Common Search – nonprofit search engine for the Web - <AUTHOR> https://about.commonsearch.org/ <comment><USER3> One thing I hope this project does that Google fails to do is give developers a good API to access search. Google closed down their first web search API and now only give developers access to a limited Custom Search API that's rate limited to 100 queries a day for free with a hard limit of 10k searches - <USER2> makes it either very hard to develop anything against or relatively expensive. There are other options (Bing, Faroo, raw access to CommonCrawl) but they're either low quality or hard to work with. A good quality, straightforward, open web search API would be awesome.

<comment><USER4> I would pay for an API, that gives me access to partial quality crawl content.

It would be even better, if the web would be treated, at least for parts, as a digital library and non-profit organizations would recognize the value of access to such a resource and provide it (just as maintenance for roads or public schools).

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback! What would be your usecase for that API?

<comment><USER4> I would love to have a list of URL of all .edu domains, which contain the word "publications". It's a bit silly, but I'd love to build a open version something like Google Scholar.

I can think of many other use cases as well, where a product needs to built from larger, but very selected set of raw input or pages.

BTW: Thanks for Hackday Paris 2011! Loved that event and venue :)

<comment><USER6> This is basically my use-case too, in that it's more important to get access to _every_ document which contains that keyword and less important to rank them in a search-engine order. I think that it may be possible to do fairly inexpensively[1] but I'm still benchmarking to pick the right mix of technologies and data structures.

[1] [https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/4225](https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/4225)

<comment><USER7> (I'm not with CommonSearch. I have my own project that crawls extensively though.)

You do realize that you are talking about potentially a _LOT_ of data?

To give you an example: The word "work" occurs on about 4% of all web-pages. So even if there were _only_ about 2bn pages in an index, that would mean 80 million matching pages. Even if you only need their URLs that would be about 2.4gb of data assuming an average URL length of 30 bytes. Ok, compression can make that smaller, but still...

It would also mean that the server would need to make 80 million random reads to get the URLs. Even with SSDs that would take some time. Hmm, actually in this case it may be faster to just read all URL-data sequentially, than doing random reads. But in both cases we would be talking about _minutes_ needed to get all that data from disk.

I currently have a search-index with about 1.2bn pages - I expect to reach 2bn pages by mid-May - that could be used to get the kind of data you need. But not in a realtime API. Not _that_ amount of result-data.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. To be honest, a static data set would be perfectly fine for a first batch processing attempt.

> that could be used to get the kind of data you need.

Cool. Would you be interested in sharing or exchanging data?

<comment><USER7> I'm always open to new business opportunities. :)

What would be more useful to you, the raw data - meaning for each page a list of the keywords on it - or the reverse-word-index?

Raw-data may be better for batch-processing or running multiple queries at the same time.

My crawler currently outputs about 40-45gb of raw-data per day (about 30 million pages). Full crawl will be 2bn pages, updated every 2-3 months.

The reverse-word-index would be about 18gb per day for the same number of pages.

Reverse-word-index is already compressed, raw-data isn't.

There is a small problem with the crawl though, as it does not always handle non-ascii characters on pages correctly. I'm working on that.

BTW: I also currently have a list of about 8.5bn URLs from the crawl. About 600gb uncompressed. These are the links on the crawled pages. Obviously not all of those will end up being crawled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've tried using different search engines to Google numerous times, but each time I've returned to Google simply because the searches are better. They're more accurate, more relevant, and I very rarely find myself searching more than once to find something.

If commonsearch can beat Google in that regard, then count me in. But I doubt it will.

<comment><USER5> Hi! I'm the founder of Common Search.

I don't think search result quality is on a linear scale so it's hard to define "better".

The results will definitely be less personalized, which will be a big plus for some people, and a blocker for others. There will be a few other dimensions where we can stand out, and some where we will have a hard time catching up (index size for instance).

In the end, given enough contributors, I'm pretty sure the results can get "good enough" for most people, and hopefully "better" for some ;)

<comment><USER8> I think it's to do with the search engine's actual algorithm more than personalisation. Even on a completely new computer or while using tor, Google's results are pretty much always spot on.

Regardless, I'll be keeping an eye on CommonSearch.

<comment><USER9> Confirmation bias, perhaps ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think people might underestimate the power of an open source search engine. In my eyes it is like wikipedia versus the old paper encyclopedia books. Improvements to search results in Google are done by a relatively small amount of people from Google. Google decides where you buy, what you think and how you live. Behind their algorithms they probably have made dozens of subjective choices. Public debate, more attention to details, and open politics are as I see it, great tools to improve search engine quality.

<comment><USER11> >Improvements to search results in Google are done by a relatively small amount of people from Google

How many open source projects log more engineering hours than Google's search team? It's the flagship product of one of the largest corporations in the world.

<comment><USER10> Wikipedia has 133,621 active registered users, and 27,755,916 users. Furthermore, Wikipedia has 819,043,068 page edits. While Google will probably have better and more engineers, but they rely on usage statistics, and not experts in the specific search domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the project's goal but as techies, we inevitably want to understand the technical details and how it helps (or handicaps) the search results in comparison with Google.

For example, the project's data sources[1] says that the bulk of data comes from The Common Crawl. It looks like the CC is ~150 TB of data[2]. I'm not familiar with google.com internals but various sources estimate that their proprietary crawl dataset is more than a petabyte. (A googler could chime in here with more accurate data.)

So it's not as simple as the _algorithm_ for Common Search being "more fair" than the algorithm for Google Inc. The underlying dataset in terms of quantity, recency, rules for the robot, etc all affect the algorithm.

This is not a criticism of the project. It is my attempt to understand what is not obvious on the surface level.

[1][https://about.commonsearch.org/data- sources](https://about.commonsearch.org/data-sources)

[2][http://commoncrawl.org/2015/12/november-2015-crawl- archive-n...](http://commoncrawl.org/2015/12/november-2015-crawl-archive-now- available/)

(I'm can't tell if each archive of MM/YYYY is cumulative or an addendum.)

<comment><USER5> Hi! Data is indeed as important as the algorithm. Common Crawl is a very good bootstrap but we will certainly need to go beyond once it proves to be the limiting factor. We also hope we can help them improve their data set in the short term by giving them a larger URL seed list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seeing how the founder is the same who founded Jamendo which later was turned into a sad, user-unfriendly attempt to make money with freely licenses music (destroying its community in the process), how can I trust commonsearch not to be a waste of time and attention?

<comment><USER5> So much anger!

I left Jamendo 6 years ago so I have limited influence on what they do now, unfortunately.

Common Search is a nonprofit and 100% open source so it is fundamentally different.

<comment><USER14> I do not sense any anger on the OP comment. It sounds like a legit, real concern.

<comment><USER5> Well I actually share some of that anger so I'm sorry if I read too much into "destroy" and "sad". Common Search is forkable by design so it should hopefully stay on course one way or the other!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If it keeps being THAT fast after they've indexed the whole web, I'm switching search providers! :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm trying to find out from their website, but it's unclear. Are the servers hosted in the USA? And will the organisation be incorporated in the USA?

If you're talking about privacy and transparency, it's better to operate in a place bound the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, rather than the US Constitution, because the former gives people _much_ more rights with their data, how it's used, etc.

<comment><USER5> It is very early so we are not yet incorporated. The issues you mention will definitely be taken into account!

At scale, we'd probably have multiple legal entities in different countries anyway, like Wikimedia.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for your concern. However I was under the impression that Wikimedia was a US organisation, with some local chapters. Perhaps incorporate in a EU country from the start?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like it!

The explainer tool gives a really cool insight into the results: [https://explain.commonsearch.org/](https://explain.commonsearch.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Neat, I was working on a project to give a full programmatic keyword index to the contents of the common crawl, but I guess there's no need! It's very exciting to consider what kind of applications you can build with this.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd love to see a Wikipedia styled search where people can improve or flag results as they see fit. I wonder if that has been tried.

Sure it might not handle the long long tail but the top ten million searches would still be pretty useful.

<comment><USER7> I think Google once mentioned that each day a surprising amount of searches are unique. They were never done before. If memory serves me correct that number was 30-40%.

<comment><USER18> Even if that's true, 60% is still pretty useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This sounds awesome. Speaking of building AIs/bots and such in your FAQ, the lack of a good open API for search is probably what gates that market to Google and Microsoft and such... That nobody else can just tap a search engine. I'd love to be able to connect to this for queries at some point.

