LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/5/8/linkedin

<comment><USER2> My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they _invited_ anyone who had ever mailed me!

Up until that point, my contact list was limited to people that I personally knew and could recommend. Now, months later, I am still getting successful "contact accepted" replies from people that I barely know. I.e everyone who ever contributed to any mailing list that I was ever subscribed to.

I even got replies from people asking why I contacted them. I have no idea how many people remain to accept my invitation or even who they are.

What a disaster. It has changed for me, an early user of the site, what was a useful database of the people I know, to now some random connection of strangers.

The worst part is the link to connect to Gmail still appears and I'm sure that it doesn't clearly indicate what it's intention is. So, if you have connected with an email provider in the past be wary of allowing it to connect again.

And yes, if you let any site connect to your personal data, expect the worst outcome...

<comment><USER3> >My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they invited anyone who had ever mailed me!

I sold a guy a couch on Craigslist in 2005 or 2006, and he must've uploaded his Gmail contacts to LinkedIn not too long afterward. I only know this because for the last six years or so, the "People You May Know" feature on LinkedIn has kept trying to get me to add him as an e-friend.

<comment><USER4> This has always interested me. I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that Gmail sells contact info to LinkedIn? Can anyone confirm or invalidate this?

I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.

<comment><USER3> I haven't heard that. I just assume that there are enough people out there that I've conversed with that have uploaded their own contact list to LinkedIn to find connections.

Gmail has/had that behavior where anyone you email ends up getting created as a contact, and in the early days it seemed a lot more aggressive as to when it would auto-add someone to the list. So there are a lot of people who have spurious entries in their contact lists.

I know it wasn't worth the time to me to clean the list, up until I bought an Android phone in 2010. So I had six years worth of auto-added contacts, going back to when I first got a gmail invite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am honestly questioning the utility of LinkedIn in general. It seems to be a sink for recruiter messages when people don't know how to otherwise contact me. I know when someone is hiring bioinformatics developers locally, because within an hour I get LinkedIn messages from six different recruiters who are all trying to pitch the exact same job.

I am not sure how it could be useful in a job search scenario. I don't perceive it as any less annoying to send someone a cold-email just because they are a FOAF on LinkedIn. Am I wrong on this?

I've been on there for 8 years and have accumulated a ton of connections, but I've been tempted to just delete the account. I have avoided doing it though because I have this idea that if someone Googled me and found no LinkedIn profile, they'd think I don't care about my career.

<comment><USER5> I boycott them with the idea that I don't want any single company to become any sort of de facto resume & hiring service, which they already try to bill themselves as. Ostensibly, if you use their service, you don't need a resume or a list of references -- it's all right there!

I also have grave reservations about giving so much of my personal info (job, job history, colleagues, etc.) to a for-profit entity that has every motivation to capitalize on that data while having few reasons not to.

I'll network the old-fashioned way, thank you.

<comment><USER6> I am unclear on why you see low-effort resume and reference services as a _bad_ thing.

<comment><USER5> I don't trust them with my data.

This stems back from a few years ago when they automatically created an account for me based on information that a 3rd party had provided. I don't know if they still do that, but it told me all I needed to know about them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing I hate most about LinkedIn right now (apart from spamming me) is their new system of friends endorsing your skills. I just got an email this morning saying a friend endorsed my skills in Python. This guy played water polo with me in college, why would he be in any position to endorse my programming skills, and why was he asked to endorse me?

<comment><USER8> Endorsements should use a web-of-trust.

Some people (undefined process) are given an endorsed skill (eg. Python). They can now endorse anyone in their network _for python_. But they cannot endorse anyone who claims a skill in 'goat herding'.

Now they have meaning as you can only endorse someone for a skill you have also been endorsed for.

My former boss had added 'Oracle' as a skill. I didn't know until LinkedIn asked me to endorse it. He's not even a technical guy, so I've no idea why he had added it but he's _actually been endorsed for it_ by other business owners.

<comment><USER9> I believe LinkedIn automatically define these skills by crawling for keywords in your profile. I've never added a skills section yet every now and then I get emails stating I've been endorsed for a specific skill.

<comment> X-Istence I believe users can also suggest them? I've got a couple on my LinkedIn profile that I didn't add, and weren't there earlier but I got a notification I was endorsed for that skill anyway.

<comment><USER10> It's really bizarre, I have skills I've been endorsed for for jobs where I didn't use those skills around the endorsers!

<comment><USER11> I've had former colleagues offended that I did not endorse them for skills (that I had not witnessed them using, though I knew they used them at that company.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a recruiter, but I hate LinkedIn. In some ways, that's a gross exaggeration because LinkedIn does one thing very, very well: it standardizes people's work experience and puts it all in one place. Once you get used to reading LinkedIn profiles you can get the context you need about a person very, very quickly. This is great.

The rest of it sucks. In particular, LinkedIn Recruiter (the module that lets you see pretty much anyone, no matter how many degrees of separation exist between you and them and lets you send some number of InMails per month) is a giant spam factory. Its design encourages impersonal spams by making it super easy to send exactly the same InMail to large volumes of people. If I'm a recruiter, I can search for everyone who attended MIT and now works at, say, Oracle very easily, and then do the moral equivalent of throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Ugh.

<comment><USER13> What are the clever, resourceful, and truly evil recruiters doing? I guess the amateur ones can filter by universities and organizations, but surely there's a more efficient way to wade through the swamp of linkedin?

<comment><USER12> I guess I don't see being clever and resourceful synonymous with being evil. I don't know what the other guys are doing, but I try to use LinkedIn only as a reference (e.g. "where is this person working now, and how long have they been there?", "what kind of stuff has this person worked on historically?")

I try to look at blogs, GitHub, dribbble, HN posts, tweets, Quora submissions, and whatever else I can to try to get some idea of what the person in question is interested in and good at. At the end of the day, I'm trying to surface smart people. Then I try to figure out whether I can offer said smart people interesting work that's in line with what they seem to be passionate about.

<comment><USER14> You sound like a good recruiter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> google _has_ a search app: (<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google- search/id284815942>) and facebook has a "just share photos with your friends" app: (<https://www.facebook.com/mobile/camera>).

While you can bemoan feature creep all you want, the truth is that its hard to remove features one they are in (see <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html>). On the other hand having a specialized tool for a common task is really handy. I like these specialized apps, (though I can't comment on LinkedIn's in particular).

<comment><USER16> Why is it so hard to remove features? Because user complains? Reading Antifragile; there is this idea that evolution works via negativa. We should applaud to any removal of dead parts, even Google Reader, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> LinkedIn has become the equivalent of spray and pray for job seeking. This article hits the nail on the head. They are more worried about monitizing >5 people who have viewed my profile than truly allowing me to connect with other professionals. I would love to see more dialog options. Groups ala G+ to partition personal info. There is so much more linkedin can be and they fall flat.

</comment><comment><USER18> Linkedin is a Facebook for recruiter spam. The article raises some valid points, you can't advertise you're looking for a new job because your boss will see or if not, one of your colleagues will and they'll most likely report you to get brownie points with the boss or even take your job.

Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox.

Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke.

Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network.

<comment><USER19> I've never used LinkedIn and got along just fine. But if someone were to build a better alternative they could be the Facebook to MySpace's death.

<comment><USER20> Small bit of syntax feedback - should be "the Facebook to LinkedIn's MySpace". Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine, since so many people word it like you in a way that is obvious to understand but doesn't technically make any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Complaints such as " _Sadly, I didn't take a screenshot of the suggestion I apply to work as a SAP consultant in Germany, though I don't speak German or have the word 'SAP' on my profile._ "

The thing to keep in mind is that LinkedIn's job, in this area, is to offer great options to advertisers. On Facebook I can put an advert out targeting a specific age, a specific city, and specific interests. Or I can just target... a huge number of people. If I do the latter, do you blame Facebook for not using their data properly?

I've never advertised on LinkedIn. Maybe it's awful, it could well be. But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER21> > But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing.

You don't think that advertisers are willing to pay more for well-targeted ads? This is a strong sign that LinkedIn is not leveraging their data as well as they could.

<comment><USER20> I have often experienced:

      - Advertisers who don't understand what they are doing with automated systems [1]
      - Advertisers whose specific target is too small, so they widen the net [2]
      - Advertisers who would rather waste a bit more money to keep the net wide [3]

Point 1: remember that plenty of advertisers are old-school, they're used to signing off campaigns over lunch or drinks, not to fiddling with settings on a website. Hell, I'm 23, so far from oldschool, and a.) I have often chosen less targeted advertising options (based on performance of KPIs) and b.) I don't like getting involved in specific stuff like Facebook advertising - I hired someone to do that for me, but maybe if I knew even less about it I wouldn't have even thought to do that.

Points 2/3: Some people are going to be your target audience without the data showing it. Just because someone doesn't list SAP as a skill, doesn't mean they don't have it. Just because they aren't in Germany, doesn't mean they wouldn't consider moving for the right opportunity. Just because someone isn't a fan of McDonalds on Facebook it doesn't mean they won't be interested in a KFC advert.

edit: Of course, LinkedIn offering poor features is also a possible explanation. As I said I've never used it (for advertising) and have no interest in exploring it as I only deal with B2C marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We're solving these exact problems by developing Mighty Spring (<https://www.mightyspring.com>).

