Ask YC: What do you actually pay for, you, yourself? - <AUTHOR>

Spawned off from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288231
It'd be interesting to know what people in the YCNews demographic actually pay for online. Which paying subscription services do you actually bother spending money on?
The question is open to you both as a consumer and as a business. If you are both, please split your answer into two parts, e.g.:
As a consumer, I pay for: Flickr
As a business, I pay for: Bug tracking software,...
Note 1: Please feel free to use specific product names.
Note 2: Please don't include things that everyone pays for online, e.g. Amazon books, electronic odds and ends, hosting - unless you feel your particular version is special.
Thanks for sharing! <comment><USER4> Well you said no hosting, so besides that I'd say nothing really. I'm a cheap ass.

<comment><USER5> Are you sure?

I physically hand over money for hardware, and that's about it. Everything else I like is free...

...except that in return for some of that free stuff I give demographic information. Oh, and in return for some of the other free stuff I give coding/testing/bug fixes. And I guess some of the free stuff I pay for via being temped into buying their real-world/physical products. Then some of the rest I suppose I pay for by validating someone's ego through the mechanism of pushing up their numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Holy cow - didnt realize so many people pay for Flickr! Thats seriously surprising to me.

I pay for Yahoo NFL Gamepass (all NFL games streamed live via internet!). I pay 200 bucks a year for that. Would pay >1000 if they wanted to really push it. I'm obssesed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Skype

I used to pay for the Zune Pass but the service became so utterly worthless plus my Internet connection times out quite often here in Kuwait that I just said forget it. Back to torrents, which will automatically resume the download, when my connection wakes back up (without locking up the entire system, might I add).

</comment><comment><USER8> Startup:gitHub, S3 & EC2 (just experimenting, so minimal actual charges), zonedit

Personal:eRobertParker, MyFoodDiary _, eMusic_ , iTunes (mostly for TV Shows and kids movies), callcentric (VOIP line for my house), .mac/mobileMe (I know, I know) *just recently canceled so I can afford my startup.

Business:Safari (as part of my Komodo/ActivePerl Studio license)

Looking at soon: a slice at slicehost, Balsalmiq (an app, really)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll start the ball rolling.

As a consumer, I've paid for: peepcode screencasts; a flickr pro account; an account to freshlymixed.com while it was still up; That's about it over the last couple of years. I'm not a prolific purchaser of consumer services.

As a business, I'm paying for: EngineYard hosting, Fogbugz, and we paid for Basecamp for a little while. That's it.

Almost everything else seems to be pretty much free.

</comment><comment><USER9> Things I pay for:

1\. ESPN Insider

Things I would pay for (but are free):

1\. Hacker News 2\. Yodlee 3\. Feedburner 4\. Google Alerts

<comment><USER10> Is ESPN's insider content that much better than what you get for free elsewhere? If so, that's really saying a lot, since the bar for sports content has risen faster than the price of gas over the last few years.

<comment><USER9> Yes it really is. People like John Hollinger and KC Joyner are must reads for my line of work. Chad Ford has gotten a ton better as well - he used to be a hack.

<comment><USER10> There's been an all out bidding war for sports writers lately. I guess that must be why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fantasy football real-time stats on Yahoo!

<comment><USER10> Interesting. Those are free on ESPN now. And, of course, Draftmix :)

<comment><USER11> We've been using yahoo for 5 or 6 years now and we're just used to it. I think it costs about $10/season and given how seriously we take this thing, it doesn't feel like a lot of money.

Incidentally, we tried to run a league on fleaflicker last year (for free) in parallel with the yahoo league, and the experience was severely lacking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For business and professional development, I pay for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library, which includes a lot of material including a couple of online books selections: One large run by Books 24x7 and a somewhat limited subscription to Safari Books Online.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Freshbooks for time tracking and invoicing clients

2\. Flickr Pro account for easy photo management

3\. Dedicated server with LayeredTech for hosting projects

4\. EasyNews account for newsgroups

5\. Netflix for movie rentals and streaming

</comment><comment><USER14> I pay yearly for mozy and rapidshare.

</comment><comment><USER15> Consumer:

Cook's Illustrated (for access to Solid Tested Recipes)

NetFlix

Consumer Reports (big purchases)

Mozy (Online Back Up)

used to pay for WSJ but dropped that due to News Corp content degradation.

Work pays several Online Journal and Library Access fees for me.

This was actually harder to come up with than I imagined because several of these only bill yearly or every two years and so the pain of paying virtually disappears...

</comment><comment><USER16> i pay for a slice at slicehost, and a pay for supportive subscriptions to some community-based forums/sites. oh, and skype.

thats it. i'd pay for other things if i had more disposable income and/or profitable startup, though. i'm making do with what i have, for now. i'm considering paying for something like an automatic cloud backup system, too, but am not currently.

</comment><comment><USER17> Rhapsody (2 subscriptions one for the wife, one for me). Safari unlimited. AWS: I just used Mechanical Turk. It's an awesome service. Safeway online grocery delivery. It's only 10 bucks! Neflix, of course. GoToMyPC for servicing the family's computers back home. Basecamp for a short time. Launchsplash. Moo : Killer business cards. Just got them today.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm going to limit myself to online services, as opposed to more mail- cataloguey applications.

Video Games: Xbox Live Gold Account, Xbox Live Arcade Games, download tracks for Rock Band, and FFXI (think WoW.)

Movies: Netflix

Hosting: In the very near future, Amazon Web Services

Finance: Credit score tracking

</comment><comment><USER19> Personal: Backpack

Biz: Basecamp, Campfire, PBWiki, AWS ... and hosting from Slicehost, Rackspace, and EngineYard

</comment><comment><USER20> One thing I pay for and I don't think anyone mentioned is "O'Reilly Safari Bookstore". US$ 22,00 month (I think?) and quite some nice books: the Javascript Rhino book, Obie's the Rails way, the Ruby way, the Pragmatic Programmer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Hackers & Painters, to name a few.

</comment><comment><USER21> Skype, NetFlix, Rhapsody, Peapod

Used to pay for VirtualPBX, Experts Exchange, and Wall St. Journal

</comment><comment><USER22> Consumer: Flickr, Giganews.com, Amazon S3 (personal docs), DirecTV +HBO +HD, access to a private tech forum, Wufoo for my blog's contact form, Google Apps Premier, misc iTunes Store purchases

Startup: Campfire, Basecamp, Amazon S3, Pingdom and soon Liquid Planner

</comment><comment><USER23> consumer

      Napster - 15/mo - i like to support the musicians i listen to
      Netflix - 15/mo
      Rockband songs - 25/mo something around that although not anymore as I'm now boot strapping

      Come to think of it, i could easily give up all of those services

business

      TollFreemax - 9/mo
      ProjectLocker - 5/mo svn repository
      Authorize.net payment gateway - 30/mo (not really special, but people *can* use paypal/gpay/aws/ccnow etc freely)

used to run a clothing store (long ago when i didn't know how to build my own ecommerce)

      prostores 30/mo

I've also purchased software for my business

      boxshot3D - <USER2>

<comment><USER10> Paypal's merchant services still have a montly fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a consumer, nothing.

As a business, hosting/mail/sourcecontrol accounts, and the big one is the ADC membership. Sure, you can get the devtools for free but the WWDC videos make it worthwhile around a new OS release.

</comment><comment><USER25> JungleDisk (for backup via S3), hosting (Dreamhost for shared, Slicehost for more power), Amazon MP3 for music. I've been trialing Pingdom for site monitoring and will probably sign up once trial is over. Netflix.

<comment><USER26> I forgot, I too pay for Jungledisk

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Personal: TWiT subscription. FLOSS weekly is awesome, <http://twit.tv/FLOSS>

Business: Pingdom. Easy peasy way to make sure your site is up. Amazon S3.

</comment><comment><USER28> Subscriptions I have

Business: Basecamp, Zoho

Consumer: O'Reilly safari - safari.oreilly.com - browse their entire library (including books in pre-publication) for $42.99/mo

</comment><comment><USER29> Office space, a managed colo from a provider in Canada, 2-3 slicehost VMs, DSL from Verizon and AT&T, 37Signals Campfire (excellent), 37Signals Basecamp (not excellent).

</comment><comment><USER30> Freshbooks(19USD/pm) for Billing Clients. Unfuddle(9USD/pm) for Repo+PM Seobook(100 Usd/pm) for learning marketing.

Ebooks , Domains(Godaddy), Hosting(Webfaction)

<comment><USER31> Is Seobook any good?

<comment><USER30> Yes, very!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I only paid some MMORPG subscriptions so far. Ultima Online and WoW - <USER3> longer than a month, though.

Also spent 20$ on Linden Dollars (Second Life).

</comment><comment><USER33> As a consumer? * Flickr * Amazon Prime * NOD32 subscription * S3 * NewsDemon

As a business? * JIRA * Confluence * Fisheye * vBulletin * JungleDisk * S3

</comment><comment><USER33> As a consumer? * Flickr * Amazon Prime * NOD32 subscription * S3 * NewsDemon

As a business? * JIRA * Confluence * Fisheye * vBulletin * JungleDisk * S3

</comment><comment><USER34> Rhapsody, and my partner pays for NetFlix. I was paying for Oreilly's Safari but I wasn't using it enough. I pay for Espn.com insider as well.

</comment><comment><USER35> Skype, Amazon MP3s. For web analytics I pay for GetClicky.com Even though there's Google Analytics, Clicky is well worth the money.