</comment><comment><USER20> "nonprofit" for me is a bad smell. I.e. the problem of sustainability, which for nonprofits is all about the money and not about carbon or solar energy, rainbows, plutonium or any of that.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm particularly interested in the discuss forum. Is it an open source one or built yourselves? Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Oh no, one project at a time :)

We used [http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/), which I recommend.</comment></comment>


The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces – Tikhon Bernstam of Scribd and Parse - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-challenges-a-repeat-founder-faces/ <comment><USER2> For anyone who doesn't want to listen to/read the whole thing (though you should; it's great), here's the quote to which the title alludes:

> Yes, absolutely. I actually think repeat founders are actually at a > disadvantage in many ways, because you feel this pressure to come up with > some genius idea, when usually the best start ups are not a genius idea. > They're not some brilliant flash in the pan. It's just doing something that… > Facebook. MySpace already existed. Friendster already existed. But Mark just > really nailed it. He started with colleges, he built something awesome that > people loved. I think often doing things better is not a bad strategy. But > as a second time or third time founder, I feel a pressure to– it's like the > sophomore slump that Richard Feinman talks about in physics, where he wasn't > allowed to work on small ideas anymore, he had to work on some gigantic > thing, but all the best discoveries in physics came from like the "That > doesn't seem right, it's kind of odd." Maxwell's equations say that the > speed of light's always constant…

<comment><USER3> Here it is directly linked to hear/read that section: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-challenges-a-repeat- founder...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-challenges-a-repeat-founder- faces/#t=43:52)

<comment><USER4> Thanks folks! Yea Feynman's spinning plate story about sophomore slump in particular is such a great read</comment></comment></comment>


'Partly Alive': Scientists Revive Cells in Brains from Dead Pigs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/science/brain-dead-pigs.html <comment><USER2> Already posted today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684386)

</comment><comment><USER3> Then comes the zombie armageddon.

<comment><USER4> Minecraft's zombie pigmen seem prescient now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> " It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead."

\- Miracle Max

<comment><USER6> Haha, came here to say the same thing. I see the HN anti-fun police have reacted swiftly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So they can relive the horror of their slaughter again. Humans wouldn't want to be treated as humans treat others, I observe, sad about it.

<comment><USER8> I agree at some point we may reach the point where this is an ethical issue, but if you had read the second paragraph in the article you would see that this is not happening as you've described:

>The brains did not regain anything resembling consciousness: There were no signs indicating coordinated electrical signaling, necessary for higher functions like awareness and intelligence.</comment></comment>


App Friday: The mobile app bubble is about to burst - <AUTHOR> http://recombu.com/news/app-friday-the-mobile-app-bubble-is-about-to-burst_M11346.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe the "bubble" would burst, maybe not. The author's reasons were not quite convincing. The web 1.0 and 2.0 has billions of sites (compared to some 200K apps) and there are millions of copycats out there. Does that mean the web is going to burst anytime soon? Just like we found Google to help us navigate through billions of pages somebody could write a good search tool which would allow us navigate through all the crappy apps.</comment>


Ask HN: Which languages use method.object() order? - <AUTHOR>

I read http://verraes.net/2014/09/objects-as-contracts-for-behaviour/ today and liked his idea of putting method calls before the object.
So rather than write 'invoice.pay(anAmount') or 'appointment.reschedule(aDate)' you would write 'pay.invoice(anAmount)' and 'reschedule.appointment(aDate)'
Are there any programming languages which allow this? Has it been tried and failed? <comment><USER2> An obvious inconvenient side-effect of this approach would be that if expressions are still typed left-to-right it would be very difficult to provide the kind of tab-completion that is common in IDEs and text editors, since the information necessary to narrow the range of a search only becomes available as you finish the expression.

</comment><comment><USER3> Polymorphic functions exist in many languages: pay(invoice, anAmount), reschedule(appointment, aDate). Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, Erlang.. They all can do that. If the function can dispatch on the first parameter given, they become equivalent to the object oriented syntax. But many languages go one step further and let you dispatch on any of the arguments, or a combination of them and so on.</comment>


The easiest way (by far) to build a real React and Firebase web app - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-easiest-way-by-far-to-build-a-real-react-firebase-web-app-5dc6fa6f1b61 <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the Firebase plugin for React Studio discussed here, so I'd be happy to answer any questions.</comment>


"Join our limited beta today for $1" - Mightybell.com - <AUTHOR> https://mightybell.com/home

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but I wouldn't pay for being a beta user. Being a hacker myself, I commit a lot of time when I sign up for a beta. I report bugs, and give my opinion on what I like and what I don't like. In my opinion, a beta should never be the paid version. In this case, I'd say 'limited beta' is just marketing speak for an early bird deal. Which is OK, as long as you call it that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder Gina Bianchini (ex-Ning) explained on launch.is that it is about setting up correct expectations: it'll have a strong "premium" component to it after launch, so apparently they don't want anyone to expect different.

I find it an interesting move given the large number of beta signups pages these days, but wouldn't sign up for MB, either.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with dirkdeman: make it free for beta users we provide feedback etc or change it to an early signup offer...the idea seems to very good indeed. It reminds me of the Game startup by Andrew Hsu: <http://www.andrewhsu.com/projects/gamestudio.htm>.</comment>


My Take on Lean Startup Development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thirdyearmba.com/my-take-on-lean-startups

<comment><USER2> Nice article, Dan.

We have recently taken a huge step toward being truly lean at Earbits, and it's not easy. Particularly when you've got as much product as we do, and have goals with deadlines, it's hard to say, let's stop for a minute and position ourselves to start doing this smarter.

I think it's easiest to get it wrong if you are more focused on mimicking examples from the book instead of applying the underlying principle, which to me is: Validate or invalidate your assumptions with the smallest application of resources possible, and double down on things that move the dial.

In our business, that can be pretty tough to do. There are a lot of moving parts to our product and it's not exactly a funnel. But you have to break each experiment into parts. For example, we have an assumption that people want more things to do on our site, and that they want more control over what to listen to. But before we go building a bunch of complex things for them to do, we decided to see if they would click on a series of tabs that seemed to "do something cool". And they did. So now we know that they're looking for more to do. Next, we fake a few different things that they could do, with real features when easy to build, and smokescreen tests when not. Only if a big percentage of users try to use a feature do we truly build it, and perhaps then we'll try skinning it different ways, since that's easy. If the final feature increases our core metrics (a whole other discussion), we keep it. If not, we don't, because maintaining a feature that doesn't improve our company health is a waste of resources.

Admittedly, you still have to take leaps of faith. The point is to make them as short a leap as possible. But I'll tell you that while it can be a bit painful to work in this manner, I feel huge validation killing features, running A/B tests and making decisions based on data. We may have come a long way flying blind, but I have a feeling 2012 is going to yield unreal results for us thanks to this disciplined approach.</comment>


Towards universal neural nets: Gibbs machines and ACE - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06585 <comment><USER3> False positives do happen, but the style of the article raises some "crank" red flags.

\- Doesn't get to the point until about halfway through

\- Repeatedly mentions Einstein

\- Appeals to quantum mechanics out of nowhere

The style is particularly hard to parse (or I'm particularly dense, but I am generally comfortable reading papers on variational inference, neural networks, etc). At the same time, a lot of it rings true-ish... Does anyone get where they're going with this?

<comment><USER4> Just to be abundantly clear - the ladder network [1] outscores this by a moderate margin, and is also _actually_ SOTA without data augmentation. In my mind at least, adding data rotations in the latent space is still different than a fully connected model without data augmentation.

I could do with a few more recent citations on generative modeling. It seems the author isn't 100% aware of some of the most recent generative modeling work.

That said, the ideas presented are interesting and seem complimentary to lots of existing approaches - I will be looking into this paper further.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02672](http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02672)

<comment><USER5> Guy, the only thing abundantly clear is that you are full of dung. Your shameless self-promotion may piss-off the police chief here - murbard2, so be more careful. Ten digits better classified, out of 10000? With a structure more complicated than a human DNA vs two lines of code? Congratulations! Or, and how are your "stairways-to-heaven" even remotely universal? Show us something these networks have generated like the VAE or Gibbs/ACE papers? Perhaps you can show some density estimation results as in [http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04623](http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04623) or [http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06585](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06585)? Oja and Hyvarinen are great guys and have left their names in the pantheon of neural nets. But it is time for you and the other 12 people who live there, to shake off the legacy of ICA and the obsession with orthogonality: Andrew Ng and company showed years ago that it is not needed and is in fact detrimental [http://ai.stanford.edu/~quocle/LeKarpenkoNgiamNg.pdf](http://ai.stanford.edu/~quocle/LeKarpenkoNgiamNg.pdf) . Read it! Also, too much dung smells bad in the arctic summer, murbard2 here prefers comics and won't be reading your installments of 25+ page spaghetti any time soon. At least Oja and Hyvarinen know how to write.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just briefly skimmed through parts of it.

If I understand the paper correctly, the objective function is a combination of a classifier and a generative model. It sounds a lot like pre-training a neural network as a generative model before fine tuning it as a classifier, except this time the two steps are jammed together. I'm not sure what the benefit would be...

<comment><USER5> The benefit seems to be shown on the right chart of Fig 8 (bottom line is best descriptor of probability density). Combining classifiers and generative nets is the natural next step, LeCun is working on in in the context of ConvNets - see their SWWAE paper a few weeks ago

<comment><USER7> Stacked What-Where Auto-encoders _Junbo Zhao, Michael Mathieu, Ross Goroshin, Yann Lecun_

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02351](http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02351)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shooting first and asking question later ain't gonna make u no friends in Compton, murbard2. Wouldn't hold my breath to hear any answers...

<comment><USER3> Like I said, there are false positives, but when I hear "quantum mechanics" in a non quantum mechanical context, I remove the safety from my gun...

