Refresh Is Sacred - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/09/27/Refresh-Button <comment><USER3> This is related to the reason I had to stop using Sparkleshare. A few years ago I thought the idea was pretty cool, so I tried it out. Then I started to get conflicts on some of my documents. A couple days later, I knew for sure that a file hadn't synced.

Upon searching for a manual sync option (that would have to be a trivial addition) I came upon this issue[1]:

"No, adding an action for this would be a hack. The whole point of SparkleShare is to sync stuff automatically.... Just because something is easy to do doesn't mean it should be added."

I haven't touched Sparkleshare since.

[1] [https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/issues/794](https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/issues/794)

<comment><USER4> Oh God, this issue thread is a perfect example of the problem with UX trends that's plaguing our industry.

Its TL;DR is this: this software is magic. It syncs automagically. You, the dumb user, are not supposed to know and care when it syncs or if it succeeds (hint: it's magic, it always does), and you're _especially_ not supposed to tell the program that it has to do a sync. If your company's firewall interferes with the magic, go talk to your company IT.

The article sums up the issue perfectly: sometimes, as a user, I know better when the program is mistaken than the program itself. I should have a way to force it to refresh its state.

<comment><USER5> It's the Windows model. Make the easy stuff super easy, and the hard stuff basically impossible. The assumption is that you'll adjust your business practices to match the software assumptions and definitely not the other way around.

Which is a little unfair to Microsoft, since they do have a fair bit of functionality only slightly hidden on Windows.

<comment><USER6> Apple is not without sin here. Spotlight is notorious for not finding files that are _currently visible in a Finder window_ because the mdfind index didn't get updated properly. You can rebuild the mdfind index with a terminal command but that's too obscure for non-experts and it takes hours.

<comment><USER7> I think all of the Desktop environments do poor to terrible on internal search. I remember using a utility on Windows that just kept a live indexed filename database because Windows search couldn't even find filenames correctly at the time: Ah here void tools everything. Loved that util.

Gaps in the "recent files" coverage are always so noticeable over all the environments too.

<comment><USER5> Windows 7 does a terrible job of indexing your user directory. It's extremely frustrating to know the exact name of a file and yet Windows can't locate it because it is in AppData or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a user of 1Password, the lack of "Sync" Button is frustrating when trying to use recently added passwords across devices.

"It just works" isn't always best - especially when dealing with cross-device data sync - I know it isn't magic, I'm not "fooled", I know it's actually data that needs to be transferred to the new device. Hiding that, not giving me the option to force sync and see the progress of it is a very frustrating experience when I can't see passwords (or any state) that I'm expecting to see.

<comment><USER9> I think the generalizable point here is that, at least for me, but I think this is for everyone, it should be considered an important part of the "UX" that users understand the "state" of an application. In particular, what data has been sent and received.

For example, this is imho one of the most important features of WhatsApp, the little checkmarks that tell you, in one tiny little graphic, whether your message has been sent, received, or viewed. This is just so important to the user experience. I feel that app developers that ignore that users need to _know_ what the app is doing, what _state_ it is in, are just ignorant of human psychology and how we interact with machines. We don't want "magic", we don't want to "trust", we want to be informed and to _know_ what is happening. Doing this is a streamlined way, little unobtrusive checkmarks for example, is UX gold.

<comment><USER10> So much this! Some developers don't realise that informing the user of state provides invaluable information in correcting their mental model of the application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> joatmon-snoo Also, even if you can demonstrate or prove that a refresh button offers no tangible benefit, it creates an illusion of control that improves the UI/UX.

It's like the close door button in US elevators.

<comment><USER11> > It's like the close door button in US elevators.

 _Some_ US elevators. The one at my office works fine, at least after the door has been open for a short time. I've done timing tests with a stopwatch to make sure I wasn't misjudging or misperceiving things. The door is open normally for N seconds and there is a threshold, T, such that if the button is pressed at time P, where P is in [T, N], the door starts closing immediately. I don't remember the details now, but T was around 2 or 3 seconds, and N was around 8 or so seconds.

There are a variety of reasons that many elevators do not work or appear to not work in the US.

• Some are programmed not to work during times that are normally high traffic to encourage fuller cars.

• Some have a delay. If the door was going to close in 5 seconds normally, and the close door button works but with a 3 second delay, it would only have an effect if you pushed it within the first 2 second after the door opened.

• Some are simply broken. A broken close door button does not put the elevator out of service so it can stay broken for a very long time.

• Some owners choose to have them disabled. Perhaps they have received complaints about too many obnoxious people closing the doors early. Perhaps they think that the law requires it (maybe local codes do in fact require it). Perhaps they think disabling it reduces wear on the doors (I've read somewhere that door problems are the most common cause of needing elevator repair).

I've seen quite a few articles that claim that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that close door buttons be disabled during normal operation.

I doubt this. None of the articles I've seen cited a specific section of the ADA, and I could not find any grepping through the text. Furthermore, the ADA was passed in 1990, but non-working close door buttons were widespread well before that. Here's a Straight Dope column on this from 1986, for example [1].

The most I found was something about there being a mandated minimum open time, during which the close door button would not be allowed to work.

[1] [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/595/do-close- door-b...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/595/do-close-door-buttons- on-elevators-ever-actually-work)

<comment><USER12> I once worked in an older office where the 'open door' button worked as a 'close' button, as using it apparently canceled the 'hold door open' timer. It also had a traditional do-nothing 'close door' button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The trouble is "The customer never knows anytyhing and requires us to dumb everything down" is also a treated as a sacred principle in our industry.

<comment><USER14> Then you're doing it wrong - the correct principle is, "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation"

<comment><USER4> That is an even dumber principle, and it is what leads to proliferation of products that are mostly useless toys that _pretend_ to be tools. No amount of JS will make a person who never used 2D graphics programs a master of Photoshop. Only God Himself can make a pivot table that's usable by a newcomer without "having to read any documentation". The _only_ way to realize the principle you described is to _dumb down_ your product until bare minimum of functionality remains, and then hope your users somehow learned to use that minimum in the past.

Others have managed to touch on this topic in the thread, so I'll just say this: you don't expect people to be able to fully use _a car_ without having to learn anything. You subject them to a training course. And this applies to pretty much any actual _tool_. You have to _learn_ to use it effectively. "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, everything else is learned." You can embrace that and figure out how to efficiently teach your users, or you can forever be doomed to building toys that don't actually help anyone that much.

<comment><USER15> He's not saying that everyone should be able to use every program. But someone familiar with 2d graphics program in general should be able to _learn_ how to use Photoshop without reading the manual.

Consider a bad example: Blender. Even though I have used 3D graphics and CAD extensively I still always have to look things up in the Blender manual. Why? Because nearly every control is poorly labelled, there are no useful tooltips, and basically no _hints_ in the UI at all. Take a look at this awful screenshot for example:

[https://www.blender.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/08/Release_n...](https://www.blender.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/08/Release_notes_279_video_overhaul.png)

What does "File Extensions" do? What about "Placeholders"? Why do none of the number inputs even have units?

Nobody is saying that users should have an intuitive understanding of what a B-frame is, but I shouldn't have to read the manual to find out whether the B-frame interval is specified in seconds or frames.

<comment><USER4> Blender is a funny program, because it can be used both as an example of bad UX - like what you describe - and good UX.

RE bad UX - I agree labels and tooltips are important. Even if I'm an experienced user, I do not remember _everything_ , and in particular I would like to be always able to visually identify that number fields use the units that I think they use.

As for the good sides - Blender is the vim of 3D graphics. It allows you to be much more efficient - after you learn how to use it - compared to programs with simpler UI.

I generally summarize my point like this:

       productivity
         ^                                     /  tools you need to learn
         |                                    |
         |                                    /
         |                                   |
         |                                   /
         |                                  |
         |                                  /
         |                                 |
         |                                /+
         |                              /-
         |                           /--           toys with dumb UI
         |                        /--        /</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
         |      /</comment><comment></comment><comment>---/</comment><comment></comment><comment>
         |  /---         /</comment><comment>
         |--   /</comment><comment>---
         +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----->
                                                                     time

<comment><USER16> Would you classify IntelliJ as "toy with dumb UI"? Because for me it hits a sweet spot in the middle - it can be both, depending on skill level.

<comment><USER4> Definitely not! IntelliJ is very complicated; I've seen programmers taking a look at it, getting confused, and going back to Eclipse.

<comment><USER15> Ha is that a joke?

<comment><USER17> Probably not, I was shocked first time i heard but i've seen it a few times also. Most common complaint I hear is that everything is underlined in red as errors because you have a different code style or misspell things. Other common complaints are that the debugger buttons are non intuitive (both location and icons), hotkeys don't follow common conventions, or that it's hogging the computer resources. Although the latter is maybe not relevant in this discussion about UI-design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I completely agree.

But the example the author notes isn't the worst. If killing the app refreshes, that's okay.

The problem is a lot worse if the app syncs to disk.