LinkedIn has always been a good professional networking tool. But because it's a professional networking tool, exploring new opportunities is rife with risk (as the OP alludes to). Great opportunity discovery is about what you want to do, not just what you have done, and that isn't necessarily public information.

Mighty Spring helps you find interesting jobs discretely -- a private place for you to manage your career.

ps. We're in private beta, but will expedite invites to all you hacker news folks that sign up :)

<comment><USER23> I'm getting a standard http "authentication required" dialog from bugherd.com when visiting your site.

I'm guessing this is because I have httpsEverywhere installed (a firefox extension that tries to use https wherever possible). Visiting bugherd.com gives me the same error, so it appears it's a problem on their end. Still, it leaves a bad impression. You might want to disable whatever you are using from them.

<comment><USER24> Looks like they had an issue, but it's fixed now:

<https://twitter.com/bugherd/status/332323807601754112>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> LinkedIn is fantastic!

This will be next.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does it make sense to look at the linked in API <http://developer.linkedin.com/apis> and build useful tools on top of the data?

Not sure what the monetization strategy would be, or whether it'd be a TOS violation, but some of the features mentioned in the article would be great to have.

</comment><comment><USER27> yeah linkedin has tons of useless stuff.. i just keep my cv updated, trying to avoid reading news, or subscribing to groups. i've actually have found few jobs through linkedin posted job offers. Most of recruiters sending automated messages with invitations which I always decline. there's no way to communicate with your connected person.. no chat, no email provided.. it's easier to grab name and surname, and write PM through facebook. in my country linkedin is not so popular and recruiters actually writing nice messages with a good suggestions, that's how i've found a job in barclays. After living 2 years in netherlands.. i still get lot's of spam from there. Sometimes it's seems for me that only my country has a culture of recruiting, all others just spamming to get your attension.

</comment><comment><USER28> I just closed my account, and I bet I'd still get a shiton of emails from them or people who finds me there.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe those are the premium features...

</comment><comment><USER30> Compared to the other ongoing social networking experiments that generate constantly exploding datasets of worthless noise, LinkedIn is a very different story. Their data is the most interesting.

Today the focus is on individuals. Tomorrow it will be groups.

</comment><comment><USER31> Agreed. LinkedIn's been awful for a long time and unfortunately nothing has paralleled its popularity... hoping something that doesn't suck will come up and sink it into irrelevance in the abyss of the interwebs as Facebook did to MySpace.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well, LinkedIn has been great for me and allowed me to land an awesome job recently. However, I babysit my linkedin account. I check it daily, update my profile with links people would find of interest, reply to all recruiters, comment on stories in the news section. Yeah, I'm pretty engaged in LinkedIn. I don't have facebook, so maybe I use it as a replacement....

</comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of a comment my former VP made. It was something to the effect of...

Oh, so and so is looking for a new job. I see he's adding recruiter connections on LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER33> Click on about on his blog. He has a link to his own goddamn LinkedIn profile right there. If he hates it so much why does have such a nicely filled out and active LinkedIn profile.

<comment><USER13> He sees the use of LinkedIn, but wants it to be MUCH MUCH better for certain simple tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I get a little too much spam from LinkedIn. The default mail digest option is daily, and unless one changes it each time after joining a new group, one can expect an inbox flood

</comment><comment><USER35> Why would you add your current boss to LinkedIn to begin with?

<comment><USER20> The purpose of LinkedIn is to connect in the business world, I don't know a single user who _doesn't_ connect to their current colleagues, including their boss.

<comment><USER2> I didn't and have had people say to me that they don't connect with current colleagues.

I also don't connect with recruiters until I have announced that I am leaving. I'll happily chat with them via private messages or give an alternative email address.

There is no benefit in the default behavior of having the system send all your contacts, including your boss and HR colleagues that you have made a new recruiter friend today.

<comment><USER20> I guess it depends on what you want to get out of LinkedIn, and your situation. Personally, my relationship with colleagues/boss is such that if I think about leaving they'll know about it from me first, and if I added a recruiter as a contact they wouldn't even think about it. But apart from that, my use-case for LinkedIn is primarily connecting with people I do/have work/ed with, to help us stay connected should we need to work again in the future, and so other people can see who I know and who knows me. If and when I leave my job, I won't be looking at adverts or to be contacted by recruiters, I'll be leaving for a job offered by someone I already know in the industry.

But appreciate that for other people, they might want to use it completely differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What a stupid webpage! It looks like it wants to do some fancy javascript just to show an image that should be: <img src="URL">

<comment><USER37> View source on this thing. The entire post is there at least two times in different formats. I like the whole "&nbsp" thing in one of them. I didn't go looking for others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product." would seem to explain the complaints made here.

<comment><USER39> A lot of people pay for LinkedIn...

Regardless, why is this such a common response to these types of posts? I understand the angle of "don't be entitled to a free service," but there's also the alternative interpretation of "here are some fundamentals your business is missing, and my humble suggestions."

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> anybody else get Mining Engineer job "recommendations" when they work in Data Mining?

</comment><comment><USER41> could have stopped with "LinkedIn annoys me."

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a feeling in my soul that "social media" is going to move into a more organic space in a way that means the most to the advertisers (or governments) that want deep information about target demographics. What I mean by this is that as the companies grow (and thus move away from niche market into infrastructure), they become too large to retain meaning to end users in an important way. What I'm saying here might be a little too cerebral for 2am, but it's the same reason Google just doesn't have the granularity to capture the mom-and-pop advertising market like they want (and consistently cannot achieve, if you pay attention to their stream of product inventions and reinventions). Facebook has started to lose its appeal on an accelerating timeline, and I believe that companies like Facebook and LinkedIn -- that are desperate for growth curves and thereby "smoothing off" the niche market granularity in an effort to streamline the company to afford maximal growth -- are going to be a "yeah, I knew that chick in high school" kind of utility that contains cursory information, but really lacks the _depth_ of social networking that is the sought-after distilled end product that everyone dreams about, where your close friends are able to keep up with you online in a fashion that closely resembles your real life social graph. This information and depth -- the kind that is highly marketable and extremely valuable to all kinds of enormous, information-hungry organizations -- will be contained in little "what app.net wanted to be" bubbles that all intermix through network APIs to other social media bubble companies.

Unless someone is capable of building a Facebook/LinkedIn that won't info grab and bother the shit out of every contact you've ever had, while maintaining that "niche market" feel for every user, and while keeping that "closely resembling real life social activity graph" feel.

Or maybe I'm just stupid.

</comment><comment><USER42> Fuck LinkedIn and everything it symbolizes and reinforces. Die, die, die.</comment>


This is the proof that the 1% have been running the show for 800 years - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/301150/this-is-the-proof-that-the-1-have-been-running-the-show-for-800-years/

<comment><USER2> It amazes me how Canadians and Americans love the royal family, yet the whole point of North America was you had access to land and could escape the crushing serf-like structure found in the UK.

<comment><USER3> Those serf-like structures disappeared in the 15th century.</comment></comment>


Stop Getting F'ed by Technical Recruiters - <AUTHOR> https://scottturman.com/stop-getting-fcked-by-technical-recruiters/ <comment><USER2> > Get notified when we publish!

How ?

<comment><AUTHOR> When I click it there is a place to enter your email at the top.

<comment><USER2> Not click-able on firefox 76.0</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Automated Bundle Update with Descriptive Pull Request for Ruby Projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.deppbot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> An example Pull Request looks like this: [https://github.com/ruby-bench/ruby- bench-web/pull/122](https://github.com/ruby-bench/ruby-bench-web/pull/122)

</comment><comment><USER2> great one</comment>


A Brief Introduction to Ice-Penetrating Radar (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://lindzey.github.io/blog/2015/07/27/a-brief-introduction-to-ice-penetrating-radar/ <comment><USER2> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976923)</comment>


Advice, Mining with an Old Laptop - <AUTHOR> I have couple-year-old, Lenovo laptop that is just sitting around. I doubt it will do much in the way of mining but just out of pure curiosity I'd like to see how far I can push it. Anyone ever mined with an old PC & have advice they'd like to share? CPU vs. GPU, Token suggestions, fire hazard warnings? <comment><USER2> Sell the laptop and use the proceeds to buy a good cryptocurrency.

Otherwise, it will be slow going with laptop mining performance levels. Consider Hive OS or something similar. As to which cryptos, look into something with a high ratio of "potential future gains" versus mining difficulty.</comment>


HTC respond to Apple: "committed to defending" their own innovations - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgear.com/htc-respond-on-apple-patent-suit-are-committed-to-defending-their-own-innovations-0276377/

<comment><AUTHOR> HTC had a touch-based dialler on their WinMo 5 devices, I wonder if they have a patent for this or other touch techniques in their portfolio?

</comment><comment><USER2> i wonder what google will do. I guess they may have a lot of patents, too. A big patent war coming? Will MS take the chance and sue google or htc too? Or even nokia? :P Apparently, Palm may have one of the biggest patent portfolios in this area (interesting read: [http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs- palm-the-in-dept...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in- depth-analysis/) ), so their chance to join forces with someone?