<comment><USER31> Does it bother you that you can't host Clicky? I'm using Mint (thanks to a rec on #startups), but Clicky seems to have more data by far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amount spent personally = 0.

Amount spent through business = 0.

Amount that could have been earned if I had been billing instead of on hacker news > 0.

</comment><comment><USER37> flickr, mefi, FogBugz, used to pay for O'Reilly's Safari. Bought the Instapaper iPhone client, if that counts. Made donations to a ton of services and people, mainly open source projects, web comics and such. Also donated to wikipedia, wikileaks, eff and a few others. That's all that comes to mind right now.

</comment><comment><USER38> Skype phone number and skype-out.

Tax preparation software.

Everything else online is business related.

</comment><comment><USER39> _"... What do you actually pay for, you, yourself? ..."_

Thrifty: consumer/biz: flickr, domain, adsl

</comment><comment><USER40> Flickr and blogging software (Typepad).

<comment><USER40> I should add that I'm about to pay for Balsamiq's Mockups (for business).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Honestly? Nothing outside of the everyday stuff, but even Amazon I only buy books every now and then.

</comment><comment><USER42> Consumer: netflix, amazon prime, ACM, cook's illustrated

Business: shoeboxed, earthclassmail, MSDN

</comment><comment><USER43> I pay for Backpack and Basecamp, and will start paying for GoToMeeting once we have more use for it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Flickr and until very recently, Last.fm, although I may subscribe to that again in the future.

</comment><comment><USER26> Consumer: iTunes, Club Penguin (for my daughter)

Business: CVSDude (VCS hosting), Highrise

</comment><comment><USER45> Nobody uses Smugmug?

Consumer: Smugmug, S3, JungleDisk

Business: GitHub, AWS (soon)

</comment><comment><USER46> Amazon S3 & UnBox. Google Adwords. Playstation Network. GoDaddy. Tivo.

</comment><comment><USER47> Consumer: \- ACM membership \- Skype

Business: \- Google Email \- Skype

</comment><comment><USER48> Rhapsody, Audible, GoToMyPc

</comment><comment><USER49> I pay for: unfuddle, itunes

</comment><comment><USER50> I remember paying $.99 for a Google Video once. That's laughable now!

</comment><comment><USER51> I didn't see anyone mention Pandora. I pay for that and flickr pro.

</comment><comment><USER52> Flickr, iTunes, a backup service, host/server/domain monitoring

</comment><comment><USER53> Business: Freshbooks, Github, Vonage Consumer: iTunes, Peepcode

</comment><comment><USER54> I pay for GitHub and AWS. Total cost: under $10/mo

</comment><comment><USER55> consumer: xbox live, netflix (if you consider that "online") for business: skype, pingdom.com (lets me know my clients' sites are up!)

</comment><comment><USER56> BoardGameGeek, although it's more of a donation.

</comment><comment><USER57> Consumer Reports ACM iTunes CovenantEyes

</comment><comment><USER58> I pay for Flickr, Last.fm and Github.

</comment><comment><USER59> consumer:

flickr

tasks (by Crowd Favorite)

business:

Highrise

Quickbooks online

</comment><comment><USER60> rsync.net (solid backup) .mac (hey, it has a few uses) motionbased itunes

</comment><comment><USER61> notebook backup, website uptime monitoring service

</comment><comment><USER62> Paypal fees.

</comment><comment><USER63> My domain.

</comment><comment><USER64> Lighthouse

</comment><comment><USER65> todoist</comment>


Discrete Mathematics and Functional Programming (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/dmfp/ <comment><USER2> I have this book, there's interesting chapters like defining arithmetic recursively in SML. You can do this book without previous programming assuming you have domain knowledge to install SML yourself.

There is no answers to the exercises in the book (some selected solutions on the book homepage) but there is an appendix on various patterns and proof techniques, which turned out to be all I needed as many of the exercises you're just writing and checking a program. I assume there's no solutions because the exercises are used for a course. I've always wondered why authors don't have a self-study, Knuth like book with answers contained in it, then sell a seperate instructor pack or something with private exercises to other teachers.

<comment><USER3> > You can do this book without previous programming assuming you have domain > knowledge to install SML yourself.

Via [http://www.smlnj.org/](http://www.smlnj.org/) ?

<comment><USER2> Which is nowhere in the book, it's only referred to as "ML language" so requires assumed domain knowledge such as (1)ML = Standard ML = SML/NJ (2)you know what a REPL is and that it has different commands on different platforms (Ctrl-Z to exit on Windows VS Ctrl-D in *nix) (3)you know commands to load your larger .sml programs into the REPL and all the pitfalls like needing to restart/empty the environment. In the course it's explained but not the book [http://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/previous/spring19/cs243/ml.h...](http://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/previous/spring19/cs243/ml.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I took this course from the author (with a draft of the now-published textbook—I'm in the acknowledgements for proofreading help) and thoroughly enjoyed it. I hadn't thought I was much of a math guy, but it made set theory and proofs and very basic modern algebra seem interesting and intuitive. Not sure what else there is to say, but I'm happy to answer questions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can definitely vouch for the quality of this course and textbook. It's one of the favorites in the CS program at Wheaton, and Dr. VanDrunen teaches the course extremely well! The textbook does a good job of balancing the discrete math parts with functional programming and relates the two in a way that helps build your understanding of both.

</comment><comment><USER6> While I appreciate that functional programming came out of the 80s... I am surprised at the assertion that it isn't 'the hotness' right now.

Maybe not in academia, but it sure is in the working world... and for good reason imho.

<comment> dan-robertson I think you are partly wrong on two counts here:

1\. Functional programming is popular in academia (particularly in PLT) but so is just about every sort of programming. Lots of academics have carved out niches and worked on them for long times.

2\. Your view of industry is somewhat biased. In the sort of tech companies talked about on HN (eg Bay Area style companies), functional programming methods are growing in popularity but it isn't really functional programming languages but certain functional programming techniques (in particular mutating this as little as possible and in particular not all over the place). Outside of such companies everyone still uses java, C, C++, C#, or JavaScript with some people using react now which is somewhat popular.

<comment><USER7> > it isn't really functional programming languages

Except that the goalposts keep moving all the time. It used to be the case that having first-class functions was enough to be considered FP, but even function objects in C++ or Java give you that. Then it was "no global mutability" \- restrict mutation to a single well-defined "context" of execution (via things like the ST monad, in a functional language like Haskell) and make sure that anything that's shared more broadly is immutable. But Rust has now codified that rule-of-thumb as well, and with it the comprehensive use of such a "sharing or direct mutation, but not both" pattern. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the future.

<comment><USER8> SHH!! DON'T TELL THEM THE PLOT!

We have to let them think that they're in control... That their languages are "just happening" to slowly evolve into shitty variants of Haskell.

<comment><USER9> And Haskell is just a shitty version of a language with real dependent types. Seriously, language flaming is dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is that no CS professors ever use a single line of CSS on their pages. This site would benefit from the following:

<style>

body{ font-family: "Calibri", Times, serif; margin: 75px; }

</style>

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the tip. It's there now. (They don't teach CSS is CSCI phd programs :) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This one uses Haskell:

        Discrete Mathematics Using a Computer

[http://www.x.edu.uy/inet/Springer.pdf](http://www.x.edu.uy/inet/Springer.pdf)

[https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781846282416](https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781846282416)</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of hackathon do you like? - <AUTHOR>

We (hackerrank.com) are planning to visit a few schools (Harvard, Princeton, UFL, etc.) in the next few weeks to conduct a hackathon. I'm not a big fan of "Here's our API, lets build something cool" type because students might be tired of every hackathon being the same type and there a number of them that happen every month.<p>There are other ideas we have in mind like a bot-vs-bot contest. What kind of contest would you like? <comment><USER2> The best hackathons I've been to had no required APIs but did have sponsored APIs with nice prizes for the best implementations. They also had experts on the APIs running around helping reduce the learning curve.

Those guys help a lot when you've only got 24 hours to get over the hump (ask the Firebase guys).

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea of having a general theme, and then presenting what you've built at the end somehow. I'd rather not do a hackathon that required we use a specific API or product, or otherwise restrict what you work on. Instead, make the hackathon about building things along a certain theme ("music", "transportation", "education", etc).

Also, I may be biased as a hardware engineer, but I only consider hackathons that welcome both software and hardware projects.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much everyone for your feedback.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hackathons like in the Social Network movie... :) Always fun but schools may not agree to host it on campus...

</comment><comment><USER5> I love hackathons like AngelHack. Great Api's from awesome sponsors but you aren't required to use them.</comment>


More on Nice Downtowns: Do They Just Happen? Or Are They Made? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/04/do-nice-downtowns-just-happen-or-are-they-made/390921/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Better question: what is a successful downtown? An entertaining Main Street USA style place that pleases visitors? Or a living place with commerce, residents and industry living in harmony? Or what?

Maybe its easier to define a failed downtown - closed storefronts, declining buildings and poor streets are red flags.