All Apple apps have this issue. iCloud is nice when it works, but it's infuriating when a photo or something doesn't show up on your other device, and there is no way to force a sync.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. iCloud's antics keep forcing me to seriously consider android.

Their refusal to give you FS or cache access is similarly infuriating; I stopped using my old 16GB purely because I couldn't selectively control what was stored on the phone and iCloud photos was too dumb to control its cache. I would have gigabytes of old photos downloaded to my phone until it was so full that apps would regularly crash! I had to regularly toggle iCloud photo storage and basically just wait until my iPhone had locally cached enough of my library that it was full and broken again... And, of couree because Apple thinks their software "just works" or whatever, I couldn't just hit a "clear cache" button or manually rm files from the cache (still a hack, but one that takes all of two seconds).

At the moment, I'm keeping myself somewhat satisfied by just using adobe creative cloud for photos I care about, but it's not an ideal solution. And I'm annoyed that Apple basically forced me to buy a new phone a year or two earlier than I wanted to by crippling my old one with broken software.

<comment><USER20> > And I'm annoyed that Apple basically forced me to buy a new phone a year or > two earlier than I wanted to by crippling my old one with broken software

Isn't that basically their business model?

<comment><USER19> Yes, it seems to be. The privacy and security emphasis is one of the main things keeping me locked in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's interesting is that we've known this in the industry for decades but people seem to forget it at the user interface.

[https://scholar.harvard.edu/waldo/publications/note- distribu...](https://scholar.harvard.edu/waldo/publications/note-distributed- computing)

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of- leaky-a...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky- abstractions/)

<comment><USER22> The impression i get is that this happens because the industry favors gung-ho youth over aged experience, and oh so many are self taught.

This combination means that the same hard lessons have to be learned over and over and over...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lack of a refresh button is not the issue. The issue is that the app developer has never tested their app in real-world network scenarios. Switching between wifi, 3g, 4g, lte, and no network access. Inserting random packet loss, jitter, and latency. There are a lot of tools that can automate this now. You can stick a WAN simulator in front of your integration testing environment and insert all types of crazy network issues into your tests. If developers did this more often, these "sync" bugs would be fixed.

<comment><USER24> How would you do this on an Android emulator?

I'm guilty of not testing this sort of thing thoroughly.

<comment><USER25> macOS has a Network Link Conditioner preference pane that allows you to simulate all sorts of awful network scenarios. It's at the system level so anything using the networking should be affected.

Not sure about the others.

<comment><USER24> Good to know, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My hope is that at some point the auto sync is smart enough so we don't need any refresh button.

For example: Instagram does auto sync of new posts, but it also has a refresh functionality. So I never know if it is up to date and I must refresh. When you know about a manual refresh functionality the auto update is totally useles. You're never sure if the app tries to stay up to date or does only occasionally sync to show some (not the latest) updates.

Another example is google mail, it does auto sync pretty well and I always see the mails when they arrive. But the refresh buttons makes me suspicious if it's really up to date (in my experience it always is).

<comment><USER27> Instagram and Facebook (at least on Android) is also a fine example of getting auto-refresh wrong. If I'm scrolling down the feed and stop for too long, or hop out of the app for a minute and then come back, often it'll refresh the feed and kick me back to the top. That's never what I want. I'd rather manual- only refresh to that.

GMail does a good job of being up to date, except when switching networks or resuming from sleep. It'll certainly eventually sync properly, but that can take minutes, and whacking the Refresh button fixes that in seconds.

I've also found that Refresh will surface very-new mail sooner than just waiting. Whacking Refresh while waiting for an email verification or password reset always makes it appear faster than just waiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This problem would be solved if HTTP provided state _synchronization_ rather than just _transfer_. Then we wouldn't need a reload button.

The invisible college built a solution called Statebus: [https://stateb.us](https://stateb.us) It's a backwards-compatible HTTP but with automatic synchronization. It eliminates these bugs.

<comment><USER5> That sounds a lot like the thinking the author was complaining about in the article. There is a lot going on underneath your protocol layer here, and much that can go wrong. How sure can you be that the system is in a synchronized state?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A lot of apps accept the pull down gesture (not sure how to call it) as a refresh, e.g. mail apps. I suppose that might not work so well when your app shows a map, like uber. Replacing a button by a gesture is ok.

<comment><USER30> It's only OK if you also describe somewhere that this gesture exists and what it does. Gestures are absolutely non-discoverable on their own. Occasionally, I try to show someone something on their Macbook, and I always have to experiment with the number of fingers on the touchpad, because nothing about the interface helps me remember the options. I guess it could be printed directly on the touchpad, but then that wouldn't be as slick.

<comment><USER31> I think the swipe-down-to-refresh UI pattern actually seems pretty discoverable. The newest things on a list are added to the top. How do you know if you're at the very top of a list?

I think this gesture eloquently addresses several issues at once. (1) The user is going to pull down on the main container to check for new items at the very top of the list, but (2) it may take a manual refresh to deliver these new items; refreshing the list when the user is attempting to pull the main container window beyond the top-most item allows the app to provide the newest content the moment the user is seeking it.

<comment><USER30> Yes, when you have a list sorted by recency, where the most recent entries are at the top, you can easily discover the refresh gesture by scrolling a little bit too far.

But when the gesture is used in different contexts, it is less likely to be discovered. For example most chat apps add new messages at the bottom, so the refresh gesture should be scrolling in the opposite direction. Additionally, I don't tend to scroll through my message history very often, so I'm unlikely to discover this. Fortunately, most chat apps tend to be quite good at loading new messages.

It gets worse when there's little reason to attempt scrolling past the boundaries. For example, it took me months to discover that Chrome on Android supports the gesture (before that, I opened the menu to refresh). That's because to scroll on a website, I just pull once and then let go. Inertial scrolling means that the motion will stop as soon as it hits the top of the page. Past that, there's a kind of resistance that needs to be overcome, which you won't do if you don't already know the gesture.

My point is, good interfaces shouldn't _require_ the user to make accidental discoveries. There should be an obvious, labeled way to do it; if necessary, it can include a hint to use the less obvious but more convenient way next time.

<comment><USER32> Pull-down to reveal the search bar is another frustrating antipattern that is all too common.

<comment><USER22> Or just vanishing toolbars in general.

Also, i have found that swipe to refresh on web browsers to be a mixed blessing. All too easy to trigger when all i want to do is to scroll to the top of the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It struck me the other day that this is the future that the industry focus on AI is driving us towards - software that knows better than you do, whether you like it or not.

In much the same way that the _capabilities_ and _usage_ of today's technologies baffles people who didn't grow up with it, tomorrow all of us will be baffled by the number and magnitude of decisions that the average piece of software assumes its users will delegate to it, and the fact that no one will really be able to debug or diagnose exactly why it made the decisions it did. Zawinski's Law [1] will be modified to read "Every program attempts to expand until it can act as a personal assistant. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

[1] [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis- Law.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html)

<comment><USER22> The industry may be trying to build a virtual Jeeves, but i fear that they are more likely to create HAL...

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I this this is a particularly insightful stance and it immediately reminded me of an application that already does this.

The thick-client MS Outlook will let you know when you have new mail, but there's also a "send/receive" button that forces a sync with the server and lets you know the result of that action.

<comment><USER35> I thought about outlook, too, but for the opposite reason: their web client overrides ctrl+r, making the way I force a refresh incongruous with the rest of the web.

<comment><USER22> that is another reason i am not much fond of "webapps".

Take Youtube for example.

If i scroll down to read some comments (yeah i know, i live dangerously for some reason that escapes me) and want to go quickly back up to the video, the natural reflex for me is to hit the home key.

But for some loony toons reason Google had decided to hijack the home key to mean "rewind video the 0 and start playing"!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is only because apps are bad at sync. Quality varies; occasionally there's an app that gets it right. For example, I've used Google Docs and Google Sheets for ages now and never wanted or needed to refresh — the content is always in sync.

<comment><USER37> Google recently changed "Google Drive" to "Google Backup and Sync" and it's _terrible_

I can see some files on the web version of google drive that I uploaded last night, but on my other machine the Backup&Sync tool doesn't even bother downloading them.

Time to move to Dropbox I think...

<comment><USER15> It was awful as Google Drive too. It really blows my mind how bad the desktop Google Drive sync app is, when Dropbox can do it nearly perfectly.

<comment><USER22> And here they wants us to trust them with always keeping the ChromeOS state in sync...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I kill many apps on the hour just to refresh. Since I've basically reinvented the refresh button with an operating system feature, why don't all apps have them? And why doesn't everything have a home button, especially Facebook.

<comment><USER22> At least on Android, Facebook seems to have redefined the back button as home. Scroll down, hit back, and rather than exit the app i will be scrolled back to the top and the feed "refreshed" (more like randomized).

<comment><USER38> This doesn't work when you're several levels deep in photos, within groups, within comment sections, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yes, please! It doesn't have to be a visible button, the scroll hard past the top of the list gesture is fine. Just show a spinner until you actually received a server response. I hate opening a weather app just to see the weather from last time I opened it. Even the most perfect sync code will not work when my internet connection is broken. I'd rather find out so I can fix it than look at old data.