Nah, probably nothing like that will happen. I just hope that ridiculous patent system in the US will change, it's awful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the reason Apple went after HTC was to establish precedent against the smaller competitor. I recall a patent troll chasing after a very small company re: push email a few years ago as a initial step to getting some cash out of RIM.

<comment><USER2> yes, that's why i am wondering if google will step on HTCs side, as this clearly threatens android. But it also threatens practically every other mobile manufacturer, as HTC is a strong partner for WinMo devices.

And not to speak of Nokia or Palm, which could be in trouble in future, although probably not sued by apple. I bet nokia and palm have a shitload of patents, they could probably shut down competition without problems. Just guessing, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors - <AUTHOR> https://colornames.org/ <comment><USER2> "Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated.... I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me."

\-- Funes the Memorious, Borges

<comment><USER3> Brilliant. I knew it was Borges after the first sentence! There's something a little Library of Babel about this project.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A few of my favorites so far:

Screaming Grey: #AAAAAA

It's Still Basically Black: #000001

Nice: #696969 (lol)

These would make for some great candidates: [https://colors.lol/](https://colors.lol/) ;)

<comment><USER4> I have a handful I'd nominate as "lazy programmer" colors that I think are useful as placeholders but aren't as horrid as #FF00FF etc:

      blue   #aabbdd
      green  #aaddbb
      purple #bbaadd
      pink   #ddaabb
      orange #ddbbaa

(I usually end up using #bbddaa as well but it's just a different shade of green)

<comment><USER5> After seeing your comment, I thought blue should be #DaBaDe(e) but I wasn't first to come up with this idea: [https://colornames.org/color/dabade](https://colornames.org/color/dabade)

<comment><USER6> Nice. There's also:

I'm Blue [https://colornames.org/color/174ac0](https://colornames.org/color/174ac0)

I'M BLuE [https://colornames.org/color/1971d5](https://colornames.org/color/1971d5)

<comment><USER7> There is only one true blue !

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Added "Hacker News Orange" to the list: [https://colornames.org/color/ff6500](https://colornames.org/color/ff6500)

I'm struggling to figure out if this is a serious attempt, though.

<comment><USER9> HN should allow changing of color of top bar via a get parameter. It would be awesome.

<comment><USER8> You can change it in your profile settings (though that's not exactly what you're asking for). I think there's a karma threshold, though.

<comment><USER10> I believe it's 256

<comment><USER11> It's 250. There's also a list of all colors in use, sorted by frequency: [https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors](https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)

<comment><USER12> #abcabc is second on HN... "soft foam". Because people like foam, or easy to remember?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm still working diligently on counting the grains of sand on the beach closest to me, and hopefully we can pool all of our work together for a final count. As soon as that's done I'll start trying to name all the stars. Colors? I'm tired already.

<comment><USER14> Grains of sand? Easy! Want a real challenge? Try naming all the numbers between 0 and 1! I've been at it for weeks and struggling to get much past 0.

<comment><USER15> Ha, I thought of doing that but decided it would be too hard, so i picked the much easier challenger of naming the numbers between 0-0.01. I'll be finished in no time.

Though it did cross my mind to split the range in to 2 parts and then recursively bin each part in two; if I allow repeating names ... Perhaps then ones chances would be greater than zero.

;oP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of course, 16.7M colors aren't all colors, not even in "web space". Enter color(display-p3). [https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css- with-d...](https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with- display-p3/)

<comment><USER17> CSS Color Module 4, which introduced support for the DCI-P3 color space, also introduced support for the even larger ProPhoto RGB and Rec.2020 color spaces (as well as the similarly-sized Adobe RGB). These were already supported in media that could be embedded in web pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Blartreuse" ow my sides...

They need to have a way to sort by votes, or have a "Best of" or whatever. I was curious (and they provide the data! Thanks!)...so naturally-

      $ curl -sL https://colornames.org/download/colornames.zip | zcat | sort -nk3 -t, | tail -n10
      486d83,Blue Loneliness,0.069
      123456,Incremental Blue,0.071
      1eeb01,Creeper Aw Man,0.072
      336699,MetaFilter Blue,0.077
      abcdef,Alphabet Blue,0.078
      696969,Nice,0.124
      b83c73,Red Tedir,0.139
      ff0000,Red,0.249
      ffffff,White,0.417
      000000,Lil Huddy,1

Edit: sorry..."Focus Group Blue"...im dying

<comment><USER19> Hey, I independently came up with a similar solution ([https://notryan.com/colors](https://notryan.com/colors)) and it renders to HTML.

But ugh... I applaud your simplicity. I used `unzip` instead of zcat, but I guess .zip files normally use GZIP internally. And, I didn't know you could use `sort` for a specific field! So I ended up using a full SQL engine... Learn something new everyday :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious—is there a point to giving two separate names to two colors which are indistinguishable from one another to the human eye?

There are zero people in the world who can tell #FF4500 from #FF4501, so aren't they effectively the same color?

<comment><USER21> By induction, doesn't that mean we would only have one color name?

<comment><USER22> "can't tell apart" isn't a transitive relation. That is, just because I can't tell A from B and I can't tell B from C doesn't mean I can't tell A from C.

<comment><USER23> "Has the same name as", however, _is_ a transitive relation.

So, if no two indistinguishable colors have distinct names, and for every pair of colors have a path between them of colors such that adjacent colors in the path are indistinguishable, then all colors would have the same name.

<comment><USER24> The flaw here is the assumption that colors have a single, well-defined name.

<comment><USER23> Even if you associate each color with a set of names, if the graph where vertices are colors and edges are "these colors are indistinguishable" is connected, and any two indistinguishable colors have the same set of names, then all colors would have the same set of names.

The solution of "assign a degree of applicability if each name to each color" and allow a color name to have different levels of applicability for a pair of indistinguishable colors, sorta solves the problem?

But, in a sense, isn't "to what degree do each of these names apply to this color" just a kind of identifier like a name is? (Though it has the advantage that we can talk about the identifiers being very close to each other )

We can't have identifiers for colors always be the same iff the colors are indistinguishable, because "is the same" is transitive while "is visually indistinguishable" is not.

Therefore, in order to be able to describe a large variety of colors (with say, rgb), we choose to use an identifying scheme (such as rgb) which has different identifiers for colors which are visually indistinguishable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As long as they include rebeccapurple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer#Personal_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer#Personal_life)

<comment><USER26> It's the top voted name! [https://colornames.org/color/663399](https://colornames.org/color/663399)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Shameless plug for color-loving people :

Are all verbs blue ?

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/colorify/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/colorify/)

It's parsing any webpage, and coloring words based on their Part-Of-Speech tags.

The idea behind is that if we let the computer pre-parse the text for us, it should incur less mental fatigue, and help visualize the structure of sentences therefore improving our reading comprehension.

The question is how universal can we make this color-mapping ?

<comment><USER28> I have been searching for something like this for years! Wish it wasn't Firefox-only :( What would it take to get it ported to a better browser?

Here's my crack at coloring or syntax-highlighting the parts of english speech for easier analysis, but mine was a manual process: [https://github.com/tomhodgins/bil](https://github.com/tomhodgins/bil)

<comment><USER27> >What would it take to get it ported to a better browser?

It's waiting for review approval on the chrome webstore.

<comment><USER29> after checking icon and layout, they just install the extension in a sandbox and if it runs without a javascript error it passes.

<comment><USER27> It has just appeared now. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorify/pipnfjhpb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorify/pipnfjhpbdpejoemmkhoglekbjakmnkc)

<comment><USER30> Could you make it activate on demand/icon click? Excited to see how this would affect skimming web pages for me.

<comment><USER27> From a security point of view it will probably require some additional permissions, that I'm not comfortable asking yet.

It's also taking a few seconds to process big pages so for the time being I'll rather have the user click the button when he wants to.

But I'll try to think of a solution for this use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just go to any paint store and you'll find yourself halfway there. When we were searching for gray tones we were stunned at the creative names we saw for the thousands of grays available i.e. "mindful gray" "blissful stone" etc.

That's got a be a dream job for some uber-creative artist.

<comment><USER32> And a nightmare job for some other creative artist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I added Draymond Green

[https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=draymond+green](https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=draymond+green)

Because, why not.

</comment><comment><USER34> Makes me think of when xkcd did a survey to produce "objective" names of swathes of the RGB spectrum [1]:

[http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_huge.png](http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_huge.png)

That was genuinely educational.

Colornames.org just seems to be a gimmick, kind of like the million dollar home page [2] -- remember that? But still fun though. :)

[1] [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

[2] [http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/)

</comment><comment><USER35> The hex code is six numbers long, the same length as a date written in ddmmyy format. Apparently this is not a unique thought because I tried putting in some random dates and found the colors were named things like "gage's birthday".

</comment><comment><USER36> Why do I get the feeling that you could programmatically name all these colors in some trivial way? Then you wouldn't end up with 30x "Blue" in your dataset.

Let's imagine we take the dominant byte of each color only. That's 4096 different color combinations. The lower byte makes up another 4096 color variations to each of those dominant colors. Just name 4096 "Color" words, like "Blue", "Aquamarine" etc. Then 4096 "useless adjectives" like "Mindful" and "Exotic".

