

<comment><USER24> It's plausible. They crossed $20BB valuation roughly at the end of 2009. At that time they had 400MM users. This is about the same growth rate as WhatsApp since founding.

However, Facebook had 400MM largely North American and European users and had $1-1.5BB revenue with obvious potential for much more. WhatsApp's revenue was a couple orders of magnitude less after five years, with lower potential on its own to grow since it lacked Facebook's ability to collect and exploit data.

So, it seems like WhatsApp should be valued less than Facebook, i.e. less than $20BB, at the same stage in its life. That doesn't mean Facebook overpaid; WhatsApp's users were nearly a perfect complement to Facebook's geographically and Facebook, unlike a company like Google, had the organizational ability to allow WhatsApp to grow while benefitting from Facebook resources.

[https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/tracking- facebooks-v...](https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/tracking-facebooks- valuation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think they're losing focus.

I've started seeing cracks in WhatsApp's UI:

\- Some times when inserting a single emoji on a single line, in between pressing send and the message being sent, the keyboard flickers.

\- There seems to be a mysterious space between the Euro symbol and the next character...? That space isn't displayed on the webapp.

\- I had a third one that I forgot.

Also bad decisions:

\- Logs shouldn't be backed-up to Google Drive.

\- Bloat. "Status"? No one cares. Why does swiping left allows me to take pictures? I have a camera app that I like using.

\- Sharing metadata with Facebook will be WhatsApp's undoing, mark my words.

Signal on the other hand is being developed by 1 guy and has 5M installs.

<comment><USER26> WhatsApp's UI is a complete mess. Trying to explain it to my mum has been near-impossible.

Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button.

Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your status, because that's clearly a similar action to chatting and should therefore be placed in a tab next to it, and one for calls, no idea why that's not just a button in the contacts list.

Then when you go into the conversation view, at the bottom you have a generic attach media icon, a take-picture-and-send-it-shortcut and then separate from that the send-voice-message button, sharing its place with the actual send- message button. That might've been clever design at some point in the past, but now you have those other buttons right next to the send-voice-message button, so it should share the look with those as it does a very similar thing.

Also, the unlabeled movie-camera-icon at the top does not mean sending a video, it means starting a video call. You could sort of guess that by the location of that button, but that's still not just obvious, especially not for my mum.

Where you can however now send videos from, is the Emoji-selector. Or well, it's rather GIFs. Reaction-GIFs, even. Which is why I'm not completely opposed to them having placed it there instead of in the attach-media-dialog, but now you have 9 tabs at the top of the Emoji-selector and three tabs at the bottom (also including the search), as well as a delete-key, which does not behave like a tab. And two of these tabs even share the same icon.

Moving on, when you mark a message for selection, you get 5 icons at the top. Two of those are the exact same arrow-icon just mirrored. One means "Reply", the other means "Forward". Even knowing that there's a difference, I couldn't tell you which one means which without first long-pressing on them, which my mum won't know to do.

Also, one of those 5 icons is a star and when you long-press on it, it literally says "Star". Not "Favourite", not "Remind me", not "Mark as Important". I don't even know what it does myself, so I can't tell you what it should say there.

Some of these problems are hard to avoid or hard to get right, but many of these are there, because they absolutely did not focus on being a chat application and instead had to turn the whole thing into everything and the kitchen sink, and then they're even making the individual features compete for a spot in the directly visible GUI, no matter how much it clutters things up, just because they want people to use them.

<comment><USER27> All of those things are pretty minor and employ fairly standard design patterns. I think you're exaggerating a bit here.

The app is quite streamlined, especially compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype. I think if you were to remove any of the main features at this point, people would complain and jump ship to another app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why do we adhere to the assumption that number of users is the ultimate metric of software success?

I would like to hear from devs who aren't interested in expanding for the sake of expanding, who still consider their apps to be very successful.

<comment><USER29> For a messenging app, with classic network effects, it's a very relevant metric.

<comment><USER30> With the network effect, if you are above a certain threshold then suddenly everybody will use your app. So the number of users is either low, or it is near the maximum number of users. This means that there is little information in the actual number of users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "Images tell a much better story than text," he says. "And videos tell a > much better story than images.