I recall the old Sunnyvale CA downtown, with its corner bar with mariachi music at all hours, its mix of thrift shops and restaurants, the old pavement with makers marks from the early 1900's. It was ... interesting. They remade it as a boutiquey shopping district with fake old English streetlights and brick pavement and chainstores, and I never went back.</comment>


Scientists turn undersea fiber optic cables into seismographs - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/28/scientists-turn-undersea-fiber-optic-cables-into-seismographs/ <comment><USER2> Also [https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-spot-an-undersea- faul...](https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-spot-an-undersea-fault-using- fiber-optic-cables/)

(via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660902), but no comments there)

</comment><comment><USER3> The method is becoming very popular in the oil industry as a robust method of instrumenting oil wells. Fiber can measure temperature and pressure as well as seismic waves. A well can be a harsh environment to place electronic sensors and the wire to power them and receive telemetry. Electronic instrument get in the way of drilling and production. A tiny fiber has none of these problems. Ditto for transport pipelines for trauma and leaks (pressure drops). The limitation is a length of about ten miles- OK for wells, but not pipelines and underseas cables.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fiber also can be a property surveillance tool. Place a loop around a boundary and listen for interlopers. You quickly discover their location and time too. A seismic DAS loop around the Stanford campus detects lots of traffic. Seismic wavefronts propagate near vertically, while cultural nouse is most horizontal. A clever reader can devise an algorithm to distinguish both cases.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could be putting additional time cheap fiber in the all new cables a solution to this problem? E.g. by an agreement between client companies, cable producers, and international organizations?

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't that like using a big OTDR?</comment>


Protect Your Right to Repair and Control the Devices in Your Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/protect-your-right-repair-and-control-devices-your-life <comment><USER2> Cory Doctorow has been banging on about this for years. What he and the EFF don't seem to understand, and certainly don't care about is the creators right to protect their intellectual property. Why should it be legal for people who only bought the right to use a product, and not the right to access the creators intellectual property, be allowed to legally reverse engineer your hard work?

99% of people, myself included, couldn't tinker or fix the electronic products they buy anyway.

The existing laws are there for good reason. This is one fight the EFF aren't going to win.

<comment><USER3> > 99% of people ... couldn't ...

The rest of your argumentary might stand, but this... Didn't we hear it all before? "99% of people have nothing to hide from their government", "99% of people wouldn't be able to understand the legal language to read the law' etc.

<comment><USER2> Nonsensical argument. What does the government have to do with this, and making up quotes to support whatever it is you're trying to get across, doesn't exactly speak with authority?</comment></comment></comment>


Major Internet Outage in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.sys-con.com/node/2938030

<comment><USER2> _At that very moment the Internet in China went down - with a few exceptions (VPN users and those who had the DNS cached within their client)._

Hmm... perhaps I should stop using DNS to resolve the IP addresses of my VPN servers. I thought I would be safe because I use Google's DNS servers but, according to greatfire.org[0]:

 _However, during that time, we see that a lookup to 188.8.131.52, a public DNS operated by Google, returned bogus results if the lookup was done from China. In fact, the Google public DNS was not poisoned; the bogus response 220.127.116.11 could only have been returned by GFW. If the Chinese root DNS server was hacked, a DNS lookup in China via 184.108.40.206 should have returned a correct response._

I live in China but am away at present, so wasn't affected. Phew.

[0] [https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/internet-outage- china...](https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/internet-outage-china-jan-21)</comment>


The new record for high-temperature superconductivity: -23°C (-10°F) - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612559/the-record-for-high-temperature-superconductivity-has-been-smashed-again/ <comment><USER2> > _The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 > gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth._

This is common in recent material, so it's not unexpected. Anyway, it's important to notice this because otherwise it looks like the conditions that you can get inside a freezer.</comment>


Want to learn Python. Should I take Udacity's CS101?  - <AUTHOR>

I am a programmer wanting to learn Python. Does it make sense to take the Udacity CS101 class from Sebastian Thrun and David Evans? Or would that not be the best way since I am already a programmer?<p>As a side note, any recommendations for solid Python books/tutorials? Is the official Python tutorial the way to go? <comment><USER2> I think it will be a good start. The lectures won't take long at all since you'll already be familiar with computation.

I've been learning programming with K & R. I enrolled in cs 101 as a supplement and found I was able to quickly transfer my knowledge of c over to python as a result.

It is basic, but you'll be able to move through it quickly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Book recommendation: <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Enthought regularly holds Python courses for people who already know how to program in other languages. <http://www.enthought.com/training/>

Disclaimer - I work for enthought and occasionally teach the Python course.

</comment><comment><USER5> The udacity class will prob be too basic for you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sure... take the course. Can't hurt. In the meantime, pick up the tutorial and run through it. I picked up Python in 5 days, but I have extensive experience in numerous other object oriented language.

IMHO, from a scripting perspective, it's much easier than shell script, more robust than PHP, and better supported than C/C++ from a community standpoint.</comment>


What Impact Did the Homeworld Exhibition of 1981 Have? (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.houseplanninghelp.com/what-impact-did-the-homeworld-exhibition-of-1981-have/ <comment><AUTHOR> Comments are golden, by people who lived in the houses, or children of the architect who built one of them.</comment>


64 Square Feet: Writer Lived Inside Astor Place Cube in New York City - <AUTHOR> http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/64-square-feet-man-lived-inside-astor-place-cube-in-new-york-city-195510

<comment><USER2> Its a hoax. The cube has a central column running through it which creates the vertical axis it spins on. There are also splines inside running to this to provide rigidity.

Here's a photo of the removal for maintenance some years back.

[http://gothamist.com/2005/03/10/the_astor_place_cube_removal...](http://gothamist.com/2005/03/10/the_astor_place_cube_removal.php)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a hoax to me. The ending shows whil the company...</comment>


Google Launches Nearby Share for Android - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-launches-nearby-share-for-android <comment><USER2> There's an interesting device update story here. This works on the Nexus 5, released in 2013, and using this update doesn't require a reboot. Similarly, the latest version of Chrome works on the Nexus 4, released in 2012.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see some Zune features making their way to Android. ;)</comment>


Inside look at modern web browser – part 4 - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/09/inside-browser-part4 <comment><USER2> I like the writeup and drawings, but I have to mention that this is a bit too specific to browsers as they work right now, specifically Chrome. Having to pay attention to the paint/compositor distinction and layer count is something that newer renderers like WebRender make obsolete. You don't have to worry about layer count causing needless overdraw if you have a unified system so that occluded content is culled, for example.

WebRender is already turned on by default for many users in Firefox Nightly…

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately for Firefox this concept doesn't work very well on the CPU it seems. Every time I open Firefox on my (slightly older but still very capable) MBP the fans go nuts and the CPU could fry an egg. Probably has something to do with my integrated graphics chip.

And yeah I'm going to keep posting this anecdote until Mozilla acknowledges the problem.

<comment><USER4> Do you have scaled resolution enabled? If so, that sounds like this bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

I think there's been a little bit of progress on that issue, but not much, unfortunately.

<comment><USER2> Sounds like Core Animation could fix that issue? I have a patch for that almost ready to go (mstange is testing it as we speak).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not trying to be an asshole, but it's hard to not feel like this is a reaction to Mozilla's amazing blog post series on how they created their new evolution of Firefox. The writeup is still great, but it feels second-to- market and chasing.

~ A Chrome User

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested in reading Mozilla's blog post series you referenced. Is this an example?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236)

<comment><USER7> Code Cartoons: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/code- cartoons/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/code-cartoons/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well that was interesting, and I had no idea that "getCoalescedEvents()" existed. I've been a little disappointed when trying to write drawing applications before - circles end up looking like polygons unless you add some kind of interpolation.

So today we have mouse events, touch events and pointer events. And due to the demands of modern platforms we have things like these passive and cancellable flags. Is there any kind of best practice these days on how to handle user input? As far as I know, iOS doesn't support pointer events (I'm not even sure Chrome was keen on them until recently?) Do I just have to register handlers for all three? Does that affect performance?

And is there any way to get pen data into my browser (pressure, tilt, proximity, ...)? I remember this used to be possible with a plugin (eg the Wacom plugin), but I've been disappointed every time I've looked at pointer/touch event pressure values.

</comment><comment><USER9> When attaching non-passive events at document level "the entire page is marked as a non-fast scrollable region." \- this is the default thing that's happening in React, since events are attached on the document. We really need passive events in React

</comment><comment><USER10> Can it be called a modern browser if it doesn't display tabs on the side?

<comment><USER11> Oh I couldn't agreed more. Chrome's tab management, in my opinion, was quite bad last I checked. Having lots of tabs open means making them so small that they're losing their title and super hard to click on them. Granted, I haven't used Chrome recently, maybe it has improved. But I think Firefox was better at this and with a tree tab extension you can actually browse the web, have a lot of projects going on at the same time and utilize that RAM.

I haven't found a good enough tree style tab extension for Chrome/Chromium and that is the main reason I am not even considering it as an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How are those awesome illustrations created. Which tool????

<comment><USER13> Looks a bit like balsamiq. But there's also this tool called "on-staff graphic designer/illustrator" that they could have used as well.

<comment><USER14> Mariko made all of those illustrations herself. Check out her "alternative introduction to promises" [1] on her personal blog.