<comment><USER5> Modern stochastic/time series analysis has borrowed most of its formalism from quantum mechanics. It is the ignorance and the bigotry that has held neural nets back 30 years, until GPUs came to the rescue. Having gazillions of parameters, which still nobody understands, did not help...

<comment><USER3> What insight do quantum mechanics bring into this paper? What exactly do you gain by calling a normal distribution: the equilibrium distribution of the imaginary time Schroedinger equation?

It's quite possible that I'm a fool, unable to see the beauty of the argument and the depth of the parallels being drawn, but to me it sounds like [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1957](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1957)

<comment><USER5> reading is not your thing, ah? It is too condensed and have not finished it but sections 1.5 and 2.3 are very explicit about it...

<comment><USER3> Maybe it isn't, but I have found the literature on the topic to be very clear in general. I do not find section 1.5 and 2.3 explicit at all.

Section 2.3 reads like a redefinition of the exponential family and its link to the maximum entropy principle. I think the idea is to optimize the sufficient statistics, but it's not clear.

Section 1.5... well you talk about two dimensional translational symmetries, and then make a link with position and momentum, but where is that coming from? This seems merely like an artifact of looking at two dimensional translational symmetries, and not at the general case. Again, what does the quantum analogy bring to the table? I think - though it's not clear - <USER2> what you're suggesting is drawing the latent noise following a distribution which is reflects the expected symmetry in the manifold.

So what is the takeout? Are you attempting to parametrize max-entropy distribution using the symmetries as constraints?

<comment><USER5> Not me dude but I like underdogs and outsiders. What u saying sounds right: symmetries, like the ones computed in section 3.8 are used as constraints a.k.a. "quantum numbers" describing the states in the latent layer. That is vintage quantum mechanics. The part is theoretical and not in the theano code by looks of it, so harder to comment on... The quantum analogy also brings along the laplacian form of the conditional density in section 1.5, so there u go. On your comment, which "literature on the topic" is clear? Have u read the original VAE paper [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4082.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4082.pdf). 95% of paper and most of 21 equations are about gradients, and gaussian too, they even invent a new term: stochastic back-propagation, why, who needs that? All the math is done in the Gibbs/ACE paper in 4 lines, just compute your cost bound and back-propagate? Having seen this earlier would have saved me a lot of pondering. Pythagorean theorem does sound too simple, I give u that...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adventures in vulnerability reporting - <AUTHOR> https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/08/adventures-in-vulnerability-reporting.html <comment><USER2> When vendors are that annoying I usually just go full disclosure.

I found some privilege escalations on some small cloud providers though that went as far as ignoring my mails to their listed security@.... e-mail, or yeah, not having a contact listed at all.

Not quite sure what to do with those. Posting these to a full-disclosure list? They're too small nobody's going to care, until someone does and steals customer data. Might as well just ignore it until someone else discovers it and steals customer data?

<comment><USER3> HackerOne provides disclosure assistance [0] for uncooperative companies. Not sure how they handle it from there.

[0] [https://hackerone.com/disclosure- assistance](https://hackerone.com/disclosure-assistance)

<comment><USER4> Hackerone and some issues with it are brought up in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Responsible disclosure is an unwritten agreement between two parties.

If I find a vulnerability in your system, and you don't go out of your way to make it hard for me to report it, then I will send it to you first.

If you show some interest in fixing the vulnerability, I will hold off talking about it for a while.

If a company doesn't do their part in making responsible disclosure possible, I don't feel bound by it either. If it's anything big, I'd first report it to the national authorities (CERT, NCSC, ICO if there's personal data involved). Want me talking to you before I talk to the authorities and possibly a lawyer? Provide me with a contact option that doesn't involve agreeing to a small novel's worth of disclaimers.

</comment><comment><USER6> FTA: "The difficulty I encountered reporting this serious vulnerability delayed my report one week. It might have caused a longer delay if I did not have contacts at Samsung who could help"

I haven't had to report anything too serious, but I've found this in most big companies (including Google). It's seriously frustrating, but I wonder where the balance is between being too hard to contact and opening the floodgates.</comment>


Asana (no longer private alpha) - <AUTHOR> http://asana.com

<comment><USER2> I couldn't figure what what this things was after skimming over landing page - after watching 'How to use Asana, in 2 minutes' it seems like it's kind of task-list/to-do/reminder thing - which makes me think of Trello. Honest question - how is it different and/or better than Trello?

<comment><USER3> Honest question: how is this different from Google Wave?

<comment><USER2> If you're asking about Trello - then I see one _big_ difference - Trello has __way __simpler interface - to the point I could send my boss and colleagues invites and they immediately knew how to use it - whereas even my most geeky friends had problems figuring out how to use Wave (I did too.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://asana.com/company/>

Too many people?

<comment><USER5> I thought you were joking till I checked:

19 staff/founders and 14 board/advisors? No wonder it took them 3 years to get to beta with a fancy to-do app -- too many cooks in the kitchen!

(on closer inspection, not everybody on the list has something to do with the app, they also list their chef, a "coordinator" (whatever that means), and recruiters and sales folks)

with all kinds of ex-FB and ex-Googlers (and an ex-Palantir and Yelp) including data scientists, mathematicians and machine learning folks, I have a feeling they _must_ have more in store than what they show here:

<http://asana.com/2011/05/new-asana-intro-video/>

And which Trello does _much_ better.

If not...this is _way_ too heavyweight a team.

Oh, and a $9mil round.

<comment><USER6> I worry that that had such easy access to VC money that they decided to grow too soon. With the names of their roster, I assume people just showed up with wheel-barrels full of of money. With that many people you are already running into coordination and scaling problems. If you don't have a really clear product to focus on then you can have problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My company has been using Asana for the last few months and we have been quite happy with the outcome. IT IS really just a glorified task list. Asana team has put lot of effort into building a snappy user interface that feels almost like working on a native app (shortcuts, etc). I miss a native iphone app even though the mobile site works ok.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks interesting... but pale grey text on white background, argh!

</comment><comment><USER9> Personally, I do not care all that much for the Asana task manager but I am eager to see more about the underlying LunaScript technology.

<comment><USER10> didn't they more-or-less drop that by the end? see the update here - [http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-developing-their-own- progr...](http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-developing-their-own-programming- language-Lunascript)

but three years to implement a todo list suggests they had a lot of fun with it along the way....

<comment><USER11> Even though Lunascript the reactive web language has been scrapped, Luna the reactive web Javascript framework is still plenty interesting. Building a web framework is much more reasonable for a prelaunch startup.

However, that's from a quora post written almost a year ago. We'll have to wait and see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> After waiting so long to get access to it and after hearing so much about it I am a bit disappointed.

<http://getflow.com> and <http://trello.com> seem to have stolen their thunder.

</comment><comment><USER12> Will this be free in the future or based on a premium subscription model?

<comment><USER6> Almost certainly premium/freemium. This type of app is usually marketed to businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks great, but I'm still kind of at a loss: How is this different than Trello?

<comment><USER8> Hadn't heard of Trello - it looks awesome, thanks for the spot :-)

<comment><USER14> Bagged these two pages in my Trello search. Joel explains the idea:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/09/13.html>

Answers: promised free as is, possibly freemium features later (7th item):

<http://blog.trello.com/trello-common-questions/></comment></comment></comment>


Pirate Bay Founder launches Hemlis - private messaging service  - <AUTHOR> http://www.swedishstartupspace.com/2013/07/10/peter-sunde-co-founder-the-pirate-bay-launches-secure-messaging-project/

<comment><USER2> >We are building Heml.is on top of proven technologies, such as XMPP with PGP.

Should't they use OTR over XMPP since it is better suited for chat anyway.</comment>


Annoyed by Mobile Sites That "Ask" You to Download Their App? You're Not Alone - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/i-dont-want-your-app/ <comment><USER2> Tapatalk is the most annoying one to me, probably because it actually pops up a modal dialog. One of our local news websites is really bad too, asking every single time if I want to install their (crappy) app. Worse, if even if you do have their app, it offers no way to go to a specific article I clicked a link from. 99% of the time that I'm on their site, it's because I've clicked a link from a tweet or something. I want to go to that specific article. And the app is totally broken for that use case -- I have to go to the home page and then try to find where the article is.

I actually greatly prefer apps over websites in general, and if it's something I use a lot, I'll install the app (assuming it's decent). But I don't want the app shoved in my face when I go to the website. If I'm at the website, there's a reason. Advertising it non-obtrusively is ok, especially if it remembers after I've dismissed it once.

<comment><USER3> Relevant: [https://xkcd.com/1174/](https://xkcd.com/1174/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've bailed on multiple sites that do the interstitial "Get Our App" page as well as multiple sites that show a sticky banner ad that takes up 1/4 of the viewport and have an X button that doesn't work.

Seriously, none of us want your poorly made app that needs 100 different permissions to install and sucks up our battery. Pinning the bookmark to our homescreen generally works better (seriously, try it with Facebook and enjoy your 10% longer battery).