Seems like the evidence of WhatsApp itself, not to mention my own experience, is directly contradictory to this.

A video is rarely preferable to an image, and an image is rarely preferable to a bit of text.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think WhatsApp is where Twitter was during their Ascend-to-protocol Vs Just- push-Ads phase[1], only that WA is dead-set on not going down the Ad route. IMO their options are whether to become an app platform for businesses(Service delivery, payments, shopping) or to become a user-data source for FB. KIM that they are naturally competing with IG & FB.com in generating revenue for FB Inc and subscription isn't working for them(mostly because of almost zero app- buying & digital payments culture in places where WA is popular).

[1] [http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have- been](http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's super easy to focus on a single metric (user growth) when you have a seemingly unlimited amount of capital and have no immediate pressure to turn _any_ revenue/profit. This article does a massive disservice to those who are not as fortunate who will inevitably be lead into failure.

Note, this should not discredit the more interesting and glorified aspects of WhatsApp (strong leadership, technical aptitude, tech stack, etc).

<comment><USER34> Did you read the article? They're explicitly _not_ focusing on user growth:

"But while Facebook has long prided itself on the way its growth team has turned attracting new members into a science, Koum is equally proud of the fact that WhatsApp has not done so. Instead, all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with—it doesn't even require you to create a user name or password—and so useful that you'll tell friends and family about it."

And that's consistent with what I've read of their pre-FB approach. During that period, they definitely didn't have an unlimited amount of capital. They got to 250m users (as of June 2013) [1] on only $8.3 million [2].

So no, I don't think this does a disservice. Especially when you compare it with things like Juicero, which rode a wave of hype into a $120m failure (14.5x what WhatsApp spent). Hype can get you money, but unless you focus intensely on user experience and user value you won't build the audience you need to succeed.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/chart/2614/monthly-active- whatsapp-...](https://www.statista.com/chart/2614/monthly-active-whatsapp- users-worldwide/)

[2] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp/funding- rou...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp/funding-rounds)

<comment><USER35> > _Did you read the article? They 're explicitly _not* focusing on user > growth:*

I also RTFA, and it's hard to understand how someone could think user growth wasn't the focus.

— "…all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with…" [Hint: They did this to improve virality.]

— "All along, he adds, the company's goal has been 'getting every single smartphone user on our network and getting them to use WhatsApp.'"

Plus, they'd said as much elsewhere as well. From [https://www.wired.com/2016/01/whatsapp-is-nearing-a- billion-...](https://www.wired.com/2016/01/whatsapp-is-nearing-a-billion- users-now-its-time-to-find-the-money/):

— "Continued growth, it turns out, was one of the main reasons Koum agreed to the Facebook acquisition. The deal allowed WhatsApp to concentrate on growth without worrying too much about revenue."

<comment><USER34> To me there's a giant difference between people focused on growth for the sake of growth and people trying to make a valuable product that is then rewarded with growth.

As an example, look at Google in the early days. They were mainly focused on making a great, valuable product. Growth was a consequence of that. In contrast, look at all the people that glued gamification, growth hacking, etc, onto mediocre mediocre products. As with things like MLMs, a growth-first focus can get business results, but I think it's a very different mindset than, "Let's make a product people love."

Growth is surely a useful metric for them, and from that quote, it looks like it's a goal. But a goal is different, broader thing than what one focuses on. Compare people who want to be, say, great athletes (and therefore famous) with people who just want to be famous. The former will focus on doing the hard work; the latter will be more inclined to chase self-promotion and attention directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sorry but I don't agree with the statistic of the Status feature.

> the company announced that 250 million people—a quarter of all members—were > using it daily

Just had a quick look, and I have around 150 contacts on WhatsApp (mainly the Snapchat/Instagram users age group) and not a single person has set one of these photo statuses right now. I only ever recall seeing one once, since the feature launched.

If I open up Snapchat/Instagram I will literally see hundreds. Unless it's become very popular within a certain country, or another age group I find it hard to believe that it's reached anywhere near the size of Snapchat's user base.

<comment> fat-chunk Are you in the States? I have heard that Whatsapp is much more popular outside the US.