Btw, why does the web Gmail refresh button not actually load new emails unless I press it twice?

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of when Google introduced MTP to Android with their 3.x version.

All of a sudden what used to be a simple transfer from tablet to PC was a nightmare.

This because while before the PC would read the SD card directly, with MTP it was mediated via a database within Android.

And that database easily got de-synced from the actual FS state if i used any kind of file manager on the tablet.

Effectively i had to dig up an app that was designed specifically to force the database to sync.

<comment><USER40> Last time I tried it, MTP was still a POS. I don't even try to use it anymore as it's just less hassle to adb push files.

You hear that google? Using adb on the command line is easier than the interface you give your phone? How did you mess that one up?

/rant

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> A lot of web UIs only show a refresh button if something goes wrong. I think this makes a lot of sense, as it is really just a placebo if the app already knows that the data is up to date (for example, if it has an active websocket connection for maintaining state).

Of course, it helps that the browsers all have builtin refresh buttons too.

</comment><comment><USER42> There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

<comment><USER5> I thought that quote was:

There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming, and off-by-one errors.

<comment><USER42> I like the original version:

Source: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has- phil-...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-karlton- ever-said-there-are-only-two-hard-things-in-computer-science)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > "When a customer really thinks your app is wrong and they know how to fix > it, [...]"

The problem is this happens too many times, even in cases when the customer doesn't have any idea how to fix the issue and what the issue really is.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes, this infuriates me about my city's (Moscow) bikeshare app. It would show you completely outdated state until you restart it with no way to refresh. Later they introduced electrobike option, and I discovered that if you switch to electrobike map and back to normal bike app, it refreshes! Later I found that Citymapper is available in Moscow, and its bike map is much superior so I don't have to suffer the official app anymore.

</comment><comment><USER45> Like they say "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." ;) Apps without `refresh` claim to be ones which managed to solve caching problem properly (they usually didn't anyway)

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Often they don't even realize they're in the caching business. And yet, showing the state of _anything_ for which the canonical representation doesn't live in your process' memory is caching state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Agree, though I must say the app suite that has come closest to making it "just work" with no sync button is Trello. It even knows when it might be out of sync and then offers you a refresh button.

</comment><comment><USER47> Surely refresh is just kill for web-apps? The app's state is discarded, the code is reloaded and it re-requests the data. I don't see the differentiation Tim is implying.

<comment><USER32> In theory, a good web-app encodes state in the URL as you work, so you don't lose everything on refresh. Google Maps is a good example.

<comment><USER22> Gmaps seems like their only good webapp...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Yeah, but the sync button doesn't always work either. For example, my email client has a sync button but I have to go to the web app to really see what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER49> ... or show an error indication to user when things are mangled.

Never seen an out-of-sync error message in any application except for multiplayer apps/games.

<comment><USER4> Usually, you can just force a resync instead. Refresh button is needed for the situations when your application _doesn 't know_ its state is wrong, but the user does - which does happen whenever your app is displaying the state of a shared resource it doesn't own, like files on disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just do what Lotus Notes does: hide the button, but if you click in the same place as where the button is, it force-refreshes.

<comment><USER51> Then how do you know where to click?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Kind of an aside, you used to fix wonky TVs by physically banging them on the side once or twice.

Vacuum tubes.

</comment><comment><USER53> My git client doesn't need a refresh button.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure git is the example I would want to hold up of a service that always synchronizes flawlessly and effortlessly.

Maybe I'm alone, but I've more than once gotten my local copy in a state that seems to require me to blow it away and re-clone it to get it working again. Sometimes it seems to get hung up at a particular point in time and I can't get it to pull recent changes, even when I've tried to tell it to pull from the head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> (I fully accept this will prob start a war..)

But IMO this tracks back to the MPA vs. SPA problem. Do we actually need to be using a SPA/JS framework (Angular, React, etc) and what do we get in return which outweighs the wildly agreed increased development effort of SPAs?

I think the author is referring to mainly "wrapped" SPA web apps that sit inside native apps with a "web view" rendering the SPA (like the browser would). It's not just wrapped apps tho, many native apps have some kind of hybrid where you're using a library directly (React Native?.. _dives for cover_ ) which but a whole framework of abstractions on top of the native interfaces. With so many "layers" and all these things being new and vastly more complex than MPA web apps, the statistical likelihood of goofing things up is just very high.

Where are the days of old (what? 10 years?) where we got to the edge of MPAs (we didn't even call them MPAs then) and optimised the crap out of them making them fast, and simple and quick and a pleasant user experience? I think we come up with all sorts of poorly justified reasons to go to SPA/JS frameworks these days and the users are the ones who end up paying the price.

<comment><USER55> The author talks about a mechanism to refresh / reload. Its probably not got to do with SPAs vs MPAs.

SPAs can have refresh / reload mechanisms, but not all do. Same for native / mobile apps, some have them and others don't.

<comment><USER56> In the browser you can always reload the page which presumably does the same thing (full sync).

Already did that twice today in Evernote.

<comment><USER22> And sometimes when you do that you get the big scary "resubmit data" popup...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Isn't the car sharing app's map just 'representative'? Refreshing isn't going to help when they are deliberately lying to you.

<comment><USER58> No.

> Since it totally refuses to sync, I have to switch to the Android > "recents" screen and kill it. When I re-open the app, it's OK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> You don't have to show a refresh button all the time. If the timestamp of the most recent data is more than Xs, and you hash or build a merkle tree of all the data, then you can opportunistically tell the user that the app's view is out of date and automatically refresh.

<comment><USER60> Why does everyone want to throw a merkle tree at it.

<comment><USER61> It's the solution that works. Random storage - hash it. Log data - <USER2> tree. You don't even have to do proper one, because log of state hashes is fine too.</comment></comment></comment>


Inactive bank accounts to be seized in Australia - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/money/banking/cash-grab-inactive-bank-accounts-to-be-seized/story-e6frfmcr-1226585867131 <comment><USER3> This story is sensationalism at its best.

The full story is that inactive money is currently held by the banks and transferred to ASIC after 7 years of inactivity. The owner of the account doesn't lose their money, as ASIC advertises the details of all inactive accounts in an effort to locate the owners and return the money to them [1].

The new law changes the period to 3 years. As you can imagine, the banks are spitting chips, since they get 4 years less use out of the money.

One can argue that the change is good for people who have genuinely lost their account, as the inactive account gets visability sooner and is more likely to be reunited with its owner. It will be a nuisance for people who do want to leave an account untouched for a long time, as they will have to interact with the account every three years.

[1] [https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/find- uncla...](https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/find-unclaimed- money)

\---

edit: spelling

<comment><USER4> This is even better for consumers and even worse for banks - no monthly account fees and automatically adjusting interest rates once the money is sent to ASIC.

Reactivating the account and getting your money back isn't hard either - <USER2> just find the unique identifier online [https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools- and-resources/find-uncla...](https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and- resources/find-unclaimed-money#claim) and take it to the bank.

<comment><USER5> If you shop around a little, you'll find banks in Australia that don't charge account fees. And I'm not convinced that ASIC will pay decent interest rates, since the government cash rate is lower than typical bank rates for deposits (again if you shop around a little).

<comment><USER6> I have a personal account with a credit union that is fee-free.

It's not that difficult to arrange. Here's my complete, step-by-step guide to getting cheap basic banking services:

        1. Avoid the Big 4 Banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not 'to be seized' - 'have been seized'

I had an account confiscated -stolen -emptied - whatever you want to call it.

This was an e-trade linked account. They sent me a warning so I wet in and checked that it was active -login, checked the account, regular interest deposits, all good,there.

Wrong.

I had to make a personal withdrawal or deposit in order to 'activate' the account or it was deemed inactive. All because I haven't bought/sold anything for 3 years in that particular account ( though I have in other accounts in the same e-trade account)

Now I have to apply to a govnemrnt agency to get my money back, the wait time is 6 weeks plus.

It's absurd, shocking, disgusting.

In the news is a pensioner who had been saving up for medical bills. Goes into hospital for major surgery, comes out afterwards and finds all his saving gone $22k.

The inactive period is 3 years. In other words, since the LOST finale aired. It's not _that_ long.

Most countries have a provision to seize unclaimed monies. But three years? What on earth is the justification? Because they can't balance a budget?

If the government came into your house and took any jewelry that you hadn't worn in three years, most people would revolt. But apparently. Only in the bank is use it or lose it. So much for savings being the necessary per- requisite for capital formation.

/rant

For what? The current treasurer and government disgust me.

<comment><USER5> I didn't realise that it applied to every account individually at a single bank. I'd have thought transactions through any particular account would be enough to show that none of the accounts are "lost". Any other activity such as logging in and checking the balance should be sufficient too. Otherwise, it seems that it's just a government cash grab.