<comment><USER5> Yep. As much as people lament the sorry state of some mobile web browsing, I find that with modern smartphones with up to date specs and a nice big screen, I'd almost always prefer to use the bookmarked website over a dedicated mobile app for each site.

Aside from the fact that many are just wrappers for their mobile site (and often do a worse job at rendering the site than the mobile Chrome or Firefox I already have installed), you get stuff like the aforementioned Facebook app which love to run more background processes and pester you to install additional apps for messaging or other features that work perfectly well in the browser.

When I got my most recent phone I didn't install the Facebook app and instead just use either the bookmarked mobile site or one of several third party apps that "sandbox" your website login so Facebook can't pull other info from your device. My battery lasts longer and I can continue to open Facebook when I want to look at Facebook and ignore it when I'm doing other things.

Additionally, I would need to grant superuser permissions to run a system-wide adblocker but in a browser, I can just install Adblock Plus/Edge/etc. and avoid the ads on mobile where they suck up limited data and generally get in the way on the smaller screen.

<comment><USER6> There are other reasons why you shouldn't install apps from Facebook and LinkedIn[0], but one thing I do wish is that there was an easier way to tell Chrome to default to requesting Desktop sites[1]. The state of most mobile websites is just abysmal and I find myself tapping the Request Desktop Site option multiple times a day.

[0] [http://lifehacker.com/5921095/facebook-just-changed-your- ema...](http://lifehacker.com/5921095/facebook-just-changed-your-email- without-permission-heres-how-to-get-it-back) [1] [http://www.guidingtech.com/16169/desktop-mode-websites- chrom...](http://www.guidingtech.com/16169/desktop-mode-websites-chrome- android-permanently/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's funny because, yes the app modal is super annoying but equally annoying is Techcrunch asking me for permission for push notifications. Another modal that steals focus as soon as you load the page.

Why in the hell would I want push notifications from Techcrunch?

<comment><USER8> Valuable industry insights!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shoving chocolate down my throat is terribly rude. No matter how much goodness chocolate is, the shoving causes me to bail 10 out of 10 times.

I wish sites and apps were made better and the MobileOS could better switch between the two but regardless of that peeve of mine analytics should do a better job at remembering our choices. There are a few websites (like yahoo) where I don't like the mobile app, the UI is totally foreign. Overtime, yahoo continues to prompt me about their app, well...bye yahoo. You are not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's worst than that. The state of the usability of mobile sites on mobile devices is horrible. I've run across so many sites who's "m" versions are utterly unusable on an iPad. To the point that I wish Chrome (mobile) had an " always ask for desktop site" setting.

The other problem how layout is sometimes handled. For example:

[https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects](https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects)

If you read this in portrait on an iPad with Chrome you get this tiny font that is hard to read at 11:00PM when you are tired. Switching to landscape doesn't help. I don't think there's a way to get a larger font. Zooming does not help because you now have to pan right and left to read every line.

I get the feeling that the state of mobile isn't all that great in general.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why aren't apps just "advanced webapps"? The technology is certainly here so I don't understand why it is not happening (* ). With a few changes in the APIs here and there, webapps could integrate perfectly into the OS, and still be sandboxed like web-pages.

(*) Well, I do understand, it has something to do with locking people into an ecosystem.

<comment><USER12> People have tried really hard to use web apps instead of native. I think if it worked well, it would have happened. People aren't writing many web apps for Android, iOS, or Microsoft.

Rather than ranting conspiracy theories perhaps we could identify the path to better web apps for mobile.

<comment><USER11> I was not so much hinting at a conspiracy theory, but rather that the motivation of vendors seems to not align with the idea of web-apps.

<comment><USER13> Disclaimer: I'm a mobile dev, almost exclusively native apps.

I think the motivation of _users_ doesn't align with the idea of web-apps, or at least not their current incarnation.

There are a few variables here:

\- Frequency of use: you won't install an app for something you use once a week, you will install an app for something you use every day.

\- Performance of webapps: hint, extremely poor, though largely as a result of bad decisions rather than bad tech.

\- Pain-in-ass-ness of installing native apps: extremely high, but we know this already.

The problem here is that modern websites perform extremely poorly because of a bloated reliance on JS and a completely un-contained explosion of HTTP requests to load something simple. Multiple people have complained about it[1], and the complainers themselves are part of the problem[2]. Even with a warm cache modern webapps still require a ridiculous number of requests before rendering/becoming interactive.

The problem is exacerbated in the mobile context where the OS is throttling the number of simultaneous requests, this is why apps that are little slow on desktop become unbearable on mobile. Users, once they have the app installed, largely prefer native _because_ native apps are so much faster in general.

This isn't a limitation in the tech - well optimized pages not filled to the brim with extraneous JS imports and bullshit tracking pixels render quite fast, and there's no reason they can't work well on mobile (as an app or regular page), but we seem incapable of doing this.

Native apps are still preferred by users (barring the PITA install process) over web-apps not because of some inherent technological advantage, but because native apps generally do not do the bullshit things that make the web nearly unusably slow.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web- suc...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks)

[2] [http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web- sucks/](http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never download the app. I get to the site either following a link (example: from HN) or from Google. The site is a commodity I might never come back again to. I only need that article. Which sites hosts it is not important. Why should I lose time installing an app (with who knows which permissions) I might never use again? And if I come back to the site for another article the browser is good enough. What's the rationale for those kind of apps?

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean Google News is going to stop doing it?

It's much easier for me to have multiple tabs open in a browser than having a separate app for every site I look at

</comment><comment><USER16> Glad that I use a Windows phone - I get less of these annoying messages as most people do not bother to make a Windows app anyway (at least at first). And just to be clear, I will not install an app even if available. I like minimal clutter in my phone and uninstall almost everything except maps, the browser and those related to basic smartphone functionality (e.g. camera).

<comment><USER17> I use a Windows phone too, and see plenty of these, usually targeted for other platforms (not that I can blame them given the current user agent of "Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; BLU; WIN HD W510u) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537" I think that is going to catch any targeting regex)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I get it that 69% people leave the website, but what about revenue? Corporate sharks can still claim that we didn't care about most of those 69% who weren't going to be customers anyway. The remaining 9% who installed the app may be the target, make revenue, are easier to track, are exposed several times a day to invasive push notifications, provide they contact details and dozen photos _, and maybe even end up purchasing a subscription to said newspaper.

I'd be a big fan of the HTTP Header "X-I-Dont-Want-Your-Goddamn-Iphone-App: true", I'm just trying to understand better the economics of annoying customers with an app.

_ Now that I think about it, Facebook should claim copyrigts on all photos you give it access to on your phone.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd install every app if they didn't all seem to need access to my identity, wifi state, phone state, etc to display some simple information on a screen.

If I have visited your website from a browser there's a good chance that's how i want to interact with you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Worst offender: Facebook. I still refuse to download their messenger (I already have too many message apps). If I have to do messaging on Facebook I do it in my mobile browser.

<comment><USER21> I'd really recommend you to download it. The split was brutal, but it was actually for the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> From a couple years back: [http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com](http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com)

</comment><comment><USER23> I developed one of the fullscreen ads called out in the article - imagine how annoyed I am by seeing it 100 times a day!

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't do it. Ever.

Truth is, I've got a browser for most use cases and that works really well. An app can shave some off the data use, but then again, it can be data hungry too.

I like to use Chrome and it's data compression service and find that works just fine for the sites I like to use.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great when you have an Ubuntu phone, which their app almost certainly won't install on.

</comment><comment><USER26> The other annoying one is the "subscribe" popup that blocks whatever you're about to read. Why would I subscribe to your service? I haven't even seen what you have to offer yet! All I've gotten is this giant flier thrown in my face, and that makes for a pretty bad first impression.

</comment><comment><USER27> Change User Agent header?</comment>


Ask HN: Possible to hire as W2 but w/ 90 day probation? - <AUTHOR>

Wondering if it's possible here in CA to hire someone as a W2 but put the employee on a 90 day probationary period where the company is not responsible for unemployment if we have to let the person go.<p>Note: I'm a regular HN contributor; using a throwaway ID just to remain anonymous. Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Also BTW, we've done it in the past as "hire as 1099 on a project basis then convert to W2" but we want to start this person as a W2 in this case.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yes, it is. Most employers in California have probationary periods for new employees.</comment>


Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose - <AUTHOR> http://storyblog.io/f11ffb15/anxiety-over-the-new-gmail-compose <comment><USER2> Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me _to_ Google from other services years ago.

Two examples:

\- maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting.

\- gmail: Previous/Next-message buttons flake out constantly (grayed out - clicking does nothing). New formatting options are hard to use and obnoxious.

And an old one that I ran in to again today:

\- there is no (intuitive) way to copy a URL from google search results without all of the google redirect garbage. This fundamentally degrades the world-wide web. For example, I want to email a link to a pdf. If an in-browser pdf reader is not available, then the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link. I clicked the "share" button in hopes that _this_ might give me the link; but no, it wanted me to share on G+.

<comment><USER3> There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution.

Steve Jobs could probably have forced consistency on Google's products without breaking them, but few CEOs have the taste Steve had.