I live in the UK and everyone I know uses Whatsapp as their main method of communication while Snapchat activity seems to have dropped very quickly, perhaps in favour of Instagram, in my experience anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How much profit increase does a new user bring can i see that?

</comment><comment><USER38> my mobile phone has no webcam...

</comment><comment><USER39> I think i see a pattern:

WhatsApp: circumvent cellphone texting charges

Airbnb: circumvent hotel laws

Uber: circumvent taxi laws

Amazon: circumvent state taxes

Facebook: circumvent people's anonymity online

Google: circumvent copyrights (take people's content slap on ads)

<comment><USER40> Of those description, whatsapp is the one that's actually the classic "how capitalism is supposed to work": provide a comparable or better service for a lower price.

Amazon's era of sales tax evasion is mostly over. And if anyone is monetising copyright infringement it's not Google (who are somewhat conscientious about this after some lawsuits) but Tumblr (literally made of copyright infringing photos)

<comment><USER41> You mean the Sears-Roebuck era of tax evasion.

<comment><USER40> I meant something very specific: [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/the-holiday- is-over-amazon-w...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/the-holiday-is-over- amazon-will-collect-sales-taxes-nationwide-on-april-1.html)

(The era of Amazon posting things from Jersey to UK and other destinations for similar reasons ended ages ago)

I was also restricting myself to the question of sales taxes; tax evasion/avoidance among the internet tech monoliths is a wider question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> why all the girls on the picture have laptops and the guy only a book? feels like this is the person who was left out from the lan party :)

</comment><comment><USER43> The messaging app no one uses in Asia?

<comment><USER44> Are you serious? Everyone and their grandma in India uses WhatsApp. It's so pervasive that it's almost like the only means of communication for people with smartphone and internet access.

<comment><USER45> Whatsapp is no 1 market share in every country. If not no 1, only lost from wechat

<comment><USER46> While I agree that Whatsapp is the dominant chat app in Asia, it's not number 1 everywhere.

Notably - as you mentioned - Wechat in China, but also Kakao in Korea, Zalo in Vietnam and Line in Japan and Taiwan, where very few people use Whatsapp.

<comment><USER45> Agree with this one. Only local startup can compete whatsapp. Asia, rusia and africa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> icq, aim, msn messenger, google talk (DOA), skype, wechat. besides widespread business adoption, what's special about this one? it's seamless to uninstall an app and get a new one. why would there be customer loyalty to this business model?

ot, i don't understand why anyone would want to get anywhere near mobile. people are too stupid to use these internet devices in moderation and it will destroy all social cohesion. it's a cash grab to the bottom as it devolves into radical groupthink, a breakdown of dialogue, and mass segregation of populations.

how is arguing about anything and everything productive or useful without domain specific expertise? how is mindlessly consuming hours and hours of infotainment benefiting anyone?

but i can instantly communicate to anyone around the world in a matter of milliseconds! your life is not that interesting, a letter sent by post every other month would probably be more fruitful to developing ideas, advancing discourse and carefully articulating thoughts. it's like correspondence chess vs 1 minute bullet matches. one is excited screaming and shouting, the other is a measured conversation and exchange. pretty sure e-mail hit that sweet spot decades ago, with bulletin boards and irc filling the less personal and more immediate gaps.</comment>


Software Technologies that I MUST Learn - <AUTHOR> http://danweinreb.org/blog/software-technologies-that-i-must-learn

<comment><AUTHOR> Dan Weinreb explains what this list is about further down in the comments:

 _What I mean is, my friends and co-workers come up to me and say, oh, Dan, you've just GOT to learn about XXX! I sigh and add it to the list; if this guy said it's cool and important, then I suppose he must be right, since I respect him so much. But when on Earth will I find the time?_</comment>


An introduction to gradient descent and linear regression - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/06/24/gradient-descent-linear-regression/ <comment><USER2> Very nicely presented. Sadly, many of us had to learn gradient descent from Numeric Recipes in C.</comment>


Afrikan Countries Export Just 0.3 per Cent of the World's High-Tech Products - tefo-mohapi http://www.iafrikan.com/2016/07/19/african-countries-export-just-0-3-per-cent-of-the-worlds-high-tech-products-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> How much does amerikkka export?</comment>