<comment><USER7> Yes, any reasonable test of an active account for an online account should be a recent login. But that's not the test- you have to withdraw or deposit money. I suppose we could call it 'banking theatre'.

'dance, taxpayer, dance! Jump through these arbitrary hoops or we'll take your cash!'

<comment><USER6> When the original legislation was drafted, online banking didn't exist. People still visited bank offices to deposit paycheques and to withdraw cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To clarify, seizing of "inactive" funds already occurs -- the change next week shortens the timeframe from 7 years inactivity to 3 years. The money can be subsequently reclaimed through tedious paperwork. This is pretty standard stuff internationally speaking (U.S. seems to have a timeframe of 3-5 years depending on the state, U.K. is 15 years, Canada has a more generous timeframe of 30 years, or 100 years for amounts over a grand!).

The responsible thing for your bank to do would be to notify you at the 35-month period. Not much good if you don't keep your contact details up to date, but if it's something like a investment or trust account then that might be the one address you'd like to try to keep accurate. THIS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE SOUND FINANCIAL ADVICE, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO KEEP YOUR BANK STATEMENTS FORWARDING TO THAT EXPIRED P.O. BOX AT YOUR ALMA MATER

</comment><comment><USER9> Seizing money out of a customer's bank account is really quite reprehensible. It's quite easy to imagine a situation in which someone has a savings account for a specific purpose that they have the discipline to not touch (e.g. an "oh shit" fund), and then suddenly find that money has been stolen one morning by the government. Indeed, I've had a number of savings accounts that have been for specific purposes that have neither grown nor shrunk, untouched for years because there has been no necessity.

The only situation I can think of in which it's somewhat ok for the government to raid a citizen's bank account is if the customer has been uncontactable for a number of years and cannot be found after a diligent search. Bar this, it's just theft.

<comment><USER4> > The only situation I can think of in which it's somewhat ok for the > government to raid a citizen's bank account is if the customer has been > uncontactable for a number of years and cannot be found after a diligent > search.

"ASIC's Unclaimed Monies Unit regularly sends letters to people and companies whose names match our records." There are also private companies (Dun and Bradstreet etc.) who scrape the records and try to contact owners for a finders fee.

<comment><USER7> I had money seized under this change. I did _not_ receive a letter from ASIC. All I got was an email, which I skim-read and filed as being ok. There was two months from announcement to seizure. It is NOT ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The worst part of the legislation is that interest and fees are not considered "using" the account.

*You must physically deposit or withdraw funds from the account.

</comment><comment><USER11> What happens when you are in prison or a coma for over three years? Once you are back, do you have to go through the several-month-long process recovery process? How do you pay the bills during that time? Do they pay you interest if you successfully reclaim the money?

What's the point of this legislation anyway?

<comment><USER12> There's no point but to utilise any reserves laying idle. There's essentially negative interest rates on a lot of these accounts. I don't have an Australian bank account, but someone I know who does discovered that her account pays no interest unless some transaction worth at least a dollar takes place once a month. With charges, this is negative.

Better on the governments balance sheet rather than the banks. What are the savers doing with it anyway it seems.

<comment><USER7> Surely you aren't serious? Better on the governments balance sheet than a private citizen? Really?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lets see them try to seize inactive Bitcoins.....

<comment><USER14> if 51% of network agree with that, this can happen too. agree = download and use client with this "feature"

<comment><USER15> Yes, that's the whole point, 51% percent of the network would never have an incentive to do that.

If they did, it would destroy the value of the currency. Self-destruction with no benefit. If people lost trust in BTC there are competing crypto- currencies/state currencies. Destroying liquidity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Money now has an expiration date, like air miles?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this a karma grab? This was doing the rounds online shortly after it was announced in February. Anyway it seems likely to only affect people who are wealthy enough to have large reserves of cash with nothing happening to it. When you think about it, most people only have 1 or 2 accounts. And these accounts usually have fairly regular activity occurring.</comment>


The Payphone Project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jcs/payphone

<comment> j-m-o This is awesome! I'm actually a little jealous.

If you can get your hands on (or build yourself) a red box [1], you could even hack your own hack.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)>

<comment><USER2> wow, that brings back memories of 1994

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been wanting to do this since I Asterisk-ized a 1975 Western Electric 500 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone>) I found at a garage sale.

I vividly remember the last time I used a payphone like this calling my then girlfriend (became fiance, became wife) outside a 7-11 in rural virginia before the turn of the century. Nostalgia by the bucketful.

</comment><comment><USER4> For those interested, Citizen Engineer (<http://www.citizenengineer.com/>) did the same thing a few years ago. The video was produced by Phillip Torrone and Ladyada, and includes additional notes.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a true Hacker project.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recall needing to insert the proper toll into the payphone before dialing a number. He's added some instructions to work around that old limitation, so you can dial the number first, then insert the coins.

</comment><comment><USER7> USPS Mailbox locator courtesy of "Payphone Project"

<http://www.payphone-project.com/mailboxes/>

<comment><USER8> As much as I hate recommending the USPS for anything, they actually provide an official search tool for this on their site: <https://www.usps.com/locator/> (collection boxes > Blue Boxes)

<comment><USER9> The only thing I like about USPS is my mailguy, who is always smiling when he rings our doorbell on occasions when we have a shipment from Amazon and it's too big to fit in the mailbox.

He never fails to brighten the day of whomever greets him at the door at our house :)

<comment><USER10> You don't like cross country mail for half a dollar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well-seasoned fifty pound familiar vintage steel vault pay phone, with a cell inside, VOIP-ing on your own or any open wifi. Running Redphone, or Silent Circle app, label it SECURE and.... and paint it red.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well done, I love this stuff.</comment>


Deep Space Industries - <AUTHOR> https://deepspaceindustries.com/ <comment><USER2>
      Departments Now Hiring:

      * Finance and Accounting
      * Business Development and Sales
      * Public Relations

<comment><USER3> I understand your cynicism, but suppose that you were seriously determined about setting up an organisation to explore and develop space. This is a very long-term endeavor. How would you go about it, and who would you hire first? Unless you have a mass of funding, if you hire scientists and engineers first, you will surely run out of money and the company will die.

You first need to create a system to feed the needs of the company for the decades it will take for it to start being profitable. And one way to do that is to spread an attractive vision of the company's plans and future. So yes, if you are very serious about exploring and developing space, finance, public relations and business development ARE the right places to start. IMHO.

<comment><USER4> You seem to be suggesting that it's possible for someone to set up an organisation to explore and develop deep space commercial activities _without_ a mass of funding? I would think step one in even contemplating such a gambit would be to acquire several billion dollars. Then, when you've got enough backing to look halfway credible (and hopefully some hint of an actual plan), you can start with the PR and business development to try and get the rest of your funding.

<comment> T-A Several billion may be excessive. SpaceX was funded with $100 of Musk's own money and another $100 million from other investors. The rest of the billion+ which has gone into it so far is from paying customers [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding)

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that SpaceX was a bit of a special case. Elon Musk could probably build a deep-space asteroid mining company in a cave with a box of scraps.

<comment><USER3> So it is possible!

<comment><USER4> Touche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so obviously nutty that is simply a wealth transfer from those with too much to the audacious.

Call me in 100 years.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yea I looked on the careers page too. I was expecting EVE online as a req for employment.

<comment><USER7> For the available positions, it'd probably be better job experience than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Watching their video I don't feel the time is now. Maybe in 10 years or so? Let's send Mark Whatney to Mars first, then send out SCVs to mine more minerals, okay?

</comment><comment><USER9> They seem to be working on enabling tech for smallsat asteroid missions. I hear they're selling propulsion that run on water.</comment>


Plotly Dash and OmniSciDB for real-time data visualization - <AUTHOR> https://www.omnisci.com/blog/plotly-dash-and-omniscidb-for-real-time-data-visualization <comment><USER2> I used Dash pretty extensively in 2018 (so bear in mind things have changed some since then).

It's a great tool but has some downsides compared to using d3, a chart library or even PlotlyJS directly.

* There is no good path to invert Dash and Flask relationship so that you can embed Dashboards into the larger context of a Flask application. Which really limits it for single standalone dashboards.

* The JSON serialization and dash components are hard to extend or customize as an end-user (without making changes to the library directly). So you'll quickly run into a barrier when extending for anything custom.

So it's a great tool, you can build responsive dashboards (that work with great Python libs such as Pandas for the processing) very quickly, but IMO its not suitable for embedding dashboards into other applications (which TBF isn't their goal).