<comment><USER4> The new Maps interface isn't driven by the idea of making it "consistent" with GMail, it's driven by the same idea that Google Search's homepage used to represent -- simplicity. The Map is the UI.

A single search box. You type in POIs, the Map is constructed around the search results.

The old Google Maps (the tile based one) was based on the idea of a multi-pane map with gadgets and a side panel of 10 ranked search results, but the map was the same no matter the search (pre-rendered tiles). Search results had to be clicked on the map to get a popup to see what it was. The new Maps is based on the idea that the _Map itself is the search result_ The POIs are rendered directly into the map, just like a specialized paper map. It is based on spatial based exploration and relevancy.

There's a difference between a design disaster and "I don't like this because it is different than what I was used to and I don't want to change" IMHO, the new maps is what Maps should have been all along.

<comment><USER5> It was always a single search box. And it always centered around results. Removing the side panel makes it so I now can't use a browser text search to find the results I want faster.

So, I disagree, and I think the old way was both easier (because I knew it) AND simpler (less complex). What now?

And here is the difference between Google employees and their users. Google believes, and has told their employees, that when they change something, users will always hate it because it's different, and that there is a gestation period during which the majority will "get used to it."

That "gestation period" now seems infinite, and any change is allowed to remain because real user feedback is ignored.

<comment><USER4> I think we've seen lot of instances of major vendors changing something, and everyone complaining, and then the new design becomes the new normal. Practically every Facebook redesign got pissed on.

Apple famously got ripped for Final Cut Pro X, for many of the same reasons people are ripping the new Maps (bunch of power user features removed)

I personally prefer the map to show the results. They are spotlighted and easy to see. The result box on the side used to annoy me because I'd have to keep moving the mouse and/or eyes from the list to the map and back. The new Maps consistently pops up the Infobox in the same place too.

You can't please everyone, but on mobile and touch devices, having a multi- pane interaction model is lame anyway. So really, the desktop is simply converging with the tablet.

<comment><USER6> >>I think we've seen lot of instances of major vendors changing something, and everyone complaining, and then the new design becomes the new normal. Practically every Facebook redesign got pissed on.

You might be getting confused. There's a difference between the new design becoming the "new normal," and the new design being tolerated because there aren't any real alternatives to the product. After all, the only reason Facebook users stopped complaining about each redesign is because they realized Facebook doesn't care what users think. (But I bet when major advertisers complain behind closed doors, they listen.)

Google Maps is not like Facebook. While it is currently the dominant maps service, it is not the only one. Not only that, but it also cannot rely on a strong network effect to protect it like Facebook can; if all your friends are on Facebook, then being on MySpace is kind of dumb. Can you say the same about Google Maps?

Here's the idea: you can afford to make sweeping, disruptive design changes _if and only if_ you have a virtually unbreakable monopoly in your market. This is why Microsoft could risk changing the MS Office interface back in 2007. Even if they had screwed up, what would people switch to? There wasn't a good enough alternative. Again though, can you say the same about Google Maps?

<comment><USER4> No, obviously the stickiness is less based on network effects and more on brand perception. But a brand can also die from staleness.

A new generation of users are coming online whose experience is predominately a mobile one, and on touch, sparse, touchable, explorable interfaces are the norm. If Google simply kept maps the way it has been for a decade, sooner or later, they'd find themselves criticized because it doesn't work like "Apple Maps".

In fact, people seem more willing to adopt radical new user paradigms if the form factor changes. If I change your desktop email, you'll get annoyed, but if I create a radically new out of the box mobile email experience, you'll be more amenable to learn it.

<comment><USER7> > _A new generation of users are coming online whose experience is > predominately a mobile one, and on touch, sparse, touchable, explorable > interfaces are the norm. If Google simply kept maps the way it has been for > a decade, sooner or later, they 'd find themselves criticized because it > doesn't work like "Apple Maps"._

Or, you know, they could have changed them into something better, either incrementally or in one step, instead of the new broken design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The self-righteous anger about the irredeemable horror of the new Gmail compose is starting to get a bit old.

First of all, it's not as one-sided as people are making it out. I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits. Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).

There are some important philosophical reasons behind some of these changes that I strongly agree with:

First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good. The OA seems to glorify long-winded CEO screeds, but by definition the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they're not I don't want to work with you), so it's correct to optimize for the short case. The two levels of pop-out (the second of which the OA appears to be completely ignorant of) scale up and out quite nicely.

Second, the hidden headers and formatting options are encouraging simplicity in email. Most email should _not_ have formatting, and arguably most emails don't have CCs, BCCs, or edited subjects either. Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out. It takes a little while to get used to and then you just subconsciously do the double click, it's not really any harder than finding them in a sea of icons, it's just that previously _you were used to that sea of options_. The optimization for the common case is done correctly.

For me the new design (after turning on compact view) is a moderate improvement that did nothing to dilute the core value of Gmail which are the labels, keyboard shortcuts/navigation, conversation view and search/filters. Running it inside Mailplane makes it even better.

There are definitely annoyances, but nothing that's even close to driving me to something like mutt, and forget about GUI clients, all of them feel like molasses compared to Gmail.

<comment><USER9> I chuckled when I read:

> First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always > good.

"Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short."

> Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability > nightmare people make out.

Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this sentence.

<comment><USER8> Nice pith, but how about adding some meat to that rebuttal.

> _" Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages > me to keep it short."_

The topic at hand is power emailing. Not people who write a message to their family once a week as the majority of their email.

> _Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this > sentence._

I don't even know where you get this. Having a minimal interface with the most used features present and others grouped under menus of some sort is an age- old proven UI convention. This is the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of Microsoft software or other bloated programs with toolbars and ribbons bursting at the seams. Citing Microsoft is just a way for you to justify your emotional reaction to my comment without adding any substance.

<comment><USER10> > _" The topic at hand is power emailing. Not people who write a message to > their family once a week as the majority of their email."_

That use-case is completely valid. Unless you're going to argue that GMail is _meant_ to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with. Optimising for something that doesn't suit the majority of users is usually a mistake.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me. There's nothing about Gmail that prevents that use case. I just responded because it's a stupid example.

> _Unless you 're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' > tool, which I'd disagree with._

Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers.

But that's neither here nor there because obviously they are trying to improve it for the most common case _which is the source of the much-reviled changes_.

It's not normal people that are complaining about these changes. It's entrenched power emailers who had their workflow thrown off by change and whose muscle memory is leading them to believe that this redesign is a disaster. New users won't have any worse experience than they did before, I guarantee you that.

<comment><USER10> > _" I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me..."_

I'm trying to point out that the topic is _wider_ than power emailing as these feature changes affect everyone. You don't get to choose which ones to adopt.

> _" Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power > email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers. ... obviously > they are trying to improve it for the most common case"_

It doesn't follow that Gmail was 'invented to be a power email tool'. Also, there's an assumption in there they're genuinely trying to improve for the common case. It could also be a range of internal pressures forcing changes that are actually _detrimental_ for users. Companies fuck up like this all the time, so let's not pretend that Google is somehow exempt from that class of big-company-mistake.

<comment><USER8> > _I 'm trying to point out that the topic is wider than power emailing as > these feature changes affect everyone. You don't get to choose which ones to > adopt._

And I'm arguing that Gmail's design decisions are made with a solid basis in the widest common use case despite all the self-righteous nerdrage piled upon the tired mantra that Google is horrible at design.

> _It doesn 't follow that Gmail was 'invented to be a power email tool'._

What do you mean it "doesn't follow"? I'm not justifying this as a logical argument, I'm repeating statements I've read from Gmail's creators in interviews over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For my usage, the new compose has been a major step back. It now takes additional clicks to accomplish basic tasks (e.g. change the subject) and is less clear on what I am doing (e.g. when you cc someone and switch back to the body, the cc-ed names is now in To: line making it appear that you are sending it to them directly.) There are many other examples where the experience has become worse.

I am not clear if Google truly believes the new compose is an improvement or if there is a behind the scenes reason that is making up for the decrease in usability. The new product is so obviously a step back (to me) that I am assuming it's the latter. Has anyone seen a write up that has an explanation other than "improved practicality?"

<comment><USER11> Oh man, I wish I knew. Have you noticed this one? You're editing a wrapped paragraph, you use the right-arrow key to move, and once you're at the end of -any- line, it suddenly jumps down to the "..." (the toggle for displaying the quoted message).

(Also, why hide the formatting bar...)

<comment><USER12> Ah, is that what's happening? All I know is I go back to proof my email before sending and I keep randomly ending up at the bottom and cursing as I scroll back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To avoid being distracted by the gmail inbox and to have a clean composition interface, I always keep this URL bookmarked, and it still works w/ the new compose:

[https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailt...](https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto)

<comment><USER14> not to be snarky but you know, this is 2013, not 1999. If the largest and best funded company can't get something as simple as email right, then they should just pack up and go home. Or at least fire their whole UX/UI department and start fresh.

By right, I mean a clean, simple interface that you don't need to judiciously learn over dozens of hours of frustrating trial and error or by googling in support forums.

The old gmail UX was fine. In fact, compared to the new compose it was the bees knees. It takes humility to be able to realize that. But Jason wants to leave his mark - unfortunately the mark is an ugly smear.