[1] [https://kosamari.com/notes/the-promise-of-a-burger- party](https://kosamari.com/notes/the-promise-of-a-burger-party)

<comment><USER13> Self-production also always an option.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chicago Lean Startup Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://leanchallenge.com/

<comment><USER2> Excited to see what companies come out of this challenge!</comment>


Mail Chimp: May the Fourth be with you. - <AUTHOR> https://login.mailchimp.com/

<comment><USER2> LOL. It is always fun to use their site. I like the whole monkey stuff. They do it in a way that is fun and still keep it professional. Very nice.</comment>


Google Wallet scrapes transaction memos for "Bitcoin", states violation of ToS - <AUTHOR>

Backstory: A colleague of mine had owned me about $200, and I said he could pay me via paypal, google wallet or (jokingly) bitcoins. A few weeks ago he transferred me money using Google Wallet with the memo "using this since I have no bitcoins".
Fast forward several weeks later; he received the following email from Google:
"It appears that you may be sending transactions that violate our Terms of Service for Send Money with Gmail.
Your Google Wallet account has recently come under review for a Terms of Service violation. Your transaction [redacted] with the memo, "bitcoins", is in violation of Sections 6 and 7 of the Google Wallet Terms of Service for Send Money with Gmail. We may decline to process such transactions or close your account if we identify in the future that you are using your account for these purposes.
Sincerely, The Google Wallet Team"
I was kind of baffled that they would actually read through the transaction memos, or flag anything bitcoin-related, but it appears to be the case. Upon some research it looks like Google has been doing this for some time:
http://estrip.org/articles/read/joe/58328/Google_wants_a_cut.html
Not sure what to make of this...just know that if you use a service like Google Wallet to send money to friends they're definitely watching. <comment><USER2> Heh.. Sorry man, but this is pretty funny. I think we are going to start having to resort to the old chatroom techniques to get around words which are censored. Want some b1tc01n5?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. I wonder what would happen if you wrote "you really murdered me on the golf course today, here's your 20 bucks".

</comment><comment><USER4> I think some banks might do this too. I know one site where you pay by bank transfer with a specific code as reference said very clearly never to use "bitcoin" in that reference or you'd be banned. I suspect Google don't share the fraud liability of banks though so this is kind of surprising.</comment>


Happy Tools: Tools for Teams with Work to Do (From Automattic) - <AUTHOR> https://happy.tools/ <comment><USER2> > "Not every office looks, well, like an office."

Great! Good point. There is a real need for tools that work for distributed global teams.

So how does Happy Tools help solve this?

...

I read the site, watched the video, read the press coverage, and I see absolutely nothing new here. I like Automattic a lot, so I want to believe they just need to improve their site content to better show off what the app can do.

<comment><USER3> Deeply timezone aware, fluid UI to manage, granular time increments.

IMO v1 is primarily about thoughtful multi-perspectival interactions. The Revolution is to come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That video serves so little purpose. It can all be read in like the first paragraph or two of the site. Yet it's a primary CTA

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, if they would concentrate their efforts on making their core product (kind of, I know) better, that would be great.</comment>


The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/

<comment><USER2> If you like this, you'll also really like the Rosetta Code project. It also has tons of algorithms (and more languages), and lately is getting some traction. [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code)

<comment><USER3> And if you'd like to try your own hand at solving problems using some of these algorithms (a good way to get some hands-on practice in your favourite new language), Rosalind [1] offers a gentle learning curve.

There are hundreds of problems on the site, roughly graded by difficulty, easiest first. In the beginning you get to solve a few easy problems. As you solve each problem, more problems become available for you to try.

They are "a platform for learning bioinformatics through problem solving" so many of the problems are about strings, but there are also problems on graphs and other structures.

They also have a new section called "Algorithmic Heights", which is "A collection of exercises in introductory algorithms to accompany "Algorithms", the popular textbook by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani." I have submitted this for discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456390)

[1] [http://rosalind.info](http://rosalind.info)

(Edit: Minor fixes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Steven Skiena's book is a must-have as well. Nice fellow; great book.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looking at their book, many of their sections for more advanced algorithms refer to the implementations with only a high-level overview of the algorithm. Their source code (by nature) is completely rigorous and nuanced. But what I imagine most people are looking for in a resource like this is something in between.

</comment><comment><USER6> Skiena has a very different style of introducing algorithmic problems. Generally all comprehensive books tend to follow a pattern. Never have i seen a book in which while just being a university student i tried solving a problem described in first chapter, kept reading through seeing my attempts fail and finally learn it was the famous TravellingSalesman NP-hard problem. Always loved that approach.

</comment><comment><USER7> This list[0] contains links to algorithms based on specific applications viz. VLSI, Operations research etc..

[0] [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/pscico- guyb/re...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/pscico- guyb/realworld/www/index.html#information)

</comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately the java links have been domain squatted</comment>


All Techcrunch Disrupt Videos - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/disrupt/video/

<comment><USER2> I find it strange that our team came in 5th place in the hackathon, and yet they choose not to post our presentation nor our interview. They posted the other winners + more. Our hack was kind of a joke, <http://venturecrapital.us>, but it must have really offended some people if they decided to not even show it.</comment>


The Fed Should Buy Down Consumer Credit Card Rates - Fast - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/24/the-fed-should-buy-down-consumer-credit-card-rates-fast/ <comment><USER2> _In exchange for Bailout Funding, the TARP should require banks that issue credit cards, whether in their names or others, to limit interest rates and fees._

No clue. None. The guy is obviously a competent technologist and basketball fan, but _manipulating prices causes shortages, surpluses, black markets, and suffering_.

If you force a bank to charge prime rates to Bill and Mary Ne'er-do-well, then the banks will simply _drop the credit lines_. Result: The underground market takes over, and Bill and Mary get their loans from (at best) a grey market "paycheck advance" outfit, pawnshops, or (eventually) the mob.

<comment><USER3> His economic "theories" are half baked at best. Seriously, the amount of unintended consequences of his proposals are absurd.

This must be the 4th article from him on Hacker News on economics, none made sense. STOP UPMODDING THEM. This is Hacker News not Things That Random Hackers Might Have Said That May Or May Not Be In Any Way Intelligent.

<comment><USER4> Much as I find it interesting, I would rather avoid economics altogether, as it often ends up being a clash between people who fervently believe in "Austrian" economics, and people who are more inclined towards mainstream economics of various stripes. This almost inevitably leads to lots of heat and little light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> when there's crisis, some people can use it for manipulation

For example:

Yesterday, NCC bank got acquired stock-for-stock 0.0392 ratio (2.23 / 56.89) by PNC bank.

NCC did not get TARP money. PNC got money from treasury in return for preferred stocks

NCC largest shareholder (Corsair) gets 4+ bln in 'non-stock dividend' + 3 bln shares valued at $2.35 (Corsair invested 7 bln dollar during the last 6 months)

NCC executives get 300+ mill usd in compensation and 'golden parachute' (they will be in PNC+NCC board)

the employees of NCC (non executives) got laid off (4000 already) and will be more

The shareholders got shafted, thursday close was $2.77, the deal is priced at $2.23

There's a class action lawsuit in progress against NCC -- NCC CEO said NCC is "well capitalized" and various misleading things that can be considered fraud

In effect, FDIC infused TARP money to PNC to buy NCC, in return for the stakes (they say _every_ bank qualifies -- that's not right)

See, in crisis some people get more power to screw everyone ... so don't worry about credit card crisis not happening -- it will ... some people want it to happen</comment>


The Revolutionary Birth Control Method for Men - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/

<comment><USER2> Wow. The entire premise of the article aside, for me the idea that _medical treatments_ can be made with _physics_ and not _medicine_ was an incredible, incredible revelation.

This man (not a doctor!) has invented a method to neutralize sperm in a way that would never have occurred to me. He uses the most basic principles of physics (magnetic charge) to neutralize sperm!

Realizing that sperm is negatively charging, he simply coats a short section of the inside of the vas (tiny tube going from testes to the penis, located in the scrotum) with a positively-charged polymer. As sperm travels in this coated tube, the ionic attraction causes damage on a cellular level in the sperm, the pull effect effectively destroying the sperm "tail" and preventing it from fertilizing a female but without hormonal/medical methods!

For me, as an engineer, this was a true revelation.

<comment><USER3> As a physicist, I have been, on odd occasions of boredom and quarter-life- crisis, tempted to go into medicine. But the only type of medicine I'd be interested in is radiology.

Walk in, cure a patient with physics, walk out, earn $600K a year. Sounds pretty sweet!

What's that? You have cancer? No worries, I have _radioactive beams_! Zap! You're cured!

Unfortunately you gotta go through many years of the more usual, squishy form of medicine before they'll let you become a radiologist, so I stuck with my existing career path.

<comment><USER4> I knew a radiation oncologist in the late 90s, and his reason for becoming a webapp startup founder instead was that radiology was destroying him: in that field, most of your patients _die_ , rather than being cured. You're mostly just prolonging things.

<comment><USER5> All patients die. The job of a specialist is to make sure they die of something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _In its report, the WHO team agreed that the concept of RISUG was intriguing. But they found fault with the homegrown production methods: Guha and his staff made the concoction themselves in his lab, and the WHO delegation found his facilities wanting by modern pharmaceutical manufacturing standards. Furthermore, they found that Guha's studies did not meet "international regulatory requirements" for new drug approval—certain data was missing. The final recommendation: WHO should pass on RISUG._

Is this an example of why health care is so incredibly expensive in this country?

Do these "modern pharmaceutical manufacturing standards" actually buy us extra safety?

<comment><USER7>
      Do these "modern pharmaceutical manufacturing standards"
      actually buy us extra safety?

Yes, but we pay a price:

* Evaluations take a _really_ long time. So it's hard to get the drugs into the hands of people.

* Development is now extremely expensive. That forces just about everyone except the largest drug mega-corporations out of the market.