And viola: Exotic Blue - 0x0xFx | xAx3x5 Mindful Blue - 0x0xFx | x5x5x5 etc.

8000 words is something a single person could do by themselves, and it would generate all 16.7 million colors. You could even have some intuitive understanding. "Aha, Mindful Blue is a little bit grayer than just 'Blue'." This isn't even the most useful schema you could come up with...

Realistically, it's foolish to even do this in the RGB colorspace. Humans are not going to notice the difference between #000000 and #000001. Colors should be organized in a way that's useful. Hierarchical color naming at least gets you partway there.

</comment><comment><USER37> OK. Went down the rabbit hole 20 minutes ago and just surfaced. I love simple time-wasters like this. My contributions include:

Peppermunt

Not quite baby shite

Medical attention required

Hardware store argument blue

Something tells me however that the colour picker that implements this list, while fun, would not be very performant.

<comment><USER38> There are four distinct competing pukes, a myriad buffet of barfs, and a veritable cornucopia of vomits, but none of them cover what I consider the entire gamut of requisite Ralph colors. There's a reason it's called the "Technicolor Yawn".

[https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=puke](https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=puke)

[https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=barf](https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=barf)

[https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=vomit](https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=vomit)

H. Fishlove & Co. "Whoops" Brand Fake Barf has its own distinct set of signature colors, including "perfect puke-yellow" with "Cabernet chunks", easily recognizable by connoisseurs and aficionados of fine fake barf. And artisanal hand-made farm-to-floor fake barf has its own earthy bouquet of organic colors.

[https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-inside- scoop-o...](https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-inside-scoop-on-the- fake-barf-industry/)

>The latex is initially white, but after a day or so, dries into the perfect puke-yellow. "Then, they attach it to a card that says 'Whoops' and sell it," Stan says.

>Of course, now, the original "Whoops" has many gnarly competitors. "One of the better ones is called Glop, made by the famous S. S. Adams joke company." Others made across the Pacific include Fake Barf and "Oops."

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would if they restrict names to be two or rarely three words and avoid punctuation. Also, I think they should advise against humorous/jocular names and ask people to suggest brief but descriptive names.

I was voting on suggested names, very many are those jocular names, overlong and with too much punctuation that does not really serve the purpose.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ah! This is fantastic!

For those curious, I created a script that sorts their data by votes! [https://notryan.com/colors](https://notryan.com/colors)

</comment><comment><USER40> Salad color varies greatly from person to person, apparently

[https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=salad](https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=salad)

<comment><USER41> Some don't even contain chlorophyll

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is a similar (and very old) project, something like a Pinterest for colours and colour palettes.

[https://www.colourlovers.com/colors](https://www.colourlovers.com/colors)

</comment><comment><USER43> It's a great project from a great idea, but I'm a little desapointed that it seems to be turned into a joke contest.

For example, most voted name for 000009 is "Really Dark Blue ", which does not really work...

</comment><comment><USER44> They should have named 12-bit (4096), 15-bit (32768) and 18-bit (262144) color spaces first then the 24-bit (16.7M) color space. It's easier for humans to manage smaller data sets at first.

<comment><USER45> More importantly they shouldn't limit themselves to an RGB bound color space

<comment><USER46> Then go all the way and use perceptually uniform colorspace. But that has complicated relationship to RGB used everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This immediately reminded me of this interactive art installation, wax chromatic, by Alexander Reben: [https://areben.com/project/wax- chromatic/](https://areben.com/project/wax-chromatic/)

The audience names a color, and the lights change accordingly. I remember attending a talk of his where he briefly mentioned the huge color name mapping he created for this piece!

</comment><comment><USER48> If I ever need a quick colour to highlight something when testing I use #BADA55, it's a rank lime green and it's spelt BadAss so it's easy to remember.

</comment><comment><USER49> As colour blind (I fall under the umbrella of Deuteranomaly) I must only celebrate this kind of efforts. I should probably know better but if I recall, up to 8-10% of male population can suffer some kind of colour blindness so it's a huge slice of population that can be benefitted from this.

Cheers

<comment><USER50> All humans are colour blind to some degree; as they get older, even more so.

<comment><USER51> Interesting. I didn't know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> More discrimination against us colour blind people. The basic names are confusing enough - my housemate mentions something "green" when there's no such thing, he's talking about the brown one.

<comment><USER53> Can you suggest an alternative?

<comment><USER54> I think Perenti is just joking.

I'm colourblind myself. I mind when eg UI elements or real world distinctions are _only_ communicated by hue (instead of also using texture, brightness, saturation, shape, text, etc); but I don't think anyone can mind less disabled people making full use of the facilities they have.

<comment><USER52> Although mostly tongue in cheek, I do think the lack of awareness by some UI designers is a real issue. I've also found IDE syntax colouring schemes that are just too hard.

I've also found posters and signs where important information is in colours/shades that I can't discriminate between. Sometimes I wonder if there should be a law that prevents safety information being green on brown, or brown on green, or the wrong shades of red/green/brown together.

And no, I don't do domestic wiring, nor can I read many resistors.

<comment><USER54> I am wary of adding extra laws. Especially ones that are hard to enforce. Luckily, I found that people seem to be paying more attention to accessibility than they did in the past.

Eg Game Maker's Toolkit has a video series about 'designing for disability', see eg their 'Colourblindness & Low Vision' entry at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrqdU4cZaLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrqdU4cZaLw)

One of their points is that lots of adjustments made to assist people with disabilities can also help normal people grasp information quicker or in unusual circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> One challenge with this is that the same name will be proposed for similar colors.

For example: [https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=+Safety+Orange+](https://colornames.org/search/results/?query=+Safety+Orange+)

Deciding what to call a color is going to require more than seeing which name for each color gets the most votes. For a set of names to be useful, they need to make sense when taken as a set.

</comment><comment><USER56> Next: name all 99 one-cent increments between middle C and C#.

Humans love nomenclature in music too!

Naming 32 gradients of smell between veal and beef might be useful, come to think of it.

</comment><comment><USER57> Maybe kind of silly like buying titles to land on the moon but I have to admit to naming a few. It's fun.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am going to give this to my kids as a fun school break activity that still is sort of educational.

</comment><comment> grey-area What about those colours which live beyond the pale of RGB in LAB space? Will they forever be nameless?

<comment><USER59> It's a grey area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Up/down votes should be added to each individual color's own page, ie [https://colornames.org/color/f9cdcb](https://colornames.org/color/f9cdcb)

Edit: I added this suggestion through their used feedback service.

<comment><USER61> But there are the up/downvote buttons already?

<comment><USER60> Wow, my mistake. The color I submitted wasn't confirmed, but for some reason, I just didn't realise that. My bad!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice project but I have a couple of questions of the team:

1\. How will you deal with bots and griefers since there appears to be no login required?

2\. When is a color considered named? More than X votes for the top name? Any final QA to check for profanity, trademarked terms or other malarkey?

</comment><comment><USER62> I love how the counters on the top bar and homepage are not updated, even though new entries keep appearing in the "latest" page.

You'd expect counting the entries in a collection (or materializing that count) shouldn't be so expensive.

<comment><USER63> The Latest page is not the final arbiter of colour naming - they are also moderated before becoming "true" names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Maybe this could be partially automated by getting lists of things like plants, animals, etc. running a web image scrape with those key words, and computing the average color of, say, the first 100 images returned for each word.

</comment><comment><USER65> This was on metafilter.com a few days ago and I felt compelled to create one:

[https://colornames.org/color/13916e](https://colornames.org/color/13916e)

</comment><comment><USER66> Unfortunately (or fortunately, depends on perspective) for these guys there's more than 16.7M colors.

The world isn't digital like that, but even in the digital realm, 10bit per RGB channel is not uncommon.

</comment><comment><USER67> I think we should also name the numbers between 1 and 1,000,000 wiht unique names. The current names we use have too many patterns :D The number 173,515 could be a "singing dog", etc.

<comment><USER68> Those numbers already do have unique names.

<comment><USER67> The names of colors like "#ff38a1" are also unique, so what is that post about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> It should be organized as a tree where each level has 3x2-1 children for the corresponding RGB bits... (local top level is the color with the current leading bits repeated)

</comment><comment><USER70> There has got to be some finite combination of stars that make up constellations. You all see the Big Dipper but thereabouts I see Jerry the Cowboy and Alan the Cowboy.

</comment><comment><USER71> At the current rate, should have them all named within a year.

</comment><comment><USER38> There should be a mash-up that lets you preview the colors on bikeshed.com.

[http://bikeshed.com/](http://bikeshed.com/)

</comment><comment><USER72> #EBABEC is now "Pink Hork" in honor of Janelle Shane[0].

0: [https://aiweirdness.com](https://aiweirdness.com)

</comment><comment><USER73> A couple nice features would be to show you the other colors with the same name you suggested, and to also provide a browsable index of named colors.

</comment><comment><USER74> Voting system kinda ruins it, ppl game it too much and bring in western cultural references a lot so their choice goes to the top instantly

<comment><USER75> Western cultural references are kind of unavoidable when naming things in English I think.

</comment></comment><comment> pale-hands This is cool! Unfortunately it is case sensitive, one search term I tried applied to four different colours, differing only by case.