<comment><USER15> Who is jason?

<comment><USER14> Jason Cornwell is responsible for the atrocious gmail UX

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What gives me anxiety is complaining about minor UX changes for a class- leading free product on a site that's called "Hacker News". I hate to get all old-fogey but Hacker News has really turned into "the random opinions of people in the startup world". I learn a lot less on this site than I used to.

Sorry to the OP, it's not your fault that you provided content the community likes and I have no personal issue with you.

<comment><USER17> It's comments like yours that I don't like. Also, I don't like this comment I'm writing.

Gmail had good UX, and people went to it for that. Now it has a few flaws. As people who care about UX, these flaws are worth discussing.

Some 'hackers' don't do UX, which is fine. So those people may find the topic boring. But many people here are making things, and find the UX direction of the leading web email client interesting. If only to see future trends in web site development. Other reasons this is interesting is to see how they are monetising their apps more, and how they are trying to make email a worse marketing channel.

Having worked at Google, it is understandable if you get annoyed when people bash your company. But that comes with being successful. So don't sweat it too much.

xo

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Something that gets me in a little trouble from time to time, forwarding an email includes the entire previous conversation chain...which isn't normally a problem, but gmail compresses the previous chain into a collapsed [...] box that I sometimes forget is there. So on occasion I forward parts of emails to other parties that probably shouldn't be seeing those other bits.

I have to remember to expand it, then delete all the content I don't want to be included in the forward.

Other comments here have pointed other gui foibles, I agree with all the maps complaints, I'm on the beta for it and switch back to classic almost 70% of the time because I can't get something done in the new one.

And I won't repeat what I had to say about the absolute brokenness of the youtube interface.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314694)

Even in search, lots of the nice sidebar utilities I used all the time like the search tools' time range are now buried two clicks deep. Searches give you quick options for web, images, maps, shopping and applications, but one I use several times a day, video, is buried.

<comment> qu4z-2 Forwarding the entire thread with each email is also bad netiquette. If anyone still cares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I suppose this comment comes too late to have much visibility, but as for me, I can deal with the fullscreen popup thingy.

The inability to default to replying in plaintext to HTML mails is annoying, but I can deal with that, too.

What I can't deal with is the broken UX for the fake HTML elements, which were previously native controls that worked fine.

The To field is now a magic list of clickable email addresses instead of a regular textbox. Great, but clicking and dragging to select no longer works, typing with a selection active does not delete it, and undo no longer works.

The From field (for use with multiple email addresses), which used to be a native <select>, is now... a HTML reimplementation with no additional functionality. It sort of works from the keyboard - you can press space to bring up the list, up/down to choose an item, and enter to select. But it's not quite the same (as OS X, at any rate): the list starts with no selection rather than the current item, you can't press space again to close the list, and you can't choose an item by typing. In fact, if you try to do a few things in the new compose, including typing on the list, the keystrokes _pass through to the greyed-out main window_ and you perform random email actions.

These interactions are not inherently critical: I could easily learn to live without them in general. But they work for _every other like control in the OS_ , and they used to work here, so naturally I have and will retain muscle memory for them; the result is infuriating.

I'm actually quite surprised nobody has made a user script to fix these and the other issues in the three weeks since my account was forced onto the new compose; Gmail's obfuscation makes this a little more annoying, but not too bad if you stick to modifying elements rather than directly interacting with the JavaScript. I'll probably end up writing one myself.

</comment><comment><USER20> I agree with this post's use of the word "ruined". That's what the new Compose did. It's a usability train wreck which I'm astonished they put out at all, let alone impose it on users against their will. There are big things wrong with it and there are little things wrong with it and the sum total is frustrating and disconcerting. It's one thing to redesign a website, but email is a huge part of my daily work, and this feels as if renovators just drove a post up through the living room floor.

<comment><USER14> Jason Cornwell is a stupendous example of the Peter Principle.

<comment><USER20> Let's not get personal. There are lots of ways this kind of thing can happen.

<comment><USER14> How is it personal to mention the individual who is responsible for the change?

<comment><USER21> Three of four comments you left in this thread call Jason's name and attempt to discredit him, with little substantial criticism addressing Gmail UI.

<comment><USER14> You are wrong. Jason's work discredits him rather well without any need for me or anyone to resort to personal insults.

As for substantial criticism of gmail's new UX, why rehash what has been already discussed over and over again here and everywhere? just google for 50+ well thought out blog posts and comments to those blog posts and google forum discussions.

I'm sorry if you are a googler and feel the need 'to circle the wagons' out of misplaced loyalty. Or if you fail to see that it is pertinent to mention the person responsible for the changes out of a perverse sense of 'white knighting'.

Now please downvote this to prove how intelligent you are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I accidentally deleted an email thread the other day. How? When replying in Gmail, there's a little button below the editing area that has a trash can icon and will discard a draft. There's a button with an identical icon on the same screen, just above the editing area that will delete the email/thread. I don't know much about design, but this strikes me as an extremely poor interface.

</comment><comment><USER23> Clicking the "Full-screen" button on the compose modal shows the following dialogue; perhaps the author just closed the tip?

      Click here to exit full-screen.
      (Shift + click to compose in a new window.)

      You can set full-screen as your default using
      the More menu next to Discard.

Likewise, the tooltip on the "Full-screen" button states _Full-screen (Shift for Pop-out)_. And for someone that spends so much time in email, like a developer and his IDE, it might be time to improve one's efficiency with keyboard coords -- gmail shortcuts ([https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594)) -- and use _Shift+c_ (popup) or _Shift+d_ (tab) composition.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm actually quite fond of the new compose window and I fall into essentially the same category of email user as you. My anxiety was in fact lessened a bit by the chat-like (and therefore more casual) vibe, thanks to large expanses of white space making me feel like I /must/ fill them with text.

Email anxiety is no fun, maybe a native client would be the best way to ensure your workflow is optimized?

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense. I do like it for casual mail - e.g., if I'm setting up a quick time to meet an advisor. But for more important things, it doesn't work well for me.

I am checking out Airmail thanks to an older HN thread. Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "full screen mode" is like a parody of poor user interface and false promises.

That said, Outlook 365 is also bloody awful in terms of usability. Say I've sent an email to a list of people, there's no way (as far as I can tell, which is all that matters really) to then copy those email addresses. You have to literally click through each one and get the address individually.

</comment><comment><USER26> "My messages are important, god dammit."

no, they aren't. get over it. The new compose does a great job of framing your sent emails in the way your recipients are probably viewing them: quickly, and often from a small screen/window.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point, thinking of it that way gives some insight into why Google may have changed the UI.

<comment><USER27> The insight being is that Google is now discarding the professional crowd who bought into their Apps for ADD teenagers. Time to look for alternatives.

<comment><USER28> Google Apps generates less than 3% of Google's revenues. (Probably much less.)

Thus, not enough of a money-maker to influence the direction of Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Really, anxiety? Use a native/local mail client and I'm sure it will solve your problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'm kinda OCD about my email.

Thanks, just found the HN thread about email clients. Checking out Airmail now.

<comment><USER30> Link to the HN thread with email clients?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I still use the basic HTML client in many circumstances, esp. when tethering off my phone with limited reception:

[https://mail.google.com/mail/h/](https://mail.google.com/mail/h/)

It approximates the first Ajax/DHTML interface that Gmail introduced when it launched in 2004.

<comment><USER31> The basic HTML view of gmail has no latency hiding abilities of any kind. It is _much_ slower for every action, and it gets worse the slower your connection is. If you have a high bandwidth, high latency link like "4G" mobile service, ordinary Gmail is almost certainly better.

If course if you have something like GPRS then basic HTML is just the thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Gmail also seems to shorten the names of people you email to (at least for me). That makes me second-guess whether I'm really emailing the right person at times.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. It also is not showing the email address making it easy to mistakenly send a personal email to someone's work account and vice versa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I literally wrote dozens of complaints to google about this, obviously they go into a black hole of nobody cares, but I like their feedback feature because it says "What part of the screen is the problem" and I highlight EVERYTHING. The new youtube interface? Garbage. STEAMING GARBAGE. The new gmail interface? Sounds like you want a desktop client BECAUSE GARBAGE.

EDIT: AAAAAAH SERIOUSLY HOW CAN YOU REGRESS SO BAD!

</comment><comment><USER34> The new GMail Compose is a horrible horrible interface. It's bordering unusable. After looking around to disable it without any success, I started looking for alternatives. I ended up installing Thunderbird and couldn't be happier! With IMAP I can run Thunderbird on different machines and got the benefit of moving from machine to machine and still be able to access mail accounts.

Thunderbird is the way to go!

</comment><comment><USER35> Google have taken quite a few missteps with their UI changes to Gmail and Youtube especially. I'm not a designer, but as a web developer know a thing or two about easy-to-use and decent interfaces. The new Gmail compose popup to me signifies the once predominately engineer led company is turning into a design led one.

While being a design-led company isn't necessarily a completely bad thing, you need those engineers and developers guiding the designers and keeping things in check. Unrestrained creativity can be a dangerous thing.