<comment><USER3> I've created a few projects with Dash in the past and it's amazing how quick it is to get something interactive up in about 20 minutes. It definitely has a narrow set of use cases, but I had that Rails ah-ha moment for the first time in a while where 80% of what I was trying to do worked out of the box with no configuration. Compare this with creating a Flask backend server and React frontend with webpacker, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP

Definitely agree with you both. I chose Dash because I knew Python, but JavaScript is just something that never seems to click with me. They definitely make it easy for the pandas-using, wants-one-screen-and-a-few- dropdowns type of person to get started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used Dash professionally for the past few years and I think it's mostly terrible. It's really easy to pick up and you can get an interactive dashboard going quickly but past that it's useless. The API is completely undocumented, all you get is a few examples which you can't generalize to your use-case because none of their functions' parameters are described anywhere, on top of that they introduce breaking changes seemingly every version. Some plots are only discoverable through obscure forum posts by random users. Unless you plan to reverse engineer the library don't bother for long or medium term projects. In the end I was so frustrated I dumped it and made a custom dashboarding library which serves Matplotlib figures from a http server (everyone says their documentation is terrible but I think it's alright: it's complete and it's mature).

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say it's terrible. There's a distinction between Dash itself (very general/customizable framework) and Plotly charts (agreed, some chart types are poorly documented).

Dash >= 1.0 has been pretty stable and well-documented without many breaking changes imo.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Finding a Co-Founder - <AUTHOR>

I've seen a lot of people say that they felt they weren't going to get into YC because they didn't have a co-founder. It seems like a shame that good ideas would go to waste because people don't happen to know anyone else who wants to try a startup.
Does anyone in the YC community have any ideas for helping people to meet co-founders? There are some websites for this purpose, but they don't seem to be working. Maybe if we come up with a solution to our problem (meeting other founders interested in ycombinator) we can then apply to it a more general audience.
Here are some existing co-founder websites: http://partnerup.com http://cofoundr.com http://www.founderlink.com <comment><USER2> I'm starting a business. (Quit my job in February, in fact.) I don't have a co-founder. Here's my cunning plan.

I build things I find interesting, and search for product ideas that other people are willing to pay for. I talk about what I do. This seems like a good way to meet and talk to the sort of people who are interested in making money by doing the sort of thing I do.

There's been a lot of talk about how not having a CF is a handicap. Let's say it is. You can get started, or not, but not getting started doesn't seem to get you closer to your goal, make you a better CF, or bring you into contact with people who can help you with your business.

It would be nice to have a good CF; a long-time acquaintance with a compatible personality, complementary skill-set, rich parents, entrepreneurial bent, few obligations, etc., but you either know someone like that or you don't. If you don't, it will take years to change that ("long-term") and it seems silly to wait, if you really want to do your own startup.

Sometimes, you have to make do with what you have.

<comment><USER3> What was it like to quit your job in February? Were you ready before you decided or did you become ready once you decided?

As soon as my apt. lease is up, I'm seriously debating about: leaving my job, traveling to another country to maximize savings and learn Spanish, code, code, code, put it out there..

Even though I have a good job (and with this economy, as my Mom tells me), I have four or five ideas that I want to execute on. I'm starting to delude myself that I'd be happier slaving away in retail or the service industry (the economy) and coding at nights, working on projects that I am interested on. But I know that if I execute right, that finding a job won't be a problem (it will be a choice - job or startup)

<comment><USER4> "As soon as my apt. lease is up, I'm seriously debating about: leaving my job, traveling to another country to maximize savings and learn Spanish, code, code, code, put it out there.."

I'm just curious...are their any hugely successful tech startups that went the route of "maximizing savings" to the point of moving to a super cheap country very far out of reach of the tech industry?

I can't help but think that being far out of the technology loop and away from peers is good for literature and, maybe, art but incredibly bad for creating an application that people want to use. There's something about Silicon Valley that, despite the extremely high cost of living, leads to more successful tech startups than anywhere else. Readily available funding can't be all of it...can it?

<comment><USER3> My definition of entrepreneur is someone who takes risks in a managed manner. Going on this trip is more about expanding my comfort zone (unfamiliar language) and adding more life experience to my non-work resume.

I agree that it's harder to start a successful company virtually without face to face networking. Silicon Valley will always be Valhalla. There are a handful of people on News.YC who are already living abroad and managing to code to support themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like this analogy I heard on one of these threads a long time ago here:

"You don't 'find' a cofounder, just like you don't 'find' a wife. It's a relationship with someone else that evolves over time and then someday, someone pops the question."

<comment><USER6> Carrying the anology a little further and throwing in some metaphors liberally:

1\. You could get a potential cofouder pregnant with your idea.

2\. The hornier you are with your idea, the sooner you'll find a cofounder.

3\. Work hard in the gym of coding so that a hot, I mean, skilled cofounder will find you and want you to screw her brains off until acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is my idea: We should make an app to list simple, web based problems to be solved.

Examples: integrating yc into twitter, being alerted about yc post by a certain user, organizing and displaying multiple startup school meetups from different websites

People can sign up to form teams to solve each problem. The idea is that people will be able to work together to do something small before they try to work on something bigger. This way people can get to know each other better through a shared experience.

It doesn't matter what the projects are, though simple ones sound like they'll work better. People who don't code can do research or come up with marketing ideas. The website will just serve as a listing and all the details can be coordinated however the people working on it choose.

I'm willing to code and host it if there is enough interest, unless someone else wants to.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a great idea. If you want any help with developing it let me know.

As far as FounderLink itself is concerned my feeling is that it is still very early days and there is a lot more that needs to be done before it is truly useful in finding a partner, I also need to open it up more and make it a lot more accessible(which is coming). Then there is the always large issue of getting users. :)

On a more general note though people just need to get out there and network more with people in different interest groups. It's very easy to pick a group(hackers, business, marketing, sales) and stick to that group of people. If you're a business/sales/marketing person head down to your local ruby user group/beer night and shoot the shit. If your a coder try one of the business conventions/meetups. Just get out there and meet people outside of your norm. Learn a bit about what they do and I see what they do. Make friends and get introductions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think there is a common misconception in the startup culture that if you cant convince a friend/buddy etc.. to become a co-founder/partner, your idea is not very good or you are not very good at pitching the idea.

I cant seem to find a co-founder, I am 22. I have many friends who are in tech, many in the bay area. Most of them are just not interested in doing startups right now. Some of them just want a stable job, they are getting paid well. Some of them are just not really into web2.0, someone of them don't have the passion/not driven.

So it is possible that your idea is great and it just so happens that you are unable to find a partner. I am in that boat and I think if there was a tool to find co-founders. There is definitely a good chance of having success in your idea, especially since there are many other people like me with the same dilemma.

<comment><USER9> I agree 100%. I have had several ideas and some people even like them, but in the end I have not been able to find others who share my passion. I am not a developer, but I have some development background and I am a tech geek so I follow trends and have been able to see things coming, but having the business acumen is not enough. Woz needed Jobs and Jobs needed Woz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's a catch 22. The type of cofounders they seem to be looking for, and that work out best, are people who have been friends for a while. That means that you can't just go out and find people, unless you're planning for 4-5 years ahead of time when you'll actually have some history together.

</comment><comment><USER11> Posts like this remind me of the old line that "the only common factor in all your failed relationships is you".

Yes, it's possible that you'd be a great co-founder, and that you have a great idea -- but if you're looking and can't find anyone willing to sign onto your idea, stop for a moment to ask yourself if it's remotely possible that either (a) you're not very attractive as a co-founder, or (b) your fantastic idea isn't actually quite so fantastic as you thought.

Being enthusiastic is good, but sometimes realism is also good.

<comment><USER12> Or perhaps all of your friends are married, or liberal arts majors who have absolutely no interest in starting a startup?

Not all of us run in the right circles.

<comment><USER13> This can be a problem, but there's an excellent solution. You should start attending user groups, be they Python, or Lisp, or whatever. If you can't find a local user group, start one. Give presentations, ask questions, get strangers excited about your idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think you should forget about all that stuff and go out and try to meet people who have similar ideas, skills, and backgrounds as you do. There are many meet ups for tech people if you live in a populated area. Either that or get together with people at work/school.

The problem with searching for a co-founder whom you don't know beforehand is that you don't know much about the person and so you don't know what to expect. From experience, you can get yourself into all types of trouble that way. What I'm trying to get at is that it's better to go out and look for friends who could later become partners.

<comment><USER15> I haven't found anyone who has what I'm really looking for.

But I agree with you.

<comment><USER8> What are you looking for/working on?

<comment><USER15> I am working on building an online pencil and paper rpg play system. It would support a character database, dice rollers, major P&P systems, the usual forums, npc character search, all sort's of toy's for players/ST's,GM's,DM's, and a chat system. And eventually support for a subscription service for the books. Much like O'Reilly's Safari.

at least that's my primary idea atm. I have many others.

The problem is that most of the people I know wouldn't want to leave there security blanket of a comfortable job. Aren't technically adept enough, or generally aren't smart enough. I only can think of one person I would really, really consider. But he is part of the first problem, and working on a drinking addiction :(.

The rest of the people who I might consider I wouldn't get along with and don't share their style of visions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally I enjoy not having a co founder. It makes everything a lot easier. I just get done with things. No dicussions or waiting for other people. I Work when I want and have 100% ownership. I quit my job four months ago, and live off some freelance work and subletting some rooms in my apartment. I have a shared office with cool startup people, so I don't get too lonely, but often work from home. The biggest problem I've encountered so far, is that freelancing can take to much time away from your startup project.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree that good ideas shouldn't die just because people can't find co- founders.