</comment><comment><USER76> We already have names for all of those colors. They start with 000000 and end with FFFFFF.

</comment><comment><USER77> So amused by this project as I struggle to give names beyond "copper", "blue", "dark green", etc.

</comment><comment> wes-k Ha I got a random color and thought "Mutant Green". Turns out there are 4 other colors named that! Well done all around!!

</comment><comment><USER78> Maybe a different language from English should be used for the CMYK names to allow ambiguities when translating...

</comment><comment><USER79> Reminds me of the idea (and the actual practice) of describing chemical formulas with words.

</comment><comment><USER80> With the current progress, this will take less than two years to accomplish!

</comment><comment><USER81> An interesting project (there was a similar one [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)).

However, I have a few concerns. It does provide feedback "That name already exists in 3 other places." with a warning sign. It really shouldn't, for quite a few reasons:

\- Names that make sense will appear many times over. It is natural and good. It will make the final result MUCH more robust if we look at the most common color.

\- Right now it promotes the first move. If someone uses color "sea" for "#003b3b" (Mexican gulf oil spill?) it discourages others for using the same name for more suiting colors. The problem can be anything: poor English vocabulary, typo, atypical connotation, poor color display, etc, etc.

\- Then the feedback says that my voice will be the name of a color. Too much pressure for me. English is not my mother tongue. I am am not a graphic designer. My display is good, but clearly not good enough to distinguish the tiniest changes.

</comment><comment><USER82> I went to name a "Doodoo brown" and was warned 7 other doodoo browns exist.

Nice, I've found my people.

<comment><USER83> I made doodoo red for you instead:

[https://colornames.org/color/d00d00](https://colornames.org/color/d00d00)

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> There's a downloadable dataset! Would be fun to train a color-labeling model :)

</comment><comment><USER85> Can't we do this automatically using webscraping + nlp + image processing?

</comment><comment><USER86> Ok, puke-green-with-a-hint-of-brown is now "radioactive mud".

</comment><comment><USER87> The variety of colors people associate with petrichor is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER88> On X11 you have /etc/X11/rgb.txt with ~750 color names.

</comment><comment><USER89> kinda duplicate of [https://www.color-hex.com/color/7fffd4](https://www.color- hex.com/color/7fffd4)

</comment><comment><USER90> Seems there are already multiple entries for Cornflower Blue.

</comment><comment><USER91> I've just proposed "Ubuntu Color" for #E95420

</comment><comment><USER92> Soon to be used as a startup name generator.

</comment><comment><USER93> WARNING

There is zero indication on the whole site as to who is responsible for this.

There seems to be no privacy statement.

The registrar is anonymized.

The chances of this being a cutesy email phishing site are VERY HIGH

<comment> yoz-y They don't seem to be asking for emails though. At least not when you go to name a color or downloading data.

The only place where they are asking for e-mail is on the contact form which makes sense.

<comment><USER93> True, but it lights up multiple red lights.

It's either a long con or a genuine cascade of oversights and bad decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Would be nice a multi-language support

</comment><comment><USER95> #ff6600 can be named as bhagwa

</comment><comment><USER96> Urban Dictionary for colors :)

</comment><comment><USER97> Lazyboy #123456 Prime #135711

</comment><comment><USER98> Amazing

</comment><comment><USER99> This is totally addictive

</comment><comment><USER100> So I can give it my name?

<comment><USER54> They have a voting system, it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> How is spam prevented?

</comment><comment><USER102> Too bad it's censored.

</comment><comment><USER103> One of my favorites:

Greerg: #123321

</comment><comment><USER104> color naming is a cultural topic.

</comment><comment><USER35> #800813

Boobie

I'm not surprised.

</comment><comment><USER105> Why???

</comment><comment><USER106> I can't see this succeeding at all. Randall Munroe tried something similar and the results weren't encouraging: [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color- survey-results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

> People are primed by the colors they saw previously, which adds overall > noise and some biases to the data

and

> Moreover, monitors vary; RGB is not an absolute color space

<comment><USER107> 2000 suggestions a hour seems like a success to me.

<comment><USER108> Would be fun to take all this data and interpolate it to all the 16M colours using a natural language model. We'll need this if we want to stand a chance against at ten bit colour depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> "Trump Orange": That name already exists in 11 other places.

</comment><comment><USER110> i like 854700

</comment><comment> purple-again Very first thing I see is a rule that the names must be non offensive and the second thing I see is the color orange named after Trump.

Apparently not a very serious attempt.

<comment><USER111> People don't like to admit this, but "offensive" is by definition subjective (to whom does this give offense?).

Thus, unless you're fairly explicit about who it's not okay to offend, "offensive" is at best vague and at worst weasel-wording.

<comment><USER112> It is, however, common knowledge that calling that particular person orange is meant as an insult. No need to have a precise definition of "offensive" for cases like that.

<comment><USER113> I, as non USAer, have no idea what is the relation between Trump and orange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> What about all the colors named on other sites? colourlovers.com alone has already named over 10 million colors. Someone should scrape those and add them :)</comment>


Concert pianist plays iPad onstage - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20003310-71.html

<comment><USER2> Jordan Rudess, the keyboardist for Dream Theater, uses a number of synthesizer apps on the iPhone, and has played the iPhone live

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFG7-Q0WI7Q>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONGpprZBkrs>

EDIT: Heh, Monday he'll even be in SF "hosting a discussion" about the iPad, among other things: <http://rudess-pyramind.eventbrite.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> menu > settings > songbook no-fail mode: on

menu > songbook > flight of the bumblebee

tap, tap, tap, tap...

<comment><USER4> What is songbook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I touched an iPad for the first time today, in the Burlingame Apple Store. I wanted one more than I had expected. And: I really do see what Apple is going after with it. This is what the computer will evolve into -- an appliance that facilitates media participation. The point isn't the computer, it's what it enables.

<comment><USER6> "an appliance that facilitates media participation. "

I just can't see that as evolving. It's a step backwards.

"The point isn't the computer, it's what it enables."

Agreed, and it's what a completely reprogrammable computer excels at.

It's not that the iPad is without merit, but it's more the evolution of the TV than of the computer.

<comment><USER7> Well, evolution doesn't always mean improvement.

I think the personal computer will split into two branches, with power users keeping today's form factors, while average users who just want to surf the web or check their email will go for the appliances.

<comment><USER8> > Well, evolution doesn't always mean improvement.

I think you mean: evolution doesn't always mean _adding things_. Taking away something that causes a net loss is evolution. Much like, say, the tail in certain higher primates. Or the ability to install and run absolutely anything (including malware, trojans, and viruses).

(Whether a thing causes a net gain or loss is its own entire argument, of course.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry, but when someone refers to "one of the world's most dazzling piano players", here is what comes to mind:

<http://fatkiddiary.com/liberace.jpg>

That guy used Candelabras to attract attention, this new one uses an iPad.

My point is, so this legitimizes the iPad as being something super-special?

<comment><USER10> I can assure you that Lang Lang is a seriously good pianist, something that nobody would claim about Liberace.

<comment><USER11> This is Liberace playing a Liszt concerto:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl6vCZSD70U>

Liberace was a professional concert pianist -- that is, he actually played as solist with professional orchestras. I'd say that fits my definition of "seriously good pianist", though he was probably not good enough to be at the top so he chose to be more an entertainer than a pianist.

But then, Lang Lang is not _too_ far from that (he played a fake piano at the Beijing Olympics ceremony).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bridge, a cross-language RPC messaging system - <AUTHOR> http://www.flotype.com/

<comment><USER2> I totally misread this and, after a glance, thought that it was a nice cross- language RPC library. Like many fiddly bits, whipping up a quick protocol is simple (and I've built one that I like), but I'd be happier to use one that everyone is helping build/maintain/document...

But I was wrong... This is a service... or something. The web page suggests library, but the pricing page suggests service. Color me confused.

[An aside: these Pusher, PubSub, whatever businesses exhibit very little in the way of barriers-to-entry. As the price to replicate the service falls (as smart folks think "pay for that? I just make it into a gem/pip/AMI!" and crush the implementation costs), I'm curious how these business will survive. See Engine Yard...]

<comment><AUTHOR> The Flotype Bridge Cloud service is intended to be a free/cheap way for you to try, learn, and use Bridge.

Think of it like Joyent's No.de service, which is a free way to host Node.js apps.

The technology is actually targeted at larger-scale applications, and enterprise sales is the focus of our business model. We've had some great traction on the enterprise front, but we're not ready to announce that yet.

We're not in the business of nickel and diming fellow developers each month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At first sight, this seems awesome. I've been looking for something like this for a while. However, The homepage seems to be a little sparse in terms of specifics. Before implementing this as a core part of a product, I'd like to know:

\- Pricing model?

\- Seems free for now, but how about when it's out of beta? How are you going to ensure you stay alive without making me go out of business?

\- How does this work? "Magic scalability" is mentioned, which sets a red flag for me. We process >1B requests a month (and growing), and we've found that even the best tools have to be used carefully. Black box software such as this is very scary.

\- How is this deployed? Is it on EC2, which would mean low latency between our infrastructure and the bridge servers? Is there an installable version for people who aren't on EC2? Seems to be a requirement, since message / queues and internal apis require low latency to process things quickly. Especially if we're basing our entire internal service-oriented architecture on top of it.