* Drugs that would be a net benefit to the world sometimes never make it through the entire process because the ROI isn't good enough, or the associated side effects are deemed too harsh. (We would likely not have aspirin today if it hadn't been developed prior to the modern way of drug development... it has too many high-risk side effects)

\--

On the plus side:

* The drugs you _do_ get are generally far safer and better understood than they otherwise would be

* You can feel safe that each batch of the drug was made the same way, using the same process, and ends up having the same strength/effectiveness as every other batch of the same drug... even when made by a different company. (We take that for granted now... but it's actually a really big deal if you look at medication from a historical perspective.)

* We have far fewer snake-oil salesmen ripping people off for cures that are, at best, useless and at worst, cause the condition to get worse, or cause birth defects, or some other harm. If we do find the drug doing harm, it gets pulled off the market

<comment><USER8> "We also have far fewer snake-oil salesmen ripping people off for cures"

Yet we still have chiropractors and homeopathy.

<comment><USER9> Hold on - Chiropractors are in the same class as homeopathy? I thought Chiropractors (which, admittedly, I've never been to, but have heard many good things about - particularly when people need to get their back "adjusted") were in the same class as Acupuncturists - kind of easternish philosophy, but effective within their domain. Not so much focussed on increasing health, as enhancing comfort (or reducing pain) without drugs.

Not the case?

<comment><USER10> If chiropracty works, it would be a surprise given the history. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_history> for more details, but basically it was founded by a complete crackpot and there's no reason to believe it should work.

Further, many studies have found weak effects, no effects, and negative effects. When you see this kind of evidential pattern, it almost always means that the effect isn't real and we're just seeing experimental error. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic#Evidential_basis>

That said, the placebo effect for something like chiropracty or massage can be very strong - and the placebo effect is real! Giving someone a saline shot creates a stronger effect than giving them a sugar pill; I don't know where chiropracty exists on that spectrum.

<comment><USER11> Off topic -- Where is the 'Edit' button on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic#Evidential_basis> ?

The article doesn't say it's locked, but I see no edit button.

I was trying to replace "Opinions differ as to the efficacy of chiropractic treatment" with "Opinions differ as to the ability of chiropractic treatment to produce an effect", because I have a grudge against overly complicated language.

<comment><USER12> Why is replacing one word with 4 making it less complicated?

<comment><USER11> Because more people will understand the longer version than the shorter one. A wiki is not a computer program.

<comment><USER13> <http://simple.wikipedia.org>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The world has been promising male birth control for decades now and the techniques (There are several that all work at almost 100% and are fully reversible) are proven (numerous long term trials, I can think of two from a decade ago off the top of my head, one in Washington state and one in Australia, in their final stages, with fewer side-effects, complications and failures than female birth control) and much more effective than female birth control (100% in most cases). I've been reading about it actively since I was 15 and now I'm 30 and I'm still reading about how it's 5 years away. I want this so bad it hurts, but no one is bringing it to market.

The problem is there isn't (enough of?) an incentive to actually put out these treatments. I guess the money just doesn't compare to female birth control.

<comment><USER3> _The problem is there isn't (enough of?) an incentive to actually put out these treatments. I guess the money just doesn't compare to female birth control_

One issue is that public health authorities are (probably quite legitimately) concerned that improved male birth control methods will lead to a decrease in the use of condoms and an increase in STDs.

<comment><USER15> Aside from the STD issue, a condom is a contraception method that is instantly verifiable. "It's okay baby, I have had the invisible sperm destroying procedure" is a bit harder to check.

<comment><USER14> Why are women on the pill any more trust worthy? I've known women who say they're on the pill just because they didn't wanna use/buy condoms. Surprise, surprise I now know people that have kids that probably shouldn't.

Also, condom misuse is a big problem in general and is the cause of the low rate of success for condoms 85% vs proper use 98%. The people that need condoms the most (uneducated/young people) are the ones that just throw them on without making sure they know how to properly use them.

<comment><USER16> What is "proper" condom use?

Honest question, as I pretty much just roll a condom on... Is there more to it?

<comment><USER17> Well, one other tip would be - hold it on when you _ahem_ pull out. You don't want any spillage.

Also, make sure you use the right size. If it's too tight or too loose - increased risk of breakage or leakage.

Ok, now I'm a bit weirded out by myself. I'm a woman, so I guess I'm deeply invested in proper condom usage.

<comment><USER18> Deeply invested indeed. Just make sure you've got a clean exit strategy though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like the future of space, medicine, and technology belongs to the countries that have not yet hobbled themselves with lawyers and bureaucrats to the point that something must be perfect if it is to exist at all.

<comment><USER20> Totally agree. If they continue without all the lawyers they will be far more advanced in 20 years.

If this or some offshoot ever makes it to the US, we should see a dramatic decrease in family law, Federal subsides for child support, and could lead to dramatic decrease in crime. That is, if it becomes as available as womens birth control.

<comment><USER21> You are making a huge leap from "this is an effective method of birth control" to "people will use this". See the movie Idiocracy. (actually just see the opening bit.)

<comment><USER22> Idiocracy isn't exactly based on fact. (It's an OK movie though.) For one thing, there's no evidence, that I know of, that supports the claim that only "smart" parents have smart children, or that smart parents don't have dumb children, or that dumb parents don't have smart children, and so on.

Although genetics likely plays some role in "natural" intelligence, it's far from a simple hereditary relationship, and there's increasing evidence that the bulk of natural intelligence is actually the result of environmental factors during early child development.

<comment><USER23> Did the movie really contain genetic claims? I took the sequence at the beginning to be more a criticism of Cleavon's cultural traits. (example: "I thought you was on the pill or some shit!") In fact, most of the movie's humor centered around a downward cultural slide. Kids do pick up their parents memes more readily, after all.

<comment><USER22> Yes. IIRC, the "opening bit" that camiller was referencing above was about how intelligent people were continually having fewer children while less intelligent people bred as quickly as they could.

(ninja edit: here ya go: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSROlfR7WTo>)

<comment><USER23> Ok, but isn't that difference in birthdate orthogonal to whether the "intelligence" is a result of nature or nurture? (Don't forget that when you have children you're not just propagating genes, but memes as well. Kids raised on Jersey Shore will tune in to Ow, My Balls!)

I don't recall the movie taking a stance towards nature. In fact, the moral of the whole story is to try to solve problems, and the great speech at the end envisioned a time where people cared whose ass it was and why it was farting. These are messages about cultural priorities, not genetic limitations.

<comment><USER22> > _Don't forget that when you have children you're not just propagating genes, > but memes as well. Kids raised on Jersey Shore will tune in to Ow, My > Balls!_

...right, which would make it irrelevant whether high-IQ parents are having kids or not (they can still work as educators, scientists, leaders -- much the same situation as now), which in turn would make that opening scene of the movie a non-sequitur.

> _These are messages about cultural priorities, not genetic limitations._

Yes, but they are also the only feasible remaining strategy left given the resources at hand at the end. IIRC, the lead character was tested as having the highest recorded IQ in the world, so it's not like his strategy for solving problems could be "go find high IQ couples and mate them in a high-IQ zoo".

Maybe I'm wrong. I only watched it once, back at a time when I thought the world was doomed and the movie was prophetic (so I didn't really pay close attention). OTOH, a quick search online finds that I'm not the only one that interpreted it this way, so at the least it was less clear than it could have been on this point.

<comment><USER23> _(they can still work as educators, scientists, leaders -- much the same situation as now)_

I don't think working as an educator or leader, in the movie's world, would make any difference. They would be, after all, attempting to educate or lead people who equate speaking in grammatical, semantically precise sentences with "talking like a fag". (see Dr. Lexus, etc.)

As for Scientists, they were consumed with solving the problems of hair loss and prolonging erections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those who aren't interested in seeing a picture of a scrotum being operated on, the technique described is a polymer that is injected into the vas deferens. As sperm pass the polymer, their membranes and tails are damaged. The technique can be reversed using a solvent.

<comment><USER25> So that means that once you have the procedure done on you, you don't have to do anything (no regular medicine) until you want it reversed?

<comment><USER2> Yes.

<comment><USER7> Sign me up!

I have 3 kids and the existing methods available for ensuring we don't have a 4th are, at best, inconvenient. (Condoms are annoying; the pill messes with my wife's emotions; and either of us getting snipped seems scarily irreversible.)

I'll be keeping an eye open for trials here in the US and on any more news about this procedure trickling out from India.

hooray for science!

<comment><USER26> Bizarre to be giving contraceptive advice on HN, but you should really look into IUDs. They're far less hormonal than the pill, and only require maintenance every 5 years.

<comment><USER27> Some types of IUD do not use hormones, at all. Copper IUDs actually operate on the sperm, similarly to the procedure we're discussing.

IUDs, unfortunately, got a bad rap in the 70s, because of a dangerous design flaw, but they're quite safe now, and in use all over the world because of their low cost and ease of use (nothing to remember, no pills to take, nothing to put on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A 100% effective, low maintenance, reversible birth control method could have an incredible effect on the future of the species. I'm guessing the benefits of fewer unwanted children will be incredible. The possible downsides include a dangerously low birth rate and forced temporary sterilization, but I think the long term effects will be very positive.

<comment><USER29> You are correct. Except for that part of the population that believes contraception is immoral. Or that rather large part of the population that can't afford the procedure or choose to remain ignorant of even basic contraception.

Something like this is certainly more convenient, but ultimately the best method is education.