...But then again, some people don't want or are better off without partners.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thank you for the links. The only reason I didn't apply this round was because I didn't have a co-founder. Basically, all of my friends are married or something similar.

</comment><comment><USER15> hehe.

I might have been able to find one if I hadn't only had a week to apply.

thanks for the links. The last looks the most promising.

</comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps the best way to find a cofounder is to keep working without one. Build that app, proof of concept, prototype, whatever. Then show it to others. It'll be a lot easier to have a meeting of the minds reviewing your app than talking about your idea.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like a great idea for a Y-combinator start-up, if only you could find a partner to help implement it.</comment>


Midas – Enriched contact information for email lists - <AUTHOR> http://fetch.amplemarket.com/midas <comment><USER2> This is good, but still falls into the FullContact/Intercom/Clearbit camp without clear differentiation. The service would add a lot more value if it niched down and provided really relevant information. As a sales person, I haven't found a service that actually tells me what I want to know about a lead/company. I often find myself wanting to know some combination of the following:

# of employees, approximate revenues, years in business, family-owned or not, number of locations, age of founder(s), scope(s) of work.

This helps me form a mental image of the company and helps me decide whether or not its worth pursuing them.

*edited for clarity

<comment><USER3> Dun and Bradstreet

<comment><USER2> yes, some of that information is provided, not all. It's also prohibitively expensive for me (~$120 for a report on one company).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is this different from Clearbit's Enrichment API?

[https://clearbit.com/enrichment](https://clearbit.com/enrichment)

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't be surprised if it this is powered by Clearbit. A lot of companies seem to be reselling the data bought from Clearbit.

Intercom uses another company for their data too: [https://docs.intercom.io/help-and-faqs/your-users-data-in- in...](https://docs.intercom.io/help-and-faqs/your-users-data-in- intercom/where-do-the-social-profiles-come-from)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can I trust this service (and others like it) to keep the list of email addresses I provide confidential?

</comment><comment><USER7> Another spammer to block. Is there a way to identify email processed through this system?

<comment><USER8> They don't spam you directly; they just sell your personal information to spammers. This is called 'lead generation' by the afflicted.

<comment><USER9> how are you claiming this?</comment></comment></comment>


Dear HN, save my life too  - <AUTHOR>

I'm not sure it's the best place to explain my problem, but I've seen similar posts on HN, and these posts got a lot of interesting replies, so I give it a shot.
Here's my problem : I smell. Ho maybe you think it's funny, smelling sometimes happens, you know, you do some sport, you sweat, then you smell. And that's perfectly fine. Unless it happens even when you don't do sport.
That's my problem, I smell and I don't need to run 30 miles for that. The strange part is, it only happens when I'm not comfortable in social situations, for example at work, but I don't smell if I'm at a bar with friends or alone at my house.
And because of that, my social life is quite terrible.
Imagine for a moment that you smell, and you have to go to work, and all you can think during you work-time is how bad you must smell, and how eager you are that the day finally end so you won't hear your coworkers sniff all the time around you.
You can't concentrate, you can't study anything, the only thing in your mind is how bad you smell, and the more you think of it, the more you smell because you're more stressed.
How can you go to a classroom, a conference, a movie, or simply enjoy life when you are so ashamed of ruining people's comfort ?
Picture yourself trying to learn some maths in a maths course, and the only thing you could think of is how to hide your own odour. When the course end, you don't have learned anything.
Actually I can't pinpoint the source of the smell on my body, but I noticed that at the end of the day, if I press my nose or try to smell the mucus (yeah that's not very sexy), it smells bad. I did a sinus scan, a dentist check, went to the ENT and everything seems ok.
I think the problem is psychological, although the smell is real (some studies show that some people believe that they smell when they don't but that's not my case, I know that I do).
Do pheromones actually exist in humans ? Is it possible that I smell when I'm stressed because it's a kind of defense mechanics ?
I don't think people realize how bad it actually is. When you're ugly, or disabled, you could still have a social life (I'm not saying that I would rather be disabled, you need a lot of courage to have a "normal" life while disabled), but I least you could get support. Who support you if you smell ? Nobody. People assume you don't bath (my hygiene is probably better than most people's), and you're just "the smelly one". People don't have compassion for you. You don't bond with other people and everybody knows that in the end, the only thing that counts is social relationships.
Please HN, please, help me.
I couldn't find help on the internet, I wrote that thread like a message in a bottle (and I'm so ashamed that I used a throw away account and Tor, just in case), and I hope that maybe someone here could give me useful informations or advices, because I know that comments here often give new perspectives.
And if you don't have any advices, you could still discuss about the fact that people with a strong body odour are discriminated.
Dear fellow hackers, please help me. <comment><USER2> If you think you have a physiological problem, see a physician. (I know, you went to an ENT-- go to your GP, explain the problem, and get a referral to whatever specialist he recommends.)

If you think you have a psychological problem, see a psychologist.

In neither case, is asking random strangers on the internet a good plan.

There are lots of physical disorders (some serious, some not) which can result in body odor, and the right diagnostician should be able to help you out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that asking random strangers doesn't seem really wise, but it's hard to talk face to face about this problem.

I did see my PG, and he told me to make several tests like blood test, microbial and fungial tests, but all were negatives and he didn't know what to do about it.

I will try another PG, but I think I could get some interesting replies on here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's your weekly diet? Please be thorough.

<comment><AUTHOR> I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, most of my diet is healthy food, although I also eat processed foods. I tried a Candida diet for 2 weeks and didn't noticed any difference, but maybe 2 weeks is too short. I eat everything, meat, fish, mushrooms, salads, fruits, pasta, vegetables. And I sometimes drink alcohol, but don't smoke. I haven't found yet any correlation between something I ate and worsening of my condition.

<comment><USER4> Do you eat anything that smells strongly? Garlic and Curry are well known smelly spices that when eaten have a tendency to be excreted when you sweat, so if you eat a lot of those spices you will tend to smell when you sweat.</comment></comment></comment>


Hevea Project – Flat tori finally visualized - <AUTHOR> http://math.univ-lyon1.fr/~borrelli/Hevea/Presse/index-en.html

<comment><USER2> That's one of the best math articles I've ever read frankly.

I was just wondering the other day how to visualize a square flat torus, and I didn't realize that this was such a compelling mathematical question.

<comment><USER3> One of the funny implications is that many 2D video games implicitly have toroidal worlds.

This is reasonable for something like Pacman, but many games with overworld maps (SNES RPGs like Chrono Trigger, for example) implicitly have toroidal planets due to the navigation.

<comment><USER2> Someone (smarter than me) should program a Pacman clone that takes place on one of these tori.

<comment><USER4> pacman already takes place on one of these tori

<comment><USER2> Yes I understand that, I meant on the 3d embedding of it presented in this article

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool: describes a way of creating a 3D figure with the same properties as a torus, but avoiding a certain stretching/distorting you get with plain tori (simplification for one sentence summary...). Their approach seems related to the idea that if you have a closed curve bounded by another curve (a square, let's say), as you make the inner curve more wrinkly it gets correspondingly longer--though it remains bounded by the same square. Here, the three dimensional embedding is more 'wrinkly' along the axes that need to be extended in order for the emedding to be isometric.

I wonder if you only need infinite layering of corrugations if the 'stretching factor' is irrational. Probably not that simple :)

Edit: added a summary to the beginning.

<comment><USER6> The infinite layering of corrugations is required regardless, because the "true" surface has undefined curvature. They are doing an approximation to that of arbitrary precision.

This is a really delightful peice of work. The existence of surfaces with the curvature undefined everywhere is an easily described concept that comes up fairly frequently in topology, but I'd always assumed it was just impossible to visualize them.

<comment><USER5> The way I was thinking about was that the curvature is named undefined because it has discontinuities in it, which result from the fact that the object is constructed by sticking pieces together, and the joints aren't entirely smooth. Is there something deeper to its 'undefined curvature'? Or I guess that's just more important than it seems to me: like it being amenable to classification by curvature type is the essential thing here. And I guess it must be something deeper than not being smooth at the joints, since there are probably applicable smoothing algorithms.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see this answered by someone knowledgeable too.

From my limited knowledge I would guess the function being C2 gives the curvature a "global" domain; while if the function is only C1 the curvatures will have limited influence, and you can use that to enforce other curvatures "prohibited" under C2. Anyway, I might be completely wrong, just the idea I got from the article :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Greg Egan produced a good visualization of flattening a torus: [https://vimeo.com/71479159](https://vimeo.com/71479159)

</comment><comment><USER9> Not to be confused with the other Hevea: [http://hevea.inria.fr/](http://hevea.inria.fr/)</comment>


Craigslist (and Silicon Valley) Greatly Offends The NY Times - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2012/07/29/craigslist-and-silicon-valley-greatly-offends-the-ny-times/ <comment><USER2> This article has no real defense or data points of CL, just bunch of words trying to provoke emotions. Title is also designed to be link bait by equating critic of CL with entire Silicon Valley.