I want to love this, but there's a lot of unanswered questions, at least from perusing this site. I've learnt the hard way to not believe in magic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I apologize for the sparseness of the website. I'm not a great designer, and this is just my MVP.

Pricing model: see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3870726>

When it's out of beta, there will be a _free_ tier on Flotype Bridge Public Cloud, and a few paid tiers for people that would like us to manage the Bridge server. This is meant for smaller applications.

We can handle 1-2 billion messages/day on a single 8-core server. "Magic scalability" refers to the concept of Bridge Services[1]. If you write code to publish a Bridge Service, you can magically scale by simply firing up more instances of that code. You'll read more about this in the docs.

This can be deployed anywhere - EC2, Rackspace, or your private datacenter/cloud, whatever! We just need to make kernel/OS level optimizations for each stack. The Flotype Bridge Cloud runs on EC2, but you can buy and run Bridge anywhere you want.

Yes, there is an installable version. The goal of Bridge is to build a messaging system for products with very large messaging needs (billions of messages/hour or more). (This is just a beta). For such applications, subsystem latency is crucial, so the primary deployment model is for you to install it next to your application servers.

Please email me at darshan @ flotype.com if you have any more questions :)

-Darshan

[1] Services documentation example in JavaScript: <http://www.flotype.com/docs/gettingstarted/js/services>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It wasn't really clear to me what the advantages of this is over a ZMQ+Socket.io based system. The aim is a fully-baked SAAS I suppose, but it seems we already have all the pieces to roll our own without too much effort.

<comment><AUTHOR> ZMQ is for server-server on the backend. Socket.io would be client-server for the frontend. But the pieces in the middle would have to translate between ZMQ semantics and Socket.io semantics and it's all ugly. There is no way for a ZMQ endpoint to directly address a Socket.io client, and always have to go through this complex intermediary component.

As I point out in the video, this is the strategy today. Hook up a bunch of different pieces together.

Bridge is meant to be a solution that provides the same semantics for server- server and server-client communication.

Thanks -Darshan

<comment><USER4> Well, there is a zmq Javascript flash-binding that gives you ZeroMQ semantics all the way to the client:

<http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:javascript>

Semantically it is clean, but the flash part is a bit ugly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, I'll ask the obvious question: how is this an improvement over Thrift, Protocol Buffers or Avro?

<comment><AUTHOR> None of them handle server-client and are just an RPC layer.

Bridge provides the full layer from RPC down to message routing, access control, etc.

<comment><USER6> Thrift provides server-client implementations, see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Thrift>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> from a design standpoint, the points are a bit distracting..and to me (not as important as the titles in most cases). I'd rather see the titles aligned to the left as HN currently displays. I think points can be equally important as comments as well as aligned to the right. otherwise, nice work

</comment><comment><USER8> RPC = old skool, ha!

What do you differently from Firebase.com? Or objectfabric.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Firebase is a backend for your web applications. It's like Parse for web apps.

Bridge is a messaging system for server-server and server-client communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> this seems to solve the same problem that ØMQ solves. Plus SDKs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I just brought up the difference in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3870777>

Thanks Tobi -Darshan

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I mean, the video is cool, but I don't think the product is very useful.

</comment><comment><USER11> can you describe how timeouts are handled ? thanks !

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all asynchronous, so there are no timeouts.

-Darshan

<comment><USER11> hmm, probably I dont't understand it that well then. assume that a client sends an async request to a server, but server being down, busy whatever, doesn't respond, a client should be in a position to set a timeout, and take so e action e.g try another server or something. no ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is going to change the game, I think.

It'll come down to cross platform support and security. Once those two bases are covered, the rest will be a walk in the park for Flotype.

</comment><comment><USER13> Meh, nodejs makes this type of service obsolete. I can host my own messaging system now, thanks anyways.</comment>


11% of Taiwanese have studied/worked overseas: survey - <AUTHOR> http://focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201907080014.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to know if there are statistics about this from other countries.</comment>


Why Global is the New Local - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/themichael/why-global-is-the-new-local

<comment><USER2> Darn. I had hoped this was an article on the implications of various scoping techniques in computer languages.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the greatest open-source project? - <AUTHOR> Taking into account factors like security, contributors, maturity, popularity, code aesthetics etc, which project do you consider to be the perfect example of how open source should be? <comment><USER2> Linux

</comment><comment><USER3> KDE

</comment><comment><USER4> Apache

</comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin Core</comment>


Why going through another accelerator program would be helpful? - <AUTHOR>

Our social shopping startup is in its early stages. We launched a private beta mid-October and are now making improvements to throw a wider net in December 2011. We won 1st place in a pitch/demo competition in October with really great feedback from VCs. We're now joining Founders Institute for their Winter program which starts Dec. 14 and then plan to get in either YC or 500.<p>Does anyone think that serially joining accelerator programs like this is going to hurt us more than help? Our competitors have just raised $1-3M in seed round this year and every time we turn our heads, there's another competitor popping up. The social shopping market is heating up, so we wonder if we should just focus on finding a senior partner that can help us get funding? <comment><USER2> Your question seems a bit premature, with an underlying assumption of no future progress. Why not wait and see where you're at by the end of the FI program? You may/not have pivoted, gained partners/team members, attracted funding, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry to deny you an answer and instead offer a question of my own but here goes: What are some unexplored niches in the social shopping market?</comment>


Show HN: CheckYourDesign – A simple service to present designs to clients - <AUTHOR> https://checkyour.design/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everybody, this is the first version of our WIP project. Users of the service can create projects, add images to them and get a URL to a public page where the images will be simply and beautifully displayed. This eliminates the need to send multiple emails with attached images, and in turn allows fast iteration as the client just needs to refresh the page to view newly updated images.</comment>


Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/ben-schlappig-airlines-fly-free-20150720 <comment><USER2> affluent man of means has much money, takes advantage of credit card (with possibly high credit limit) offers and rewards and leverages ability to acquire credit card rewards points through spend at price points above average consumer at a favorable points earning ratio - assuming selection of the "best" travel rewards card - which can buy you an airline ticket directly (revenue ticket) or can allow for strategic conversion of said points to airline miles that may get you even further on a point per mile v. cost per mile evaluation. Overall, from leveraging credit card reward points, brand loyalty (preferring an airline for travel, despite trip cost), airline's "First-Class product" promotional marketing, "mileage runs" all contribute to being able to fly for "free." Furthermore, review of aforementioned first- class product is possibly eligible for tax write-off as a business expense due to the airline industry marketing and "travel hacking" focus of his blog?

<comment><USER3> Good summary. Basically the trick is to be rich, and spend ridiculous amounts of money with the right credit cards.

It even says in the article that his brother was killed when he was young, so his parents felt guilty and bankrolled him.

<comment><USER2> spend it right, using the proper channels. The larger lesson is... make your money work for you / earn you money while you sleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is more to the story around being banned from United than he states in the article. It wasn't about the lying, it was what he was doing after he received the certs.</comment>


Betternot.rest - <AUTHOR> http://betternot.rest/ <comment><USER2> Serious question, why would anyone sign up for this "smart" alarm clock service that fines you if you hit the snooze button?

"Disruption" and "innovation" at its finest...</comment>


Joining a startup as employee no2 - <AUTHOR> I'm being offered a position in a startup. It's a branch off an existing pre-series A, post angel round startup. The parent startup is creating a new entity in a different country. Their current product is to be modified and introduced in another market, with a different pricing model. Essentially creating a new startup.
The offer is for me to join the new startup as employee no2 (essentially a cofounder). This isn't exactly a blank slate as the parent company will have some ownership roughly 20% and will be covering some initial costs. The offer consists of me taking a low salary. I also get 5% equity in the new startup + a further 5% conditional to us reaching 1k business users in the first 12 months.
Is this a reasonable offer for me to take given the circumstances? <comment><USER2> It's a pretty good chunk of equity, but....

1k business users in 12 months seems pretty difficult - besides a good product you'll need marketing $$ or sales people to get you there - are they giving you any capital to get there?

You said they would be covering "initial expenses", but this sounds like you need to get your expenditures approved by the parent company, which seems not great.

If you're a technical person, this equity setup seems weird since you only have pretty indirect control of how well you can sell the product.

Given you're branching off from an existing startup and I assume taking their source code, will they be providing engineering support to help get people up to speed on the codebase, is there any expectation they will be kept in sync, will the new entity owe any royalties?

In the end, I think the question is: do you think the product/company is good? 5% of a great company is great, 5% of a shitty company is shitty. It sounds like the parent company basically doesn't know if this will work out or not and doesn't know the target country well, so it hoping you do.

</comment><comment><USER3> The 5% conditional doesn't make sense to me. After all, if it doesn't work out that 5% is worth next to nothing so they might as well gift it to you in that case.

As far as a 'low salary' is concerned, unless you have inside info as to why that stock should be worth the gap between a normal salary and a low one I'd value the equity at roughly $1.

</comment><comment><USER4> > The offer consists of me taking a low salary.

>Is this a reasonable offer for me to take given the circumstances?