<comment><USER30> "Except for that part of the population that believes contraception is immoral"

If you're thinking of Christians, it isn't necessarily all-or-nothing. Although I believe the Catholic church disapproves of all contraception, Protestants typically approve of anything that prevents fertilization. Once the egg is fertilized, it's considered a human life worthy of protection; prior to that, the egg and sperm are just cells. So this would be considered fine.

<comment><USER31> And quite a lot of Protestants are perfectly happy even with methods that may result in the loss of some fertilized eggs. And many, many Catholics _use_ contraception, whatever they're theoretically supposed to _think_ about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have nothing to add except that reading the description of the process made me feel physically uncomfortable.

<comment><USER33> That's because you've got a physical identifier of this concept in your mind. Does the idea of a pacemaker feel bad? Probably not, because your "heart" is an abstract idea--you'll probably never see it with your own eyes. A lot of professors teaching dissection have noted your feelings, girls in general don't have a squeamishness to overcome in testicular dissection since they don't have that externality of organs.

<comment><USER34> Just reading your comment made me squeamish. Very squeamish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would sign up for this procedure in a heartbeat, but it still doesn't get around the (albeit not perfect) STD protection condoms can provide. If this takes off, people probably won't wear condoms most of the time, and the number of people being diagnosed with STD's will skyrocket.

<comment><USER36> _If this takes off, people probably won't wear condoms most of the time, and the number of people being diagnosed with STD's will skyrocket._

I don't understand this thinking. To me condoms have always been about STD protection and not pregnancy prevention. I'd like to think for most people this idea will not change. I mean if you barely know a girl and she tells you that she's on the pill so you don't need a condom that should be a giant, screaming in your ear red flag to put your clothes back on and run home. I don't see how this will be any different if a guy tells a girl the same thing.

<comment><USER37> I'm just curious, where do you live? I live and attend university in Norway, and I must say, I don't think I know anyone that uses condoms on regular basis. Every girl I know uses an IUD or is on the pill, and most people I know get checked regularly. I know Norway is the "world leader" in one night stands [1], and has one of the most well educated populations in the world. Still, condom use is abysmally low. I wonder why this is? Every time I go to the states, I'm reminded how different the "average american youth" views the condom.

[1] <http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article633160.ece>

<comment><USER36> The US. Keep in mind I went to college over ~10 years ago.

From college on most women I know were on some form of birth control to the point where I assumed most women are. Post high school, condoms were never about stopping pregnancy but avoiding STDs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have a two-year old daughter. I want more kids, not fewer. If I had known how amazing raising a kid was, I would have started sooner. Smart people need to bring more smart people to the world.

<comment><USER39> You comment puzzles me. Hopefully you will reply below.

Are you discounting the value of _reversible_ birth control based upon your feelings at a certain point in time? Also remember that evolution has probably programmed children be "amazing" until they can fend for themselves.

Presumably you're comfortably middle-class in a first-world country with a good social contract (yes, kid-friendly services like subsidized/free public schools and universities are a safety net). You need to step back and think about societies which don't have such luxuries.

And sorry to get all personal on you, but do you use _ANY_ scientific form of birth control? Are you ok with you/your SO getting pregnant every year (unsure about your gender, hence hedging)? That's usually what happens w/o birth control. If you do use scientific birth control (so-called "rhythm" method etc don't count) then your comment is pretty hypocritical.

<comment><USER38> I started two write a response, twice, but your arbitrary assumptions don't deserve answers. Your general tone does not indicate a desire for dialogue.

<comment><USER40> Your original post is completely off-topic, or do you actually want everyone to have as many kids as humanly possible? That would equal 1 kid a year, do you want everyone to have 1 kid a year, even teenagers, grandmas..everyone? No? Then stay on topic, which is prevention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Will this cause an increase in sexually transmitted diseases? If straight men don't have to wear condoms for pregnancy-avoidance, and straight men & women don't like to pretend/boast that they've had lots of sex (unlike gay couples), then the pressure to go bareback (without a condom) increases and there might be more HIV/AIDS/STIs

<comment><USER42> >straight men & women don't like to pretend/boast that they've had lots of sex (unlike gay couples), then the pressure to go bareback (without a condom) increases and there might be more HIV/AIDS/STIs

If I'm reading this right, you're under the impression that a condom protects you against the vast majority of STIs, correct?

Yeah no. Condoms are primarily preventative towards towards diseases that are spread via Semen, vaginal fluids, and skin to skin contact only on the area it covers. Syphilis, Herpes( which can also be spread via oral sex ), Genital Warts, and crabs as a loose example ( There's more ) are not prevented by a condom. Aside from HIV/Aids ( in which case African American women are the highest rate of infected ) that quip was pointless as was this post.

<comment><USER41> Yes, you're right that STDs can still be spread with condom use, but with condoms the odds are better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yet another illustration about how broken the health care system is in the US. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies are disincented to produce cost effective treatments, it's really an outrage. Medicine in the US is geared towards costly treatments that are needed on a recurring basis; we're inundated with marketing and profit driven medicine. IMO, the NIH and FDA should be promoting a research-rewarded system that promotes cost effective and potentially society-shifting treatments such as RISUG.

<comment><USER44> Yeah, I was thinking this would be a great kickstarter project. "Pledge $100 or more: get this procedure done for no additional cost, once available."

<comment><USER45> Fantastic Idea - crowd financing at its BEST !!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> >"If it's no longer a crazy Indian idea and it's something that's working in India and in rabbits in Ohio and in the first 20 men in the US," Lissner says, "then there's got to be a point where there's just no excuse for a Gates or a Buffett not to get on board."

The words "crazy Indian idea" hit me as offensive at first. But I guess that's just the way the world perceives us and its up to us to change that.

</comment><comment><USER47> All On One Page: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/all/1>

</comment><comment><USER48> There should be a NSFW in the link title.

</comment><comment><USER49> seeing any kind of operation done in that region I come to think a condom is actually a pretty good idea

</comment><comment><USER50> Now if only they could invent something revolutionary for treating infertility...

<comment><USER51> It's always easier to destroy/disable than it is to create/enable.

Infertility is a complex problem with multiple possible causes.

<comment><USER50> Totally agree. Just wish there was same "easy" way to do opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It should warn me "DO NOT CLICK IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE HAIRY BALLS"

</comment><comment><USER53> Bonus points for reading the whole article without flinching!

<comment><USER54> If you just lost your appetite for the entire day when you saw the single shot on that video, you are not alone.

<comment><USER55> I am greatly enjoying my chicken with mac and cheese and mashed potatoes, thank you. (I did flinch, though.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The video is excruciating. Make sure you watch it.

</comment><comment><USER57> hello NSFW.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is going to change the world ... this is by far going to have deepest sociological impact (good & bad) on the society ... because many men will use this secretly without telling their partner to avoid having kids ... which eventually will bring enormous decrease in population ...

Now someone should come out with novel technique to avoid STD without using condoms ... combination of these 2 techniques will be VIOLA !!!!! :)

<comment><USER3> _because many men will use this secretly without telling their partner to avoid having kids ... which eventually will bring enormous decrease in population ..._

I doubt there are _that_ many men who want to secretly make themselves infertile in order to not give their wives the children they want to have.

 _combination of these 2 techniques will be VIOLA_

I'm really not sure what violas have to do with it.

<comment><USER53> Viola is the american far-too-spread wrong spelling of the french expression voilà, which could be translated roughly to "behold" or "that's it".

Et voilà :)

<comment><USER3> What I found amusing was that not only did he misspell voila (and I'm not gonna be pedantic about the accent mark because I'm too lazy to remember how to type it myself), he also managed to use it in a place that voila wouldn't have made sense either.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google to Close door on Gtalk from February 16 onwards - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmodo.in/indiamodo/Google-Closes-the-door-on-Gtalk-From-February-16-onwards/articleshow/46126521.cms <comment><USER2> The article is a little short on technical details, will only the Gtalk client be retired, or the XMPP interface (ie Adium) too?

</comment><comment><USER3> Another sign that Google has lost their way.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, what impact, if any, does this have on Google Voice, and more specifically, the Asterisk connector (Motif)?

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be nice if they announced end-to-end encryption for Hangouts at the same time. At least then they wouldn't have the excuse of "having to support a legacy system" anymore.</comment>


Amok – Live Editing for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://amokjs.com

<comment><USER2> Light table can do that too: [http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/04/28/light- table-040/](http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/04/28/light-table-040/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. The integration is really cool, though that's totally without digging in at all to compare it to live editing and workspaces ([https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/workspaces](https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/workspaces)).

Looks like Firefox supports some form of remote debugging too ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugg...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugging)), though looks like it might be more painful to integrate with ([https://github.com/caspervonb/amok/issues/10](https://github.com/caspervonb/amok/issues/10)).

I do wonder how well this would integrate with SPAs - seems like it would be great for testing events/handlers/etc, but might be weirder (or at least possibly more work than just refreshing) for testing app starts and the like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Support for clients are definitely coming, JavaScriptCore and Node would be awesome, but one step at a time, trying to support multiple protocols before 1.0 could become overwhelming very quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't used any of these, but curious if this compares to emacs':

SwankJs [https://github.com/swank-js/swank-js](https://github.com/swank- js/swank-js)

JsSlime [https://github.com/segv/jss](https://github.com/segv/jss)

skewer-mode [https://github.com/skeeto/skewer- mode](https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm trying to understand how this is different than browserSync [1].

[1] [http://www.browsersync.io/](http://www.browsersync.io/)

<comment><USER6> I don't believe BrowserSync does 'hot code loading' like Amok is doing.