I feel the same way about the new compose popup. It's intrusive and distracting and I even emailed them about it sometime ago. I got some cookie cutter response about how Google are continually refining their products, blah blah.

I would use a third party email client, but email is crucial for me and if the chances of something going wrong between the connection of the client and Google's servers are higher than that of losing an email composed within the Gmail interface itself.

</comment><comment><USER36> My problem with that is people who write emails in full screen windows end up writing poorly formatted emails (very long paragraphs) because they are now composing their emails with 300 columns.

Besides, a CEO that can't focus on writing a message unless they don't have any other distraction on their screen should probably work on their focus skills.

<comment><USER37> _" should probably work on their focus skills"_

Terrible argument. "Let's add more distractions to the screen, because the user should be able to focus anyway".

Also, Google broke the "Best Secret Gmail Feature" [1]. In the last few months, you can't select text and hit reply to quote it anymore. Grrr

[1] [http://gizmodo.com/5963768/the-best-secret-gmail-feature- is-...](http://gizmodo.com/5963768/the-best-secret-gmail-feature-is-hiding-in- plain-sight)

<comment><USER38> Really? This still works for me, I use it a lot...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't gmail still offer imap? Use a real mail client, not a web page. Much more fulfilling in almost every way. I like emacs, because I like to be able to write emails using the same editor I use for everything else. But that's a preference. There are many good mail clients to choose from.

<comment><USER40> Of course that doesn't always protect you from Google's whims. Google purchased the company that made the mail client I like, Sparrow.

<comment><USER41> This is actually a good thing. I've always wanted to get better at HTML5 / "web 2.0" programming. Now I have an incentive. I think I'll just go ahead and make my own web mail client, with imap support, and host it on my own server (or AWS account). Can't think of a better way to learn than to have a good project (necessity and invention, and all that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Google products changes recently have been a pain to use. Damn, its so annoying coping up with these crappy UX changes nowadays

1\. First of all the new Gmail inbox with the tabbed interface, it does not show you the number of unread mails in each of the tab, once you have opened a tab, the new mails count vanishes. There should at least be an option for enabling that.

2\. Hangouts, it just sucks. Does not work reliably on a data connection, messages are received late. Can't discover online contacts on the UI easily. Makes it easier to chat but harder to find people to chat. I still don't get why did it replace a fully functional chat client with a half-baked piece of crap !?

I don't even want to get started about Google+, the connection model is very good, but the execution is very crappy. Why is Google forcing everyone onto Google+ ?

</comment><comment><USER43> I have a feeling that this new design ("docked floating div" instead of "new regular window"; "modal floating div" instead of "new fullscreen window") is an effect of Windows and OSX, in their latest iterations, pushing apps to fullscreen virtual desktops.

If Gmail is the whole screen, you can't actually open a "new window"; it would open back on the primary desktop, instead of within the app's screen. Maybe Windows+OSX need to refine their "app-desktop" solutions with some limited form of window management, so that every app isn't having to reinvent its own window management just to keep its windows visible...

<comment><USER44> > is an effect of Windows and OSX, in their latest iterations, pushing apps to > fullscreen virtual desktops.

Hrm, possibly Windows 8 does that; haven't used it. To do it on MacOS, you have to either click the strange icon in the top right, or hit the highly obvious key combination CMD-CTRL-F. Anecdotally, most people don't even seem to realise that the fullscreen thing exists, unless it's pointed out to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> [https://twitter.com/NewComposeSux](https://twitter.com/NewComposeSux) collects together a lot of sentiment about how great this new feature is. I kinda feel sorry for Jason Cornwell. He's been blasted with "feedback" on Twitter since it went live.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, checked it out. Impressed that Jason takes the time to respond to many of the tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Umm... powered by Storystrings, but features the Svbtle network's Kudos button (as "cheers")... is there a connection here, or is the former borrowing from the latter?

<comment><USER47> Using the github library here: [https://github.com/masukomi/kudos](https://github.com/masukomi/kudos)

Also from the sourcecode on this blog: <!--No plagiarizing here. Thank you to SVBTLE and [https://github.com/masukomi/kudos-->](https://github.com/masukomi/kudos-->)

<comment><USER48> Interesting that someone took my code, nearly character-for-character, and "open sourced" it without permission.

<comment><USER49> Client side code _is_ open source.

<comment><USER50> But open source doesn't imply a certain license. Does it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I could live with the new Compose... its the hidden/floating "Formatting Options" that really grinds my gears.

<comment><USER52> A lot of people complain about the window size, but I agree. It's really the hidden options and extra clicks for me. Everything that used to be easy is now harder. And things that used to be hard are easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> One trick I use for composing messages: Add "compose" as a search engine to chrome. I use the url [https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&su=](https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&su=) , which means I type "compose", hit `tab`, and then type the subject line of the email I want to send.

Makes for a nice way to get quickly to a distraction-free compose window.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm not sure it's a good idea to take anyone's opinion of gmail seriously that doesn't use the keyboard shortcuts. If you really are composing so much, hit 'c', not reach all the way over to the mouse like an orangutan.

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en)

Pop the window out and maximize it if you don't like the new interface. If you hit d, it will open the compose window in a new tab, _the whole thing_, dedicated to your awesome email that you really need to concentrate on writing.

But as for the "hidden text formatting controls".

Don't use text formatting; send plain text email like a decent human being.

If you need to _emphasize_ or:

1.e

2.nu

3.mer

4.ate

that's why we have markdown. No one wants to see your fancy fonts and fuchsia signature. Content, yo.

If it's that much of an issue, why not edit content in your favorite editor then paste it into gmail?

If you're on a mac, you can format to your heart's desire in textedit (full- screen-mode-obviously) then copy it all and paste into gmail and all your stupid font size changes and bold shit will still be there.

EDIT: minor changes, also imagine that the formatted stuff is the raw markdown, because I forgot that this does that.

Edit 2: it's cool to hate - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkRJzErnRmY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkRJzErnRmY)

</comment><comment><USER55> I sometimes wonder whether Google developers only use giant screens and don't realize how much the "comfortable" whitespace on Gmail and Google+ layouts detracts from the product on smaller screens or laptops.

</comment><comment><USER56> Why not just hold shift when you click "compose"?

<comment><USER57> Using shift-click to open in a new window is a fairly standard behaviour in most browsers these days isn't it? Then again I guess it wasn't intuitive in this case.

Edit: I should note that the above is actually a genuine question.

<comment><USER58> Shift-click to open in a new window is a pattern for links. Gmail's 'Compose' doesn't look like a link, it looks like a button.

Shift-clicking the 'search' button doesn't work on Google.com.

<comment><USER59> > Shift-clicking the 'search' button doesn't work on Google.com.

It does in pre-webkit Opera. One of the things I really miss in other browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Holy cow. I'm starting to experience outrage outrage and this post may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

<comment><USER61> Indeed. Of all the 'usability nightmares' I've seen on the internet, Digg was by far the worst offender and deservedly so given the transition of users from Digg to Reddit. Gmail has made some odd changes (specifically compose on the bottom right) but ultimately it hasn't irked me at all. I mean, if people want a free e-mail service, they can still go to Outlook or Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> > Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

Anxiety over some feature?

If your anxiety doesn't come from the fact that you agree to the concept of the surveillance state (by using products like Gmail), then something is clearly wrong.

<comment><USER63> Yeah exactly. This should be a top comment. But apparently everyone is moving on, business as usual, as if the case were closed. And a lot of people could not access your accounts. And read your email.

Apparently some UI-issue is a bigger threat to user-satisfaction.

Weird.

<comment><USER62> > Weird.

I'd say _frightening_.

This is HN. Readers are people who understand and produce technology. People who also understand the nefarious potential it holds, if abused.

The situation just doesn't compute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Click the "-><-" arrows at the top and you can go back to the old style.

I like the new version and wish they'd used it long ago, I want a large box to type my emails in, not a small rectangle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clicking "-><-" brings me to a small chat-like box for my email. Agreed though, I like large boxes for email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> The window size and position is fine; I like being able to easily refer to other emails.

It's what they've done to the editing that bugs me.

\- It encourages top-posting. To bottom-post, you have to click the "..." button, and then remove the two blank lines at the top.

\- Fast selection of text with shift-Pg{Up,Dn} no longer works.

\- Firefox's "It's All Text" add-on, which lets you drop into a real editor to edit a textbox, no longer works with it.

</comment><comment><USER66> The idiotic modal window is bad enough, but the new Gmail Compose also breaks basic shortcut keys (such as Command+left or right arrow to skip to the end of a line), at least in Firefox on my Mac. And pasting text in "Plain text" mode often adds weird line breaks. Gmail used to be such a pleasure to use and I cringe to click Compose now.

</comment><comment><USER67> You know what I like about the new Gmail compose? Nothing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't understand, why can't they just have the 'show all options and full screen' mode as well? They had it optional for a while now, what does it cost to maintain the old composer?

</comment><comment><USER68> Composing a new message should be a lot more RESTful and first class, not a modal popup. I understand the on-the-fly desire but not at the cost of manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER69> Personally I am a big fan of the new compose, although I can also understand why it isn't right for some people.