Missing a necessary piece of data. 40k is different than 90k.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well interestingly they couldn't specify upfront and wanted to know whether equity wise, the structure made sense. If yes, the salary could be negotiated. However from what it sounded like, they were looking to keep the salary level at enough to just cover the basic expenses.

<comment><USER4> This is a red flag.</comment></comment></comment>


The Slow Criminalization of Peer-To-Peer Transfers - <AUTHOR> https://news.bitcoin.com/the-slow-criminalization-of-peer-to-peer-transfers/ <comment><USER2> If we want to draw the connection to cash, companies that trade in large amounts of cash are also subject to regulation and reporting. For example, U.S. financial institutions are required to file Currency Transaction Reports for deposit, withdrawal, exchange of currency, or other payment or transfer that involves more than $10,000.

Any organization that is facilitating those trades is subject to financial regulation, even if the trade is in cash. Indeed, if the transaction crosses the border even individuals carrying cash have to report it for sufficiently large amounts: [https://www.ffiec.gov/bsa_aml_infobase/pages_manual/OLM_035....](https://www.ffiec.gov/bsa_aml_infobase/pages_manual/OLM_035.htm)

If anything this enforcement is treating bitcoin more like cash, not less.

<comment><USER3> Regarding how awesome Bitcoin must be, can I just take a moment to point out that only _half_ the reason crap like randomware exists (and hits places like hospitals, etc.) is suboptimal security. The other half is untraceable digital payments. Food for thought.

<comment><USER4> Ransomware existed before Bitcoin, generally using something like Western Union.

Bitcoin just became preferred is all. In no way did it "enable" ransomware to exist, it simply lowered the bar.

<comment><USER3> > Bitcoin just became preferred is all. In no way did it "enable" ransomware > to exist, it simply lowered the bar

Would love to know where the heck you pulled the quoted "enable" from, because it certainly wasn't from my post.

And you say "it simply lowered the bar" as if that's somehow insignificant. Actually, it's the _entire freaking point_. There's _orders of magnitude_ difference between the two. We're not proving undecidability here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little bit of background about this site (bitcoin.com). This site is owned by a _very_ controversial figure in the bitcoin world (Roger Ver). Many people feel his use of the domain is unethical, as the URL looks like an official voice for bitcoin when it is far from it.

Satoshi Nakamoto (bitcoin's creator) registered the bitcoin.org site to present information on bitcoin, with the .org domain reflecting the open source, community engaged spirit of early bitcoin development. Roger Ver purchased bitcoin.com from a domain squatter and uses the site to frequently attack core developers of bitcoin and to hype altcoins. From the submission title this article doesn't appear to fall in either of those categories but I think it is still worth pointing out the dubious background of this site to anyone just becoming interested in bitcoin.

<comment><USER6> Roger Ver isn't an angel, but the core developers are far from deserving uncritical respect. They've failed for 3+ years to implement _any_ of the dozens of proposed scaling improvements.

<comment><USER7> This is a very political comment. The Core developers are free to do what they want. The software is open source and running it is the choice of the users. The Core developers are not compelled by any means to do any implementation even if the majority of users, exchanges and investors want it.

<comment><USER6> The parent comment implied that saying anything negative about core developers is a terrible thing, which is a view that many people don't share. My comment was intended to provide some insight into that aspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In all of these cases, the bitcoin vendors did not register on FinCEN's website. Registering is simple but by doing so the person/company is required to check ID's of their customers and make sure there is no money laundering involved. Including filing reports with the gov't for any suspicious activity and large cash transactions amongst other things.

<comment><USER9> How would one launder money with bitcoin?

What would that look like?

<comment><USER10> Buy bitcoin, put in mixer, use it to pay for accounts from your "legitimate" SaaS product.

<comment><USER7> Through virtual credit card numbers you charged from crypto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > At first, the purchase of bitcoin was apparently conducted through digital > currency exchanges such as Coinbase and Bitstamp, with the sale occurring on > Localbitcoins.

That's not really peer-to-peer, is it? It's just acting as a middleman between a peer and a trusted, central exchange.

Peer-to-peer, in my opinion, would be Joe Sixpack selling bitcoins, that he earned by mowing someone's lawn, to someone else who wants to pay for a service sold for bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER12> The author belies the libertarian quirk of mind that conflates something being regulated with something being made illegal. Quite different things!

This strikes me as a cousin to the libertarian intuition that if it is possible to craft an activity that is literally impossible for the government to discover, such an activity simply can't be illegal. (I'm sympathetic to this intuition, but it doesn't take long to see the illogic behind it.)

<comment><USER13> > The author belies the libertarian quirk of mind that conflates something > being regulated with something being made illegal. Quite different things!

You're understating how blurred the line is. A Texas regulation on abortion clinics was struck down last year for being too close to a ban on abortion. Regulations on tobacco products are introduced and strengthened over time with the goal of eliminating the use of tobacco. Gun control lobbyists commonly push regulations on gun form factors, bullets, magazine bans, and all sorts of other things since a ban on handguns has been consistently ruled unconstitutional.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. The practice of medicine in general is one of the most highly regulated professions. It does not follow that such regulation is a slippery slope to the practice of medicine being made illegal.

The contrary argument is easier to make: when an activity is regulated, by the government, it has been officially sanctioned as a legal activity.

There is no logical reason that an activity such as trading bitcoin should be able to be conducted outside of the legal framework of the state the trader does business in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The value of bitcoin was always to evade taxes and launder money, both of which are criminal enterprises, the only thing that is changing is enforcement.

<comment><USER15> While I am sure those reasons play a part I think thats not even close to all of what makes it valuable. Ease of use is a huge one. I can set up a wallet in less than a minute and someone from across the world can send me bitcoin in the time it takes for it to clear the block, other cryptos even faster.

One can post their wallet address and make jokes on social media and receive bitcoin just because people like the content and are happy to support it. (yes that works)

You can receive bitcoin without giving anyone your name,address,etc,same with sending it to someone and do so for legal purposes.

Try to do any of those 3 above with dollar bills and its just not even in the same realm. I see great value in that.

<comment><USER16> > Ease of use is a huge one.

Bitcoin is very complicated to use, doubly so to use securely. I've lost count of the number of stories I've read of someone losing everything, and then being chided by the community because "you deserved it, you weren't doing it the ~right way~", and of course there are a thousand mutually incompatible explanations as to what the right way is. This happens so often there's an entire subreddit for it.

(EDIT: For example, 12 hours ago an Ethereum startup burned $13 million because of a typo: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6ettq5/statement_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6ettq5/statement_on_quadrigacx_ether_contract_error/). The top comment, of course, is "you deserved it, validate your inputs". I'm not kidding when I say this happens every day)

> I can set up a wallet in less than a minute and someone from across the > world can send me bitcoin in the time it takes for it to clear the block.

Which is anywhere from half an hour to days and days, depending on how much you're willing to pay in fees.

> One can post their wallet address and make jokes on social media and receive > bitcoin just because people like the content and are happy to support it. > (yes that works) You can receive bitcoin without giving anyone your > name,address,etc,same with sending it to someone and do so for legal > purposes.

I can do all of this with a PayPal account, both more quickly and with lower fees than Bitcoin. I need a real name to cash out, but you need that with Bitcoin too unless you're using a service that's breaking the law and not doing KYC.

> Try to do any of those 3 above with dollar bills and its just not even in > the same realm.

Yes, digital transactions are certainly faster and more convenient than physical ones, because that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. On all these metrics though Bitcoin loses to PayPal, and when you're losing to a company that is the embodiment of pure evil, that's not a good look.

<comment><USER17> That is a UX problem, though. The comparable problem in the 'old' financial system is legislative and cultural. I have tremendous faith that the rough UX edges of cryptocurrencies will get smoothed out by designers and coders looking to make a buck on-boarding people. I don't have the same faith regarding the vested interests of the existing financial infrastructure.

<comment><USER16> Two things:

1) Bitcoin isn't new, it has been around for years now, and millions in venture capital has been poured into it. It's _still_ a pain in the ass to use at all and basically impossible to use securely. I'm starting to think that if it could be fixed, it would be by now.

2) Not all those problems are UX faults. A lot of us happen to consider transaction irreversibility to be a bug and not a feature, for example.

<comment><USER17> > 1) Bitcoin isn't new, it has been around for years now, and millions in > venture capital has been poured into it. It's still a pain in the ass to use > at all and basically impossible to use securely. I'm starting to think that > if it could be fixed, it would be by now.

I think it's improved quite a bit in that time. Especially so if you consider some of the newer cryptos. Is it there yet? No. But these things take time. Computer interfaces took a long time to get where they are today. It takes a while to find the right abstractions, and people are constantly iterating on these things in the crypto space.

> 2) Not all those problems are UX faults. A lot of us happen to consider > transaction irreversibility to be a bug and not a feature, for example.

Well, I respectfully disagree. You may want to build reversibility as a layer on top of Bitcoin. Perhaps something mediated by trusted third parties. But that should be _opt in_. You want the underlying financial infrastructure to have immutable, irreversible transactions. On top of that base, you can and likely should build support for reversibility in certain contexts.

<comment><USER18> > You may want to build reversibility as a layer on top of Bitcoin.

How is that supposed to work? Once the money has been sent to someone's private key, you rely on their cooperation to get it reversed.