Hot code loading is when you update the running code without reloading the page, preserving any state in the program running.

If you watch the start of the Amok video you'll see author changes the elasticity value but the timer at the top keeps ticking and the ball doesn't reset to the start position like it would do if the page were simply refreshed. (BrowserSync refreshes the page when JS is changed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does it refresh all functions? Including the anonymous ones in already attached event handlers?

I have done something similar recently but it requires any live-reload-able function to have a name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, everything including anonymous functions.

<comment><USER8> I see the FAQ says no callbacks. So as long as there aren't any callbacks, running app state should be preserved through code updates?

The video demos a React component, great. I hope amok will work with my current workflow, using jspm (rather than webpack or something).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the opposite, if the application has no callbacks, how can anything be live edited when none of your code is hooked up to anything.

<comment><USER7> Old callbacks can call to newer versions of modified functions. The live- reloading code I made needed named functions for this reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've really liked using this. I donated!

</comment><comment><USER10> Could it be possible to use this with headless node applications for debugging?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like, phantomjs?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually something I haven't thought about! file an issue?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What editor is used in the demo video?

<comment><AUTHOR> As mentioned, Gedit 3.x. Dark adawaita theme applied globally to the entire gnome desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Does it work with closures?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Email hasn't changed in 20 years, I've coded something new for 9 months - muszc-master http://ivelope.com/invite/InvitedByViktor <comment><USER4> I wish you well with this, but I don't see why I would want to use it. I don't see any mention of email priority settings or incoming filters, which are key to my email workflow. (I have hundreds of filters that automatically prioritize my email for me before I even begin to read them each day.)

I'm fairly attached to a native-app based workflow (I'm a big fan of Postbox, and before that I used Eudora), so I'm probably not the target market for this anyway.

The search looks promising though, and while the design does look 2005-ish, I don't mind the design of the promo website. Something about the font feels slightly off (somehow Windows-like with the way it antialiases, fonts are a bit too small in places) but it isn't terrible. The animated screenshots are really helpful.

(One tip: be open to charging a _lot_ for it. Email is mission critical and one of the apps I spend the most time in, I am happy to spend money on having the best experience possible. Postbox charges $40 and I still feel that's a bargain.)

<comment> muszc-master Thank you for your comment! I agree that filtering and priority settings are very important, maybe it wasn't clear enough but there are two animations with active (if you send a question in an email and are waiting for an answer the email will be marked as active) & inactive emails and the drag & drop filtering option.

Some people has said that they prefer native-apps and I still haven't decided if this will be a web app or a native app (using Electron, which for example Visual Studio Code is built with). The design will be fixed and probably next week I'll have updated the landing page with a more modern design.

Thanks for all your feedback and yes - email is a mission critical app and the target audience is people spend a lot of time with email so saving a lot of time and effort in that department would be worth paying for for some people.

</comment></comment><comment> muszc-master Any feedback is very much appreciated. A lot of people I've shown it to doesn't like the design and think it is too 2005-ish. I have to admit, I'm a developer first and designer... second...

<comment><USER5> I don't have any feedback _(not big on email myself)_ , but i just came to sympathize with your design woes. It's just so difficult, imo.

<comment> muszc-master From the people I've talked to regarding the design it seems to be a divided camp between making the design more like Premier Pro: [https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/04/6-PR- Sec...](https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/04/6-PR-Secondaries- affected.png)

or more like this: [https://dribbble.com/shots/1334369-Mochila-Mail- manufactured](https://dribbble.com/shots/1334369-Mochila-Mail-manufactured)

What do you think?

<comment><USER5> Take a massive dose of salt with my comment, as i am not a designer.

Personally, i think the mochila design looks better, but i really like dark designs (easy on the eyes), so the Premier is nice on that front.

<comment> muszc-master No worries, I think it's a matter of taste and I will try to find a good design that will look more modern either going in the mochila or premier pro direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems very similar to what once was Google Wave. That's not a criticism, though. I miss Wave.

<comment> muszc-master Yes, some functionality is inspired by Google Wave :) Hopefully this will not go the same way that Wave did though

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really nice concept. I can see myself using a web email client when I need to move between Mac, Windows, and Linux. Features look promising, however I feel like the UI design is a little dated. It reminds me of Outlook 2005. Perhaps if you try moving into a more modern design format, you'll be able to attract users more easily. Other than that, I'd be happy to try it out soon!

<comment> muszc-master Thank you for the comment! A lot of people love the functionality but hate how it looks so my priority right now is to make a more modern design for next week, stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks interesting. The biggest question I have that isn't answered on the website is what is your business model? I doesn't look like an open source project but it isn't clear.

<comment> muszc-master Yes, it is not an open-source project but the intention is to make it into an SaaS if the beta launch goes well and people like it enough to pay a small fee for extra features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If this were a stand-alone app, I would use it. For me the workflow seems better than Mail.app or Thunderbird.

+1 for using characters from the HBO show Silicon Valley.

+2 for using TPS Reports!

<comment> muszc-master Thank you for your comment! And a lot of people has requested it to be a stand-alone app so maybe this is the direction I in which I should head..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, this is awesome. I use Gmail web as my default clients and while I was watching the video I was like... yes, yes and YES! Most compelling features were: calendar in email, tabs, quick edits. Things that appealed less where threading and tasks, since I'd assume others have to use this product too.

I've signed up for beta and can't wait to try it out.

<comment> muszc-master Thank you for your feedback! I've received massive amounts of love for this product and if you'd like to get involved somehow, you can find my email in the footer of the landing page :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only thing that attract my eyeball is the tabs. Others are identical to all sorts of mail agent product out there. Also, you need to think about who is your customer. If you are targeting at developers, the front-end isn't that important but the performance and functionality are crucial. For what you currently offer, I don't see a clear position of your product.

<comment> muszc-master Thank you for your feedback. The target market is not really developers but people who use email more than 3 hours per date. It has a lot of similar functionality to for example Outlook - but there are small things - <USER2> example adding an email to your calendar by clicking on a date that Outlook doesn't have but makes a big difference in how you use it I think. Glad to receive your feedback I will try to clarify my positioning also!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The front-end part looks ok to me. I hope your invite queue advances quickly enough so I can try it soon.

The instant-meeting-setup feature is nice, but the main email/agenda solution have this covered in an acceptable way already, IMO.

I know for a fact that providing a search feature in a mail service isn't an easy problem to solve. Can you tell us a bit about the infrastructure behind this service ?

<comment> muszc-master Good points. Thank you. About searching the email inbox: Upon first signing on, all emails (and filenames) in the inbox will be indexed and cached to MySQL and we're also working on providing an option to use WebSQL to cache this locally.

<comment><USER12> You may want to aggressively filter the amount of emails you're going to index, then. It's not rare that people have inboxes bigger than 10Gb.

To be honest, I think email search is something even Google hasn't succeeded yet. The way it's introduced on your homepage makes me think you have succeeded...but it will definitely be HARD to scale if your service becomes popular.

<comment> muszc-master Yes that is absolutely correct, we'll be using an agressive filter for what data is indexed, and to make it fast, the search will primarily search the most recent emails & files...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What does this offer over, say Outlook? Tabs are nice, but mostly it looks like just another average mail client, just on the web.

<comment> muszc-master If you watch the demo video, I'm showing a lot more of the functionality - <USER2> example the ability that when multiple users send emails via Ivelope, it turns the email into a reddit-like thread with different levels of indentation which is also, I think, the reason why Reddit won over traditional web forums - right now, email is like an old school web forum, but with Ivelope it turns emails into real discussion threads - one of the reasons that Reddit is one of the most popular places to discuss things on.

You also have the separation between emails from people and emails from computers (newsletters/promos) into a separate folder, which is displayed in an overview mode, where you can see the email instantly and also unsubscribe from ANY email with one click of a button :)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for posting this. I think you need to work on finding your _key_ differentiators and putting them up front in video & marketing materials.

Curious how you handle something like the task feature when the recipient is not an ivelope user.

<comment> muszc-master Very good point, thank you. So when someone has sent you a task that is not using Ivelope and you click "Mark task as Done", the first time the user will be shown a popup on how to handle this, if he wants Ivelope to send an email every time he sets a task as finished, or if he wants to send an email when all tasks in an email are finished or if he just wants the tasks for his own personal todolist. Having unique features will bring in more users I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But it is an email client, or a client to some other protocol?

<comment> muszc-master It's a web-based email client with some features which will only work fully when both users are using Ivelope (but most features work for everyone) - <USER3> also does it count as a protocol when [] in text is converted into a task? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this an IMAP client in the browser, or something where you give your email credentials to some server somewhere and it looks at all your mail?

<comment> muszc-master This is a concern several people has voiced, and it's not yet decided if it will become a native-app or a web-based client that was my first thought. There are two camps basically: people who would hesitate to give their credentials to an unknown server and would want a native-app and people who don't care about that and would prefer a webmail client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wish you well, but I would love it to be a Mac mail agent instead of a web base client.

<comment> muszc-master Yes many people has asked for this and I'm trying to figure out in what direction to go :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> eMails, tasks, conversations, documents, searched and indexed, all bound up together in one integrated whole.

Is this another Lotus Notes? Or the ill-fated Chandler?

<comment> muszc-master I sure hope not!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> i thought the website was called 'ive-eloped' and had a hefty chuckle.