I wonder if the author of the post understands the problem here or has some other hidden agenda. It is very clear that CL had no reason to send lawyers if a guy was not even scrapping their website. The fact is CL has effectively become monopoly by levering network effect. This network effect had been created by gaining trust of users and its "public good" philosophy. In my view, CL's actions have betrayed those users. Now they are more concerned with saving their business and stopping others to become more popular. Because of lack of resources they can't invest in new innovations but they also don't want others to do it either. They have created a fence around data which is not even owned by them.

A company that preaches "public good" and then goes out to hires top tier lawyers for "copyright violations" isn't doing "unqualified good thing".

</comment><comment><USER3> If the people who put their data into CL wanted their data in the other apps, they'd put it there.

If you photocopied my rolodex, and started calling all of my contacts, I'd come after you too.</comment>


The Boston Hack Day Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://beta.boston.com/hackday

<comment><USER2> I have a theory that the increasing number of these kinds of events ("let's get together and hack!" or "The Foo Contest!") are basically just thinly veiled efforts to attract, identify and hire talent. A next-generation replacement for the traditional "post job descript, sift through tons of resumes, figure out who to call, setup interview, devise lame questions, hyper-over-analyze every nuance (on both sides), make decision based on proxies for what we want rather than actually what we want" paradigm of employee recruiting.

And if so, I think it's a great thing! Let's see more of it. It's progress. Folks using their brain.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm going. I have my own full time project, that I am trying to spend every minute I have on right now. But, I want to work with some clever people on something that I can see really working over the weekend. It doesn't take TOO much time and the mental exercise, and fun to see some cool quick projects happen will be a great energizer to keep me going on my main project and see it through.

The idea I am taking to the hack day is a mobile to mobile one-time-pad twitter encryption tool so people like those organizing the protests in Egypt can communicate and organize in the open with those they trust.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll be there! Any other HNers going?</comment>


Ask HN: Anybody using Firebase in their app or business - <AUTHOR> Just another Firebase user and wanted to get a feel for how Firebase is being used right now and as well talk about issues I've faced as soon as Firebase has some data (Firebase web UI stopped as soon as I reached above 500 users) and see if anyone else came up with solutions. <comment><USER2> Indiehackers is on Firebase [0]

[https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/935242615540260864?s...](https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/935242615540260864?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm using Firebase for all my backend needs. As a relatively inexperienced programmer, I found Firebase to be extremely time-saving and easier to implement into my app. Granted, I'm only at a prototype stage so I'm not sure how well it will scale in the future.

I use Firebase for authentication, database (Firestore), storage and hosting. I have not faced any issues yet with any aspect of the suite.

<comment><USER4> I'm at the same level of experience as you right now. I'm working on an inventory system for my team and Firebase has been a joy to use from the start. Everything, including auth, Firestore, analytics, and Cloud Functions, have been easy to use and well documented.

I just don't trust myself yet to build a relatively secure backend but still want some custom functionality, and Firebase allows me to do that with minimal setup and low operating costs (at least for ~50 active users)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For my side project I have chosen Parse. Although not perfect, I like that it is open source, and although I use a managed service I know I can swap over to a digital ocean type implementation if every single managed service calls it quits.

My fear with Firebase is being a Google product, who knows if it will stick around, and then you are forced to refactor your code, to something else.

<comment><USER6> I have used firebase in a couple of side projects. And quite happy.

> My fear with Firebase is being a Google product, who knows if it will stick > around

Same here. Simple solution would be to self host something like parse or [https://gun.eco](https://gun.eco) . Anyone used the open source alternatives to firebase?

<comment><USER7> CEO of a building app here. Same thought. Parse > Firebase because of open source and movable quickly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> another thing to note is that being a Google service, Firebase is blocked in China. May or may not matter depending on your audience (in China right now and IH doesn't work without a VPN)</comment>


Video Interviews Increase 101% in March - <AUTHOR> https://interviewschedule.com/blog/video-interviews-increase-101-percent-in-march/ <comment><USER2> Interesting data. Wonder what this will look like at steady state once things revert back to normal. Everyone talks about wfh but in reality I think a lot of people are cooped up and craving human interaction even in remote-first teams before Covid.

<comment><USER3> We'll definitely see a reversion towards the mean. But it'll be interesting to see if the investments teams are making in remote interviewing will lead to a sustained increase in remote interviews for candidates that prefer it (think, candidates that can't travel easily, or take enough time off of their current job). I'd bet the new normal will be noticeably more remote-friendly than the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what industries & companies are still doing in person interviews</comment>


Metro Design Principles - <AUTHOR> http://ux.artu.tv/?p=179

<comment><USER2> Great post and a great site overall.</comment>


Headcount  - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/11.html <comment><USER2> _At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer..._

The converse (and less stupid) idea is to require every employee at your software startup to do sales/marketing/customer service. There are a bunch of great examples of this, but what comes to mind is how the employees at Wufoo rotate the customer service position daily (mentioned here: <http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/>).

<comment><USER3> Expect to lose staff if you do this suddenly. I've been at a place where this was implemented... and in a few months a bunch of people had left. Many developers at companies just want to do development... and not sales and support. As usual, changing a culture of a place should be done in consultation with everyone there.

<comment><USER2> Good point. The other, probably better way to do it is to have that kind of culture from the beginning.

<comment><USER4> If you make it clear it's formal part of everyone's responsibility during the interview process you will likely get a self-selection for the development team that you are looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What Joel should argue, in addition to "don't outsource programming", is that one could augment sales and marketing. A sales and marketing team in a major region like China or Russia could multiply good coding done at home.

If code is the analogue to manufacturing in the digital age, why would one outsource the manufacturing of the new industrial revolution? It would be like Henry Ford contracting with Mexico instead of building factories in Michigan.

</comment><comment><USER6> _US software companies can't expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston, but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5% advantage from offshoring development._

I assume he's talking about some specific class of company. Anyone know what it is?

<comment><USER7> For whatever class of company, I am puzzled why is it wrong to assume marketing and sales cannot be outsourced. Marketing allows work to be done in flexible timings, for sales and support one will require employees to be awake at odd hours, specific to their customer's time zone.

And, I have personally seen it being done successfully - not in an outsouring company, but in an India-based product company.

I believe that as long as there is going to be considerable cost arbitrage to be taken advantage of, there will be outsourcing. Development / sales / marketing - anything that does not require direct visit to customer premises.

<comment><USER8> For marketing to be really effective it needs specialist knowledge of both field and geographic location. There are countless examples of marketing failures where people simply assume that what works in country A will work just as well in country B. I wouldn't trust a marketing firm halfway round the world to know what works and what doesn't in my home market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The marginal uillity of programmers have an inverse relationship to the quality of the codebase.

The sale force's marginal utility increased in relative to code quality.

However, all else being equal, it is probably best to hire the best developers and salespersons you can for your money.

I think this sum up the blog post? Maybe I got the explanation wrong?</comment>


A $50m Drug and Gun Dark Market Just Disappeared and Millions in Bitcoin with It - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/03/18/evolution-market-a-scam-says-site-pr/

<comment><USER2> Not sure why there's such a sympathetic write up in this article. People who sell guns and drugs get ripped off, and worse, all the time. I get the Bitcoin angle, but still...</comment>


The Nexus One is Google's Way of Fighting Android Forks - <AUTHOR> http://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/286332746/the-nexus-one-a-slick-developer-unit-to-fight-against <comment><USER2> The trackball may seem redundant if you're not used to it, but I miss it when I switch from my G1 to my iPod Touch. The iPod/iPhone gives me thumb fatigue whenever I have to scroll repeatedly to read a long web page. There are all sorts of uses where the trackball feels more ergonomic than the touch screen.</comment>


Google Cloud CEO: Istio is going to a foundation - <AUTHOR> https://www.protocol.com/google-cloud-kurian-istio-foundation <comment><USER2> Good news.

Probably currently see some loss of adaption due to this delay.

I just wonder why not CNCF from the get go.</comment>


An early look at SQL in Meteor - <AUTHOR> http://info.meteor.com/blog/an-early-look-at-sql-in-meteor <comment><USER2> Been waiting a long time for this!

</comment><comment><USER3> this is awesome!</comment>


Build a Real Time Hybrid App with Ionic and Firebase - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/angularjs/posts/build-a-real-time-hybrid-app-with-ionic-firebase?hn=mon

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be releasing AirChat today, built on firebase :)</comment>


Computer Science for the Rest of Us (Non-Computer Scientist) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/business/computer-science-for-non-majors-takes-many-forms.html?_r=1&hpw

<comment><USER2> I think they lose audience by using terms such as "Computational Thinking".

What I find lacking in many non-tech folks is not Com Sci thought (by my definition), but rather something much more fundamental: systematic and analytic thought.