To effectively force them to give it up, a trusted third party would have to hold an even larger amount in escrow. But then what if that third party refuses to cooperate? You would need a larger escrow service to hold the escrow service accountable ... or they would have to make their identity public and be personally liable for any losses, putting government regulation back in the loop.

And this is assuming the transaction was made voluntarily in the first place. If someone steals your money they are not going to make the transaction reversible if they can avoid it. Unless you have the clout to convince a majority of miners to do a hard fork, good luck getting your money back.

<comment><USER17> In Ethereum, reversibility could have strict constraints. For instance, you could devise a contract in which the funds are held in escrow for 90 days, during which time a neutral third party may reverse the transaction using their key.

The important point is that the actual parties to the transaction may choose how they want to mediate this, whether they want reversibility, what conditions they want it to have, and have it all enforced by code and cryptography.

Of course, this burden would only really take place on high value transactions. For most transactions, there'd be a standard configuration people and merchants would use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought the IRS decided bitcoin was property, not currency?

<comment><USER20> The IRS determined that, under _tax law_ , it was property.

That has no bearing whatsoever on how _money transmission business_ law treats it.

Different laws often have different applicable definitions for similar terms.

<comment><USER21> For the purpose of money transmission business law, what is considered money and what is not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The banks and governenrs would never allow a currency that they can't control and tax and which doesn't benefit the rich.

<comment><USER23> I am not sure how btc, right now, is not driving buy the rich Chinese corrupted business man or government officials...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is unfortunate. The world needs electronic cash, for all the same reasons it needs physical cash. If it weren't for financial bearer instruments, millions would have died all across the globe over the last decade.

To understand why, you have to understand System D. System D is the global informal economy, and it is $14 trillion in size.

It provides a lifeline for hundreds of millions of people around the world who cannot operate in the formal economy due to a myriad of structural deficiencies in their economy. The only type of money that works in System D is cash. With electronic cash, the opportunities System D affords expand. Suddenly people in the informal economy can rent servers, and sell digital music online. They are not just confined to their local economy. The benefits of economic development through expansion of System D, in reducing mortality rates, crime and civil strife, far outweigh the cost of criminal activity that is enabled by electronic cash at the margins.

<comment><USER25> > System D

They implemented another useless thing?!?!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> To all the people who think they can bypass the legal system through smart technological solutions:

The judge won't care how smart you think it was.

</comment><comment><USER27> So if I sell a bitcoin to my friend for cash, I'm breaking the law?

<comment><USER2> Nope, but if you started a business where your friends gathered to sell each other large enough quantities of bitcoin for cash you would be.

(Edited to add that IANAL and none of this is actually legal advice.)

<comment><USER28> You are wrong, selling any amount of bitcoin for money is considered money transmission and is a crime without licensing.

<comment><USER15> Please link to some information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> they're scared that rather then end[ing] the fed, we'll make it irrelevent.</comment>


Apple Products and EU-wide Consumer Laws - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/ <comment> k-mcgrady It's funny to see this here today. I've been on the phone and in store with Apple and my carrier today trying to get a faulty lock button sorted. Here's what I've learnt so far:

It's the second time it's happened in 10 months but unfortunately the phone is 1 month out of the Apple 12 month warranty. Even with a cracked screen (glass not LCD and working fine) Apple was willing to replace it to fix the lock button until they noticed it was 13 months old (out of 12 month contract). At this point the EU warranty comes in (6 years in the UK - Apple actually informed me of this but I was already aware). It is the seller who has to cover it though and as I bought it from the carrier Apple pointed me to them.

The problem is (and Apple actually warned me about this) the local carrier store manager. He's actually asked the local Apple store to stop informing people of their 6 year warranty rights and refused to help me.

On the phone they have been just as useless failing to acknowledge any EU warranty laws. At this point I'm waiting to hear back from some higher up at the carrier.

Fortunately I contacted Apple via phone and they were much more helpful. I'm still waiting to hear back (the person on the phone had to speak to someone more senior) but as it's just out of warranty and the second time I've had the fault it sounds like they might replace it.

tl;dr The EU warranty laws apply to the seller not the manufacturer. Don't buy from a carrier (they are assholes), buy from Apple. If Apple sets up your contract with the carrier they become the seller and will be more helpful.

<comment><USER2> Since it's the second time it's happened, can you claim that they didn't fix it properly the first time (when it was under warranty)?

<comment> k-mcgrady Apparently they can't fix the lock button. First time round they just gave me a brand new device. It seems like the lady on the phone now is going to help me out (although she's probably pulling a few strings). The moral of the story is that carriers suck and even out of warranty Apple is at least trying to help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I commented yesterday on another thread, worth repeating in case it helps people in the US:

 _If you read their iOS and iPhone EULA 's, they disclaim all sorts of liability but don't disclaim iPhone hardware damage caused by iOS. I argued with them for three days after an iOS update bricked my phone (outside of its warranty period) but only after pointing out this issue in the EULA did they finally replace the phone free of charge (with a refurb that had a scratched camera lens and bad battery)._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6631457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6631457)

</comment><comment><USER4> Years ago here in Austria I bought an iPhone 3G that from the beginning frequently didn't have reception where all other phones did, including a situation where I needed to call an ambulance because someone was in urgent need of medical attention and couldn't, and they never replaced it and gave me the run-around every time I contacted them. Finally they claimed that the liquid detectors being slightly off-white, rather than pink or red, meant it had been dropped in water when it was obviously just from humidity, a practice for which they were later sued.[1] They were also sued on the reception issue which affected thousands of phones, but again not in my jurisdiction. They have extremely poor service if they think they can get away with it, they are only kept honest in countries that have strong consumer protection laws. It's simply disgraceful to sell a multi-hundred dollar piece of equipment that can't perform its core function and then not replace it.

[1] [http://www.imore.com/apple-pay-53m-iphone-warranty- settlemen...](http://www.imore.com/apple-pay-53m-iphone-warranty-settlement)

</comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't really matter if the national implementation sucks. In Germany the burden of proof flips after a mere six months (from seller to consumer), so the two years aren't worth much. How are you, as a consumer, supposed to prove that the defect was present when you were sold the device?

At least until a few years ago that was also Apple's point of view, making all the EU consumer protection laws completely useless in Germany.

<comment><USER6> Yet in practice, I never had any trouble getting products repaired for free after 23 months or something along those lines. It may be that the burden of proof is on the buyer after six months, but in reality no company (except maybe Apple) really makes a fuss about it. Burden of proof is one thing, but as an EU citizen I expect my electronic devices to work at least two years. If a company were to argue that I have to proof a defect is really their fault after just a year, I would definitely never buy from them again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> With Apple acknowledging EU's consumer laws, maybe they should start looking into Micro-USB connectors as well?

<comment><USER8> I'm really surprised Apple don't do this just for user friendliness. I have lots of USB cables and chargers that have accumulated. That means that I can plug in at work, in the car, at home.. etc. I only have one lightning cable that usually lives at work. I also have a cheap-crap 30 pin that I can never find for my old ipod that a rarely use.

Basically this means that my ipad often runs out of juice and my ipod gets used even less. My guess is that there are a lot of old ipods that will not get a retirement job because they outlived their connectors.

<comment><USER9> > I'm really surprised Apple don't do this just for user friendliness.

I can't stand proprietary connectors as much as the next person, but there's no denying that their Lightning connector is much much better than any USB. It's reversible for one (size and robustness aside).

<comment><USER10> Reversible always comes up when asked what makes it better. Always reversible. Sometimes there's some other thing, but you can count on reversible.

How hard it is to feel which way you're holding the USB cable? They are often asymmetrically designed, you know?

I can do it half asleep in pitch dark.

If someone can't plug in a cable in the right way, I seriously doubt they should be using a smart phone in the first place... or any technology more sophisticated than a pointy stick.

<comment><USER9> > If someone can't plug in a cable in the right way, I seriously doubt they > should be using a smart phone in the first place... or any technology more > sophisticated than a pointy stick.

Sure, I'll take that bait. There are innumerable disabilities which might mean people have trouble manipulating small objects. That seems like an obvious reason for making it reversible for one. But congratulations for managing to do it half asleep in the dark (anecdotes don't make a convincing argument: I could share several contrary anecdotes myself).

But as for other benefits? There have been USB standards that have been deprecated because they were so fragile (I forget which–Mini?). The Lightning connector is solid, not hollow, and so seems more robust. The Lightning connector is also designed to support much higher power ratings than USB, so can charge devices faster.

<comment><USER10> I doubt Lightning is that much bigger than USB that it helps handling it.

And I didn't say anything about whether Lightning is better or worse than USB, or more versatile or what ever. Just that can we please stop with the "But it's reversible" thing? It just sounds like something to say when people can't come up with better reasons.

<comment><USER11> Not everything has to be grand. Iterating away small annoyances is a worthy part of design and is often noticeable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Ph.D. Grind, Year One (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir-year1.htm

<comment><USER2> The author needs to come to terms with one fact; not even your professors are going to read these walls of text.

Most people you want to convey your opinions to will check the amount of text before deciding on whether to invest the time or not.

Fact of life. Work around it.

<comment><USER3> This is actually chapter 1 of a very well-known book. See here for details: [http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm](http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm)</comment></comment>