<comment> muszc-master Haha that's funny!</comment></comment>


The U.S. is decades behind the world on paid leave. This gives us an advantage - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/02/the-u-s-is-decades-behind-the-world-on-paid-leave-this-gives-us-an-advantage.html <comment><USER2> thats one way to put it. as a worker I still plan to leave the US to the EU (where I also have citizenship) before I have children. The US is too far behind, and the culture in Europe is better - paid leave + family structures to support having children. I can't imagine putting my kids in daycare. The US is very very different than the EU in terms of family structures and family values so I don't think we can really copy and paste what they've done.

<comment><USER3> Did anybody else catch this line from President Trump's State of the Union speech?

      The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by
      ending chain migration

That _literally_ says that 1) extended families threaten nuclear families, and 2) we should prefer as a matter of public policy the dissolution of extended families in favor of nuclear families.

It's obviously a very awkward attempt to reframe the debate and defend against accusations of racism. Though, it does neither and taken at face value is anathema to the expressed values of conservative rural Americans, if not all Americans.

OTOH, Americans, rural or not, obviously do prefer nuclear families over extended families. Americans want to live _near_ family, but never _with_ family. So there's something peculiarly honest about Trump's logic.</comment></comment>


Update on Maintaining and Running the Pokémon GO Service - <AUTHOR> http://pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/en/post/update-080416/ <comment><USER2> Looking at the title, I was expecting them to share the juicy details of how they handled the huge amount of traffic, the hacking attempts and the engineering problems they are facing. Instead I was met with some sort of PR attempt to explain the downtime.

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily downtime, but why they "killed" a very popular third-party tool to show real-time locations of Pokemon.

<comment><USER4> I mean the tool basically defeated the point of the game.

<comment><USER5> Really? You think wandering around was the point of the game, as opposed to actually catching the Pokémon?

<comment><USER4> I mean, if you reverse engineer an api for "where is pokemon X", you may as well just reverse engineer your GPS device for "where am I standing" to move your in game character to right where the pokemon is.

Then you can do a for loop and catch all the pokemon in 30 seconds.

Actually catching the pokemon is a 0 skill item. Its literally dragging your finger across the screen.

The entire game is the exploring the real world part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Godspeed Niantic dev-team!!! Really despise the negative press you're getting. Don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would have thought PoGo would have taken off as well as it has and now they are stuck between a rock and a hard place:

Do they suffer the rage of entire countries, and potentially their backers by delaying launching in territories to fix bugs?

OR do they suffer the rage of existing users by delaying bug fixes to keep to their original schedule by launching new territories?

All the while, they are crippled by scaling issues they never dreamt of having and managing cheating/additional traffic from the meta-ecosystem of trackers.

Have no doubt the team are working doubletime and overtime as it is, a shame that redditers are unable to see this. So keep it up Niantic - thanks for bringing us the AR killer app and for showing that there are still opportunities for huge apps to launch![0]

[0] [https://www.appannie.com/insights/mobile-strategy/pokemon- go...](https://www.appannie.com/insights/mobile-strategy/pokemon-go-an- opportunity-not-a-threat/)

PS if you guys need more devs, do let me know :P

EDIT: downvotes - really? The post scriptum was obviously a cute joke. Or are the downvotes towards the Niantic support?

<comment><USER7> Uhmmm I guess the downvotes are coming because no one believes that Niantic couldn't predict that the first mobile game(if we forget Pokemon Shuffle for a second) in one of the biggest franchises in the world would be this popular, and I feel like it's quite a popular opinion that the app was released at least 6 months too early, it's poorly optimized and full of bugs. Not to mention that Niantic cannot handle PR, they don't even have a Pokemon GO- dedicated rep yet, they are looking for one. Personally I know several people who played this game every day after it came out, now this number fell down to zero, after a while there isn't much to do and the recent updates made the game worse. I have stopped playing after few days because every other catch the app would freeze and I would have to restart the whole thing. Plus the fact that it's obliterating the battery just by being open is unacceptable - obviously it's just a personal opinion so take it as you will.

<comment><USER8> It's also unfortunate that the game handles failures so badly. It hangs and behaves strangely in a number of ways instead of showing an error message.

<comment><USER9> Yup. For instance, the whole catching interaction part behaves as if the code was full of shitty hacks that couple UI and local game state with successful and _timely_ API responses. The kind of hangs you get with e.g. your Pokéball stuck mid-air because of API response problem seems like a type of bug you'd actually have to go out of your way to make in any kind of sane design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about putting some actual efforts into proper engineering before launch, stop blaming third parties for your 6h+ downtime and proving ban effectiveness with a graph missing its Y axis?

The only edge Niantic have over their fanbase is their gis database. Lack of communication was appalling, execution and reactivity too. I'm surprised nobody started a "private server" implementation of the game, yet.

<comment><USER11> You seem borderline vitriolic about this.

Nobody including Niantic would ever have dreamed that Pokemon Go would be as huge a sensation as it has been. Nobody. And they have smartly realised that this opportunity is potentially fleeting and so they need to capitalise as quick as possible i.e. grow into other regions.

To expect them to do accurate capacity planning is ridiculous. Likewise it is ridiculous to assume that they can react any quicker than they can. It's very hard to scale quickly whilst still maintaining a high level of uptime.

<comment><USER10> I am, indeed, quite angry towards Niantic. They made a very fun and addictive game, I'm not denying that.

However, they behaved in a way that really makes it difficult for us, players, to support them. They weren't ready for their success, sure, but they could at least bring some explanations on why would they ship without a trade system, why are they struggling with traffic and downtime, why would they delay bug fixes for more than 3 weeks, why they decided to remove one of the key feature of the game, and why they decided to ban third party apps made by people trying to fix their mistakes (and not with a broken graph!). I remember terrific launches from Blizzard, but even with all issues combined from Wow, Diablo and Hearthstone, this is nothing compared to Pogo's. I care about this game, because it's different from the long trail of duplicates we've seen for a long time; but, I really wish, Niantic, as a company, was more mature.

<comment><USER12> How much did you pay for the game?

<comment><USER13> Pokemon Go does have ingame micro-transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They banned third party clients from accessing their API.

From the chart it looks like third party API clients were generating two thirds of total traffic. That is a lot.

On the other hand, this has sparkled a huge community effort to reverse, understand and bypass the implemented protection/fingerprinting. [https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4w1cvr/pokemo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4w1cvr/pokemongo_current_api_status/)

<comment><USER15> I'd be really interesting the see that graph extended to to left - what was the traffic like before the 3 paws "bug" was first introduced.

I definitely feel that a significant amount of the drive to use the 3rd party services was due to the fact that you couldn't realistically hunt down any of the pokemon that show up on your radar.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the lack of a functional Nearby feature - either integrated or with a third party app - really affects motivation while playing.

I was out walking today and saw an unknown Pokemon silhouette in my Nearby list. All I could do was shrug and hope I'd run into it (I didn't). Previously I would have gone significantly out of my way to find it, adding mileage to my walk - which I understood to be one of the design objectives of the game.

<comment><USER8> Not only must the three steps have been buggy, the whole "nearby" list is useless and/or wrong. Two friends walking together, with the same exact GPS position on the maps, can have vastly different nearby-lists, sometimes without even one entry in common. How is that even possible?

<comment><USER17> It could be that, since the nearby listing holds only 9 entries, that there are more Pokemon nearby and the query to display them is unordered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They don't cache images (of Pokestops) client-side. This has got to be one of the bigger inefficiencies of this client. Aggressive client-side caching can relieve a lot of load on the server.

<comment><USER19> That's only on the network side. Playing the game you get a feel that the entire codebase is a cesspool.

Everyone I talk to who's also played Ingress sees history repeating itself. They've experienced the same bugs, lack of communication, shutting down services making the game better instead of improving said game and whatnot.

I really, really wish Niantic fixes its technical, management and communication problems. The game has so much potential but at this point I lost almost all hope they'll be able fully exploit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like they started authenticating a key (unknown6) that was previously being sent but not getting authenticated against.

A lot of bot writers are trying to break that authentication. Given that people are paying others to 'walk' their pokemon there is real money in faking GPS movement in the API.

<comment><USER21> Or go middle way and spoof the GPS radio signal near the device: [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/cheating-at-pokemon-go-with-a- hackrf-...](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/cheating-at-pokemon-go-with-a-hackrf-and- gps-spoofing/)

<comment><USER22> That is extremely overpowered, all you need is a rooted device with Xposed framework and a GPS spoofing app.

<comment><USER21> I was (half-)joking :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to see some numbers in that graph.

</comment><comment><USER22> That graph is a joke.

[http://i.imgur.com/HC9PEx0.png](http://i.imgur.com/HC9PEx0.png)

</comment><comment><USER24> Spatial graph, no scale</comment>


Google's Nest is leading a 3rd IoT standard group - <AUTHOR> http://www.threadgroup.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> The first one being AllSeen Alliance [1] supported by Qualcomm, and the second one being Open Interconnect Consortium [2] lead by Intel.

The difference seems that The Thread Group is solely focusing on the network protocol [3] and not a full IoT platform like AllSeen and OIC.

And apparently, Nest thermostats are already running a version (is it the final one?) of the Thread protocol.

[1] [https://allseenalliance.org/](https://allseenalliance.org/)

[2] [http://www.openinterconnect.org/](http://www.openinterconnect.org/)

[3] [http://www.threadgroup.org/Technology.aspx](http://www.threadgroup.org/Technology.aspx)</comment>