I find no end to the level of frustration I feel when I try to have a conversation about something, anything, with a non-tech person and they can't deal with breaking a problem down into a set of interrelated sub issues and focusing the discussion on what those issues are and how they interact with each other.

This of course, isn't true of every non-tech person I talk to. But, it is clearly far more prevalent outside the tech community. I do agree that it needs to be core to education, far more core than remembering what year some guy found some land in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> I agree, though empirically so far, "computational thinking" has been the most successful of the various phrases coined for versions of this concept.

I personally prefer "procedural literacy". "Procedural" still has some potentially scary connotations, but is as least not _specifically_ about computation. The idea is that the general skill of thinking in terms of sequences and processes and systems is a kind of literacy to be fluent with, and that that's not really the same as knowing how to _program_ in particular. But somehow "computational thinking" has garnered more press and institutional support, despite being coined several years later.

This paper has a nice history of procedural-literacy-esque proposals (disclaimer: written by my grad-school advisor): [http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005....](http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Fellow slug i assume edit: went to your website, you are only a slug by affiliation, my apologies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I were trying to solve this problem for Primary/Secondary education, I wouldn't teach "computational thinking", I'd teach philosophy and give students programming tasks in an art class.

Why? Philosophy gives you a feeling for syllogistic reasoning of the type that occurs both in arguments and computer programs.

Programming in the art class because what really matters with implementation is that students feel that they are making something they want to see in the world, rather than rote-learning drudgery.

Programming in Mathematics classes, also.

</comment><comment><USER6> If only I had more upvotes to give.

Don't teach programming/technology just for the sake of it to non-CS folks. If they enjoyed that, they would have opted for CS major.

However, strongly believe that there is a need for better understanding of the computational world, outside of CS domain. Help build familiarity (kind of computational intuition) and they will participate eagerly in technological revolution in their domain. (instead of pushing back)

Ideally we should introduce computational skills in middle schools. Scratch is a great platform to teach these skills implicitly; kids focus more time on being creative/fun and less with writing code.

For adults, we need to identify strong application areas and start from there. Loved to hear what Professor LeBlanc is doing in his course 'Computing for Poets'. We should have more of these 'Computing for X' style introductions. (X = [Doctors, Teachers, Product Managers, ....])

If anyone is interested in working on this, PM me. Love to discuss ideas.

</comment><comment><USER7> My favorite part of this article...

 _[T]his course is tied to two courses offered by the English department on J.R.R. Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon literature. Students in the computing course put concepts to immediate use by analyzing large bodies of text. The syllabus is more like what one would find for a humanities course._

Too often introductory CS programs focus on the "how" of programming. By showing students the "why" and "what" first, you immediately have a more compelling case for keeping them engaged. This is true of all subjects I suppose, but CS is somewhat unique in that there are problems waiting to be solved almost everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER8> I didn't gain much from the article. As an engineer who loves computers, I was hoping for more enlightenment about the theory versus application of computer science, with my experience being in the latter half. However, the article seems to focus more on the abstract concept of incorporating computing into primary education.

</comment><comment><USER9> The obvious mnemonic is "reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, recursion". It's illustrative that they didn't go for that.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very surprised that the author failed to mention this: <http://www.collegeboard.com/html/computerscience/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Social implications of algorithms?! What on Earth does that mean?

<comment><USER12> Sounds like technological determinism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Couldn't view article on my iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was trying to convine someone just the other day that if they were serious about wanting to get a video game made to their own design, then the first thing they should do before hiring programmers is to learn the basics of programming themselves, which I also offered to show them. I said that they should do this so they have at least some fundamental understanding of the issues involved.

Their answer is that they dont need to do this because they will be hiring programmers.

I suspect that they will not get their game made.</comment>


Show HN: SMS My TV Show (find out when your show is on next) - <AUTHOR> http://eapen.in/apps/

<comment><AUTHOR> Send an SMS to (650) 918-6928 with the name of a TV show.

You will receive a reply with the number of days the next episode will be on (and the date) as well how many days ago the last episode was broadcast (and the date).

eg. Send an SMS to (650) 918-6928 with "Dexter" and you will get the following reply: Next episode of Dexter in 224 days (9/25/10). Last episode was 62 days ago (12/31/09).

<comment><USER2> Bug report :) It got Lost wrong. It said it airs today. It doesn't, except in reruns. Then it doesn't know it airs tomorrow, and says it doesn't air again for 8 days.

Is the app only showing for "New" episodes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dpcan. I had a hard time figuring out whether to show episodes airing today as the next episode or last episode. So, I made some changes related to that yesterday and this bug was a result of that change. I have changed it back to show an episode airing today as the "next" episode.

Long story short - this bug is addressed now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty cool idea. How are you getting the info from TVRage.com? If you're doing a cURL type web scraping then you might want to check out if you're even allowed to do that.

Definitely add show times, like your friend said.

Are you planning on monetizing this at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! TVRage now offers an API with this information and I am utilizing that.

Don't really see this taking off yet and don't plan to monetize unless it gets too expensive to run. A couple of hundred hits a month is affordable.</comment></comment>


Koobface: the cross-platform worm (Windows, Linux and OS X) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.paretologic.com/malwarediaries/index.php/2010/10/27/koobface-the-cross-platform-version/

<comment><USER2> This is more like malware/spyware. The fact that it is persistent on Windows, even after a reboot, seems like the only real vulnerability here. Maybe sidejacking facebook could be counted, but that's old news since firesheep. Although, most Linux and Mac users just don't reboot, so it could be running for quite a while.

Moral of the story: Don't run unknown java apps.</comment>


Data on Uber Usage in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.secondmeasure.com/2015/07/28/people-ride-uber-more-than-you-think/

<comment><USER2> This is not a very insightful analysis, which is surprising since I assume it's coming from a YC batch company. (given that katm submitted it).

The stacked area charts specially are very confusing to read and are impossible to compare the changes over time of the different categories.

There also is no sample size given, which is relevant since the average values are close and therefore we can't easily say if the average values by subgroups are statistically significant at a glance. (I assume it's high, but it needs to be explicitly stated)

The title is also unanswered in the article. "More than You think" compared to what? Normal car/taxi traffic? All the data shows is that people ride Uber a lot.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback -- we'll definitely be improving these over time!

To answer the question on sample size:

This analysis was done across >300,000 unique Uber customers from a very large, representative sample of US consumers.

<comment><USER4> What is the source of the data set? Are you buying data from credit card/ bank companies?

<comment><USER5> This is part of our secret sauce :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Interestingly, highly engaged riders (those averaging 12 or more rides per month) spend less per ride than infrequent riders"

Thinking about my own Lyft use here, I became a frequent user after discovering that Lyft Line was a great and cheap way to get to work if I was running late. So one could hypothesize that people become heavy users because Uber allows them to take a frequent trip affordably.

<comment><USER5> I agree - the more frequent riders are likely using Uber for shorter distances, like commuting to work. It's great to hear the other side of the numbers (riders' anecdotal experiences) so thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks like an amazing dataset. Are you able to extrapolate from your sample up to their full US revenue? How often is your dataset updated / how much lag is there? Looking forward to your future blog posts!

<comment><USER5> Yes - when a company reports their actual numbers, we can get a sense of what % of revenue we see and extrapolate to full US revenue. We update our data weekly - our blog too so stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mike and Lillian from Second Measure here. We're just ramping up on these sorts of posts, so we'd love to get feedback and answer any questions!

<comment><USER8> One thing that struck me as odd from the data: bookings are growing just below customers, on the same scale, which seems inconsistent with only ~30+% of customers riding only once per month. The only obvious way I can think of for that to happen is if there are _many_ customers who ride less than once a month, which would actually make sense; I use Uber a few times a year, when I travel, but I don't use it locally. So, it seems like the "Domestic Customers by Monthly Rides" graph needs to have a "0" included in it (and then a second graph without it if that squashes the rest of the graph).

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the comment! It'd definitely be interesting to see this same analysis for annual rides to see how many people fall into a similar category as you.

To quickly clarify: The growth chart only includes customers who paid for an Uber ride in that month, so any customers riding 0 times are not counted. The "Domestic Customers by Monthly Rides" graph simply takes that set of customers and breaks them down by # of rides in that month.

Bookings can grow more slowly than customers if customers are spending less on average. This is in fact the case - in July 2012, customers were spending ~$85 a month on Uber. This has dropped steadily over the last three years to ~$70 a month. This makes sense given that Uber has lowered its average price over the years, with the introduction of UberX and UberPool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can a company opt out of your dataset?

</comment><comment><USER10> Where does Second Measure capture this data from? Are my Uber rides in this study?

<comment><USER5> We analyze spending across a large number of US consumers. It's anonymized, so we couldn't tell either way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We changed the title from "People Ride Uber More Than You Think" to get rid of the linkbait "you". Happy to change it again if anyone suggests something better.

<comment><USER5> Thanks dang. The linkbait effect was unintentional - we'll be more mindful of this going forward!</comment></comment>