My usage would be something like 80% very short emails, 5 lines or under with maybe a copy paste block. Occasionally I will want to add an attachment or a cc.

The speed and the ability to still see the email list works for me. I should also add the majority of my gmail use is done on a 27 inch screen.

</comment><comment><USER70> I find it very hard to have sympathy for someone who says _" For better or worse, email takes up a large part of my work life."_ and then chooses to use a free, ad-supported email service.

If this is such a crucial tool for you, then you should be willing to pay a reasonable price for something you're happy with instead of just complaining about it online.

<comment><USER71> Maybe she's a business user and pays for it. Business version also has the same bad layout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I do quite like the new compose - I get a bit annoyed by the in line editor when you reply though. Feels a little inconsistent.

</comment><comment><USER73> If you're such a heavy gmail user, I'd recommend using keyboard shortcuts for linking, formatting, adding cc/bcc, etc.

Once you enable them, you can easily check if you've forgotten by hitting ?, and within a month you won't have to touch your mouse (or navigate the UI) for anything save for the esoteric features.

</comment><comment><USER74> I don't mind designers and/or developers changing their products. If they think they have something _better_ (disregarding the contrived-ness of the term for now), they're more than welcome to provide me the new stuff.

Just don't take back my old stuff which I'm familiar with. Give us the choice, damn it.

</comment><comment><USER75> I hated the feature at first as well, but I've found myself multi-tasking recently where I type multiple emails in parallel as I collect my thoughts for each. It's growing on me, but I definitely see the validity of the criticism. I do wish it was easier to get at the advanced features.

</comment><comment><USER21> If email is important to you, maybe you should take some time to set up an email client.

I personally am using Gmail from OS X Mail via IMAP for a couple of years now. Once you get used to the software, you can focus on reading and writing the mail—there's no distraction caused by continuous UI evolution.

</comment><comment><USER76> I really hate that thing as well. Although it isn't just supposed to be quick, it is supposed to allow referencing several other emails while you write. Which I don't do so it is terrible for me.

</comment><comment><USER77> The shortcuts for CC and BCC help a lot with adding recipients.

Obviously that doesn't do much to solve the problem of it squeezing them all onto one line when you focus out if you're paranoid about recipients.

</comment><comment><USER78> I logged into an old Hotmail account the other day.

The new interface they are using is massively better than Google's, I fell in love straight away, it's actually quite lovely and very fluid to use.

</comment><comment><USER79> I just shifted my behaviours to different tools that Compose is no longer suitable for. It was a bit of an annoying shift, though in the end felt more helpful with forcing me to organize.

</comment><comment><USER80> If you have shortcuts enabled in gmail settings you can simply hit `d` (instead of `c`) and you get a full dedicated compose window in a new browser window.

So this is simply a non issue!

</comment><comment><USER81> If you don't like being subject to changes in your UI, then stop using a webapp that you have no control over. Use a sane client over IMAP and be done with it.

</comment><comment><USER82> Seems there is an easy solution. Just use Thunderbird.

</comment><comment><USER83> Whoever approved this change at Google deserves to be fired, its a serious usability fuckup

</comment><comment><USER84> "recently"? October 2012 this started rolling out....geezus.

<comment><USER85> And I opted out. I believe that it was only recently enforced on everyone.

<comment><USER86> I'd be curious to see what the opt-out rate on the new compose UI was. I like to adopt new UI improvements but that was one of the few that I immediately hated and switched back. I wonder if this feature was liked more or less than some of Google's other UI changes.

I get the feeling that Google is ignoring user feedback for some of these types of thing so they can push users towards their corporate goals. Youtube badgering people to switch to their Google+ username is a good example. Clearly a lot of people don't want to do that, yet they persist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Thunderbird

</comment><comment><USER88> The new Gmail compose is 20 years worth of interface design learning, lost in a single poor choice.

<comment><USER89> google is good at that. See the latest iteration of google maps for android. Ugh.

<comment><USER90> My favorite part is that it doesn't work with the hardware search or menu buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> tldr; Somebody moved her cheese.</comment>


Ask HN: What roles should I consider if I enjoy analyzing more than building? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer with a CS degree, but I I enjoy learning and analyzing more than I enjoy building. For example, I'd read a book about some framework and really enjoy it, but I won't feel like building something with it.
What roles related to software would y'all suggest that would suit someone like me and why?
Some of the roles I have considered include developer advocate, code reviewer, automated QA developer, and security analyst, but I'll be interested in some more suggestions or feedback from people who have had those roles!
Some other things about me: - I enjoy writing, but I'm not fantastic at it. - I don't communicate very well verbally. - I enjoy answering StackOverflow questions. If answering questions on SO was a job, I'd probably take it. <comment><USER2> Not a suggestion but researchers do plenty of reading and writing. They're constantly learning about new, bleeding edge stuff.

Source: I've been working as researcher for a researching team for the past three years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Business Analyst/Product Owner, if you're willing to work on your communication skills.

Researcher/PhD student if you're not scared of thinking hard.

</comment><comment><USER4> By reading your post it seems like you like to read and that's all. It doesn't seem like you want to create any sort of output.

I am sure that's not you, but that's how you paint yourself which is in alignment with your own assessment of your communication skills.

It is going to be very hard to get any sort of job if you portray yourself as not wanting to do any job, because in theory, all jobs need to product some output which you don't seem to like.

I would encourage you to think about how you can add value to any company and look for positions related to your interest because even if you don't have to deliver a working solution you will still have to produce something if you want to be employed.

</comment><comment><USER5> > I enjoy writing, but I'm not fantastic at it.

> I don't communicate very well verbally

That's not something to let lay where it is. This is not good. You need to change it.

Communicating verbally and in writing is essential to moving to where you want to be. Wherever that is.

So, improve your communication skills. That's the most important thing here.

Thankfully there's tons of classes you can take and they're easy to find.

</comment><comment><USER6> Developer Relations & Solutions Engineering (aka Solutions Consulting, aka Sales Engineering) could be worth a look.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do you think Node.js is catching on?  - <AUTHOR>

Let's disregard technical merits. Some questions:<p>1) what are the sticking points? 2) can you see it becoming legit? 3) is the turf war worth fighting in? 4) how might it break into the mainstream? <comment><USER2> While there have been some very good attempts at making server-side JS (SSJS) work, IMO NodeJS is the first to get it right. With the growing ubiquity of JS, the scalability of NodeJS, and the explosion of JS-based document storage its success is not surprising.

The ability to create a scalable platform that uses the same language from data storage to UI means developers can focus on being a JS expert without having to spread their time and abilities thin being mediocre in many languages.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree re: single language/data model instead of spreading time and abilities. It is definitely cool to know a variety of programming languages (and I've used about a dozen of them in commercial work). But it's great to work with a single language from top to bottom -- like we do when writing native apps). In my opinion, it frees-up brain space and cycles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen:

1\. It's event-driven and javascript.

2\. It already is.

3\. It shouldn't be a turf war. It isn't for everything. But, I'd rather write in javascript than erlang, scala, haskell, etc. and I'm sure others would be in the same boat.

4\. Heroku, etc. are starting to host, so it kind of already is. Any fast, simple web-based service could be a good candidate for node.js.

See: [http://debuggable.com/posts/understanding-node- js:4bd98440-4...](http://debuggable.com/posts/understanding-node- js:4bd98440-45e4-4a9a-8ef7-0f7ecbdd56cb)</comment>


Heroku | the Ruby on Rails Podcast - <AUTHOR> http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/heroku <comment><USER2> Heroku is the weirdest company I've seen. Everything started rather typically for a YC-backed group: an announcement of beta on YC news, immediate if not mandatory post on techcrunch, hundreds of enthusiastic comments. Cool.

Except this time I feel like I am alone in my feeling that the service is completely useless. Tell me, how is this better than my regular "offline" dev tools? How can browser-based JS-IDE even approach a productivity of NetBeans or my beloved Vim? Who told you that having a Rails stack on your own machine is hard? Who told you that deploying your existing (already developed) Rails app is hard? Why would I want Heroku?

I do remember that question, on YC application very well: _"What is the problem you are trying to solve? What are your users forced to do now?"_. I am a typical user of Heroku, and I don't have any problems that need solutions like this. I am not forced to do anyting unpleasant. My life is awesome without Heroku. But I feel soooo dumb because of "not getting it".

Damn...

<comment><USER3> In terms of development, maybe it's not better than what you have on the desktop. If you're really productive in your environment (terminal + vim OR IDE), then it definitely doesn't make sense to develop on their JS editor.

But in terms of hosting, it's a lot cheaper to host your Rails app using Heroku than getting a VPS. Both money-wise and time-wise.

I only listened a few minutes into the podcast, but I think one of the founders mentioned that at its current state Heroku is great for people who want to make apps for their friends, like 1-20 people. But these developers don't want to buy a VPS plan and manage the application themselves.

Their future goal is probably to get hosting for apps with 1000+ users, so they can make some money.

But you're right, for developing an app, I'll probably stick to the desktop. Maybe one day Heroku will get so slick that we can do all development straight from the browser and hit "Publish", like Weebly.</comment></comment>